it sort of feels like a sunday to be honest. probably because i took the day off work.
this is the last newsletter of the year. how about that! how about it. it is not however the last newsletter in the year-long provisional newsletter experiment, as you can tell by the number up there that says 049 instead of 052. i will be doing some kind of schmaltzy retrospective-slash-looking-forward edition for number 52 but that’s not today.
after some cutthroat negotiations with my firm & securing a raise at the last possible minute last week, i hopped on a plane up to alaska for just a few days to spend christmas with my family for the first time since 2019. in the intervening uhhhh i guess 2 years, my sister got married and had a kid, and this was the first time i’d met my new nephew in person. i suspect at this point most of you reading this have moved into a category such as uncle or aunt or parent, so i don’t think i’m telling you anything too surprising when i say babies are kind of neat. this particular kid i don’t think quite has a personality yet so to speak, he’s still pretty young, but i did get some laughs out of him. so he’s got a good sense of humor brewing in there at least.
hey, maybe some day i’ll have a kid of my own! at the moment it doesn’t seem likely. but who knows what the future holds.
on a totally unrelated note, to kick us over to a rare Music Corner segment here on the four things newsletter, i have been really enjoying Islands’ 2021 album, which i have heard exactly zero other people even mention. this band was pretty big, i think! once upon a time. in certain circles. i guess maybe not since 2005 or whatever although they have definitely had some hits since then too. nick diamonds (not his real name but i’m being respectful) is one of those guys who rubs people the wrong way because he seems a little too aware of his talent. if you’re good at things you’re supposed to pretend you’re not good at them. it’s a little gauche if you acknowledge it publicly. it’s a lot gauche if it comes up in your own music.
nevertheless, the album is great. at first i was only really grabbed by Set the Fairlight, and didn’t listen to any of the others. then i had some deadline to finish and in the interest of being able to focus on drawing, i actually put the album on to play all the way through, and was kinda blown away. if you’re one of my two friends i text about music i probably bothered you about this already. but there’s a lot of cool stuff going on on this album! i think it might be a zero skips album! wow!
my current favorite is marble. the squeaking noises, whatever that is, are very cool. weeeow weeeomp, w-w-weeomp. etc. check it out. check out the rest of the album too.
okay enough of that. let’s get going.
1. painting
let’s get this out of the way up top, if you don’t know who simon stalenhåg is, look that guy up. you probably recognize his stuff, though, it’s pretty popular on the internet. which is to say, it’s pretty popular full stop.
i’ve been a fan of his for years and i’ve always wanted to take a crack at emulating his style. kind of a gloomy, hazy semi-realism. very evocative. people use the word dystopian a lot when they’re talking about it.
initial sketch on the left, and then a cleanup on the right. i knew from the beginning i didn’t want any linework in the final on this one, but as i got into it, i realized i needed to actually draw the truck and the crashed wind turbine balloon in some actual detail so i would know what i was doing with regards to form and shadow. and maybe reflections etc. if i got lucky.
i started this on the plane, and with the light way down on my ipad screen and a dim cabin around me, it’s kind of hard to make out colors with any kind of accuracy. so i started in grayscale, to get a sense of the values and contrast. some people do this a lot. it works pretty well, i think, if you have the patience and/or discipline for it.
more values in, then turning the linework layer wayyyyy down and starting to polish up the forms a little bit so it’s less like a confused gray sludge.
some colors laid in. for the very background, it’s easy enough to wash some tones over the existing values, but that doesn’t work as well in higher contrast areas, in my opinion. also snow is not that dark even right up close where contrast is the most pronounced.
close to being done. definitely still some areas that need more cleanup, that are just kind of vague suggestions of forms. but you don’t really spend much time looking at those areas anyway.
scroll up for the final.
