Boldly Going Where Absolutely Everyone Has Gone Before

Upcoming Events: 

IlluxCon! I look forward to this event all year. I will once again be in the evening showcase and I will once again be giving a talk (date/time TBA). ! It will be a follow-up to last year’s presentation and if you’re near Reading, PA at the end of October, it’s worth your while to come check it out. You’ll see the best illustration in the industry all in one place, and all the artists of those pieces will be there in person to talk to you. 

Main Show:

Oct 22-26, 2025

The Goggleworks Center for the Arts

201 Washington St 

Reading, PA 19601

Evening Showcase: (I’ve got a booth here!)

Oct 24-25, 2025

8 pm-midnight

The Reading Doubletree Hotel

701 Penn St 

Reading, PA 19601

East Bay Open Studios! If you’re a behind-the-scenes person and you’re in the Bay Area, EBOS is the place to be. I always have a great time meeting visitors and showing them around the place. Chances are good you signed up for my mailing list at an open studio event and I’d love to see you again! 

Dec 6-7, 2025

11 am-5 pm

2908 Chapman St

Oakland, CA 94601

The studio is up a flight of stairs with no elevator access.

Now, on to this month’s newsletter.

Let’s recap: Last month, I talked about the epiphany I had when I decided not to hold space in my head for things I hate. I was giving myself permission to ignore a whole bunch of stuff that I was being told to culturally pay attention to, and suddenly I had all this spare brain capacity and no idea of what I was going to do with it. July ended with me needing a plan, or at the very least a direction.

So I did what I always do when I’m lost: I started reading. 

I have a few books on art and business that I’m working my way through, and the underlying message across all of them is the same: trust yourself, trust your art. Don’t try to force yourself into a certain style or subject. Just listen to your inner artist. 

I hate this advice. I’ve heard it before, many times, and I have never trusted this philosophy for the simple reason that every time I’ve tried it, I hate everything I make. And when I look at other artists who seem to lean into this approach (ahem, Lee Krasner), I’m not too thrilled with their work either. 

The first problem is that my inner artist is a capricious, flighty little thing that gets bored with pretty much every idea after about two hours. The work I’m proud to have made (such as Quicksilver) takes months. And the inner artist has nothing to contribute. It’s off filling its pretty little head with new ideas, which it’s then trying to convince me to chase. If I listened to that asshole, I’d never get a painting done.

"Quicksilver" I love this painting but good lord was it ever a slog.

The second, more pressing problem is craft. Indulge me in some (more) professional snobbery here. Narrative imagery of the type I create requires a high level of technical skill. If you want to paint things to look like things, you have to understand what makes things look the way they look. If you’re painting landscapes, you’re probably thinking a lot about sunlight and why things in direct sun have a warmer temperature to them and things in the shade are cooler. If you paint buildings, you can’t avoid learning at least a few perspective systems. And if you paint people, you’re going to end up with a working knowledge of anatomy and musculature that you never wanted, but is extremely handy if you ever end up in physical therapy. 

My inner artist is interested in precisely none of that grind. It is no help when I’m trying to figure out how to paint mercury or wings coming out of someone’s head. But the artist (me) demands that the viewer understand that those swirls are liquid metal and someone (also me) has to buckle down and figure out how to make it happen. Solving these problems is where all the time goes. 

So I read my business books and dismissed them as mystical claptrap written by people who have never had to make a hand look right.

Around about this same time, I had an urge to go revisit some music I used to listen to growing up, so I waited until the house was empty, fired up the really nice speakers, and settled into some Nine Inch Nails that I hadn’t heard in the better part of twenty years. The song I randomly selected is “Only” and it’s about a guy who has built a life around a fictitious version of himself that he can no longer maintain and his only choice is to confront the inner chaos he had worked so hard to keep bottled up and hidden. Trent Reznor was about the age I am now when he wrote it, and lest we miss the point he’s trying to make, the music video is entirely centered around the midlife crisis of the typical office worker drone. By the time the song was over I was glaring at the TV. It felt, frankly, a little too on-the-nose for real life. 

