welcome back to tuesday.
this week i am taking three days off in the middle of the week to go to a little cabin near some water and spend 48 hours by myself in a different small room than usual. tomorrow it’s my birthday and i’m not really a hugely sentimental guy about birthdays, especially not at this point in my life, i am a huge believer in using my birthday as an excuse to go somewhere else and do something different for a few days and most importantly, to bail out of work and not think about houses and footings and cost overruns and siding choices and clients.
more about birthdays in part 4.
this week i think i also broke my toe. it’s the middle toe so i don’t think there’s much to be done. in some ways it was a relief that it happened during this time in our collective history — there’s never been a better excuse to avoid putting weight on it for 4-6 weeks — but in some other very crucial ways, taking a little walk every day and riding my bike around on weekends was one of the key things keeping my sanity at a low simmer.
also when i broke it (maybe) i realized another important fact: i don’t think i currently have a Bruise Friend in my life. someone who i’d send gross — but undeniably fascinating — pictures of bruises to and confidently expect their reaction to mirror mine, i.e. “jesus christ, yuck, damn, that’s wild, can you take a pic in a little better light?”
i’m not taking applicants for that position at the moment though. it’s my problem to solve.
here we go.
1. painting
i’ve read a lot of science fiction in my life and one thing i always enjoyed about it was the cover art. even some of the very worst books i’ve ever read have had fantastic covers. there’s awful cover art out there, too, of course — it would be interesting to do a little personal data gathering and see how often covers i like match up with books i like. my guess is it’s not quite random.
anyway, if you read science fiction you are probably familiar with the work of John Harris. i have always been a huge fan and from time to time i’ll try to do a little sketch or something in his “style” and inevitably get frustrated and give up. that almost happened this time but i stuck with it a little longer than usual. and here’s a little peek at the process i went through.
first of all, i browsed through a ton of his work again, quickly, on pinterest, and kind of let it wash over me and get my vibes radar up and running. then, i went back through and focused a little more closely on a few pieces that stuck out, and consciously identified compositional themes. in this case literally talking out loud to myself on my couch. this helped. some recurring themes i noticed:
very low horizons & blasted desert landscapes
something tall or large in the distance
a strong gradient in the sky
some kind of planet maybe
some mid-ground objects on the desert plain that give even more of a sense of scale to the giant objects in the distance
when i’ve tried to do things like this in the past, i didn’t spend anywhere near enough time on the composition and just kind of launched into color work, and as a result was fighting a bad starting point the whole way through.
so i did some sketches this time. there they are up there. then i looked at some colors:
the theme of this portion of the newsletter is quickly becoming “guy actually starts doing all the more boring fundamental exercises literally every successful artist encourages new artists to do.” i guess 30 is a good age to learn that lesson.
i spent about 5 minutes each on these and purposely kept them very loose. the idea here was to get a general sense of what was going on, color-wise, in a lot of his work. this is all based on basically the same composition idea from above. the fourth one is the one i went with.
here are some of the things i was thinking about as i worked on the final above. if you take a few minutes to go check out John Harris’s stuff, maybe you’ll notice some of these things too:
the smoke / dust at the horizon - what color? how saturated?
the main shadows on that landing platform tower - what tone? how dark?
when are the edges smudged? when are they crisp?
how bright are those highlights in the distance?
how the hell do you actually fake a bunch of real-seeming mechanical detail onto these things without spending a zillion hours on it?
this is definitely an area i’ll be returning to.
