Eye Trouble is apparently a sketchblog of some sort.

It’s thundering and lightning outside, right at this very exact moment. Which means I oughta quit working on spice rack designs and shut this dang machine down. I hate it though, ’cause every moment of delay means our spices will have to keep on being all disorganized and whatever. I mean, we hardly ever use cumin, on account of it’s always hidden behind the bay leaves and the cajun-flavored sea salt. And the last time I saw the turmeric, Howard Dean was still a viable candidate for President. So, as soon as the weather clears up, or at least as soon as the lightning bolts quit tickling the tops of the trees in our neighborhood, I’m gonna re-embark on my mission to computer-design a new rack ASAP. Man, I can hardly wait…

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.

Okay, this was supposed to be a drawing called “Megabase Lunatron,” but now it’s a drawing called “Moon Crystal.” What happened was, the crystal was going to be a crooked-style Fullerine dome, but then I couldn’t crowd in all the dumb little rovers and space workers and moon trucks I’d planned on drawing, so I drew it like it was a couple of folks out for a sort of outing. With, of course, their space dog and a future kind of digital camera, which will be bulkier than the modern kind. Again, I was going for a crummy chipboard look, like this thing was a linocut, cut with the dullest possible gouges and then printed with cheap sticky ink on the back of a newsprint pad. I guess, in fact, I could just do it that way instead of on the computer…but, whatever, maybe later, if and when there’s actual extra time laying about. Thing is, lino doesn’t feel as natural anymore as a Wacom tablet, so I’d have to relearn some muscle memory or something. Not that drawing’s ever natural. Anyhow, gotta go and take a break from the internets.

Apparently, there are about as many people selling art on Etsy as there are people living inside the city limits of the city where my wife and I live in now. Which is not so much a huge number, but it’s not a small one, either. I mean, I guess if you imagine every person on our street and on the other streets in our neighborhood has a storefront, and then multiply that number by some other large and scary number, and then add in all the people at all the stores and gas stations and restaurants in town, plus all the bajillions of people who are always, always roaming about on the various roads, then you might be able to arrive at some sort of vague visual idea of just how many people we’re talking about. Of course, you’d probably have to also include everyone on every paddleboat and picnic table at the lake, and every person in every movie audience, and everyone at the art museum, and every golfer on every fairway of every golf course from one end of the city parks system to the other, and every single student and teacher in summer school or Hebrew school or Sunday school. Not to mention, you’d have to count all the people who are riding in buses or waiting for buses, and all the people going about their lives in every hospital, factory, and warehouse, and all the many people hidden away here and there who usually don’t get counted. And, well, you know, it’s a pretty big crowd’s what I’m saying.

Which is fine, of course. It’s even a kind of amazing and good thing, that the planet’s that full of artists, despite how civilization’s not always 100% in favor of keeping artists around.

Besides, it’s a good reminder to think about the relative bigness of the Etsy community, since it reminds a person (namely, me, I guess) how the sweet delicious solipsism that wafts off the Internet like brain-shrinking glue fumes is really an enormous illusion. It’s good to remember that humbleness is way more rational than not being humble.

Speaking of which, here are some square little PDA sketches from the last couple of days. They’re not worth much, except that occasionally I’ll see something I like a bit in this or that odd corner. Such as a certain crackly line or an accidental pattern or a weird shape of eye or ear.

So, I was a grubbing about in a box of old art, looking for stuff to maybe sell (you know, instead of using my time the wiser way, which would mean actually working on new drawings and boxes and whatever), and, anyway, I happened upon a couple of pieces that I’d completely forgotten about, which I thought I’d post here to kind of remind myself how I used to draw lines, which is a way I wish I still drew ‘em, which is to say a little more messy and random and completely contrary to the idea of “rendering”, whatever that is. Although, of course, the caribou drawing is pretty imperfect, on account of how the negative space is completely negative, instead of having Smurfs or Nixon heads or Mercury astronauts floating about in it, like it oughta have. But, that’s the thing with being a slow learner, I’ll learn how to integrate spaces eventually. Like, possibly in twenty more years of doodling. And, well, the pseudo-funk-style retro head drawing, who knows what I was doing, since I barely remember doing it. Probably it was just a lot of fun to fill the background with weird tangles of aimless cross-hatching. Even though, yeah, I know “fun” is not supposed to be one of the top ten reasons why anything art-like exists. Anyhow, back to work. Or, at least, back to work after we take my Dad to a local fish place for Father’s Day (I lived away from my family for a long, long time, and I’ve lately been discovering that my folks are actually pretty cool.) Maybe next time I’ll finally have new stuff to staple to the phone pole on my corner of the 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’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.

Once again, I have no actual real-life time for this blogging junk, so I’m just gonna very fast post a few random sketches from last week’s trip out West. All these things came off my crappy old crash-happy PDA, which was a complete and total waste of money, except that I like Pocket Painter more than I oughta like it, considering that using it means I end up neglecting the nine million felt-tip pens I already own and also the extremely blank and brand-new Moleskine that needs to get scribbled in really soon. (Or, well, okay, I guess the dumb old PDA came in a little handy last year in London, when we needed to know real quick and easy-like how to ride the Tube from one place to another, which we did by checking the cool animated maps in Visual IT’s Tube 2.) Anyway, so that’s why the sketches are tiny and plus have that pixelbrick look of old MacDraw art from long, long ago, which is a look I always liked a ton. Meanwhile, the rest of the day today I’m working on Master Plan Number 99, which I’m sure is the version that this time will once and for all solve the various fun issues that now and then crop up in this so-called artistic lifestyle of mine. And I need to read some more from the book my wife recommended when she saw me struggling a bit with non-creativity. The book being Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, which so far appears to be the greatest book ever written.

All right, so, as usual, today’s one of those days where I have next to no time for any type of cyberspatial activities. What I’m doing instead is, I’m spending the day out in the actual realistic world, painting and drawing and writing and also maybe studying, if my eyes and brain’ll cooperate, which is always an open question. Plus I guess I’m gonna try to take care of some paperwork that badly needs to get taken care of. Plus, perhaps today’ll be the day I catch up on politics…it’s been a while since I last heard or read anything about the primaries and I need to see how Chris Dodd is doing.

Anyway, since all of that sort of stuff is not, of course, the sort of junk worth blogging about, I’m gonna go ahead and not blog about it. Assuming “blog” is now officially and not just casually a verb, which I guess it’s been for a while now.

Oh, and here are a few old drawings I’m sort of tossing overboard from out of some ancient sketchbooks. Sometimes I have a very foggy notion what I wanna draw, but usually what I end up drawing is way, way far from whatever the first idea was. And also usually not a tenth as “good” as I’d pictured in my head. Which I suppose is normal, although who knows, I’ve only ever known about 1.5 other visual artists in person, so all I’ve got to go on for how to do this stuff is just various sorts of hunches.

Before I go, I need to mention (’cause I forgot to mention when it happened), congratulations to Sophia Camille for getting born into this crazy world! You’re a lucky kid, on account of hundreds of reasons, but especially ’cause your parents are very good people, and also ’cause you’re gonna grow up near one of the best taquito places on the whole entire planet of the Earth.

Okay, back to work.

Except: the idea for the butterfly drawing was stolen from an original artwork by one of my nieces. Sorry, kid, but your uncle’s one of those type of pseudo-artists who steals ideas from wherever he can steal ‘em. I totally always admit I’m not original, though. If that helps. Which I’m sure it doesn’t.