#13 - Answers to Persistent Questions

In the last issue, I shared some haiku and the latest episode of the SneakyArt Podcast. Listen on [Apple] [Spotify].

Today, I will introduce a persistent question, my first gallery exhibit of ‘SneakyArt of Chicago’, and some comic book influences.

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A Good Question

Today I asked myself a good question. I try to ask myself as many good questions as I can. Generally, it is a good idea and also it is very easy to do. It helps to begin with not knowing many things. You are even encouraged to ask the same questions again and again. The question I asked myself was this:

Who gave you the right to fling your words and your lines carelessly into the universe? And where do you get the nerve, to demand that others - who themselves are running frantically inside this infinite void - should catch them, and understand them and react?

I mean, the sheer audacity.

I have met this question before. It looks a little different every time, uses different words. But it’s always the same idea - that I stop doing whatever it is that I am doing. Sometimes it has won, but a lot of the time I have defeated its arguments. Now we are old acquaintances. I cannot call it a friend, but it knows me very well and I know a lot of things about it.

We had a chat, and then it went back home. And then I got back to work.

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Gallery Exhibit “SneakyArt of Chicago”

This week I put together 50 prints for display at the Gallery Cafe in Wicker Park, Chicago. Eugene, the owner, had been interested in my work for a long time. But since COVID hit, I had given up hopes for this working out. Anyway, I delivered the frames last Sunday, he put them up and here we are!

From very small to very large prints!

The long wall

All of the drawings were made on location in Chicago. For reasons of sneakiness, they were drawn inside little sketchbooks. I love to display sketchbooks, but COVID makes that difficult. Without the tactile experience of handling the sketchbook, it’s just not the same. For that reason, this is an exhibit of high quality giclee prints of my drawings. Giclee printing makes a professional grade art print using inkjet printing with archival quality ink on fine art paper.

By scanning the originals at a very high resolution, I am able to make prints at larger sizes too. This is another aspect of using prints that I like very much. One of the large prints is 16x20”, but it was made from a drawing inside a 4x6” sketchbook.

Drawn in line at the local Trader Joe’s

Before the pandemic

It me!

Yesterday, I went there to watch. They serve great coffee and sandwiches, but do not have indoor seating at the moment. So the cafe floor itself is a kind of socially-distanced waiting space, with not much to do. The walls are full of SneakyArt.

While I was there, I saw someone catch a glimpse of the wall behind them, out of the corner of their eye. It was in that brief lull between notifications. Sometimes that lull is all you get. I saw him look at the wall, first one side, then all the way down the other. At the end of the line, he stopped and watched for a long time.

I wondered what thoughts were going through his head. What neural connections can some lines scratched on paper make inside another mind? Can it make them happy? Can it make them sad? Can it sink like an anchor inside their heart? Can it flutter like a feather? Will they think about it again, today or maybe next week? Will they forever carry an imprint of those lines inside their mind, a distorted copy that is entirely their own? In that copy there may be comfort and hope. But the lines would fade over time, and even the memories would ultimately disappear. Is that too much to ask for?

It is like asking for a superpower, to be able to play with someone’s life like that. What gives you the right…? I ask myself again.

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If you live in Chicago, do visit the Gallery Cafe and check out my exhibit. My display will stay through the month of October, until mid-November. They’re open everyday from 8am-3pm.

I would love to hear what you think of it.

[Map to Gallery Cafe]

Gallery Cafe, at W North Ave in Wicker Park, Chicago.

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A Reason To #USk

For the next episode of the podcast, I spoke with artist and friend Donald Owen Colley. We discussed some of his comic book influences and this got me thinking about how comics also brought me to urban-sketching (#USk) and SneakyArt. I’ll explore this in more detail with the next newsletter.

(Below, from Will Eisner’s “Contract With God” trilogy.)

There is a lot of simplification in these drawings. Every frame delivers a calculated amount of specific information to the reader. Comics can be a very useful way to study framing and composition.

In these pages, the city is an important part of the story. It shapes the lives and actions of the human characters. It can support or hinder, intimidate or welcome, and it can assume different forms depending on whether it is night or day.

(Below, panels from “From Hell” by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell.)

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I started drawing SneakyArt to draw better comics. And I made comics as a way to keep writing. All I ever wanted was to be a writer. But here I am, suddenly an artist.

So it goes.

Here is a recent ink drawing I did for a client in Chicago. It is a famous Chicago landmark - the Chicago Board of Trade building.

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