Cartoons and Visual Art 1

Drawings on polar coordinate paper and my interest in making more of them in exchange for donations to charitable causes.

I started drawing on polar coordinate paper several years ago when the novelist and artist Jeremy P. Bushnell sent me some in the mail that he’d found somewhere. After drifting back to California and having done enough drawings to use up what Jez had mailed me, I sourced this company out of Ohio called Geyer Instructional Products which manufactures the stuff and ordered a ream from them.

This piece from 2022 is called Drawing.

This next one is called Drawing for Polina.

Drawing for Polina wasn’t originally going to be a drawing for Polina. Back in early 2023 I was seeing a gal whose thirtieth birthday was then approaching and I designed this piece to have thirty dinosaurs in it because I was going to make a birthday gift of it but we ended up going our separate ways before the birthday and before I finished the drawing. So I worked as hard as I could to finish it and then put it in the mail to Polina, a young refugee from the war in Ukraine living in England with whom I occasionally trade dinosaur art.

The next one, from later in 2023, is called Sixteen Dinosaurs. In terms of overall quality I think it is the least flawed of this series. In particular I stumbled upon some interesting color patterning that I want to consciously develop as a technique, which I will do in my current polar coordinate outing (about which more below).

The most recent polar coordinate drawing, completed in late 2023, is called She Comes in Colors Everywhere.

I knew before I made the first pen stroke on this one that She Comes in Colors Everywhere was going to become a gift for Frienefactor in gratitude for all the books and movies she either gives me or simply brings to my attention and tells me to go out and imbibe.

I made two novel process changes with this piece. Firstly instead of confining myself to a limited color palette or an interlocking sequence of them as a constraining limitation, I intentionally used every single color of gel pen that I had on hand (the amount of which had recently increased because Frienefactor herself gave me some new gel pens in colors I didn’t have before). Secondly instead of largely starting in the middle of the paper and working my way out I made a point of simultaneously starting at the corners and edges and working my way in at a comparable rate of progress. Out from the inside and in from the outside at the same time. I just wanted to see what would happen and I got some markedly different results out of tuning those particular dials.

I also made an animated GIF image compiling process shots of She Comes in Colors Everywhere, taken at multiple locations around San Francisco (I often travel with my work in progress for when I have downtime, or sometimes intentionally go work in a coffee shop for a change of scenery and/or to try to get women to ask what I’m doing).

The current drawing in progress does not have a title so I will come up with one before I share the finished version in a future entry. For this one I am focused on melting into a repetitive and unconcerned meditative practice of technique; the only thing I’m focused on consciously attempting to get less bad at is that wicked patterning in Sixteen Dinosaurs where the color trails are zigging and zagging into one another like curved lightning bolts. So far for this one I also find myself drawing the exact same hypothetical dinosaur over and over again. I’m not sure what that means and I dig it.

I make a lot of this type of stuff and it tends to just pile up in my pad or in my storage unit (which my buddy in New Jersey calls his “basement” in “his” “house”). I’ve never been particularly interested in trying to develop a steady income stream from making art but I would like to get some of this material out the door and have experimented in the past with exchanging finished work for donations to charitable causes, with modest results. I’ll be pressing the point in future entries but let me know if you would like to own some artwork and we’ll try to come to an accommodation as to what amount of funds is to be donated to which charitable organization. I don’t need this art prettying up my space anyway and I’d just as soon see the flow of capital redirected towards people who can use it more than me. Get all that money and completed artwork away from me and make it someone else’s problem; I have dinosaurs to draw.