News from the State Police: They approved my application for concealed carry. Which basically just means I’ll be OK to drive to and from the shooting range.
Last night I wrapped up a course designed for Creative Directors and taught by a CD at Ogilvy Canada. I went into it thinking it would be good to talk with other people at a similar age and experience level, gain some insight, and share any strategies or wisdom. The class size was close to 100 but seemed to be made up of younger Art Director-level creatives, with some newly minted CD’s looking for guidance. So I found myself to be one of the old heads in the virtual room offering advice more than I was learning. And because the course was taught by and for agency-style creatives, I felt a bit disconnected, being an in-house leader at an NGO. Still, it was inspiring, I did learn a few things, and my LinkedIn profile is full of connection requests.
The final assignment was to pitch a project as if we were in a room with the client, which I’ve always been good at doing. I looked back through my history and did a pitch for the billboard I designed for Deutsche Bank in New York City, when I was at an agency. Thankfully I spent a bunch of COVID sorting through and organizing my digital files so I knew right where to find it on the server in the basement. I set up the camera and did a quick pitch on tape, then overlaid some photos and video of the project in the final edit. I keep forgetting that we won a couple of Addys for that piece.
On Thursday I’m headed to Florida for a football weekend with a bunch of my uncles and cousins, which should be a blast. Dugans are flying in from all over, and we’re meeting at my Uncle’s house for the Bills/Dolphins game on Sunday. I have no idea what to expect here; my cousins and I are all older than our parents were when we were gathering for holidays regularly, so there is a very good chance we will all be asleep by the end of the third quarter. My days of drinking an entire case of Milwaukee’s Best during a football Sunday are long over, so I’ll have to pace myself and bring plenty of ibuprophen. And hopefully my Dugan’s Beer shirt will be here before I have to leave for the airport!
Amy Sherald, the artist best known for her portrait of Michelle Obama, is having a mid-career retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She recently cancelled an exhibit at the Smithsonian over censorship concerns with the painting “Trans Forming Liberty”, above. She’s a fellow alumnus of MICA, having graduated from the MFA program, and worked in Baltimore for 17 years. I’m going to get tickets and take the girls to this show. I was lucky enough to have seen the Michelle Obama painting at the National Portrait Gallery, and it is breathtaking in real life. Looking forward to this show.
This morning, theoretically, I am on day one of my second sabbatical at WRI. I spent the last three months cranking on a big project at work and with a few small details left, got it over the finish line (more details on that soon). I’ll have to plug in for a couple of small meetings next week, but hopefully I can step away and enjoy the next five weeks doing some personal projects and seeing family—because in the fall, things are going to get very busy again. Brian is looking at a Nissan Leaf parked in his driveway and wants help disassembling it for his electrification project, and I’m hoping I can put in a couple of solid weeks helping him with that. I’d actually like to keep working on that through the winter because I am keenly interested in that project. And as always, there are projects here around the house to tackle, and I’ve got a red truck that I wanna get on the road before the snow flies. I’m also signed up to get my concealed carry license next week, and I intend to put some time in at the range.
I will never own a watch this expensive in my life, but watching this guy disassemble, clean, and reassemble an original Rolex GMT was fascinating. This watch is gorgeous, and would be everything I would want in a vintage timepiece. That bakelite bezel is beautiful—the rich color and typography are absolutely perfect, and the wear on the whole watch is just right.
I’m currently taking a class/working group for creative directors run by the CD at Ogilvy Canada. I found it through my social media feed and signed up for it on a whim. I was lucky to get WRI to pay for it (after 11 years, this is the first class I’ve asked them to pay for) and so far it’s been pretty good. The class size is much bigger than I was expecting, and there are a lot of people who are in the place I was after about two years at WRI—they had the title, had been doing the work, but are still trying to figure out how their role fits in at whatever agency/company they’re at. This Thursday we went through the creative brief and roughly half the class had never written or used one, which I found kind of shocking. But something I’m finding universal is the lack of any formal training or mentorship for this role; if you’re lucky you work for a CD somewhere as a design or art director and they show you the ropes. My experience involved little mentorship—I had to figure it out along the way, which has been the theme of my entire career. The class will run through most of my sabbatical but that means I’ll be able to focus on the homework better.
I was talking with the girls last night at dinner about a cabaret I used to go to when I was in college, which held drag performances, musical reviews, and other avant-garde events that I can’t even describe. Typically my friends and I would pregame a little bit and then walk downtown to the show, get hammered and have fun, then wander home. In Baltimore, in 1990, which was sort of like walking through Beirut in 1983. Anyway, the name of the show suddenly came to me and I looked it up online when I got home: the 14Karat Cabaret. I found a post about it and a ton of memories flooded back; the Baltimore City Paper, the Haus of Frau… Man, I miss those days.
