Eyebrow!

Sonuvagun, I forgot the eyebrow! That’s what’s been bugging me!

Finished!

Finally done with the painting. I'll need to do a little quick lettering tomorrow, and maybe some touch-up work, and then it's off to UPS.

New moods

Here at Grumer Laboratories (Introspection Division), we’re always looking to bring you, the customer, the very latest in mood and emotion technology. That’s why we’re happy to announce the recent discovery of two new moods. You may remember some preliminary results being released in previous posts. Further research has revealed that Ben Folds’s “Gone” makes a very effective mood barometer, and that I can measure my mood by how I sing along with it.

If I’m moved to stride about, waving my arms and singing along triumphally, mirroring the surface mood of the narrator, it means that I’m feeling optimistic. Scientists have dubbed this mood “Gone up”.

If, on the other hand, I find myself bitterly repeating the closing lines of each verse, “I will consider you gone”, it indicates pessimism and hopelessness relating to particular areas of my life. This mood is called “Gone down”.

Especially interesting is that these moods can co-exist with other, seemingly contradictory moods. My current mood of “slightly Gone down” does not seem to be at all interfered with by a more general sense of well-being and accomplishment brought about by a morning workout and the recent completion of a painting, nor by the anticipation of a day spent with friends buying comic books and performing semi-professional fanac.

Buildings and Art

Getting out of the subway at Union Square today and heading towards my bank (to make a deposit, woo-hoo!), I saw a man selling prints and sketching. He was leaning against a lamppost and gazing off to the north, and I knew instantly what building he was sketching, because I’m fascinated by it as well. It’s on the northeast corner of Broadway and 18th Street; that’s it on the left. “That dark one, right?” I asked. I was right. We chatted about it for a while, about the details, the variously-shaped windows, how it’s the exact color of an ivory black wash.

His name is Tom Matt, and he makes amazing paintings on newspaper and sells prints (for more than I can afford, or I’d buy some). (Hey, Meem — his bio says he’s studied at the Lyme Academy of Fine Art, Old Lyme, Connecticut.) I feel inspired.

New York has such beautiful buildings. It’s odd — when I was in college I was a fan of the Bauhaus school of functional design, all that form-follows-function, plain and simple stuff. That movement was a reaction against the very stuff I like so much now. I still like simple design for tools, though. I see no problem with having different aesthetics for tools and buildings.

I did some reading about creative blocks (browsing through a book in A.I. Friedman to kill a few minutes before meeting Kevin at Cosmic Comics), and I suspect strongly that not having space to really work is, well, getting in the way of doing any serious work. Time to start kicking Chris’s butt to get her stuff out of my place. Also time to start getting rid of my stuff.

If I’m correctly remembering an article in the South of the Navy Yards Artists News, on the third Thursday of each month a bunch of Brooklyn artists meet at A Table from 9-11 AM for breakfast. I’d like to show up, but that would require waking up at around 8, and I just don’t know if that’s gonna happen.