well here we are on another tuesday.
we’ve reached the theoretical halfway point of this little newsletter experiment. more on that in the fourth segment this week. we’ve laughed, we’ve cried. we’ve made some truly disgusting food together. more on that in the third segment this week.
summer has reached a tipping point here, it feels like, to me at least. with the benefit of hindsight, the week i took off from work to go and toodle around the midwest was definitely more of an inflection point than i gave it credit for at the time. my lease is up in september: where am i going to be after that? my job was stressful and frustrating: what do i want to do about that? i wasn’t really feeling passionate about the particular nucleus of Activism i found myself orbiting: is there a better place to spend my time?
i’ve been the type of person in the past who believes that problems can be solved by moving to new cities. this might sound like an immature point of view born out of some kind of long-standing commitment issues or something like that. and maybe that’s true. but the truth is: a lot of problems can actually be solved by moving to new cities. not all of them! but not zero of them either.
one weird trick!
i love minneapolis every time i go there but i don’t think i would enjoy the winters, and in terms of scale it’s very similar to portland, so, lateral move in that department. i loved visiting chicago but i hated being damp all the time, and thinking about what my life would look like in that city, i wasn’t totally sold. the upsides of chicago are kind of orthogonal to my current internal dilemmas. the pegs don’t quite fit the holes.
one other thing they don’t tell you is you will have internal dilemmas for your entire life. two life tips so far in this edition! move to a new city, and resolve yourself to a lifetime of small doubts.
i think now that while i may need a change of scenery in several areas of my life, rather than an explosive blast-open-the-airlock fire-the-ejector-seat type of change at the end of the summer here (as i had been contemplating) what i really needed was just a vacation. and to not respond to work emails for a week. and hanging out with cool people and seeing family was a fun bonus, too.
mission accomplished!
here are the four things for this week.
1. painting
a loose one today.
these things move in cycles as you may have noticed. i’m beginning to prickle against this format, as we will get into in the fourth section (hell they ought to call it the fourthshadowing section at this rate!)
but basically, i have a comfort zone. and basically, every time i do one of these i try to do something that is outside that zone. sometimes that results in me doing some studies from reference, or multiple iterations, or some other actual “process” - sometimes it’s kind of a fusion of those past process-steps. does that make sense? does that make sense to you?
anyway, the comfort zone here is the mountains, the uncomfort zone is the mid- and foreground. always a challenge to know how tall those trees should be in the front! should there be a big ol trunk in front of us? are the trees really that green? heavens.
originally there was going to be a little more whimsy involved - look at those a-frame cabins up on stilts. how neat. they did not make it through.
first pass at colors. i did this one the old fashioned way: every element has its own layer, pretty much. this makes it very easy to isolate elements and add more detail and color, and also to stick things like clouds or more trees in between the layers.
like most digital artists, i made myself a custom brush that paints those graphic triangle trees that make up the rear mountains. another weird trick.
if you look closely at this you will see that the silhouettes of those ridge lines has not changed at all - i just went in and added some slightly darker areas and some slightly lighter areas at the bottom. secondary ridges, and a fog effect to show distance.
the mid and foreground is a whole lot of just kind of fucking around with a loose brush. throwing colors down and seeing what sticks.
an overlay pass. i believe the final is a little less dramatic. scroll up to check that out.
2. poem
“happy poem” - summer 2021
when i saw you last
and wished you every happiness,
i don’t think you caught the sarcasm
and now i write you again to ask:
could you please save some happinesses
for the rest of us?
3. sausages II
heads up: these pics are gross. and i cut a lot of the even grosser ones. if we’re on texting terms i’m happy to send them to you but be warned: they are gross.
hey, what tha— that looks good!
it does, doesn’t it.
this week i am following up on the sausage experiment from a couple weeks ago. i got my fancy modernist cooking ingredients in the mail and was very excited to concoct various gels and spritzes and potions.
essentially, i am following along with this guy’s method. and it actually worked for him! so if you are curious about how to make these correctly, or just want to see someone make them correctly, i recommend skipping this section and just going and watching that guy’s video.
if you want to see pictures of goop, by all means, keep reading.
one element of this process is a solution of calcium lactate in distilled water. when this stuff hits the sodium alginate gloop, a reaction occurs and it forms like, a skin. a membrane. ostensibly, at least.
on the left we have the sodium alginate gloop. there are a lot of pictures of this stuff that i did not include. it’s not that kind of newsletter. keep your jokes to yourself.
in the middle, the spritz. and at the end, a “dunk tank” to rinse off after spritzing.
i already had the sausages from the other week.
basically, you dunk the sausages in the gloop, let the excess gloop run off, then spritz with the calcium lactate solution to get that reaction with the gloop, then rinse them off.
i have absolutely no idea if this attempt represents too much gloop or too little, or if i got them spritzed enough, or what, but one this is for sure: this looks awful and i can’t believe i’m going to eat it.
into the cast iron. we already have a critical structural failure on the top sausage.
actually, the membrane is browning nicely! it’s supposed to imitate a sausage casing. you probably guessed that.
you, the guy she tells you not to worry about, etc.
the structural failings of the top sausage were easily covered up by condiments. the bottom sausage turned out OK in terms of looking like a sausage: the outside browned up nicely and it held its shape.
but these things were not good. the texture inside was way off (see notes from previous edition) and there wasn't any kind of noticeable “snap” when biting through the membrane.
so i guess that’s life lesson #3 for this week.
