Radiant Comics

They can’t all be winners. That’s what the law of averages says. Some are good, some are bad, and in the end there is an average. Everything can’t be above average. I bring this up because I just spent the day making a bad painting. Maybe “Failed painting” is a better phrase but either way, in the end, the piece was a disappointment to me. I hate when that happens. It’s not a great way to pass a day.

More often than not I like my paintings. I have been at this for quite a while now. I think they are successful at fulfilling whatever vision I had of them. Of course some are better than others. I have my favorites but even when a painting is not my favorite someone else may like it. I know that and try not to judge them too harshly. I’ve finished paintings and thought, “Eh, that doesn’t really do it for me but it’s still okay”. Some paintings I learn to like more over time. The opposite happens on occasion too. But a bad painting, a failed painting, that’s a whole different story. A whole other level of muddled confusion. Where did it all go wrong?

I can often feel it when it’s happening. Something is not quite right. It’s different than feeling bad when making a painting. At times I’m not in a good mood as I paint but my mood isn’t necessarily reflected in the painting. I can make a good painting while in a bad mood. Sometimes making a good painting can even get me out of a bad mood. Other times I can’t even tell if it’s a good painting until my bad mood has left me. No, making a bad painting is having nothing I do be able to make the painting better. It’s a feeling of helplessness.

Paintings all start out the same. Blank. And it takes a while for a painting to come together. I start off by making a drawing. Usually I have the drawing already done and I transfer it to the canvas or paper. Then comes the paint. This is the part that takes a while. There is a lot of painting to be done where it all looks like an unfinished statement. I’ve heard artists say that a painting should look finished at every stage but I think that’s wishful thinking (and usually comes from an abstract painter).

An unfinished painting often looks like an unfinished painting. If it looked like a finished painting then it would indeed be finished. Why would anyone work for another three minutes or three days on a finished painting? It makes no sense to me that whole “Finished at every stage” thing.

It’s during the various unfinished stages that you have to have confidence in your abilities. It helps to know what you are doing. You have to know that the painting doesn’t look like much right now but after some of the other steps are taken it will look nice. It all pulls together in the end. That’s how things are done. When you’re young this is the hardest part. That’s why a lot of young artists never finish things.

What happens with a bad painting is that things don’t pull together in the end. In fact there is never an end. There is just stopping. I go through my steps: drawing, color sketch, underpainting, painting, details, finishing touches, and then nothing. No pay off. The painting doesn’t come alive. Instead it just lies there looking dull. Sometimes at this point I can recognize what’s wrong and change things. I can pull out a late fourth quarter victory when things look like a defeat. It is possible. But not always and not today.

A bad painting is different than a bad drawing. It’s easier to either figure out or abandon a bad drawing. At least it is after you’ve learned how to. That’s one thing I, and others, have had to learn through experience. I’ve seen it and felt it before. As a young artist after you’ve worked for a couple of hours on a drawing you don’t want to give it up. You want it to be right even if you know it’s not. You work and rework the drawing trying to make it better. To give up is to lose all that work. But you gain more by giving up than by continuing.

In that situation there is usually something so fundamentally wrong with the drawing that you’re better off staring over. That’s the hard part to learn: when is it easier to start down a new path rather than continue down the one you’ve worked hard to get down? Most artists do learn this lesson but it’s only after quite a few times of trying to make the unworkable work. Knowing the right and wrong times to give up isn’t an easy thing to learn.

When I make a bad painting it’s a lot harder to put my finger on what’s gone wrong. Structure is only one part of a painting and I usually have that worked out before I even start. What is it? The color? The texture? The brush strokes? The image itself? That’s what is hard to figure out. I can’t always see how the water is getting into the boat.

I think a lot of the times when a painting doesn’t work for me it’s the image itself. There are some drawings that work as drawings but can’t be made into paintings. They work in the simplicity of black and white but not in color. There can be a balance between black and white that is lost when I try to add color. It usually happens when the shapes in the foreground and background interact in a certain way. They almost blur together with edges becoming parts of both. Adding color to that defines the space in a way that often makes the image less interesting. But once again this is something I can recognize fairly quickly in the color sketch stage. Not always but a lot of the time.

