From the Old into the New

During the late 1980’s into the early 1990’s I was a very busy guy in world of art.  Not that I was famous or even “professional” by any means.  Just that I was “busy” and cranked out a lot of work.  I had juices flowing then like a mo-fo.  Then came kids, college and career focus.  I put it on the back burner ever since.  After a recent trip to a local museum with my son I got some of the juices flowing.Most of the work I did then was either pencil on paper, or (more often) pen and ink on paper.  I had a strange technique involving a common ball-point pen and a particular side-angle sweeping stroke that allowed me to shade with very fine gradients and not look choppy or aliased.

The downside was hours and hours with my eyeballs no more than 3 inches above the paper surface.  My eyesight was pre-destined for bad times given the 20/400 nearsighted astigmatism my mother handed down to me.  This only added more to the mix and I hit the spectacles before 15 years of age.  I’ve worn glasses ever since.

I have volumes of work stuffed away in all sorts of places, as well as works I’ve given to family and friends over the years.  I’d love to get some of them scanned and sent back to recall those I’ve forgotten.  But I digress.

So anyhow, all of that work was 2D.  I’ve had some ideas to move that into mediums with more “depth”, but I hate the term “3D” so I won’t use it.  More of a layered approach than outright stand-out objects and shapes.  Maybe a subtler approach.  I got to playing with some out-takes from my old scrapbooks and layered them on top of some things I was messing around with and I think I’m on to something I really like.  You might hate it, but that’s cool too.  Art is about the subjective obviously.

The only name that came to mind about these three pieces is “3-steps”.  From what to what, I haven’t got a clue.  Just 3 steps.  It’ll have to do.  I’m pumped.  I’m not really content with the results, in some respects, but it’s given me ideas to pursue that have me really excited.

I’ve begun setting up a workspace and got some materials gathered to start working again.  I’m excited.  Baseball season is fast approaching, so I’ll have to juggle my time a little more carefully to keep this going, but it’s worth it for me.  If you’re hooked up on Facebook, I have more art posted in my Photo library as well.  I’ll post more as I finish them up.