Winter Days

 

November Trees

 Inspired by Leonardo's sanguine chalk landscapes, I sat in our sunny field and drew a few of my own. By the next week most of the leaves were gone.

Botanicals

Two Ways to Think

 

Scraps in the Wind

 

The Monster Market: Hearth and Home

Last year I quietly recorded ten (of a projected 13) episodes of a sort of folkloric bestiary podcast with my pal Zack Giallongo. We called it The Monster Market. The idea was that for each episode we'd pick a theme and then each of us would talk about three creatures that fit the theme. It's been tremendous fun. 

Episode 2 was posted last week. The theme is domestic spirits. 

We also agreed that we would illustrate each of the creatures we discuss so that, in the end, the podcast itself would be a sort of illustrated bestiary. I'm way behind on my illustrations, of course. But thanks to a nice hand-bound sketchbook from Tim Canny (and a little inspiration from Angelica) I finally settled on a trajectory for them. I'm aiming at a sort of folklore field guide approach. Here are my first two pages in the raw:

Stay safe out there.

--Ben

I'm Sure this Door is Some Kind of Metaphor

 I've been designing doors in my sketchbook. At a certain point I visited the Strong Oaks Woodshop with a scheme in hand. I've been stopping by periodically over the winter, in my little red truck, to pick up loads of scrap bits to burn in our wood stove. 

Keeping warm with cast-off bits—one of the little things that gets you longing for Summer.

Over this last weekend Mike built the door and helped me arrange for my design to be cut from a sheet of 1/16" steel on the wood shop's laser cutter (it was amazing to watch). Then we polished and placed the design as the last of winter's snow flurried outside. Finally we wrapped the door up in padded plastic and I drove it home in the back of my little red truck. 

Not scraps this time but treasure. 

And it all began as a few sketches. 

I've written a longer piece about this process over on my Patreon, along with video and lots more pictures. It's an open post, so feel free to have a look. 

Sweet Circus Dreams

A little corner of my mind lives forever in this particular dreamspace. 

All that and a bucket of inspiration. 

I am Writing.

 

It’s NaNoWriMo. 

For me it’s NaNo(re)WriMo. 

I have a little logbook. 

I have an eighty thousand word manuscript to use as a starting point.

And I have many-pages-long document full of notes from a Very Sharp Editor. These notes cut deep, and I found them to be very frightening for a long time. The notes (very rightly) pointed out some problems with the narrative that were just so dreadful I would just sink into humiliation at the thought of opening the manuscript. I wanted to just pretend the book didn’t exist. 

But it did exist. It does exist.

I have a little blue drugstore notebook that Denver bought me when I was visiting. I’ve used it to re-outline the whole story, longhand, bird by bird. 

I’m writing. 

The Walker

 It’s the most frequent scribble in my notebooks, that little analogue that is Ben-but-not-Ben. Always walking, always thinking. Often head down. Frequently with a satchel or bag. A wanderer. A traveler. 

Of course it’s nothing new to say that the legs the the brain are connected, that walking and thinking go hand-in-hand. But for me scribbling completes the trifecta, the Creative Trinity. 

Move the legs, move the brain, move the pen. 

And repeat. 

The legs wander, the brain is messy, the lines are crooked. But if you ask me that’s where the real beauty lies.

So keep wandering.

Keep thinking.

And, if it’s your thing, keep scribbling.

A Thoughtful Leo

 

“Tell me if anything was ever done... Tell me... Tell me."*

                        *a repeated phrase in his notebooks.

Sweet Drolatic Dreams

A very peculiar book has recently caught hold of my magpie mind. I discovered it thought the Public Domain Review's Instagram account. It’s a book from Renaissance France, right around the time Montaigne was kinda-sorta inventing blogging (well, okay, inventing the rambling personal essay). The book is called The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel and it’s so wonderfully weird and I love it.

Published in 1565, Drolatic Dreams is just a big parade of goofy-ass monsters that look like they crawled out of Hieronymus Bosch’s ears after a hard night’s drinking with H. P. Lovecraft and Alexander Dumas (there's a swashbuckling, cavalier look to many of them). There’s no text beyond the introduction, just creatures galore. 

It all just goes to show that weird books and zine culture were right there with everything else in the wild early days of publishing. 

You can read more about the book here, and you can flip through the whole thing here.* 

I’ve already copied out a couple of the creatures in my notebooks (sort of a #drawthisinyourstyle). Here's one:

One of the best things about finding this book is that it felt like a missing piece for one of the weird side projects I’ve been slowly (slooowly) fiddling with over the last year. Everything suddenly snapped into focus and the story felt more alive. That’s a good feeling.

But more on that later…

*For some reason I think leafing through the Drolatic Dreams pairs well with this playlist based on the travels of Ibn Battuta.

Petra

 

On Friday, November 19th, in the wee hours of the morning and at the end of a lunar eclipse, our own Petra Luna sauntered—not to say leapt— out from behind the curtain and onto the Great Stage to the sound of applause and into a host of loving arms. 

She’s beautiful and perfect and I love her.* 

And it’s scary, though. This time, at this late hour, after tragedy and heartbreak and with much of my youthful brashness worn away, it’s more frightening than it’s ever been before. The weight of love.

One of the things that Ida’s death left me with was an ever-present awareness of how quickly everything can change. 

Here’s another many-months-old scrap from my journal:

*even though, like all babies, she is notoriously difficult to draw.