Whelp Hunting

"It was noon before they began to find the bills of Sleary's Horse-riding on barns and walls, and one o'clock when they stopped in the market place."

By general consent, they even avoided that side of the street on which he habitually walked.

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He looked round the lamp upon his table, and saw, with amazement, his eldest daughter.

Some of my paintings are a wrestling match, I sneak up on the idea and have to pounce before it scampers away, and then it's a tussle to get it onto the paper. I'm wrestling with a face on a picture right now. I spent all of last Saturday trying to get an expression just right -- trying things, painting them out and trying again. It's the sort of struggle that makes you question whether the entire thing wants to even be a painting or not, whether you pounced on it when it was on its way to someone else, to become a sculpture or a song. But there's something about the idea, it just works so well for this picture, if only you could just get that face right.



This painting though, this one on the easel, came to me all at once when I read the passage. It was fuzzy and vague, but all complete. It was as though I'd peaked behind a curtain and there it was. I sketched out what I thought it might be, and whoa there it was. And then I blocked it out on paper and yes, it's still there, just as I hoped it would be.

Because it looks so good to me now I hesitate to add too much too it -- I don't want to over work this one. I don't want to rush past the finish line and start laboring over something that was supposed to be finished before I added this or that unnecessary thing. Less can be more sometimes. But that's a fine line, and it's rare that I am alerted to the approach of that line so early on. (I tend to barrel through things in cases like this, carried on by the frothy insouciance of youth.) It takes a lot of effort for me right now to take a step back and asses. This painting is very generous, and has been screaming NOT YET! WAIT! MAKE SURE FIRST! It's demanding my full and undivided attention, and because of all the other things going on in my life right now, it's also very patient with me. I talk to it every day that I don't work on it, asking it to wait, and thanking it for waiting.

It was a combination of Other Things To Plan For and a solid week of temperatures over ninety degrees fahrenheit that drove me out of the apartment -- and out of the city -- last weekend. It was supposed to be my last full day to work on pictures before things get truly crazy. Big car trip, that friend of mine's wedding, and something else I'll tell you about here in a few days. But it was hot and I had a really good painting that wanted me to wait and think about it, to wait until I wasn't so distracted any more. So I took my distracted brain for a drive.



I joined up with some friends camping on the coast, near a tiny little functional town. Two members of our group were listened and experienced clam diggers and oyster-finderes. I didn't witness this but I did enjoy the results of their labors, eating my first raw oyster fresh from the bay. It was magical. I walked along the bay for a long time in the early morning, marveling at the blackberry / morning glory / other-things thicket, watching innumerable tiny fish jumping, spotting kingfishers, herons and cormorants. Just the thing for a distracted brain.

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"What do I know, father," said Louisa in her quiet manner, "of tastes and fancies; of aspirations and affections..."

...Louisa saw her lying with an awful lull upon her face, like one who was floating away upon some great water, all resistance over, content to be carried down the stream.

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I inferred, from its being so miserable a marriage, that it was probably an unequal one in point of years.

The first beat of foreshadowing Ms. Sparsit's behavior later on in the novel.

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"Coketown, Sir," said Bounderby, obstinately taking a chair, "is not the kind of place you have been accustomed to. Therefore, if you will allow me -- or whether you will or not, for I am a plain man -- I'll tell you something about it before we go any further.'

Mr. Harthouse would be charmed.

"Don't be too sure of that," said Bounderby. "I don't promise it. First of all, you see our smoke. That's meat and drink to us. It's the healthiest thing in the world in all respects, and particularly for the lungs. If you are one of those who want us to consume it, I differ from you. We are not going to wear the bottoms of our boilers out any faster than we wear 'em out now, for all the humbugging sentiment in Great Britain and Ireland."

By way of "going in" to the fullest extent, Mr. Harthouse rejoined, "Mr. Bounderby, I assure you I am entirely and completely of your way of thinking. On conviction."

"I am glad to hear it," said Bounderby. "Now you have heard a lot of talk about the work in our mills, no doubt. You have? Very good. I'll state the fact of it to you. It's the pleasantest work there is, and it's the lightest work there is, and it's the best-paid word there is. More than that, we couldn't improve the mills themselves, unless we laid down Turkey carpets on the floors. Which we're not a-going to do."