2. poem
“momentum poem” - winter 2021
i’m misting the plants
i’m making the bed
i’m filling up and emptying the ice cube trays
even when my drinks are already pretty cold —
i’m threading my little needle with attention
and harpooning everything i can see
i’m making decisions all the time
i’m revisiting them just as often
i’m winding all my springs
and turning over my hourglasses
3. some food related lists
first up in the food section, some sad news. i didn’t time my cheese making experiment very well and even my very brief trip home was enough to ruin it. they are not kidding around when they say you have to flip those things every day. i didn’t think to hire a cheese sitter to come over and flip my cheese once a day and as a result when i got back, the cheese resisted being flipped to the point of breaking into a bunch of chunks and ripping itself in half.
also the mold seemed a little funny. like too fluffy somehow. i was a little nervous about it but assumed it would firm up at some point and become an actual rind. i will be carefully checking my calendar and trying again soon, though, so we will see.
i didn’t really cook anything interesting this week, either, i mostly just ate a lot of broccoli and corn chips, so i thought it might be fun to look at something tangentially food-related: my little book of lists.
this isn’t all food-related, despite the semi-hesitant subtitle, but a lot of it is. over the past year and a half ish, this notebook has been the main place i write a list when i need a list. mostly shopping lists as we will see. but sometimes lists of things to remember, things to do, things to verify. it fits pretty well into my left back pocket so when it’s time to go grocery shopping, i can just tuck it back there and cross things out as i go. it’s very convenient to have it all in one place rather than using post-it notes or whatever, and plus, we now get the added benefit of flipping through it looking for interesting stuff to comment on.
an early entry, from right when i had moved into my previous apartment. i move once a year, pretty much. i don’t know how normal that is. people i know say things like “my apartment” and i never know quite what the connotation there is. looks like i was restocking my cupboards with some essentials. there’s broccoli again. the unofficial second main character of this newsletter.
if it’s circled that means i couldn’t find it in the store and a trip to a second location was required. you can also see some measurements happening on the next page.
a question mark on the list means it’s dealer’s choice at the store. leaving it up to the future version of me who has the boots-on-the-ground up-to-the-minute intelligence needed to make the game-time call.
i was going through a lot of ginger beer at this point. two ginger beer runs in one week. that reminds me i need to get some ginger beer. broccoli count is up to at least three.
this was for a camping trip, i assume. hence “meals” with no further elaboration. gum, ice, meals. snax.
here’s one with a list of things to do. if i remember this day i think i accomplished all those missions despite not crossing them off. i think i got the artichoke hearts too.
4. 2022
it’s almost here. everyone you know is doing retrospectives and setting goals and loudly refusing to do retrospectives and loudly deriding the idea of setting goals and indeed the idea of years to begin with. everyone you know is sharing their favorite creative endeavors from the past year and everyone you know is doing a huge eye roll at the idea of monetizing and commodifying their creative energies. everyone you know is extremely conscious of the passage of time and everyone you know is dealing with it publicly in their own privately insane way.
i don’t remember if i set any specific goals for 2021. if i did, i didn’t leave them in a place where i would be confronted with them at some point, in time to do something about them. such as accomplish them. and if i did, they also didn’t sink far enough into my cerebellum to leave any kind of imprint. so let’s assume for the sake of moving forward that i did not.
i don’t think i have any big goals for 2022. i don’t know what that would really mean. i wonder how common it really is to have those. i do have some things i will be shooting for, though. i guess we can put it that way. i’m not going to tell you all of them. but here are a few.
write more physical letters
draw more people
lower my resting heart rate
see a new body of water
lightly embroil myself in a minor controversy
avoid embroiling myself in any affairs (sinful)
work on a piece of writing for more than a week
work on a piece of art for longer than 4 hours
work on establishing some kind of less chaotic approach to the combination of waking up, breakfast, caffeination, morning heartburn, avoiding scrolling. a better morning, i guess. a better morning more often.
use some of my powers for good
use some of my powers selfishly
see a new city
play a whole song on my guitar
i think that’s it. that’s all i can think of right now, at least. and since i’m about to hit publish, that amounts to the same thing.
okay well that’s it for this week. and for 2021. see ya next tuesday. or next year. ha ha ha. bye.