Picking

Today is a beautiful June Saturday. I have a shop to run so I'm running it. Noon until 5:30, maybe 6 PM. The internet tells me that everywhere one would choose to look, on can find a street festival, a garage sale, an outside summer event. I did what I could this morning. Garage sallied an original Inuit drawing, signed, for two dollars, a small bronze of a dancing bear playing tambourine for five. Home made leather purses, pure 1970s Quebecois hippie cost a bit more, four for twenty.. A street nearby hosted a many family garage sale so walking up and down a couple of blocks yielded much fun. I could have done it all day. I'd love to do it all day but here I am. One day I won't have the shop and I'll be able to go hunting and picking all day long. But then what would I do with all the crap I'd buy ?
    This is day one hundred of my daily writing project. I committed to a month and have now cracked three.

Slow Walking Thanks

To walk streets slowly is a gift. Every step intentional, every sidewalk crack another line in a vast sprawling poem that each new walk reveals another stanza of. The houses, the homes, the buildings themselves creak with character. The hockey stick garden posts, the porch furniture sagging, the paint jobs and the rusting banisters, bicycles teamed up like herds, chained to each other. The chalk drawings on walls and in alleys, on sidewalks are all blessings. The children are safe and they can scribble, they can add to and better the ill thought out sprayings of their elders. They can write games, inviting slow walkers to take note, reminding fast walkers to slow down. Where are you rushing off to ? Yoga ? Coffee ? Don't rush to where you can slow down. Slow down all the way there.
    The trees are waking up. The blossoms cascade over lawns. There are book boxes, sharing spaces, places that reaffirm our humanity. There are so many things to give thanks for every step on the long way roundabout  towards home. Gratitude comes with breathe, with slow and careful steps. Thank you.

Random

Trying to write about art with zero references around you is kind of a dumb way to do things. There are so many nuances lost that even memory of beloved pictures falls short and fails. The scholar, I'm sure, has all the right pages marked clearly with post-its, all the right references lined up in a row.
    Huddle and limp, just tell the world you love something, tell the people there is an idea somewhere in your head.
    The things I love in no particular order: King Kong, the original 1933 film, the first Star Wars movies - they're called something else now but fuck that, The Lord Of The Rings books (the movies make me seethe and or kind of entertain me). How, I cannot imagine, can a director decide to make a 12 hour long movie mostly consisting of ring in hand shots, decide to completely remove the arguably most important part of the trilogy - the scouring of the Shire ? Anyway….I love crappy superhero comics of the seventies but not enough to care who is who in regards to artists, letterers, writers. I love paranormal shit, never got into ghost stories too deep but it's not too late. I love fantasy and science fiction, I love the shape of reported ufos, I love monster sightings but not enough to call myself an expert. The internet clearly shows that there are experts for every niche, and many to boot. I'm a luke warm Fortean.
    I love black and white logos, symbols and charms, type and noise, stamps and seals. I love mystery tongues and wizards, robots and villains, heroes and queens. Horses, tigers, dogs and elves. I love plant life and rock life. I love planes and gods, people and things. I'll keep Britannica open to my favourite page, the one I can rip out and scribble on. I love lost and found paper, old books and puzzling lists. I love the shape of lips and legs, clouds and bricks. I love poetry and songs, paintings and objects.
    I forget what I like, I lose lists like I make them. I love fantasy art. I love words. I love stories and myths, fables and tales, lies and jokes, pranks and hoaxes.
    I read and I forget details. I give the books away, I've forgotten which ones I've read. I don't keep score. I keep score. I'm no scholar, I'm a scholar without an index as of yet. Or a bibliography.

