Fair Lakes Menagerie

The task: “Start a collection based on the first found object you see on your walk, whatever that is. You decide what the connection between the objects is (can be based on shape, color, size etc.).”

I lucked out on this one. I had braced myself for the likelihood of something like this happening:

Of course I did.

Instead, when I walked out of my apartment door, I was greeted by a giant hawk perched atop a handicap sign in my parking lot. This bird has been a fixture in my neighborhood over the last couple of months, easily found sitting in a tree, sitting on top of the dumpster, sitting on the railing of a patio…Always sitting, always watching. I don’t know if it’s been displaced by construction, if my apartment complex is infested with rodents, or if one of my neighbors is a falconer, but it’s always strange to me to see animals I associate with “the wild” inhabiting the suburbs.

“Take wing, Lazarus! For today we hunt deals, and we shall find them at the Oldest of Navies!”

Whatever the cause, I was happy, as I’d much rather draw this magnificent bird than my other options: a discarded Big Gulp or a sock mysteriously tied to a tree branch. I decided to make my connective theme “animals.”

Despite living in the eye of a hurricane of strip malls there is an abundance of wildlife to be found around my residence. I seem to be located at ground zero of the squirrel uprising, but I frequently see geese, deer, raccoons, crows…Two summers ago there was a snapping turtle that regularly appeared outside of my door. I would put it in a box, drive it down the street to a pond and release it, only for it to show back up again a week later. I repeated this process so many times that, to this day, my 3rd floor neighbor greets me with “Hey, Turtleman!”

“Fancy meeting you here…for the 37th time.”

On this particular outing I encountered the usual menagerie, but also a couple of foxes and, oddly, a bunch of seagulls. An unexpected sight considering my closest connection to the sea is a Joe’s Crab Shack.

I brought my dogs along on my walk, in an effort to kill two birds with one stone. Instead, I tried to kill many birds (and squirrels, and rabbits, and especially foxes) with two dogs. Some days they wouldn’t blink at a grizzly bear, other days they react to a chipmunk like it’s an abominable snowman. On this trip they were feeling the latter, so, my doodles were fleeting as my subjects were played off the stage by a chorus of barking.

Friends of man, enemies of art.

Ignoring the fact that is was a logistical nightmare to combine a dog walk with a sketch crawl, and that I’m self-conscious about the results, it was fun to see an environment that had grown mundane over time with fresh eyes, and to take the time to appreciate the natural world thriving in what often feels like urban blight.

A Brush with Death...

The first assignment for this course: Take an old paintbrush, cover it with clay and embellishments, and make…something. Simple enough in theory, maddeningly difficult in execution.

My acceptance to the MAT program is provisional, with the caveat that I complete the sculpture and ceramics requirements for teaching licensure within a year of admission. I have never taken a sculpture class in my life, hence, I am terrible at sculpture. I don’t know how to approach an assignment, I don’t know how to use the tools, I have no experience to draw from. If you ask me to sculpt something, you might as well also ask me to turn lead into gold. As long as we’re attempting the impossible, why not shoot the moon?

Compounding matters was the fact that this was an in-class assignment, meaning I couldn’t engage in “my process.” It goes like this: Charge in with delusional over confidence. Crash head first into cold, hard, reality. Stalk around the room, cursing my inefficacy. Begin to interpret this minor failure as emblematic of my greater failure as a person. Realize I’m a fraud, spiral into a pit of insecurity. Weep. Am reminded a deadline is approaching, become panic stricken. Weep some more. Unable to face the embarrassment of turning in nothing at all, resume work, but with wild abandon, having determined this is my final project before quitting art forever and joining the Merchant Marines. A series of dumb-luck “happy accidents” begin to restore my confidence, misinterpreted as signs of latent genius. Maybe I’m actually the greatest artist who ever lived? Power forward with renewed resolve. Finish! Adrenaline fading, I come back to reality. Look at finished work objectively, think “Eh, it’s fine, but clearly I am a maniac.” Put it all out of mind and move on to the next thing.

