On a cold winter night, a snapshot from an evening last summer.

click the image for the big version.

Lake Minnewanka photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Sea monster-armed ventriloquisty guy camped out on First Encounter Beach this summer on Cape Cod. Last summer we came upon this other clown-faced boy.

This one goes out to 13-year-old Tanya C who wrote me this summer and sent one of her mcglinch-inspired drawings, which, if her mom says it’s “OK’ I’ll post up here for you.

I only have a couple weeks left at the present job — I gave notice last week. I’ll push to get as many doodles in as possible and then hope for the best at the next gig — both in terms of work and doodles.

Over the summer I received a few emails from Tanya C, a 13 year old, who said she enjoyed my drawings. She said she had even done a ‘mcglinch-inspired’ drawing of her own:

The theme is “Tried to open the pickle jar”
And the guy’s all bruised up and pickles on the floor!
You’ve given me so much insperation.
So i’m letting you know that.Because for sure,people might say my pictures are different but they’re good.

She took a photo of her drawing with her mom’s cell phone and eventually got her mother’s permission for me to post it here.

So, thanks, Tanya for the kind words and most of all, the great work! Thanks for sharing and enjoy your Thanksgiving wherever you are!

Was I really thinking of Saddam Hussein in the summer of 1981?
[note: I've obscured some of the phone number to protect the innocent person who now has that phone number.]

Another event happened one morning when I left my South Philly apartment for class in the mid 1980s. A neighbor down the street was on the second story roof of his row home threatening to do harm to himself with a large carving knife. The police and firemen below mulled around on the street. His mother pleaded with him.

As I made my way to the intersection he decided to wrap the coaxial TV cable around his neck and jump from the roof. All that happened to him was he fell into a tree below and the cable pulled away from the house. I still wonder if he really thought that he was doing himself in or just wanted to make it look like he was trying.

My most recent thing-I’d-rather-not-see happened the other day as I was pruning branches on the bush in front of the house where caterpillars were making a nest. I clipped the dying branch and pulled it away and saw something drop and heard it go smack on the sidewalk.

I looked down and saw the remains of a bird’s egg with the partially formed bird creature splatted on the slate. I grimaced.  I hadn’t seen the good nest holding a single egg inside above the offending caterpillar nest.

I’m extremely weak-kneed when it comes to killing creatures (mice) and especially when it’s baby-to-be-bird or other young creature. This was especially painful coming two months after 2-week effort to document a different nest in the back of our house earlier in the summer:

Purple Finch Babies from mcglinch on Vimeo.

I grabbed a broom and quickly swept the mess into the ground cover below the bush. I’lll keep watching this video to try to sweep the memory of the baby bird splat away.

One of things I love about some blogging artists is when they show a work-in-progress or the steps it took to get to their final version. Superbadfriend, Jess, is good at showing things she’s working on and when they’re finished.

Most of what I do is drawn in a notebook or sticky note and that’s the extent of my works-in-progress. I rarely devote much enough time to any of my so-called art. So when I took on this project in the late winter I decided I would at least document the process, frustrating as it was, to see what we could see.

The Montana SkatePark Association, based in Missoula, MT, “helps Montana communities establish skateboard parks and skateboard program development with the goal of creating additional recreational opportunities and positive alternatives for its residents and underprivileged youth.” In their On Deck Art Auction, each year they ask artists from around the country (and world?) to create art out of a blank skate deck. They offer the work up in an online gallery and auction which is followed up with a live auction in Missoula.

My sister has lived in or near Missoula off and on for the past 14 years. She told me about the program and I submitted an application to be considered one of the artists with this blog as my ‘portfolio’. I bet my sister a ton of money saying there was no way I’d be selected as one of the fifty. However, about a month after applying, I received an email from them saying I had been selected. A month later I received a blank skate deck via FedEx with instruction to get on it and send it back.

After receiving the board, I started trying to draw up some ideas on old newsprint. One of my concepts was to incorporate our local famous skateshop in West Chester, PA: Fairman’s. I went one Sunday morning and took photos of the store hoping for inspiration.

I was feeling more than a bit the phony for trying to do ‘skate art’ having never mastered the skateboard beyond the project my Philadelphia roommate and I accomplished one summer over 20 years ago. We built a longboard skateboard out of an old wooden water ski and proceeded to wow the Pennsport neighborhood kids as we went up and down Wharton Street.

The Strapper carves up Wharton Street ca. 1987

Another idea, my son’s, was to do what I do most and doodle a bunch of drawings on sticky notes and then cover the board in the sticky notes. And then layer over some decoupage and that would be the project. I still kind of wish I’d tried that.

I also considered drawing what I wanted the board to look like in my more comfortable medium of pencil or ball point pen and paper and then scanning it in and having someone create a decal out of it that I could just lay on the board. I got a head-shake from the Mrs. on that one.

In the end, I realized I needed to return to my painting. I’ve been wanting to return to painting for about five years now. Time and attention span being my enemies I’ve never gotten around to it, aside from a brief foray into ink and watercolors a couple years ago.

So I found myself taking on a big project with a medium that I hadn’t touched in about 18 years with a due date. For some, that might get the creative juices flowing but for me that’s a guaranteed drawer’s block.

My first draft of the skateboard went like this:

and then went to this:

at which point I was totally disgusted and went to this:

and start again with something like this:

which was based on a drawing in a notebook that I liked a lot. I lost that scrap of paper.

Which became this:

and ended up as this:

A few days after finishing I shipped it back to Montana and this weekend it went live along with more than 40 other decks that really look amazing and I’m honored and humbled to be included alongside them.

Here’s a few close-up detail shots.

If nothing else, in the end, I can get the board back if it doesn’t sell and I’ll probably end up hanging it in the office. The real bonus is that it got me back into the painting again and I’m trying to really push myself to keep at it. I already have another small piece in the works — that honestly I haven’t touched in a month, but it’s down in the kids’ craft room awaiting my return.