Later that night, having worked my way through a bit more of the NIN discography and feeling suitably gritty and raw, I was curled up in bed reading. I read to turn my mind off and get to sleep, and for that purpose I’ll grab almost any piece of fiction that looks tolerably written and not miserable or scary as long as I can get it from my library. So I grabbed a random library romantasy (criteria: standalone or first in the series, can be read on my Kindle) and settled in. 

The random romantasy turned out to center around an oil painter (really?). Who is trying too hard to control her painting (really??). And distrusts her impulses (really???). And once she takes the big mental leap to trust herself, suddenly she gets the guy and her painting is amazing and also -- this is a fantasy after all -- she can bend time and space (oh for pete’s sake).

The only other time I have felt this specifically singled out by the universe was when I had ants in the kitchen and termites in the crawlspace and rats in the attic all at once. It felt personal and I took it that way. 

And I took this romantasy personally. I don’t like being told what to do, particularly by people and things who have no direct experience doing what I’m attempting and no particular stake in the outcome, especially by a vast, uncaring infinite expanse of causality. I went to sleep in a mutinous huff. 

I woke up the next morning, set up my paints, and...sigh...listened to my inner artist.

Now if this were a book, the skies would open, the birds would sing, and from my favorite red-handled mop brush would issue forth a masterpiece of evocative watercolor whathaveyou, but that’s not what happened. 

What happened was a painting I don’t like. It wasn’t particularly interesting and it didn’t make me happy. I wasn’t proud of it. In the past I would have dismissed it as a failed experiment, trashed the painting, and moved on. 

There's a good chance I'll like this better if I come back to it in three months.

But this time, I thought a bit more about Nine Inch Nails and how they blend expert musicianship with the dulcet tones of a Pittsburgh steel mill, and I realized that they probably went through most of this and came out the other side with something uniquely theirs. There’s no way they woke up one morning, put a microphone next to an air hammer, and ended the day with a song, much less one that other people liked. 

There’s an “ugly stage” of most creative endeavors, where you’ve got the main idea down, but it’s not refined or developed or even comprehensible to anyone other than you. And then you spend a lot of time going from an idea to a finished piece, and that’s where a lot of the work is. Reworking and revising and polishing until every part of the piece looks like you meant for it to be that way.

For the first time in my life I considered the possibility that I didn’t need to start over. I had an idea. I just needed to start refining more. 

So I woke the next morning and did it again. And the morning after that. And the morning after that. 

I’m not ready to pass judgment on these just yet. They’re the result of me getting up every morning and saying “what if 1) I don’t stand in my own way and 2) I work through the rough and the ugly and force myself to get to somewhere that is, at the very least, visually resolved?” So I’m making them, scanning them, and filing them away for future reexamination in a few months.

I hate that the books appear to be right. I hate that all the advice to just keep making art seems to be pointing in the right direction. I hate that all these mystical claptrap factories seem to have stumbled on to something correct that they can’t explain or defend. It’s aggravating. It’s one thing to read about how “you just need to make more work and keep going” and another thing entirely to live it. On my better days, I have enough optimism to trust the process, the future, and myself. On my not-so-good days, usually brought on by reading the news, I have no faith in the future, no faith in myself to shape it, and a blinding hatred of commercial mysticism disguised as self-help. 

But the books do appear to be on to something, and I don’t have any other choice, so I guess I’ll just keep painting.

Postscript: A few days ago, I woke up and went straight to the keyboard to finish up this draft and send it off to my editor. That done, I wandered over to Muddy Colors and found... well... the exact answer to all my problems. 

This was one of those forehead-slapping moments that you get when you know you should have seen the obvious, right up there with “the glasses I’m looking for are on my head” and “I can’t find the phone I’m using to text you.” I know Vanessa Lemen’s work. I know Lisa Cyr’s work. I know they’ve both got a strong background in formalism on which they lean heavily, and I know they work intuitively to find their way through their works while still maintaining a narrative and a high level of craft. I know they both come from and continue to work in illustration. In short, they’ve worked their way through all the painting concerns I have as well as the professional concerns I’m grappling with and they both like to record videos talking about it. 

I watched the video, decided there and then that I was going to have some faith in myself, and resolved to stop trying to shoehorn myself into a planning-heavy painting process that mostly makes me miserable. The watercolors in this post were the unknowing start of that, and you’ll see more next month.