i love los angeles

leda's swan

found scribbed many months ago: when large planets circle too closely to each other, they collide. that's why the wiser ones are careful to keep out of each other's way, travelling in parallel paths.

carnival cotton candy

kim girl

midwest highways

this is very old, but it's part of a larger story, one which I plan on having resolved by July in time for the Comic Con 2008.

blue wet heart

bodies

large version

sweet reach

wandel

bartendress @ the zeitgeist beer garden

I miss these really gruff, frank no-nonsense women that go around in dirty t-shirts. Maybe it's because I'm such a girly girl lately, walking around in ironed shirts and even trying out heels but too afraid to buy them for fear it will destroy my soul. There have been several epic battles this year, but that's a tale for another day.

The bartender at the Zeitgeist was one such San Francisco lady; she was polite, knowledgeable, and able to handle orders while chatting about how she didn't like her new haircut. Also, she has the best beer on the planet, all the new Californian microbrews. There is good American beer, you know, although nobody will believe me. While most people are drinking the worst possible beer on earth throughout the country on Superbowl Sunday, there are friendly bartenders filling up big pitchers of Stella Artois for beer fanatics.

She's not pretentious about it though. And she doesn't overdo the service, like how some bartenders ask you how you are doing even though they don't really care. Lean back and watch her move back and forth the bar plastered with a zillion generations of punkrock stickers and big floppy bottles of vodka and whiskey. They're all here for the beer though.

At the end of the night she'll be wiping the countertops with a gray rag tucked into her back pants pocket, back aching, and then go stand outside smoking a cigarette in the outdoor beer garden with the rest of the crew. She's probably heard a lot of the drama that has gone on tonight but has learned to filter it out. It's one of the tricks of the trade.

harvest time sketch

large version

guardian angeles & the starlets of la la land

in the city of angels there are thousands of lost souls.

a beautiful guardian angel, plump and healthy with desire, watches over the hungry lanky girls who dream of being starlets, although sometimes they cannot save them before it's too late.

bay area love

how do you draw paradise?

dreams from the void: cowgirl & ghost woman

age of consent

from Rainer Maria Rilke's notebooks:

I think I ought to begin to do some works now that I am learning to see. I am 28 years old, and almost nothing has been done. To recapitulate, I have written a study on Carpaccio, which is bad, a drama entitled "Marriage" which sets out to demonstrate something false by equivocal means, and some verses. Ah! But verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one night be able to write ten verses that are good. For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early enough), -they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know animals, the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming, to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else), to childhood illnesses that begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars--and it is not yet enough if one may thing of all this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white sleeping women in childbeds, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must have been able to fget them when they are many and one must have great patience to wait until the come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves not til then can it happent hat in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

skully girl

all of these little pen and ink sketches have to become either a big drawing or a painting soon. i love my moleskin, but the art has to start living outside of its box soon.

the root of the matter

the curse of beauty

at this age, i realize how fortunate I am not to have been born beautiful. when i was younger it would have been a case of sour grapes if I had said something like this. but no, while i am happy with who i am, it's been really to my benefit that beauty hasn't encased itself around me and made me something i wouldn't want to be.

beauty is a wonderful thing, but it is also such a horrible curse. it attracts the wrong kind of attention from even the best kinds of people, and there is so much potential for it to go wrong. it's also after a certain point perpetually declining...

a male model told me recently that men are better suited for modelling because beauty in men is seen as an asset to other great qualities, while in women it's seen as the only thing.

On the other hand, I know quite a few women of worth and standing who are beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished. Maybe they somehow avoided the pitfalls of beauty by being around the right kinds of people at the right time.

dream love sketch

larger version here

lady guadalupe offering on the first of june

...drawn in a bustling Los Angeles Mexican restaraunt. There were so many interesting people there!

sketching in a Phoenix bowling alley

I finally got my scanner!