2. poem
“notebook poem” - winter 2021
i got new pens
which are pretty good
my notebook isn’t quite the right shape
life was easier i think
when the people i wanted to impress most
were people i saw every day
now there’s no looking or looking
to see if i should be looking —
in some ways, i’m better than ever.
but i’m not sure how many
3. salmon dip
my favorite family recipe (i’m not sure there’s that many to choose from, now that i think about it, actually) is our salmon dip. it was a fixture at dinner parties growing up, and was always the first bowl to get un- plastic wrapped when we finally all made it over to grandma and grandma’s on christmas morning.
it’s pretty simple i guess. probably a pretty common recipe actually. i’ve had similar dips at other dinner parties and with other grandparents and it’s never quite hit the same. i think the key ingredient is the way grandpa always smoked the salmon.
there he is, at the house in juneau, alaska which he shared with my grandma until she passed. since he left the steep misty slopes of juneau for the wide brown of idaho, he doesn’t smoke salmon anymore.
for a while, the last remaining cans of his smoked salmon were a prized currency in our family. the dwindling supply was carefully meted out to the kids of my generation, stocking by christmas stocking, and my sister was the only one of us with the willpower (if that’s what you want to call it) to stockpile her allotment and ration her dip consumption. this caused some tension as maybe you can imagine because salmon is, first and foremost, for eating.
fortunately, she still lives in alaska and has taken up salmon fishing and smoking, and through trial and error has perfected grandpa’s old smoking method. so once again, the salmon flows.
i’ve been vegan for what seems like a long time now, but for my birthday i made a little exception and made myself a container of salmon dip to take to my little cabin with me. and here it is:
you need a container of salmon. good luck getting some.
i’ve made this recipe with store-bought smoked salmon before and it’s OK, but the hard smoke on the family stuff isn’t something i’ve found a decent substitute for.
you also need a thing of cream cheese. i used vegan cream cheese because although salmon is not vegan and i could have just leaned in and done the whole thing “right” i was, to be honest, a little nervous about the effects of eating a whole thing of dairy after 9 months not eating it.
also - another plug for plant-based cheese alternatives. the cream cheese out there is really very good. you can’t really tell the difference. something to consider!
if you want to just use the normal stuff that’s fine too. use a whole “brick”.
a couple tablespoons of this
if you use your mind powers to reconstruct the missing geometry of this onion, that’s how much you should use. about.
put it all in a food processor and process it up until you get this nice mousse.
if you don’t have a food processor i think that’s fine, all this stuff is pretty soft and i think you could do it with a fork. i would consider grating the onion, though, so it really gets incorporated.
put some dill on top and there ya go. salmon dip! the canonical cracker to eat this with is the wheat thin. serve at dinner parties or on christmas mornings in between hands of bridge.
4. thirty again
they stole a year or more of our lives from us with this pandemic shit man. a whole summer, or maybe even two summers, probably. how come we’re not all in the streets right now. how come any of these fuckers can sleep at night. how are we not all screaming 24/7.
i didn’t get to do all the things you’re supposed to do when you’re 30: wine tasting, slightly better than nosebleed seats at a basketball game, “fun” “grownup” “parties” that end at 10pm, seven thousand weddings. being the “cool” architecture faculty instructor who, after weeks of joking pressure from the studio extroverts, goes out with the kids from my Arch 1 studio for exactly one beer at happy hour and refusing to stay any longer, thus establishing rapport but also maintaining a proper distance from the 23 year olds i’m teaching to think about form, space, and communism.
all the typical “30 stuff.”
so tomorrow i will be turning 30 again. rules are rules.
just kidding. i’ll be 31 and that’s fine. last year, we got a big passel of us together and rented a house on the coast right next to a casino, got way overdressed for an Oregon coast casino, and spent a chaotic six hours mostly losing at blackjack and craps. my brother even came out for it.
this was only a couple weeks after i spent a long weekend in Iowa knocking doors for Bernie. this was not the high point in my life, but it was a high point. the wheels were starting to come off and the air smelled like they tell you lightning smells. everything was brittling and sharpening but the hairline fractures hadn’t spread across the porthole yet.
this year, i got myself a little cabin on a little inlet near Olympia. the snow is melting fast, the ice is almost gone, the power is back on. there’s a hot tub and i brought all the little poetry books i’ve been meaning to read, and a bottle of gin, and a nice comfy robe.
that’s all for today. see ya next tuesday. have a good week. bye.