I go through this with everything I do, but it’s not really appropriate for a public setting. Instead I had to settle for a (healthier) stripped down version: futzing around in a repeating cycle of confusion and discovery until I had something.

When I slapped white clay on my long handled paintbrush, it kind of resembled a woodpecker as designed by Tim Burton. I decided to lean into that connection and do my best to exaggerate some of the skeletal, deathlike qualities. I went for bony protuberances, angular shapes and beady black eyes. Then I bedazzled it a bit as a counterweight as I generally don’t like morbid work. We were asked to do a write up of what we’d made, so I submitted the following:

“The White Crested Petrolbird is native to the United States and parts of Canada. Over time, it has developed a long beak which it can use to siphon premium gasoline from high-end automobiles. It then sells this gas through an elaborate, woodland creature-run black market in a strictly cash based enterprise. The Petrolbird uses the cash to purchase gaudy, knock-off jewelry of questionable taste to adorn its frightening, skeletal head and face. It is beloved by the gasoline industry for increasing sales, but despised by drivers who are convinced their fuel was stolen by their shifty, cheap-assed neighbors.”

Nothing goes over quite like Audubon Society humor!

Overall this was a challenging opportunity to work in a medium I wouldn’t have on my own, and to follow where the work lead me as opposed to trying to enforce some vision on it. It wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be, but I’m already thinking of all the ways I could improve in the future now that I have some small bit of experience. Final verdict: Eh, it’s fine, but clearly I am a maniac.

Wegmans, Womens, and Childrens

For this assignment, the prompt was to “go somewhere and draw 50 things.” I thought about going to my parents’ house, but I wasn’t sure how to illustrate “arguments” so I defaulted to my second option: the grocery store. There are few places I can walk into and be so immediately paralyzed by choice like my local Wegmans. I could easily generate 50 doodles of cereal boxes or mysterious Asian sauces if I were so inclined. Instead, I decided to take this opportunity to drill down and pay attention to the smaller details of a grocery store that typically get filtered out as white noise: symbols, signage, tools, demo stations, entire rows of products I generally overlook (I tend to treat the Gluten Free aisle like someone handing out fliers on a New York City street: Head down, avoiding eye contact, flailing my arms and shouting “no thank you!” as I hustle past.).

I often find myself frustrated by the shopping experience at popular establishments in the Northern Virginia area, where the store floor becomes a microcosm of our roadways. Just a bunch of inconsiderate, oblivious and highly aggressive people careening about wildly having substituted a shopping cart for their Lexus SUV. Costco might as well advertise itself as a demolition derby. As a result, my regular routine has become an episode of Supermarket Sweep, in which I make a calculated sprint through the store, scooping armfuls of necessities into the basket before blasting off to the next location in a race against the clock. This project caused me to slow down, observe my surroundings, and engage in a sense of awareness I’d long replaced with muscle memory. It’s amazing what you notice when you take the time to focus. Did you know that human beings actually work amidst this chaos? Stalwart souls who position their soft, frail bodies in the paths of screeching metal, attempting to place pork rinds on a shelf as they are ripped from their hands by a ravenous horde. There are broken things on the floor. What was once a recognizable food item or product packaging, through the transformative power of foot traffic, has achieved new life as a colorful smear or fine powder. I was surprised to discover a questionably hygienic number of small dogs. Shopping bags, shopping carts, coolers, dishware, and cutlery: the things that move food but are afterthoughts in a place that sells it. I tried to take in as much as I could, and reproduce it from memory in a calmer environment when I got home.

I’m of mixed minds on whether I should have used a bigger sketchbook for this project. On the one hand, for a process intended to concentrate on details, it feels like a mistake to use pages too small for me to render them. On the other hand, being forced to capture quick, simplistic impressions mandates the use of what may be a valuable filter. It reduces objects to their most iconic forms, allowing me to register more of the things I rarely register at all.