hi there. it’s tuesday again. and here we are.
i’ve spent the past week slowly moving in to my new apartment and slowly returning to the rhythms of working in the office. my apartment is tiny. it might be the smallest apartment i’ve lived in so far during my life. does that seem like a step backwards, or a stutter in the procession? maybe.
fortunately, i am a professionally trained and award winning architect, and so i have been able to leverage my experience, my incredible innate design talent, and a suite of professional-grade software tools to assist me in rotating various rectangular blocks of furniture around a small computer model of my apartment and seeing how many will fit. answer: not many.
should i have looked for a bigger apartment? should i have increased my budget? should i have started sooner, held out longer, made bigger compromises in other areas of my life, leveraged more connections, thrown myself into it full bore, and trusted that doing so would allow me to live in a place where i could put my desk next to my couch? well, maybe.
but life is full of regrets, and i have deeper and more recent ones than that. some of you have heard the stories. my man over here, he knows. he’s laughing because he knows.
let’s get into it.
1. painting
have you ever had a truly wondrous night of sleep in your life?
i have only had a few. possibly only one. i do return to this well of emotional inspiration from time to time, though, in an attempt to manifest the type of dreamy nocturnal spaces, cavernous, silent, glinting, in which i could recapture the feeling of that one night of sleep. previously, though not in this newsletter, one of these became one of my personal favorite things i have ever drawn - the sleep of a thousand humidifiers.
this is one more of those.
initial sketch. this idea came to me after waking up thirsty one night recently. a dreaming space filled with dozens of vessels of ice cold water.
cleaned up linework. you can see that there are not dozens of vessels but really half a dozen. next time i will try to get more in. i don’t know how you would incorporate those into the walls of an a-frame cabin though. maybe shelves.
here is where i had to pause and once again turn to the aforementioned suite of architectural design software. i could not for the life of me picture how a shadow would move across a space like this and hit the side wall when the only source of light is the giant triangular glass front of the cabin. so i modeled it up and checked. my initial sketches were way off, as it turns out. those are not included in this edition.
layering in the first pass of color.
adding a wash of tones and atmosphere, some glowing areas, etc.
at this point the piece is composed of about a dozen layers of various linework, colors, and overlays. moving forward from this point, i flattened everything into one layer to make the color sampling easier. then i went through and added some details and cleaned some things up and then finally at the end added a few more overlays.
et voilà.
2. poem
“desert poem” - fall 2021
i kept thinking how funny it would be
to run across you out there
in those dusty, wide places.
would we recognize each other
between those crumbling trees
with the past echoing in our ears,
and the sunset in our eyes?
3. a little stack of cards
this week i did not go out of my way to cook anything out of the ordinary. as previously mentioned in the “apartment recap” section above, i do not currently have a lot of space in my new place and i do not currently have my kitchen laid out in a way that makes me excited to cook things. i did make a couple of pizzas for a friend’s birthday party (previously mentioned in the “recent regrets” section above) but that’s about it.
when i cook, i am usually gathering information together from at least one and often two or three different sources. because it’s 2021, these sources are usually on my phone or in my computer: people text me recipes or thoughts, or i seek them out and read them online. and when i cook, i do not like to look at the computer. part of it is having messy hands but part of it is the kind of uncomfortably hot buzzing in my head when i have to think about too many things at once. including scrolling up and down on the computer.
so usually, i will read through a recipe, or two recipes, or whatever, and write down on a piece of paper the steps and ingredients and process before i dive in. writing them down helps me remember what’s going on, and reading them through and then writing them down helps me understand the whole process beforehand. before i start boiling something and then realize that a critical element to be added to the boiling component is not ready.
anyway. i have a little stack of these cards sitting on a shelf in my new place, ready to be assigned to their more permanent home when i finish furnishing things. but for now, here are some of them.
the pizza dough. it’s very fast.
put this on your noodles with some roasted broccoli.
this vodka sauce is incredibly good and makes a ton of pasta. great for a week of leftovers.
you can press a thing of tofu, cut it up into slices, pan fry them, then let them cool and crumble them into this sauce and you will have tofu crumbles in your fridge for a while that you can put on other stuff or eat with veggies.
i wasn’t sure what this was at first but i think it’s a creamy tofu sauce plus a couple of toppings. you can also put this on noodles, or broccoli. i think it’s probably good?
and finally, i believe this is an aviation. “creme d. v.” is creme de violette. probably.
4. a nice shirt
when it’s getting toward the end of summer, you can start thinking about it. you don’t have to worry about it just yet, but in the back of your head, on saturday mornings or on thursdays after you get home from the bar, you can allow those gears to begin turning.
one shirt may be enough, this time around. you can wear it once at the beginning of the week, then you can work from home the next day, maybe, and then you can wear it in the middle of the week if you are going to see friends, or if you have a date in the evening. you can wash it that night and hang it in your shower to dry so it doesn’t get too beat up by the automatic dryer and the next day it will be sunny or at least not quite as rainy and you can wear a t shirt and a jacket and even though the end of summer has slipped by that will probably be fine.
and by the time you get home, your shirt hanging in your shower will not be damp and you can wear it one more time, at the end of the week, to the office, and then to the patio of the bar near the office, and then to the sidewalk table at the bar that’s halfway between your office and your apartment, and then you can slip it off and if you didn’t spill any wine or soup or aioli on it you can hang it up just inside your closet and wear it one more time during the weekend.
when there are a couple weeks left of summer, and you can feel it, you can start thinking about which shirts you can take out of the closet on their hangers and hold up and purse your lips and do a little “hmm” noise and then slip them back into the closet, maybe a little further back this time, and take out your favorite shirt instead.
and when the leaves are rusting and the rain is back, at least for now, if you haven’t started thinking about it yet, you might as well start.
that’s all for this week. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.