4. the halfway point
edition 26 of (at least) 52. we made it.
one of the goals i set for myself when i kicked this project off was to do it for at least a year. you may recall from middle school that there are 52 weeks in a year, so here we are. i figure it couldn’t hurt to do a halfway point retrospective at this juncture — i think that’s kind of the thing to do, right?
if we check back in on the very first post i ever made, before even edition 001, we will immediately notice a few things.
i was still capitalizing the first letter of sentences. no commitment to the aesthetic at all. sheesh.
i’ve been pretty good about sticking to the framework, but i had some ideas for the fourth section that i haven’t ever really dived into yet.
from that post:
I am someone who enjoys two things: making things, and having people look at the things I make.
And putting frameworks around the things and the making of them. Daily drawing challenges, a painting a week, a post a day, whatever, in the past I’ve found all these structures helpful and what is Substack after all but another shelf you can arrange your thoughts on in a way that might make them seem artful and considered.
all this is still true. phew! so in general, we are still on the rails. let’s talk section by section.
intro:
the intro section has expanded, i think, proportionately to my desire to have a place to document semi-significant life events that don’t seem to fit into any of the other four slots. i don’t think i had a real firm perspective on how autobiographical (not sure that’s the right word) i wanted this project to be but the thing about writing is it’s a good way to make yourself think about stuff. and clearly that was a lace that was missing from the shoe, so to speak.
paintings:
this is the toughest one for me. this newsletter has dramatically altered my relationship with making art. these days, i do one piece a week, and that’s pretty much it. formerly, it came and went in waves: there would be weeks where i was struck by inspiration and crank out 3 or 4 things i was happy with, and then months would go by with nothing but an occasional derivative-of-my-own-self painting of a mountain somewhere.
is doing one thing a week better? i’m still not sure. i can say it is having one desired effect, for sure: documenting the process of a painting and writing about it is actually making me think more about what i’m painting.
in some ways i do wish i had the mental energy to still toss off those quick one-ofs in between newsletters, and sometimes i still do, but most of that energy has been directed into this channel.
but also: i don’t really have a “goal” with my art except to get better. once upon a time, i wanted to be some kind of semi-professional concept artist or illustrator but that ship i believe has well and truly sailed. i’ve never wanted to make a living from my art, or have it up in galleries (lol) or anything like that. so what’s the big deal? so my process is totally different for a year, who cares?
i’m not sure if i care yet. but it’s something i’m thinking about.
poem:
of all the sections this is my secret favorite. could you tell? i wonder if it comes through at all. it’s the section i attach the least amount of commentary to.
i started writing little “poems” in a notebook last spring and summer, during peak covid pretty much, when i was living in a house with a couple friends and spending a lot of time sitting on our back porch getting drunk on summer nights. not like, getting drunk on the night, like a poetic type thing, getting drunk on alcohol and also it was summer.
some of them i wrote down more or less fully structured, some of them are assemblages of lines i’ve written down, some of them are half-ideas and then i whip them around into different shapes real quick on Tuesday morning like a chiropractor and hit “Publish.” there are a lot of them in the book that do not make it to this newsletter because they suck. there are a lot of them that are unintentionally but definitely thematically linked, i wonder if that comes across at all reading them week after week?
anyway. they’re fun. no complaints.
food:
the food section is also fun. i would be cooking anyway, but this section pushes me to try more “interesting” recipes than maybe i would otherwise. if you left me to my own devices i think 90% of my diet would be roasted broccoli. i wonder if you can live on 90% roasted broccoli. worth considering.
one fun thing about this section is they are not all hits. in fact i wonder if most of them are failures in some way — i did not do the math. but like the paintings, writing about failures is a way to think about failures, and as we all know, the best way to learn is by making mistakes. that doesn’t count as tip #4 because we all know that already.
the fourth section:
i’m glad i added this in. it’s been a good space to just kind of do whatever. sometimes i’m proud of what i put in there and sometimes whatever i put in there pretty much could have been a tweet instead. i guess there are some avenues i’d like to take it down that i haven’t yet. i’ll work on that.
overall:
overall it’s been fun. hopefully you have enjoyed it. the main thing i like about this project that i don’t think i mentioned in the intro post at all, somehow, is that it gets me writing. i think of myself as an OK writer, sometimes pretty good depending on the context, but it’s something i would never really do unless i had a reason to or a structure to do it in.
luckily, a weekly newsletter is both.
well, i think that about does it for this week. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.