Eye Trouble is apparently a sketchblog of some sort.

So, this is about all I accomplished today, meaning that, as usual, I accomplished very little compared to what needed to get done. Anyway, I suppose this thing was inspired by how, when we were at a Family Event a couple of weeks ago, my nieces and also my mom and also everyone else got pretty energized over blowing bubbles (although, my nephew was more into discovering the space-age coolness of Nerf, which is a completely understandable preference).

Meanwhile, I have a meeting tomorrow and plus there’s other stuff to do, but my number 1 dream is to sketch, even if it’s just an inch-square sketch of nothing in particular.

More Etsy stuff. And now I’ve gotta get back to work.

So, I totally expected to find the crumbly stubs of spent fireworks strewn all over the yard this morning, ’cause I’m always expecting obnoxious stuff like that, just like I’m always expecting the Sun to one day turn inside out or some errant wormhole to time-warp me back to when I was a bowling alley pinsetter (which would so suck). But, you know, instead of going out to get the mail and stepping on big piles of pitted cherrybombs or the shredded nosecones of paper missiles, all I discovered was just one charred rocket-butt wrapped in dewy cobwebs. So, now I have absolutely nothing to ramble on about…or, well, I guess I could talk about my abiding affection for Mr. Pibb, or the song stylings of Leonard Nimoy, or the word “jodhpurs.” The thing is, though, I’m kinda saving all that type of stuff for my book A Midnight Dreary, which will be a handy desk reference containing all my opinions, wishes, phobias, and pet peeves. So, anyway, at least you have something to look forward to, assuming you don’t already have tons of other stuff. Which you probably do, come to think of it.

Meanwhile, I uploaded some new junk onto Etsy. Mostly it’s just various creatures of various kinds, which seem to work way better as cut-outs than they do as pictures in frames, ’cause frames are often rectangular and require filling up lots of negative space with lots of nonsense, while cut-outs take care of their own negative space by using whatever’s around ‘em in the regular old environment. Or, something like that, anyhow. In any event, a few of the pictures need to get replaced, on account of some of ‘em are too dark or whatever, but I’ll work on that tomorrow, which I know you need to know, Internet.

People sometimes want to know (like, about once every 9 years they ask me), what’s the deal with all the boxes you’re always making and then piling up all over the place? Well, it’s actually super incredibly simple: I just like making ‘em, ’cause of how they’re fun to make, although I admit I’ll probably have to make dozens and hundreds more before they start looking at least halfway how I want ‘em to look. Which is usually how art goes for me, when it goes. Anyhow, lately I’ve been posting these things on Etsy, just for the heck of it, which is partly why I’m behind on drawing new stuff…the other part of the reason being I’ve sort of been distracted by looking at other people’s art, which is a good thing to be distracted by, but also a time-suck, and so I decided today to cut it out and get back to work. Even though, okay, I need to mention, that guy who did that one SoyJoy commercial…wow, his work kicks my butt how cool it is. Except, of course, now I can’t re-find the link in order to share it. Blurg!

But, yeah, the boxes: if they’re ever inspired by anything, it’s not usually by anything much. I mean, you know those ultra-fancy heirloom-style boxes that really elite craft-folk make? The kind you see in museum shops and galleries and whatever (there are currently, for example, some nice tea ceremony boxes in the Phoenix Museum of Art’s onsite store). The kind with ten kinds of exotic woods all bent and polished together into various odd amorphous forms? Well, you know, much as I respect that high-art stuff, that’s not what I’m doing with my so-called work. Instead, I’m inspired by really primitive, junky, sort of accidental un-design. Stuff made with totally mundane materials and used in pretty mundane settings. Like the things I see in random pictures from random books that sort of stick with me a while. Like, if you take a look at page 87 in London Style (Jane Edwards, Taschen Books, ISBN 3-8228-1398-2), there’s this really great homemade cubbyhole/shelf thing hanging on an office wall. And, if you look at pictures all through African Style (Angelika Taschen, Taschen Books, ISBN 3-8228-3917-5), you’ll see all these cool shapes and patterns that are the shapes and patterns I want my boxes to at least echo, a little. And then if you image-search “peruvian retablos” and “nichos“, you’ll see all these boxes with triangle bits sticking up out of ‘em, which seems to me like the very best idea for a simple hanger.

Anyway, obviously, just about any kid or grandmother in Peru or Mexico or Burkina Faso can do this boxy art stuff way, way better than I can do it. I think it’s worth working on, though, as long as it remains a large amount of fun to bang scrap wood together into various little objects. I figure maybe if I do it enough, these objects of mine might eventually start resembling the way more ambitious pictures of boxes I keep imagining in my head.

So…even if they’re really simple and not exactly flashy, here are a few pictures of the boxes in my studio, to show how I’m using the ones I don’t plan on selling.

Here are some fake folk art signs I worked on today. About half the time, these things come out almost just like I dream for ‘em to come out, while the rest of the time, they’re sort of only barely in the neighborhood of the various mental sketches floating around my inside my messy headspace. Especially today, especially for “Motel,” I was thinking of doing something a little different, something blockier and more uneven than what I ended actually doing. Guess that shows how much my art abilities atrophied while I was away doing other work. Plus, the eye trouble’s not entirely a joke, but is also a real thing, on account of how I see everything sideways, although not always as much sideways as I’d like. Whatever, though; there’s more salvage and scrap lumber laying about to draw on and paint on and so I’ll maybe do another motel sign soon. Although, as usual, I’ve got an extra-long list of words and phrases I want to paint just as much, all inspired by vague memories of signs I’ve seen but didn’t get pictures of or couldn’t buy off whoever made ‘em, ’cause sometimes you simply can’t find that part out, since signs like these, when you run across them in whatever odd corner of the country, are almost always sort of mysterious objects left over from a long-gone world. Like, a real life folk art sign rarely ever has a provenance, except if you want to just imagine what the provenance might be, which is what I like anyway, imagining stuff.

