GRIZZLY PEAR
Claire!
Claire!
Who’s Claire?
Oh wait!
She’s your imaginary friend, right?
No! She’s our imaginary little sister!
…
Charles!
Charles!
Who’s Charles?
He’s our imaginary baby brother!
Really?
When did he join the family?
Last week?
No! He’s been with us for a year!
.
.
.
An hour later, I asked my wife if she had met Claire and Charles.
What are you talking about?!
䷺䷓
apostolic sea
auspicious foam
ambitious dissolve
Many years ago, a BoardGameGeek user in Australia asked me to receive several shipments before his arrival in Vegas to attend a friend’s steampunk themed wedding.
When he came to pick up the games, his wife gave me this pink handmade pillow with chibi Star Wars characters for my newborn daughter.
Last year, I joined Post.news. The open and accepting crowd inspired me to start drawing again after years of fearful, constipated dormancy.
I started a series of hand sketches forming the ASL manual alphabet.
After a few letters I started adding alliterative sentences.
A month into this exercise, I was forced back into the office.
Reinserting a commute into my routine was so disruptive that I dropped the project before completing it.
~
A couple weeks ago I also joined Substack Notes. One of the first folks I met was Charlene Storey, who started a weekly ritual to share pictures of “everyday magic”.
Given my interest in the mundane objects that surround us (I earned my 2003 NaNoWriMo by writing about the stuff in my tiny garage apartment), it’s a perfect way to jump into the new stream.
~
I should finish the alphabet series, but I also like this new weekly thing and I don’t want to wait half a year before archiving these memories.
So for the next 26 weeks, I’ll be doing a series of unplanned diptychs. Let’s see how it goes.
Cat!
Moon!
Gingerbread Man!
He’ll play Spot It!
But only as a team with his sister.
So I flounder, one man chasing four sharp eyes.
When she was small, I’d slow down,
Looking for two pairs while she only needed one.
Even then, those were easy wins.
Now, I can’t keep up.
They double me up.
~
I didn’t have preconceptions about parenting.
Except boardgaming.
Start ’em young and they’ll love it.
Nope.
They enjoy the occasional play, but that’s it.
Two bookshelves of games hibernate in the garage.
Maybe as teenagers?
One can hope!
But it’s not for me to determine.
Staying at the in-laws,
Digging into the closet,
She finds momma’s old shoes.
Shiny taupe flats with half inch heels,
Clomp, clomp, clomp!
Marching on the tile.
Her feet are still small,
But the ankles fill the throats;
Last year’s gap is gone.
䷑䷝
cross great water
before three days
after three days
twin flames
I dropped this studio on the last day in class.
I would have failed anyways.
I spent my undergrad focused on the arts, not theory, much less jumping into the insanity of A Thousand Plateaus, by Deleuze and Guttari.
The studio was about the nomad. I picked the Truck Stop as my program and the site was the 16th Street Train Station, at the time completely abandoned.
Unlike the aborigines’ in Bruce Chatwin’s Song Lines, I stayed completely lost the entire semester.
I made a video of rubber ducks.
I visited a port terminal at the Port of Oakland (before 9/11 you could just drive up and ask for a tour).
I spelunked that Train Station multiple times.
I drove inland to check out real truck stops.
I mashed ramen onto a wood board (that didn’t go well).
One night, my buddy threw a pack of cigarettes on a desk and we spent hours hashing out a grand scheme that looked promising.
The next morning I reviewed it with my professor. She agreed it was a good start.
I pulled out my drop papers. She happily signed it to avoid failing me.
That was my last day of class at UC Berkeley.
The main takeaway from the studio was to trust myself.
Raveevarn Choksombatchai was a brilliant professor who would ask pointed questions every time I met her. As a young designer, I earnestly took in every critique.
Her pedagogical approach was to be the devil’s advocate. She stress tested my convictions. That would be a fun studio nowadays, but I wasn’t ready.
Her challenges convinced me to reassess everything every time. Starting over twice a week is a great way to get nowhere.
I’ve since realized that the grand concept is only the seed of a project. Part of the designer’s job is to say “fuck it, good enough, move on”.
There are plenty of problems at that next scale. Architecture is more than a conceptual art; it’s also a craft. Design challenges will confront you at every level along the way.