"Mr. Bounderby, perfectly right."

"Lastly," said Bounderby, "As to our Hands. There's not a Hand in this town, Sir, man, woman or child, but has one ultimate object in life. That object is, to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. Now they're not a-going -- none of 'em -- ever to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. And now you know the place."

- "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens, Page 118-9


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Branching out

In an effort to push the Charles Dickens pictures through to completion -- and in an effort to take advantage of a rare opportunity -- I am subletting a studio downtown. From someone I really, really admire.



I’ve resisted doing this up to now, partly because of the expense, and partly because the opportunities previously open/available to me were not a solitary shut door, but rather a shared space, which I don’t think would work so well for me. I really need to be alone to really get work done. Solitude cuts down on the distractions.



And the lack of things cuts down on distractions. When I talk about this to people I tend to emphasize how empty it is, and how much I love that. They look at me like I’m crazy, because I think what people want to see when they think of an artists’ studio is the beautiful, shambly mess that I work in at home. And I have that at home. What I needed was a monistic cell to close myself in, that worldly things would not interfere with my art-making.



Don’t get me wrong. My home studio is a dream -- more than a dream -- and if it were on its own level in the apartment, or had a door that closed, things would be easier. It’s hard to explain. I’ll let Mr. Rockwell help:

“After marrying Irene I’d moved my paints easel, etc., out of Remington’s former studio and into our apartment. But it was no good. When the grocery boy rang the doorbell I had to lay my wet brushes on a chair and walk down a long hall to let him in. The same with the butcher’s boy, the postman, and every wandering salesman who thought our door looked promising. I couldn’t get any work done. So I rented the top of a garage on Prospect Street.”

- Norman Rockwell, from My Adventures as an Illustrator, pg. 133

There’s also just the difficulty (for me) to get the creative juices flowing in the same room where my partner is laughing aloud at reddit antidotes, suddenly saying, “Oh. Are you sure?” while I’m in the middle of retrieving someone’s belly from the muddy background, and I have to get up and look at a picture of a “Pilot Car - Follow Me” truck headfirst in a river. Funny, yes. Conducive to the creative process, not really. Asking my coffee mate to stop talking to me at home while I’m working feels rude because with this set up I work all the time, to varying degrees of focus. And he is a saint and will actually quit the place when I need “office time” is completely amazing. But sometimes you just need a blank space. Without internet access, fabric, canvas, and a kitchen to distract you.



I’ve had access to it since May 23rd (about ten days ago) and just about every day I’ve gone in. And it’s perfect. A little blank slate for me to cover in drawings -- affixed to the wall with that magic 3M stuff. I’m not really going to move anything in, I’ll keep it in this blank little way. Well...aside from some refinements such as an electric teakettle. For some reason I hadn’t remembered that long term desk sitting requires a great deal of tea. I don’t notice it at home, because I have an oven in the next room. It seems I don’t so much listen to muses as turn vast amounts of tea into pictures.

I have sole use of this space right up until ‘Fair, and so I go down there as often as possible. Sheer bliss. I have already done exquisite work in there that I will share with you soon. After ‘Fair I have the option to co-rent the space and we will share it tag-team style -- when one of us needs it we can text the other and ask if that’s okay. I hope that works out. So far the space is being very good to me. A great step out of the house and into the world.

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"The basket packed in silence, they brought her bonnet to her, and smoothed her disordered hair, and put it on. Then they pressed about her, and bent over her in very natural attitudes, kissing and embracing : and brought the children to take leave of her."

Sissy's Progress

"Then Mr. M'Choakumchild said he would try me once more. And he said...I find that in a given time a hundred thousand persons went to sea on long voyages, and only five hundred of them where drowned or burnt to death. What is the percentage? And I said, Miss," here Sissy fairly sobbed as confessing with extreme contrition to her greatest error, "I said it was nothing."

"Nothing, Sissy?"

"Nothing, Miss -- to the relations and friends of the people who were killed."

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The One Thing Needful

"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else."

