DOCUMENT:
Chronicles of Project 25:365
Toluca Prison is Gonna Kill Me
(Ink + gouache)
The nurses swinging pipes? Fine. The bitches with the knives? Fuck that. Spider mannequins? Fuck them. I did not agree to those things becoming more dexterous and omnidirectional. I might have blacked out for a moment after the screaming in the… you know what? I’ m not going to tell you where, because spoilers. It’s definitely going to be my heart that gives out.
Playing the Silent Hill 2 remake is a weird experience. I played the first one when it came out, 23 years ago, when I was 23 and the graphics on the brand new XBOX were hideous. Now I’m older and Pyramid Head looks good and I look like shit. Somehow having played it before makes the pervasive SH2 anxiety worse. Or maybe I’m an anxious bastard. That’s just true. I can prove it with a prescription for not one but two anti-anxiety meds.
After spending my requisite 40 minutes beating monsters to death with a lead pipe and shouting “Oh, fuck THAT” at my nearly black television while the sound of radio static filled my home, I read an article about how, if you’re going to have a blog, you should have a clear topic.
It may appear that I lack one of those. It’s a critique I've gotten all my life: artwork too inconsistent in type, style, and theme; and a CV so odd that some people think I’m lying (yes, I am a painter and tattoo artist with a PhD in art history who used to be an adjunct professor and I did, yes, work at a comic book store and spend a summer as an assistant inker and, I swear, yes, I do bind books but not very well so please don’t be upset about it). And how the hell is Toluca Prison relevant to a blog (ostensibly) about creating art every day?
I mean, it’s kinda not. But it’s also my actual life. I didn’t sit down and stare meaningfully at a canvas that was perfectly lit for recording my mostly fake brush strokes. I didn’t work on anything artsy in my warmly lit and aesthetically pleasing painting studio. I sat on the couch and screamed obscenities at make-believe monsters. And then drew a 5-minute sketch of one as my piece for the day.
Sometimes, I paint something that has emotional or intellectual depth. Sometimes, I paint canvases that are 7 feet tall and take me months to complete. But as an everyday practice? Nah. That’s not what I’m doing. And it’s not what anyone needs to do to be an artist or engage with their craft. No one needs to perform their role to some fucked up standard of a script none of us agreed to.
I have some deep thoughts rattling around in my brain. Believe me, I was brutally trained to harbor those thoughts. If you catch me at exactly the wrong time (for you; for me, it’ll be fun), I'll probably share them with you and you’ll think, “what a pretentious jackass” or “why does anyone know this shit?” In that depth is love and respect for art and the human drive to create. But most of the time? As an actual person doing real life grown up shit in a world where the ocean currents might collapse and someone posted on Reddit today that Hitler might have just been a metaphor? Yeah… I’m gonna be leaning heavily into shooting monsters in the head twice to knock them back before beating them into a bloody mass with a lead fucking pipe.
Just the Date
(Ink, pencil, + gouache)
All I managed to draw today was the date. I had glorious intentions of trying out some new pens, but my brain exploded and I spent 3 hours hiding in the dark instead of being productive.
I have… a lot of projects happening all at the same time. There’s a dollhouse taking up the entire table in my studio, I have a pile of signatures for my new journal (the leather is rolled up on the floor below the aforementioned dollhouse), there are two gessoed canvases leaning against the wall together like belligerent drunks, taunting me about how they’re supposed to be tarot cards, and there are 32 tabs open in my chrome browser about how to build websites on platforms I don’t use.
Whatever is the opposite of procrastination is what is wrong with my brain. Precrastinatory overindulgence. That’s what I’m calling it.
Oh. Yeah. And I'm making a friend a rosary based on the tree of life even though I don’t know how to do that.
Jesus Christ.
The current journal.
The bathroom in the dollhouse.
Keys
The original Keys on Raymond in St. Paul. Drawn on my phone while waiting for my burger.
Tonight was also the first night I met up with the Art Jam folks at ALTR Gallery and attempted to woo them into joining the 365 project. I’m glad everyone is being so nice to me while I make this shit up off the top of my head.
