A Retirement Gift

No, not my retirement. I hope that I drop dead doing work that I love. And I hope that doesn't come right away. The retirement that I'm talking about here is that of an old companion. Here's the story.

Back on October 26, I did a drawing and wrote about the old black leather Coach shoulder bag that went from being my business briefcase to becoming an all around tote for sketchbooks, pipes, tobacco, and whatever else I could cram into it. My friend Neil Flancbaum, who has been following this blog and the drawings and comments I've been posting on facebook since July, commented "Nice sketch. Too bad about the bag." Anyone who owns high grade pipes knows that Neil hand crafts the best pipe luggage in the business under the witty "Smokin' Holsters" label. To him, a Coach bag was a blemish on my credibility as a serious artist. Not long after that, he asked me how big a sketchbook I used. I told him, thinking it was just curiosity between artists, as Neil has painted watercolors in his spare time. It seemed an odd question nonetheless.

Then on Monday, a box arrived unbidden with the mail, addressed to me, with a return address from Neil Flancbaum. I was on my way out the door for a meeting and didn't have time to open it, but I assured my wife, who has had to put up with too many of my unauthorized acquisitions, that I was clueless as to its contents. When I finally had time to open it in the wee hours of the next morning, I unwrapped a gorgeous black bag made from bison hide, with deerskin pipe pouches sewn into its roomy interior, and a large front pocket under the beautifully simple flap. Several pipes, my baccyflap tobacco container, a tin of Magnum Opus, lighter, matches, pipe cleaners, cell phone, charger, wallet, another zippered pouch for three more pipes and a day's worth of smoking supplies, a small pencil case and a box of 24 colored pencils, and my favorite size Moleskine sketchbook fit inside with room to spare. I could hardly have specified it better if I'd ordered it custom made.

When I talked to him on the phone, stuttering my stunned thanks to him for this utterly unexpected gift, Neil was matter of fact about it, and actually worried that my sketchbook wouldn't fit inside. His comment: "When I saw that blog post with the Coach bag, I said, "All right, he's gettin' a freakin' bag!" All I can say is, "Holy Smokin' Holsters, what a freakin' bag!" Thanks, man!

Pipe Possibilities bag in black bison hide, with pipes co-opted from Neill Archer Roan's collection: Geiger, Eltang, J. Alan, and Brad Pohlmann.

Work and play

Along with the other components of a productive but stress filled day, doing these concept renderings for a Washington, DC showroom today:

put me in the mood to drink beer, smoke a pipe, and do this after supper tonight:

Excerpts from sketchbooks and my dictionary of art terms

I’m particular about words and their meanings. Not to suggest that I don’t use them inappropriately at times myself; I do. But I’ll go as far as to say that it’s a hang up of mine, maybe even a mild obsession. Here, the case in point has to do with my personal definition of “sketch” versus “drawing”. 

In my private dictionary of artist’s terms, a sketch is a vehicle whose primary purpose is to help shape a more finished work. It’s a mock up, to provide direction for a “serious” piece of art, one worthy of the effort and cost of framing. Something that belongs in a gallery. As a designer, I do plenty of what I’d call sketches as a means of working towards a well resolved product. But as an artist, I’ve come to think of much of my work that most people call sketches as something else. I see them as drawings. The distinction seems like hair-splitting, but here’s why I make it.

sunset from my aunt yoko's living room, yokohama, japan, december 7, 1991

 I am an intensely emotional man. When I draw, the experience between me and my subject is intimately physical, perhaps spiritual. I’ve tended to prefer pencil or pastels on paper, because the actual contact between me and the medium is so direct. I often use my bare fingers and even the heel of my hand, smearing the media across the surface. I work quickly most of the time because I don’t want to give myself time to intellectualize the experience. I go for raw energy, with recognizable forms accurately and skillfully drawn, but with a savagery that the outlines can barely contain. It’s taken years of practice to be able to render what I see, and to do it more or less faithfully to the forms, light and shadow, perspective and foreshortening, color and value of what I’m looking at or thinking about. It takes something altogether different to let all the emotional intensity out, and to convey that energy without premeditation, and without obliterating the subject beyond recognition. I find that I can only sustain that level of performance in relatively short intervals. If you think of a gymnast, a dancer, a figure skater, or a sprinter, you can find sort of an analogy. 

christmas tree in the living room, december 8, 2007

When I take out paper and pencils, pen and ink, or pastels, it is usually an all out effort for a relatively short period. I give it everything I have to give. I’m focused and intent. For reasons that go beyond the scope of this essay, the time available to me is limited, but that plays out well given my temperament and what I’m trying to achieve. Because they result in what is, for me, a piece of art that stands on its own merits, I call them drawings, and thus distinguish them from sketches. They capture that moment of unpredictable and spontaneous inspiration and interaction, full of immediacy and feeling, between me and the subject before me.

rad davis smooth zulu, december 9, 2011

Pearl Harbor's Sad Legacy

Seventy years ago today, a horrific and tragic event, the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese Imperialist forces, pulled the United States into the terrible global conflict that was World War II. I've read more posts and comments on social networking sites than I care to count from people who seem intent on resurrecting the ill will that arose in this country against all people of Japanese ancestry, whether they were complicit in the ambitions and savagery of the Imperialists or not. For many of these people, the anger they nurture also includes the Chinese and Koreans, who were much more viciously victimized by the aggressors than most Americans have ever understood. And sadly, many of these Americans also proudly think of themselves as good Christians, at the core of whose faith are the principles of love and forgiveness.

I was born to a Japanese mother and an American father eleven years after the war was ended by the dropping of two bombs on cities filled with innocent men, women, and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who had the misfortune of being citizens in a country that was controlled by a brutal and power crazed minority dictatorship. My mother nearly starved to death in that war. My father, an enlisted man in the U.S. Marine Corps, lost his uncle in the European war, and my grandfather was injured in the Pacific fighting against the Japanese forces. It didn't go over well with either family when my mother left her homeland and my father went back to Japan, a year after promising my mother that he would return, to marry her in 1955. But over time, both families accepted their children's decision. My grandmother took my mother into her American family, and many years later, my mother nursed her in our home for many months through the long illness that eventually took her life. I learned about a gentle, beautiful, aesthetic side of Japanese culture, and later in life more painfully about the dark side of that same culture that sent Japan on its ugly imperialist ambitions.

I grew up tortured and scarred by teasing, bullying, and discrimination from children and adults in my native America who felt the need to keep the resentment and hatred spawned by the war era alive. Occasionally, even my own children, who are only one quarter Japanese, have had to endure ugly insults about their Japanese heritage. And the war ended nearly seventy years ago.

Honoring those lost to horrible acts like the Pearl Harbor invasion is important, but to use their memory to fan the fires of hate is to dishonor them and what they stood for. Remembering the atrocities of war, whether the Japanese invasion, the Nazi holocaust, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the extermination of native Americans by whites, or the bombing of the World Trade Center, is only valuable as a lesson to remind us what greed and hate can do, and that in this rapidly shrinking world, we all must find ways to reach across cultural and ethnic barriers, to find and appreciate our common humanity and to heal the wounds of the past.

More from the roadside

A very quick update this morning. Here are a couple of sketches (notice how I seldom refer to them as sketches? More on that topic in a longer post soon) along the way between my house and Premier. Maybe working up to larger and more involved works. Both around themes that I've been thinking about a lot lately - how our experience of the landscape merges with our psyche, both individually and as a civilization.

Stone Quarry Road crossing Rt. 222 northbound. 11 9/16 x 8 1/4

farm along Rt. 322, Hinkletown, PA, 8 1/2 x 5 1/4