Artwork, drawings, and various sketches by a once-and-future freelance illustrator.
You can’t really tell it too much, but this box has inside of it a bunch of wooden clay tools and beads and other weird objects all painted with black India ink. Sort of like relics, I guess. Like maybe the bones of saints, or perhaps ancient astronauts.
It’s probably backwards to do things this way, but I made a book box a couple of weeks ago before I started working on the actual book, and, well, here’s the cover or lid or whatever it’s called. The book itself is sort of in a primitive state, on account of I’m still trying to figure it out, like how it should look and what it’s saying and all that stuff. For now, it’s just called “the Bewick book,” ’cause the sideways inspiration for it was Thomas Bewick’s A General History of Quadrupeds. But…we’ll see if I can avoid this whole project ending up lame the way too much of my junk ends up.
Here are a few more old boxes from around the house. These are the ones I’m keeping, unless someday I decide not to keep ‘em. I mean, I can always make new ones, I suppose…except that, very, very soon I really need to actually draw something, even if it’s just rocketships and robots or whatever. You know, all the usual dumb boy junk. Anyway, today I uploaded a few more boxes and other odds and ends to Etsy, so look at ‘em while they’re visible.
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’s what I’d planned to do today:
Memorize a map of India, memorize the titles and current locations of every work of art Joseph Cornell ever made, learn 100 Spanish verbs, learn the whole entire history of Pakistan and also Brazil, pin down once and for all the names and the powers of the Greek and Roman gods, learn yet more about soukous, learn how to make a tiny radio, figure out the meanings of various lyrics, cut and print 10 woodcuts, draw an avant-garde comic about a spaceman with blue skin and black eyes, draw another comic about a girl who loves carnivals, make several little books, look up info about Yayoi Kusama and fridge magnet art and the ecology of the Sonoran desert, and read every word John McPhee ever wrote about anything.
Of course, I totally ran out of time for half this stuff.
Instead, I mostly just studied various less interesting things and “thought” about drawing and posted a new box to Etsy. Which, the box, if you wanna see it, is pictured down below. And that’s all for now. I have like 30 more boxes, drawings, paintings and whatever I need to post, although it’ll probably be tomorrow before I can get to it. After that, I have to really get productive, ’cause there’s never any such thing as enough work.