Nope, I have no idea what made this painting bad except that it never came together. Though I have made bad paintings into good ones in the past. But that doesn’t happen the same day I make the original bad painting. That happens after I put the painting away and come back to it. I forget what I wanted to do with it in the first place and make it into something else. I start over just not with a blank piece of paper.

I use the bad painting as a launching point. It’s much easier to completely let go of a painting after I’ve forgotten about it and after I’ve forgotten how much time I spent on it trying to make it good. It’s the time that kills me right after I finish a bad painting. I sit around and think of all the better things I could have done with the time. That’s a little exaggerated. I don’t think of anything specific. I just think there were better things I could have done in general than make a bad painting.

Writing this has given me a little hope that maybe I can eventually transform this painting into something else, into a good painting, in the future. I’m going to pack up my paints and put them and the painting away. That seems to be an important part of the process to me. Putting things away and clearing off my drawing table. It helps clear my mind. I could go for some clear mind right about now.

What did I get accomplished this week? It feels like nothing. But that’s how a lot of weeks feel to me and I’m guessing I’m not alone in that. I’m sure my lack of feeling any accomplishments has something to do with the fact that I’m most interested in whatever I’m currently working on and not what I’ve already finished. Once I’ve finished something it often leaves my mind and I tend to forget I’ve accomplished it.

I have a friend who’s favorite video game was usually one that hadn’t come out yet. This was in the days before everything about everything was on the internet and all of us gamers used to buy video game magazines and pass them around. There were at least half a dozen magazines about video games published each month. Most of them were filled with fluff, press releases, and lots of nothing. But this friend would scour each one bit by bit for any info on an upcoming game that he was excited about. He could find things we missed because we got bored and stopped looking very hard. When the game was finally released this friend was often not as excited about it anymore. He liked anticipating the game rather than playing it. The game was always better in his imagination.

That story is really an aside. I remembered it because of my “Forgetting what I’ve accomplished” mindset but isn’t quite a parallel. No, I just concentrate and am most interested in what I’m doing at the moment. I also think it’s a human trait to forget our accomplishments at times. At least for a large portion of humanity. The past has a way of receding as we all deal with the present. Plus we tend to think about the future. At least those of us not trapped by nostalgia or cursed by a painful future.

I’ve noticed one way for a person to give themselves a sense of accomplishment is to lay out their work in front on them. That is if your work has a physical result. Sometimes you have to grab a whole bunch of your paintings, drawings, photos, cartoons, or whatever it is you do and lay them out in front of you. On a table, on a couch, or on the floor. Whatever works. Pull them all out of their storage spaces and look at everything. Seeing a bunch of what you’ve done makes you realize that you have, in fact, actually done something. Most artists I’ve known do this every once in while. It keeps the spirits up. You can say, “Yeah, I did that”.

A few years ago I came up with another way to give myself more of a sense of accomplishment when I needed it. I started using my computer calender but instead of using it to write down what I have to do I use it to write down what I’ve done. It’s backwards looking rather than forwards. I guess it’s as much a diary as it is a calender. Things pile up in it behind me.

First I started writing down what I I did art-wise that day. I painted, I worked on a drawing, I made a print, or anything else I produced. But then I got more specific. I started writing down what drawings or painting I worked on. But first I had to start to name all of my stuff. I actually started out by numbering whatever large oil painting I was working on. Somehow I thought only the large works needed to be noted by an identifier.

Then as time passed all the days on my calender began to look the same. I realized that I’d have to name everything I did. Drawings, paintings, prints, and photos. It didn’t even matter what the name was as long as it was a unique identifier and would make the days look different. I’d write the name on the drawing itself and then put the name in the calender. It’s kinda fun. I’m always coming up with strange titles.

As time went by I added more things to my calender. I now note what paying work I’ve done on any given day and how long I worked on it. I write down if I went for a bike ride that day or wrote a blog. I now mention if I mowed the lawn. That also helps me keep track of when the next lawn mowing might be. My calender might not be filled with exciting social engagements I can look forward too but if I need a sense of accomplishment I can easily read back on what I’ve done. The rearview mirror isn’t as empty as it was before.

