Moby by Andrew Pommier

A few months ago (or maybe more like a year), my mom got me this book entitled "Concrete to Canvas: Skateboarders' Art," which I flipped through and set aside. The art in the book was great, it just didn't pertain to me. For one, I don't skateboard. For another, I'm still in that limbo period of all artists' lives where I can't really create anything without slapping on a humorous quote. (see: you can use me as a dildo) But that sort of shifted today, because I have nothing to do and no ideas for blog titles. I opened to a random page and surprise! I slipped, tripped, busted my lip, and fell in love. The page was featuring an artist named Andrew Pommier. That site is sort of broke right now, but in any case, you can still see how totally fucking rad that guy is.

So I took the title for today's post from a little sketch of his, a little sketch where a man in a whale suit smokes a cigarette. I know that description does it no good, but for fucking real, if I could have found a link to that goddamn Moby, I would have linked it to every word in this post.

And now to the actual content.

I'm in a sophomore slump, so to speak, when it comes to art. There was once a time when it was completely easy to just whip out my sketchbook and some watercolor paints and just go from there. Splatter this, dribble that, and I had an abstract piece I was proud of. Then, I sort of slowed down. I was taking a class at school that was CE Drawing. My train of thought was that I had to keep drawing to keep up, though according to my art teacher, I was already racing ahead of the pack.

I'd been doing silly little drawings like this and this and sometimes this, because I was bored. I spent a lot of time at Strest making drawings as such just to keep my sanity. When I came to The New School, and no longer felt so insane, I still did these little drawings to amuse my friends. Some of the drawings got to me in such a way that it was almost self-abuse. In retrospect, the image of one tiny freshman bent over a wooden desk, frantically scribbling the phrase, "This is ironic, somehow" on a line drawing of a rubber chicken, that image is really sad. This little kid is really fucked up.

And between producing two or three of those drawings a day, and working on meticulous drawing assignments, with near seas of gradient to be filled, somewhere I lost the more creative part of my art-persona. I mean, I suppose that the silly drawings were the creative manifest I was subsisting on. But that's only a vague thought. I mostly just miss the ability to do things that people actually really admired, that weren't copied from a picture pulled out of Vogue. In that style, I feel less like an artist and more like a student of art.

Maybe that's what education is, though. Maybe I have to find a medium where I can be both.