This work was painted in oil on canvas. The figure is life sized. In the background is a triangular UFO sending a column of light down to another figure that may be too small to see in this digital reproduction of the painting. This piece used to hang in my dining room. Then it was moved to a second floor hallway. Then remodeling placed it in temporary storage in the parlor. Hopefully I'll be able to hang it back up again soon.
Today was a long workday at my news job. Since I like my job, the day went by quickly. Now I can't decide whether to work more on my current writing project or start a new painting. I'm closing in on ten thousand words in the new story and have tentatively decided on a subject for the next painting. Realistically, I'll probably do some preliminary sketches and then write for several hours. Or maybe I'll just write. I'm pretty into the new story at this point.
Conversation at the coffee shop this afternoon included the sexual assault allegations against Prince Andrew and the US avoidance of international courts. I brought up the nascent push to genetically engineer plants that carry covid vaccines, which struck me as one of the absolute weirdest things being done by scientists right now. No one at the coffee shop seemed prepared to eat covid vaccine plants.
In other news, my new shoes arrived! They're Born brand Bromptons, an exact replacement for the pair I've worn for the last few years. The new ones seem a tiny bit tight, but once they're broken in they should be perfect. Compared to these, most other shoes feel like little prisons for the feet.
The printer's proof of my upcoming book Psychic Avalanche hasn't arrived yet. It actually looks like it hasn't even shipped yet, though it was ordered a week ago. I'm a bit nervous about how the cover will come out, since I did the spine a bit differently than usual. If the cover has to be redone, there's always risk that something won't line up right and it'll have to be redone again.
In my household, a new roommate has moved in. A young aspiring artist and writer. While I have yet to see any of this new roommate's art, the situation has presented me with the opportunity to give away some of the art supplies that I'll probably never use, such as vine charcoal. It's also got me thinking about where I was as an artist fifteen or twenty years ago.
Back then, I painted abstracts almost exclusively and sold these on the street or at debaucherous parties. Some of these parties were highly focused on art creation while others were more purely dionysian. I was also desperately poor during that time, eating mostly from dumpsters and the stuff restaurants couldn't sell, paying my rent by cleaning a trucking terminal one day a week.
In truth, my art back then wasn't great. Some of it was interesting but none of it could hold a candle to the work I've done over the last several years. It's funny to think about how seriously I took myself as an artist in those days, turning out mediocre abstracts and showing them off to my drunk friends. Everything has changed. And in terms of art, it's mostly changed for the better.