Drawing Bunnies

I started drawing bunnies because I was trying to cheer up a friend who had a bad case of the blues. These first bunnies were actually animal shapes with smiley faces in them, hovering around the head. I got a kick out of them myself because up until that point I was mostly drawing erotic fruit, guts and psychedelic bullshit. When I was ten I would proudly draw big nosed cartoon characters. I would practise Daffy Duck as a pre-teen. As I got older, I got more pretentious and it was all gothic eyeballs and stewed intestines.
    In my early twenties, when I drew a funny animal cartoon it was all angst, sweat drops and panicked expressions on the little critters. In hindsight my friend suffering from depression helped turn me around. I let my art be as light as I could be at times. I wasn't a heavy dude but I drew heavy nightmares and visions. The creatures were twisted organic structures bound with straps, existing in a possibly positive space but serving more as gross-out material than anything else. I loved the supple forms of mangos and pears with labial folds and tumescent piping. Fun stuff, alien porn.
    The bunnies, called Glees, trotted in and said, hey bozo, chillax. They pointed their fingers at humanity and mocked us. They mocked me. They turned, like Bugs before them, into tricksters, aligned Chaotic Good with a wicked helping of Chaotic Neutral or just downright Neutral. They took the piss out. Nervy The Dog, a character I created that featured in maybe two stories total, was a stress case freaking out over everything. The bunnies couldn't care less. They were easy going and happy. Happy, gleeful. They were also easy to draw. When I drew human faces, they invariably were streaked with a thousand lines of weariness, shadows and spots - again with the heavy. The bunnies were smooth as the sexy fruit without the naughty bits poking through. Fast and easy, and cheerful.
    I used them in paintings and comics, I had them embroidered, I cut-out tin can collages, I made papier maché bunnies. If I was faced with a new medium I would cut my teeth with a bunny. I knew the design well enough to try it out in any material.
    Of course people thought I had a thing for rabbits. Couldn't give a damn about rabbits. I'm more of a squid or great cat guy. Rabbits and hares are amazing animals of course, like all animals, but I never had a soft spot for them. The very first drawing I did that led to the bunnies actually was a blocky chunk with Mickey Mouse ears. The bunnies I draw today, still called bunnies, look often like mice or dogs or bears or some creature with big ears. My aunt calls the creatures I draw 'bear cubs', she says it in Greek though and I like it. When I first heard her describe them that way a tiny voice almost came up to correct her but it was squashed dead by a greater voice saying, hey that's good.
    I'm not going to start rebranding now, the damned things are bunnies. My wanky side has described them in interviews as not cartoons of rabbits but cartoons of cartoon bunnies. Meta enough for that bong of yours ? In any case the basic bunny form is now a vessel, a vehicle, a platform, a support for any of my scribbling tendencies - unbroken curved lines, sleek and flowing, gestural asemic scratchings, blended gradations, psychedelic auric fade-outs, whatever I want. I can draw a mess of eyeballs and intestines, even some genitalia for god's sake and throw a couple of ears on top and voilà, bunny.
    There were some recent years when I felt like Leonard Nimoy fighting off his Spockhood. I kept the bunnies at a distance, they made cameos in comics but not in any serious art (yes, I know how that sounds, I'm a cartoonist, even a graphic novelist). I am still tired of civilians who think that widely varying cartoon bunnies look like mine, or that they liked that TV show I never worked on. Cartoon bunny taxonomy is vast, and it's pearls before swine if I have so explain the difference between a Garfield and a Heathcliff, let alone Krazy and Bill.
    Last year or so, for a lark and to decorate a new snack bar with lots of toys as decor, I banged out a slew of bunny paintings using cheap dollar store paints and repurposed canvas. It was a blast. I've always been aware of artists who never once stopped presenting their stupid cartoon characters as subjects for painting. I took a detour into douchebag land with all that implies about pride and seriousness. I'm back again, reclaiming my art as, you guessed it, mine. I was never on the career track towards the Tate anyway. I'm not doing coke with a curator unless they are also a friend. And every bit of wisdom I have read regarding art most always states something about following your heart, being true to yourself, doing what you love.
    I love the way these critters stare at me with their huge smiles. I love how they judge me and keep me on my toes. If I'm not careful, they may start breeding like rabbits and take over my life.
   

Favourite Numbers

There are Corvette kids and Trans-Am kids, I was a Corvette kid. My brother was cucumber, I was tomato. His favourite number was five so I couldn't have five also. I went with seven. Seven is ok. I still don't understand people who didn't have a favourite number as children. Or a favourite colour. I ask them, what's your favourite number, as if it still mattered and they pause, uncertain. Sometimes they even go so far as to think the question stupid.
    Kids attach to things and to ideas. Things often are ideas, to kids. Cucumber means something very different than tomato. Cucumber is Bert, tomato is Ernie. Seven oddly enough is more cucumber than tomato but this is not a precise science. This is a mythopoetic structure that assumes free float on occasion. Entanglements occur, schisms rise and fall, seas part and mountains crumble.
    Adults can secretly, unknowingly glom onto the number two and not ever think they are infected with anything. They go ahead and divvy up this big old world into this and that, tit and tat, tomato and tomato. Good for them, these little magpies. They've taken shiny things and left the dull to their enemies. Wars aren't made by the number two, it's more complicated than that but for the popular vote, two is instrumental. It must be firmly planted in the supporter's mind.
    Any kid of course can like two fruits or two sports cars. But sometimes the dividing line pops out clear and strong and it can't be crossed until maturity sets in and wipes the playing field clean. Having a favourite doesn't mean you can't like the other thing. It means you have a favourite. Reasons why are arcane, inscrutable. I saw it first. You like that so I don't because I'm not you, I'm me. I like it because I saw it when I was having ice cream. I like Corvettes because Mrs. Walker had one. My grade four teacher was pretty. She also drove a Jimmy. Both vehicles were metallic brown, if that's possible. Small flakes of sparkle. Maybe burgundy brown. Later on Peter K. liked Trans-Ams and he was a bit of a jerk, so fuck Trans-Ams. But not with that word yet, that's still a bad word.
    My mother tells me that when I was very young I couldn't get enough of cucumbers. Apparently I OD'd on them before the onset of memory. I got sick of them while my brother continued to enjoy them. So naturally I assumed they were his thing and me ? Tomatoes. Bert is taller than Ernie, taller means older like my brother was. Cucumbers are taller than tomatoes. Bert is long and Ernie is round. If Bert was green it would be perfect.
    Tomato goes great with lettuce. I loved lettuce. Could eat a whole head of it. A proud moment was when a truck full of crates of lettuce was spotted and my older brother told some neighbour kid that I, his kid brother could eat that whole thing. I could too. It didn't stop at tomatoes. Eventually I warmed up to cucumbers. Trans-Ams too. Beyond this and that, number three has been with me for a long time. Three plus seven makes ten. Ten is two fives. I always wanted number five to be my fave.