Don’t let (yourself or someone else) stop you at gestalt.
I’ve gone in quite a different direction from those high concept Berkeley days. Indeed, I don’t design. In the past five years, I’ve done four sketches, my last one locating one door in a short corridor.
But the lesson of this failed studio still lingers.
Not a painful barb, but a gentle reminder to trust myself.
My ideas aren’t perfect, but I know they’re good enough for taking that next step — cause analysis paralysis is so much worse.
I don’t think you can ask for a more impactful lesson coming out of college.
你再下来就没有snacks!
(Come down (from the table) again, then no snacks!)
Poo-poo!
(he just came back from trying to poop, unsuccessfully)
真的? 这次没有大便也没有snacks!
(Really? If you don’t poo this time, then no snacks!)
Oh! 我说了 acc-i-dent-a-ly.
(Oh! I said it accidentally.)
I snuck out of Berkeley with an architecture degree even though I only completed one architecture studio (while dropping out of a second architecture studio, taking three visual studies studios and one landscape architecture studio).
The landscape studio consisted of a series of quick projects, including this exploration of remediating an abandoned rail line using plants to pull heavy chemicals out of the soil.
It seemed fitting to share this long buried project for Earth Day.
This studio was as much an art studio as a design studio, which isn’t a surprise when you check out Professor Chip Sullivan. This piece was an homage to old science fair presentations, with infographics and drawings, using oil pastels and ink.
With the re-discovery of my old fountain pen late last year, I am now finally finishing the very last of that red ink, twenty three years later.
Over a cup of coffee, my friend defined a group of design students who are basically art majors. There is much appeal to straddling both worlds. What can be better than savoring a creation with no “ifs” about how it might actually be in “real life”? To make is the most primal human activity. Yet “to make” also encompasses “to imagine”. To think a drawing represents a viable space 57,600 times its size, to believe “these” certain lines will best direct the movement of hundreds of people over the next fifty years — that demands imagination. A design education challenges and refines raw imagination. For those who cannot rise above the flatland of pure art or refuse to descend from a theoretical ivory tower, let them remain trapped. While the opportunity remains, I will precariously attempt to scale both worlds high on caffeine.
It’s a bit cringe to read what you wrote as a 20 year old.
~
Hindu thought includes a roadmap of life with four stages. These college drawings were the climax of my work as a Student.
In their system, I should be wrapping up my time as a Householder, but I’ve got another fifteen years before Retirement (I doubt the ancient system expected folks to be making babies in their late thirties…or Social Security age limits).
Even though I might be late on the ancient Hindu time schedule, I’ve noticed that my attitude has changed towards work in the past eighteen months. I’ve lost appetite for business books. I still think about my role as a project manager, but I no longer study “leadership”. I work a hard 40 hours, but I’m not turning that dial up to 11.
I wonder if that next stage in life will be in letters, as with my little library, or if it will be a return to making art.
If it’s the latter, I need to make some space to get messy. It’s been much too long since I’ve gotten my hands dirty.
Early April is a time of birth and death in my life.
My mother’s birthday was last week.
A church acquaintance drowned in Hawaii over spring break.
A friend committed suicide two decades ago.
A colleague lost her daughter almost ten years ago.
My son was born five years ago.
~
Aside from mom, all that was future when I took a “Word and Image” studio with Tony Dubovsky.
One of the big projects was to pull something from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I landed on Orpheus.
The final sculpture was made of wire with a paper mache skin of tracing paper stained with acrylic paint. The translucent piece hung from the ceiling.
I might have a photo of it hidden at my parent’s house. I should dig it up one day.
I should also to read Metamorphoses one day. There is copy buried in the garage in one of many boxes of books.
On Thursday I tried drawing the boy who told me to draw the tricycle instead.
And a Figure 8 to start a quiet Sunday morning (since I decided that work can wait till Monday).
I feel like I’ve got a decent handle on bodies when I’m paying attention. I might switch to focusing on heads.
Threw in some more architectural scalies. Reminds me of that one day where I spent twelve hours practicing architectural lettering. Have it down for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately it’s a dead art. Though I’ve used it on handwritten thank you notes after interviews to show I’m a real old school draftsman.