I was talking with Finley last night about customizing clothing, something she’s really been into in the last couple of years, and mentioned a jean jacket I had in high school that I customized myself. At the time, most of the burnouts in school sewed a section of a concert T-shirt into the back panel of their jean jacket, or had a talented friend paint the scene on the fabric with acrylic paint: lots of Iron Maiden, Slayer, or Metallica. I was really into Frank Miller comics at that point—a series called Lone Wolf and Cub was popular and he was doing cover art for the western manga reprints. His style for these was very woodblock/pen and ink inspired, and I started researching Ukiyo-e art at the library. The usual masters were always represented, but one artist stood out to me: a late-period artist named Yoshitoshi, whose style clearly influenced Miller and who stood out among his predecessors.
I scoured the libraries in the area and found a book of his prints somewhere locally—then kept renewing it until I had to give it back. I studied all of the prints in the book and whatever I could learn from his style—at that point attempting my own crude woodblock prints with no press, basic inks, and no means of registration. One print stood out among the hundreds, and I chose this to paint on the back of my jacket: Fujiwara no Yasumasa Playing the Flute, a triptych which depicts a musician and his outlaw brother in a scene from a kabuki play. The linework, color, and use of pattern are phenomenal, and I thought it would look good on blue denim. Over a couple of evenings I painted the jacket, and I was pretty happy with the way it turned out.
As the years passed, I lost track of the jacket; I don’t remember what happened to it, but I’d love to have it back, if nothing more than to give to Finley. I bet she’d like it.
My ribs are feeling better after a week of low-impact activity. I’ve learned to pull my knees up to my chest and pivot my entire body when I’m rolling over in bed as opposed to using my core to do the work for me. Stupid stuff like pulling the handbrake on the OG-V , pulling on my socks, and taking stairs two at a time are still out of the question, but I’m not as stiff as I was last Friday. Sneezing still sucks, though.
Friday morning I drove up to the Towson library, loaded a file onto their 3D control computer, hit START and reviewed hundreds of applicants for a graphic design position based in Africa as two new dealer badges printed in a slightly larger size. After the fiasco with my first silicone mold attempt destroyed the first badge and the second printed too small, I needed a couple of examples to work with. Luckily I was able to reserve a block of time long enough to print one decent example, abort a second misfire, and print a third excellent example slightly larger than the original. After work I sanded down the rough edges, built a proper mold box out of foam core and hot glue, and mixed up a new batch of silicone after I’d let it warm to room temperature. After pouring it, I set it on a seed starter mat to keep warm overnight. Saturday morning, the silicone at the top is hard to the touch—unlike my first attempt, which took five days and a heat lamp to finally set.
The next step is to go and find a cheap used pan at the thrift store and melt a lump of lead-free tin I bought from Amazon. This will get poured into the mold and, hopefully, provide me with a metal version of the dealer badge that will stand up to heat better than the plastic will.
The under-cabinet lighting in our kitchen has been dimming and dying for several years now, especially after I switched the annoying halogen bulbs out with LEDs. They are small round unmarked pucks connected by wire snaked in and behind the cabinets and connected with a bespoke two-prong plastic coupling, making their removal or replacement impossible—there is no manufacturer information to trace back to to match the couplings. So I’m resigned to swapping the 20-year-old pucks out with new LED units and splicing the old connectors onto the new units. This does not thrill me, but LED carries very low voltage (the original lights go through a big brick of a transformer, while the LEDs plug right into the wall) and I’m confident in my soldering and splicing abilities. It’s just going to take a lot of time and crouching under cabinets, which is going to be murder on my ribs.
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Happy to have this completed. My team was awesome; I couldn’t be prouder of all of them.
In the Yale Review, Chris Ware looks back on the author/illustrator Richard Scarry:
The Busytown books, as they came to be known—with their dictionary-like visual presentation paired with lightly slapstick situations and the presence of recurring, memorable characters like Huckle Cat, the Pig family, and my favorite, Lowly Worm—grew into a real-feeling big world that Scarry seemed to be letting little ones into.
As a kid, I spent countless hours poring over our collection of Busytown books: There was a welcoming simplicity to them, and they described people and places in a way I could understand easily.
I also picked up on something Ware mentions in his essay: a markedly European feeling to each book. There were cars and buildings and words that weren’t like the ones around me in Massachusetts or New Jersey and I was smart enough to notice the differences. So it made sense when he mentioned that Scarry lived in Switzerland after 1967, and during the period when his most popular books were published. There’s also an approachable quality to his artwork I always appreciated. His early work is technically excellent, but the loose style of pen and guauche artwork in the later Busytown series influenced my drawing style in ways I hadn’t really realized until thinking about it.
An article on a completely different website brought me to this one, and I could not have been happier last night. This is a reconstruction of the history of the Millennium Falcon, from the earliest days of Lucas’ scripts through Ralph McQuarrie’s original sketches, a pivot in the “Space Pirate” design after Space: 1999 hit TV in 1975, and the birth of the now iconic shape. The author sources multiple books, articles, websites, and photos to piece together how it evolved. I remember seeing some of these paintings over the years in different books and magazines, and now I know why they were different than what we saw on screen.
Oh, this is definitely bookmarked for weekly visits: Penguin Series Design is a review of classic Penguin book cover design from its origins to the modern day. The author has a collection of about 1400 Penguin books and teaches art and design in Melbourne, Australia.