Y-O-Y-O-Y

I'm working on a new series of drawings that mimic and make light of my recent cosmic frustrations. Life feels hard here in San Francisco with all the money and future and health things to worry about. It's actually quite nice to hole up in my sunny studio, talk through the wall at Conrad and draw crazy things. These new drawings illustrate celestial pleas, with thousands of tiny hand-written words in giant speech bubbles. The first one is called "why oh why oh why" and the second one is called "no yes no". They work sort of like those fabric drawings I made in Portland last year-- I start in one random place on a sheet of blank paper and let a pattern dictate how the drawing proceeds-- except in this case the pattern is with short repeated words instead of rendered stitch work. I'm interested in how the words begin to slip in and out of their meaning, especially in "why oh why oh why" which is funnily reminiscent of "xoxoxo" or "e-i-e-i-o."

For now it's nice to just be conceiving, activating and completing drawings in short amounts of time. The brevity and aerobic dexterity of their execution helps keep me focused. Pandora radio helps too. Moreover, I'll get to try lots of different words and mess around with the paper composition and can worry about the editing process later. These pictures came from Portland and are part of a series I have of double-takes where the photographer has taken multiple frames of the same scenario, but often with surprisingly different results.