A person can get lost in the nostalgia of the past but I think that a calender generally avoids all that. It’s an unemotional grid with numbers on it. And in this case writing. It represents the past but in a formal way. I’m sure if I was using a calender that had pictures on it then the picture might lend themselves to nostalgia but the grid alone does not. I like a computer calender.

I haven’t used a wall or book calender in years. At one time I had a calender on the wall like so many other people do but I eventually got tired of it taking up so much wall space. I needed more and more places to hang/store my pictures so as the years went by I switched over to a book type calender. It was a week by week calender and I used to write down some of the things I’d done but not as as regularly as I do now.

I did make a habit of writing in my book calender though. Once a day, usually at night, I would write a sentence in that day’s box. Just a sentence that would stand on it’s own and not have to be connected to any other sentence before or after it. I would use those sentences for my mail art pieces or any other time I wanted some words to go with some pictures. It was also an outlet for writing daily before I began to blog. I actually wouldn’t always get to write a sentence daily as life would get in the way but I would double or triple-up some nights to make sure each day in the calender had a sentence.

So you’d think with all that my sense of accomplishment wouldn’t disappear so easily but it does. I was pacing about a bit today wondering what I was going to do, how I was going to get anything done, and if I had ever gotten anything done because I sure couldn’t remember anything I had ever gotten done. Or at least the stuff I had already done didn’t interest me anymore. Yes, life is a strange place.

I’m not much of a list person but some people are. They like to write things down and then check them off one by one as they do the things listed. I can understand the appeal. Finishing everyday tasks rarely come with rewards so putting that check mark next to something on a list can give a person a sense of accomplishment. That can be a reward in itself and it’s the little things in life that get us through.

The only time I make a list is when I’m trying to figure out what to do next. Creatively that is. Most of the time I know what I’m going to do next. I finish a painting so I want to then do some drawing. After that I turn the drawing into a print. Maybe then I work on a photograph. I have many artistic things that I like to do. When I’m tired or disillusioned with one thing I can move onto another. But it isn’t always that easy.

Sometimes, like this week, I have no clue, no direction, no focus, and no idea what to do next. Some of the time when I’m like that I just draw. Basic idea drawing in my drawing book. I might not use them now but maybe I will in the future. I’ll dig through my old drawing books and work up finished drawings from some old ideas. This week I dug through my drawing book from 2003, pulled out a few ideas, and made them into finished drawings. Finished drawings aren’t necessarily finished works of art though. That’s a few more steps.

It’s only when I’ve done idea drawings, finished drawings, and maybe even some color sketches yet still have no idea just exactly what it is that I want to do that I make a list. I make the list in an attempt to gain some focus. It’s a list of things I’ve been working on, am interested in working on, or have to do. I don’t usually check things off of the list as it’s not there to help me with my sense of accomplishment.

As a matter of fact I often forget about the list entirely after I get back on track and start doing a few things on it. I write the lists in little notebooks I have lying about the place and then ignore the list as my attention moves to whatever I’m working on. Quite often when I rediscover the list a week later I notice I only finished half of it and it doesn’t even matter that I didn’t finish things on it. All that matters is that it got me started on something.

This weeks list went something like this:

Self Portrait

Photos for BDay

Print Store

Marker Drawings

This is a list of some of the things on my mind. The self portrait is because I just watched a BBC show called Ego: The Strange World of Self Portraits. It was all about the art historical tradition of self portraits. It made a case for artists’ self portraits being important works in the history of art. I liked it. I’ve done a couple of self portraits in my day but haven’t done any in a while. This show made me want to do one. I think this one is a long shot on the list though.

Photos for BDay is for my Mom. For her birthday my Mom wants some photos. She gave me all the family photos from over the years and sometimes I uses them as a basis for making my own photos. She gets photos she took decades ago reinterpreted by me. I’m making these in the style of my Lo-Fi Found Art that I’ve been using lately. I’ve made them all different ways for her over the years depending on what style I’m using in my current photo work. Sometimes I go back and do things in my “Classic” style though.

