I have noted that my muse, or whatever entity it is that drives my artistic expression, is doing work almost exclusively to please the child in myself. I have a theory about this. Because I came into painting as a young adult, I never really had this period of doing cartoon cars and other non serious pieces of art. I feel I may be going through a period of satisfying this kind of missing artistic childhood. A place where I can tell myself little jokes and make myself laugh and engage my young self in exploration of things that I found fascinating, frightening, or just cool.
This has been extremely beneficial as a tool to practice the craft. Since these are relaxed works almost all are sketched free hand with very little use of reference photos. This has done wonders for my drawing ability in a short period.
white watercolor pencil on black bristol board
"Fageddaboudit Sanitation" is a great example of this type of work. As a child I had a fear of, as well as fascination with, garbage trucks. Having spent my young life going to school around New York where the mafia "allegedly" monopolized the sanitation business I imagined Oscar as a grumpier version of himself in a stained wife beater shirt and perhaps a thick gold chain. A longtime employee of the mob run "allegedly" Fageddaboudit Sanitation. Of course his partner is Animal who is probably a pretty annoying, and perhaps intelligence deficient, partner. He is a less than desirable conversationalist to be cooped up with in the cab of a garbage truck. I imagine Animal thinks Oscar is his guru of sorts and Oscar plays this role for him giving him occasional tidbits of wisdom to succeed in life, and gossip about the rest of the muppets on "SEZme" St. It is a hard fast rule that Animal will NEVER get to drive the truck but always is told he will, some glorious day when his "training" is complete.
I have engaged in playing this backstory in my head with art before, but never as an internal sitcom like this one was. I very much enjoyed this.
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