Illustration for the opening passages of Charles Dickens' "Hard Times", which is in fact my next big project. Now you know! I am terribly excited to be tackling something this hefty, and equally pleased that now I can talk about it.

I read this book in the blink of an eye over Christmas. In fact I gobbled up the first eighty pages in the bookstore, laughing aloud in places because it is so delightfully ridiculous. Arguably his most allegorical novel, (and arguably his shortest novel at 277 pages,) I found Hard Times to be a wonderful book to get yourself into Dickens if you've struggled with him before. I had, as he was forced upon me in college. A week or two with this book and he quickly became one of my favorite authors.

I know, boring. That Dickens is a good author is not news. But had you heard of this book before? Is this book news to you? It was news to me. And that puzzled me. I wondered why it wasn't more famous, as light and accessible as it is. It's what really sparked my interest in painting these pictures in the first place -- to give the book a lift and maybe get it out there to a wider audience.

Well -- I also wanted to make paintings because I couldn't stop drawing pictures in the margins of my copy. The book begs to be illustrated. Many people already have. I just felt like we could do with a bit of a modern take.

Many more illustrations to come as you can imagine. In the meantime I leave you here with "Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities", surveying "the inclined plane of little vessels...ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim."

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Trying to hone in on this one character. Once I nail him down the others should (I hope) come easier. Most of the other characters have real-life people driving their look but I could never find a satisfactory reference for this guy, and because of that his face is a little amorphous to me. I know generally what his key features look like, but I don't see clearly how his entire face should look, and that makes coming to terms with him a little challenging.

A good challenge though. I've been putting off building concrete techniques for approaching faces in my work which seems insane given most of my pictures are fairly character-driven. It's long overdue, these face studies.

A weird side effect of all this face work I've been doing is that lately I have this socially-unfortunate inclination to get really into your face if I'm talking with you right now. Everyone's got such a different structure and it's beautiful to behold. My fascination is genuine and pure, if a little unsettling.

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Getting To Know You

There's a big stack of books by my green chair these days. One of the many anthologies of literature from college, for its historical introductions to the Victorian era. Wordsworth, who has been there since Christmas anyway but is being revisited as he was Poet Laureate in Britain from 1843 until 1850. There are many, many books on costume and dress -- some good, some less good, but all are taken into consideration and bits and pieces of them end up in my sketchbooks.



There are lists in all my notebooks. Color ideas. Lighting tests. Characters slowly reveal themselves to me. And the actual source novel itself is getting shabbier and shabbier as I pore over the thing looking for details that may have slipped me by earlier, and try and flesh out the quick doodles made the first time around.



In short: I am in the research phase of a massive new project, and it is pure and utter delight. My work days lately have consisted of just stirring this glorious soup of ideas, coaxing them into sketches. My reference stack is getting higher and higher. And my sketchbooks are getting fuller and fuller. Every rock I overturn leads to more questions, more books on hold at the library, digging and digging. Entire days have been spent in the shadow of this great stack of books, something I haven't really done since college.



For the first time I am really appreciating that English major I ended up getting. An English major asks all the questions about a story that an illustrator SHOULD be asking. Why is that character dropping hints like that? What is motivating this character to ask his boss those questions? What the heck is a "hair-cutting chamber"? What would a cotton-mill look like? What does that work entail? What does it look like? What part of their bodies would be the most tired? A good illustration doesn't merely repeat what the text says. It should add a further element to a scene, perhaps depict what is being inferred. It should be a sort of conversation. A picture should encourage you to want to read the words. That's my goal here, anyway. I want the people who flick through the book to look at all the pictures looking for spoilers to come away with more curiosity.



I finally started to hone in on the actual scenes I'm interested in, and as you can see there are quite a few. I'm trying to thin them down a little bit, though I'm certainly interested in painting all of these. There's actually more that didn't even make the rough cut. I went on a field trip to the bookstore a few weeks ago to see other illustrated novels (typically classics for young readers -- think Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Heidi by Johanna Spyri, Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain). They often employ a mix of black and white line drawings and full-color paintings, but I suspect that had more to do with the cost of printing than artistic choice. It all really depends on which pictures look best once they're dummied up, which is the next phase. Storyboard building. And sketching, sketching, sketching. And reading, reading, reading.

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