Print Store is something I’ve been threatening to do for a while but still never have. That is setting up an Etsy (or some such) print store. I keep wanting to do this but I think it might be another long shot. Or this might finally be it’s time. I’m never sure. It would mean coming up with a plan for which pieces of mine I should make prints out of. I’m horrible at this part. I have no idea what other people will like. I know what I like well enough but it has been my experience that when what I like matches with what other people like it’s strictly coincidence.

I’m not even sure what the plan would be. I’d have to pick five or six pieces, figure out a size, price, and edition, make prints of them, set up an Etsy store, post them, and then what? No one will know or care that the store is there so I’d have to somehow market it. So now I’m doing marketing? That wasn’t on the list. You can see now why I’ve never gotten around to doing this one.

Marker Drawings is the final thing on the list. I haven’t actually uncapped a marker yet but this is the one I chose to start today. I picked a couple of idea sized drawings and worked them into some finished drawings. They’re going to be small marker drawings, about five by seven inches, because I wanted something I can get a handle on. I haven’t made a marker drawing in months and one of the reasons for that is that I made them more and more complex.

Last winter I started working in marker as a finished medium because I thought I could use them with a little more speed than paint. Then my technique got so complex and time consuming that it took all day to finish the last marker drawing I made. I liked the way it turned out but I haven’t had the desire to do another since. So I’m simplifying a little. It’s not always easy to simplify but I find it helps me focus. I’m pretty sure I’ll get some done.

I don’t usually have more than five or six things on any of these lists of mine. I lose interest in them after they get about that long. That might also be because one of the things on the list should spark an idea or get me motivated before it gets too long. A long list of things to do is too daunting. It becomes an impossibility. It’s one thing to expect not to get two or three things done on a list and another thing to not get ten things done on a list. Then it becomes a list of things I’m never going to do. What’s the point of that? There is no focus here.

Well, enough rambling on about lists. I better focus and then go and do something on that list.

I still don’t have a good handle on my GPS Navigator yet. I don’t use it too much so that’s an easy explanation but then again the thing isn’t that easy to use. Well, it is but it isn’t. It’s a Garmin nüvi 285W/285WT unit that I got over a year ago. It’s easy to use in that all I have to do is type in an address and hit go but it’s not easy to use in that I have no control over the route. At least no easy control.

The one way I know to exert some control over the route is to insert “Via” points. Except I haven’t been able to successfully do this yet. I last used the GPS to drive to Long Island on the Sunday before Memorial Day and was not able to add a single Via Point because I couldn’t figure out how to. I was playing with the machine the day before and couldn’t even find the Via Point menu. The only time I’ve been able to locate the Via Point menu is when I was driving and accidentally stumbled on it. A little late. I’m no novice when it comes to tech so if it’s this hard to even find out how to program a route I blame the software design.

I’ve never had a particularly good sense of direction so I like to check out the route ahead of time. I’m usually driving alone so having some clue about the way to go is helpful. I like to check out the best route on Google maps or Mapquest. Those are easy to uses sites for planning a trip and it’s real easy to choose which route to take. You can just drag Via Points onto the map in order to set the exact way you want to go. The GPS has a touch screen and it would be nice to be able to do click and drag on it. But you can’t. That’s one of its frustrations.

When I start out a trip using the GPS I drive the route I want to take and wait for the GPS to adjust. It’ll adjust it’s route on the fly to keep up with where you are. In the beginning, because I’m close to home and know that part of the trip, it’s easy to keep track of. It’s when I get further afield that things start to get tricky.

Now that I think about it things got tricky for me right away when using the GPS. Things got tricky in ways I didn’t anticipate. The first problem I had was where to put the thing. I have a 2009 Civic and the dashboard is pretty far away and curvy. I was thinking about getting a vent clip but the steering wheel blocks my vision of the vent. I used the suction cup holder that came with the thing but, just as I feared, it fell off of the windshield after about half an hour. I ended up putting the GPS on the console in between the two front seats.