As usual, I have zero time for this sketchblog thing, although I guess I should be making time for it, ’cause that was the original idea, to draw something new every single day. But, you know, time is always running away down different furrows in the earth. Plus, there’s forty tons of other work to do, all of which I’m glad to do, but still. Anyhow, the big distraction recently was, this weird orange car that kept showing up in front of our house was out there once again on Saturday, so we had to deal with that, meaning we waited for the driver to show up, so we could ask him who the heck he was and where the heck did he actually belong? Turned out, he was just this poor confused kid who was all tangled up in a messy romance with a girl from up the street. Apparently, the girlfriend’s mother didn’t like him parking in front of their house, so he parked in front of ours instead, even though we live hundreds of feet away. All of which, I guess, is a pretty exciting story, which is over now anyway, ’cause it seems the mother must’ve had a change of heart, ’cause now the confused kid’s parking up by his girlfriend’s house. We kind of figured he wasn’t too bad of a person, ’cause his weird orange car had a Stevie Wonder sticker on the back window, and who nowadays has the nerve to drive around with one of those?

Otherwise, I haven’t been sketching much worth posting, except this one thing, which was me just working out patterns for some objects I’m making. When I was doodling it, I was thinking about aerial views of farms and cities, and about various kinds of maps, and about ritual patterns, and also game boards. Plus, I reckon there are a lot of germ forms in this kind of drawing, too, cells and organelles and the shapes of various imaginary viruses. And also, I was thinking about Sixties SF book covers, especially the ones from Ballantine. All of which, of course, is totally un-original, but whatever. I think it’s possible I even had Pucci patterns in the back of my head, although who knows how or why I ever have patterns like that anywhere near any part of my brain.

The objects, meanwhile, are kind of hard to explain at the moment…they’re vaguely for a future project that’s vaguely called “Martian Destination,” which is a term for misdirected internet traffic (sort of). Maybe I’ll post pix of ‘em later, if they ever shape up to be anything more than a glimmer of an idea.

Oh, and I guess I did do this one other thing, which is a very simple little drawing based on a fairly ancient memory. According to a story I heard a long time ago, one of my extremely distant cousins once had a motel way, way out on a State Highway (I don’t know which state). Anyhow, supposedly, once a year or so, this guy would come through town with a traveling Snake Show. And, so, besides showing off different kinds of snakes to motel visitors for whatever loose dimes they had laying around, he also would get in this kind of aquarium-style contraption and let rattlesnakes roam about all over him. I suppose that was the capper to his whole little roadside attraction, the snake-tank bit. I actually have no idea if the story’s even true, but it sounds at least half-true, knowing the odd types of folk I’ve encountered down the years. I do know I kind of like the idea of some old character roaming mid-century America making a living off his talent for charming snakes. If I could write, I’d write about him, imagine a whole back-story and everything, but drawing’s slightly more my thing.

P.S. Here’s what I’m reading now: an interesting article about the Egyptian novelist Alaa al Aswany in last Sunday’s New York Times; Swimming Lessons by Rohinton Mistry; and Production for Graphic Designers by Alan Pipes, to refresh my memory about some stuff I haven’t dealt with for a while, but expect to deal with again soon.

Also, this painting’s from Tuesday, which was during my recent Critter Period. I think the red shapes are sort of symbols for buildings and clouds and sounds. I think I was thinking about stray cats in places like Ouagadougou and Conakry and Colombo. Like, how they wander around in the noise and dust and heat, all hungry and grumpy and yet not wild anymore. Or, who knows. Anyway, now I’m back to drawing airplanes and cosmonauts.

While I know it’s pretty hard to imagine, I actually have 13 or 14 things I’d like to write about, although I’m not sure “writing” is actually the right word. But, anyway, I’m super-busy at the moment, so I doubt a lot that I’m gonna have time today for any sort of writing or scribbling or whatever at all, which is a shame (for me, not for you), ’cause I wanted to write about this weird orange car that keeps getting parked in front of our house, and about the book I’m reading right now, which is a good book for learning arcane graphic design terms like “beard” and “nick” and “quoin.” Also, I wanted to write about book covers I’ve known and enjoyed down the years, and how it’s really strange I dream so often of golf courses, ’cause I’m not remotely fond of golf or the way it uses up the surface of the Earth (with all due respect to my dad and to the memory of my grandfather…I mean, I guess golf was a pretty solid family tradition until it took a detour around me).

Like I said, though, I have zero time at the moment for all that kind of stuff. So, instead, here’s a painting. Which, you know, I guess I’m trying to paint as much as possible, to maybe try and rediscover how to do art. The goal’s to do maybe five of these things a week, but I am, as usual, behind. Anyhow, I think the idea of this one came from spending time in Phoenix, where the sun is sometimes kind of relentless (although I love Arizona), and figures can sometimes look kind of like silhouettes against the bright, bright air. Plus, I remember from Texas how people would often carry around parasols for portable shade, which is a cool visual. Plus I draw in silhouette anyway, ’cause it’s a cheat for how I don’t actually know how to draw the right way. Okay, enough, I’ve gotta go.