Of course no matter where I put it the darned thing was a distraction. Try driving while looking at a little video game of where you’re supposed to be going. I have good eyes and good concentration and still found it too much. I looked at it as little as possible and still almost rear ended someone. It wasn’t even close really. Stopped at a red light I started to go a little before the car in front of me did. I leave room between me and the car in front at lights so there was plenty of room to stop but it still unnerved me a little. I had just been looking at the GPS while we were stopped and clearly I was distracted by it when starting to go. That is why I try to only listen to it and not look.

I got this GPS model because it speaks the street names. Even never having used one before I thought that was a good idea. I think most of them do that now but not when I got this one. That leads me to mention the second of the tricky things. It’s tough to hear the GPS if I’ve got music on in the car. I never thought of that until I used it. Since I don’t know where I’m going I don’t know when the GPS is going to start speaking directions. It could be anytime. Even if two people are in the car just talking they might miss the spoken directions. It’s tough to be constantly listening up for the GPS voice to speak.

All that is why I like to plan out my route (I even print out the maps) to familiarize myself with the roads. This usually cuts down my confusion but the whole thing seem to always break down when I’m nearest to my destination and I have to take the local streets. The GPS always picks different local streets than I do on the map and I’m not familiar enough with the streets to ignore the GPS at this point. I always end up driving through a maze of small streets rather than a main one. But the GPS does get me there in the end. It’s worth it just for that.

One other thing I wanted to do on this recent trip was to test the battery life. I hadn’t done that before. I’ve only been on short trips, not that this one was especially long, and had no idea how long the battery would last. Sure I could plug it in to the cigarette lighter but I haven’t even bothered with that yet. It turns out that the battery lasts about two hours. It turned itself off on the way back home. It’s a good thing I knew where I was by then or I would have had to pull over and plug it in.

One last annoying thing about the battery is that if you don’t use the USB cable that came with the GPS then the battery won’t charge via USB. I have a bunch of USB cables that fit it and will make it mount on my computer’s desktop but they won’t charge it. That is an inconvenience. I had to label my GPS cable when I realized this. Before that confusion reigned.

On one recent trip I had to abandon the GPS altogether. I was on my way back from somewhere in NJ and wanted to take the local roads. It was mostly one local road but the GPS didn’t want me to take it. I made the mistake of following its instructions and made a wrong turn. I realized it quickly and turned around but later on missed a turn I wanted to take. The whole time I was driving north the GPS wanted to take me south.

After I realized I had missed a turn somewhere I decided to stop ignoring the GPS and started following it. It brought me back to the beginning of my route! I had gone about five or so miles backwards. Then I turned the thing off. I checked the maps I printed, found the turn I missed and made sure to make it this time. Out of curiosity I turned it back on to see where it wanted me to go (actually I had a passenger with me on this trip so he was the one who was handling the GPS). It wanted me to turn the car around again. Crazy thing.

I can see why I’d want a GPS built into my car. It would have a place on the dashboard so there would be no need to find a place to put it plus they would have it hooked up to the sound system to interrupt any music that was playing. Also no battery to worry about. So I say that if you have a chance and the money to get a car with a built in GPS it’s probably worth it. At least that’s my conclusion from using a non-built-in one.

Habit is a funny thing. I say that because I recently realized that one of my main habits has changed over the years in a way that I never really noticed. That would be my comic reading habit.

In the last few years I’ve purchased more of my comics as hard cover or soft cover collections than as actual comic books. This mostly has to do with me not liking too many super hero comics so there are not a lot of new monthly comics for me to buy. I still get the small press comic books that I’ve been buying for ages but there aren’t a ton of them and they don’t come out monthly or even bimonthly in a lot of cases.

It’s been a golden age of comic book and comic strip reprints and I’ve gotten a lot of them. Plus I’ve bought a lot of graphic novels and a couple of current super hero books as they’ve been collected in a bound edition. I sure haven’t been reading fewer comics. This switch from comics to collections is not the habit I’m talking about.

Every comic reader has his habit of how comics are read and put away. There is a temporary place to put new comics and a more permanent place to put them after they’ve been read. From an end table to a comic box or shelf most collector’s comics follow the same path from month to month. If there is no order to your collection then you don’t have a collection you have an accumulation. That’s a different beast entirely.

When I get back from the comic shop I usually log my comics into my database. Not every collector has a database but a lot do. This way I know what comics I have and on which shelf to find them. How to find them is actually the most important part to me because my collection is spread out across many book shelves. It’s more a map than a database.

I still don’t have all my hard and softcover books in a database though and that is making it hard to find them at times. I’m constantly having to rearrange my shelves as I get new books and it’s tough to get them into any kind of order because they come in so many different sizes. Some need extra tall shelves and some don’t. It can be an organizational challenge but at least books have easy to read spines that the book title is usually printed on.

After a comic is logged into my database I put the comic into a bag and it goes onto my end table in the “To be read” stack. There it stays until I read it. When I want to read a new comic I pick one off the stack, read it, and then put it away on a shelf with the rest of the series. That’s it. Not too complicated and it keeps things neat and easy to find. The comic don’t linger around the place getting under foot.

This week at the comic shop was different than my usual one. Not only did I have none of my regular comics come out but I didn’t have any collected editions come out that week either. Sometimes on weeks like this I’ll find some collected edition of something on the local comic shop’s shelves that looks interesting and buy it. But not this week.

This week I decided I was going to pick out six super hero books that I usually don’t read. Three from Marvel and three from DC. As I said I normally don’t buy any super hero books so I had a lot to choose from. But as they mostly looked like crap to me so it wasn’t a particularly easy choice. I even wanted to check out an issue of Astonishing X-Men but it was a dollar more than the other comics. All the X-Men I looked at were a dollar more. That lead me to eliminate the X-Men from my choices.

This blog isn’t about reviewing comics but I’ll give you a quick rundown of the ones I bought:

Powerman and Iron Fist – 4 – My least favorite of the bunch. It barely made an impression on me. I won’t ever be picking this one up again.

Secret Warriors – 26 – Not bad but it was mostly a Scooby Doo “Big Reveal” issue and I wasn’t really interested coming in at this part of the story. That art and script were fine but I had no interest in the plot. Oh, and everybody ever who you thought were people were really robots.

FF – 3 – Well done but it was too reminiscent of “Planetary” for me. I already read that comic and it was better. Not a bad comic though. Nice art.

Teen Titans – 94 – My favorite comic of the six. It kept me interested and entertained. Nice art and writing. I’ll buy the series again.

Batman: Gates of Gotham – 1 – Pretty good but the artist’s confusing use of blacks hurt the story telling. I might check out another issue of it.

Flashpoint – 1 – Decent alternate world story. I might read some more of this too.

So those were the comics I bought. What was interesting to me was that they lead me to rediscover an interesting old reading habit. Since these comics were all series that I didn’t collect I had no idea if I was even going to bother to keep them. They had no place to go, shelf-wise, and I didn’t enter them into my database or slip them into protective bags. They kicked around on whatever flat service I could find to temporarily store them. Before and after I read them.

Just having the comics kick around may not sound so radical but it changed my reading habits. Even after I read them I picked them up a few times over the week to thumb through them. I read a couple of them twice. Then I remembered that this was how I used to read comics as a kid. I’d buy them and they’d kick around for a while until I got to know them. I think that’s how most kids used to read comics and one of the reasons why most comic collectors have vivid memories of childhood comics. We read them a few times just by the virtue of the comics being at hand for a week, month, or so.

I think that the pile of comic being small was also a help to this habit. I’ve had large piles of unread comics lying around over the years and often I’ll just ignore them. Sure that may be because they were freebies and I wasn’t that interested in them to begin with but it also may be because a larger stack of comics is unwieldy to flip through. And they all blur together. A large stack I just want to get out from under foot. They can just be clutter. But a smaller stack is more manageable and intriguing.

Whether the small stack was important of not it was nice to rediscover this old reading habit of mine. In judging if I liked these new comics or not it gave me a chance to get to know them better then if I read them and filed them away immediately. I think I’m going to try some more new series and let them linger about the place a bit.