For those of you who don’t know, Abigail is a rock opera about the Salem witch trials; it is a completely original work, created by Michael Xavier, Daniel Knop and Kurt Brown.  This marks their first original rock opera after producing a number of successful rock opera “covers”, i.e. The Rocky Horror Show, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar.  Few debuts are masterworks, but in my estimation, this one is.  Aside from being an outstanding work of art and music, it has also been the catalyst for several momentous milestones in my life, all of which revolve around my return, in earnest, to the joy of music I thought I’d had to leave behind.

Some of you who will read this know my story; most probably don’t.  Very briefly, I have been singing and performing onstage since I was six years old.  I was active in competitive choir for my elementary, intermediate and high school years.  After high school, I joined a band called The Mimsies, which would eventually make something of a splash in Hollywood and tour North America.  I left the band under tragic circumstance in 2003, after ten years of nonstop gigging and recording.  At that point, in the words of one of my new songs, “I put down the microphone and called it a day.” 

I thought I was done.  I tried to perform here and there in the years after The Mimsies disbanded, but each time I took the stage, I was struck through with anxiety and would often break down in tears, hyperventilating and unable to complete even a single song.  I took a day job and tried to forget about music.  Music, however, did not want to forget about me.  It nagged at me.  In 2006, I started taking baby steps back onto the stage with four-minute burlesque routines for the Hubba Hubba Revue.  It was the safety zone I needed to be able to stand on my legs again.  In the intervening five years since my first Hubba, I have spent a year in convalescence, gotten married, moved back to the Bay and finally accepted myself as a legitimate artist and performer.  It’s been a long road, but all of a sudden, I’m back, and all the trauma of the past seems strangely distant, as though it never happened.

To roll back a tick, the height of my competitive choir career came in Virginia, when my Dad was stationed at the Pentagon.  I had a wonderful group of friends and we were all motivated, talented and hungry to make a mark individually and in concert.  I won Outstanding Choir Student two years in a row, even though, at that time, I had a very small, shy voice that had yet to find its wings.  Regardless of my volume, I was devoted.  I loved to sing; I always have.  When my godmother first held me in the first few weeks of my life, she pronounced, “this child is going to grow up to be a famous singer”.  I didn’t know that until well into my career with The Mimsies, but it would appear that a calling to vocal music has always been a stamp upon me.

Those years in choir were, until now, the last time I really loved being me, loved doing what I was doing, felt like a normal kid who had a great peer group and a purpose.  I would have gone on to sing with the nationally-reknowned and multi-award-winning Lee High School Madrigals choir, but after eighth grade, my Dad’s orders came through and we were shipped out to McAlester, Oklahoma.  That move took me away from my first boyfriend, from my deeply-beloved friends, and from singing.  There was no choir at either of the high schools I attended in Oklahoma.  When we moved to Hawaii in my junior year, again I was dismayed to find no choir.  The move from Virginia to Oklahoma was the most important of my life in that it introduced me to depression, a major player who did not relinquish his reins on me until this year.

I have spent  twenty-two years searching for that peer group of choir kids I had to leave behind in Virginia.  For many years, I didn’t realize that’s what I was looking for — that was the shape of the hole and the longing in my soul.  Finally, here, with Abigail and all the surrounding trappings of my life at this time (Hubba, Chickenhead Johnson, 120 Minutes, Mimsies, Zanzibar, producers, etc…), I have found it.  Finally, I am returned to a place where music is a matter of fact in my life and I am singing with other people daily.

I cannot express to you the intensity of the joy I feel at arriving here.  I love singing with other people — beyond words — there is something that changes in my chemistry when I am vibrating in harmony with other voices.  It is Divine.  Sublime.  Tapped in.  Blissful.  Joyous.  To be here — to have a second shot at this after all the water under the bridge — is nothing short of miraculous, and I am humbled by the opportunity.  The crowning glory of that opportunity has been Abigail.  There is so much love, goodness and positive energy surrounding this production, it’s a high unto itself.  I have great love for the entire cast and band; everyone is so talented and beyond that, skilled.  What is even more delightful to me is that everyone is who they are and the differences make the magic — I have always loved that.  The camaraderie among a group of individuals is what attracted me to the idea of being in a band in the first place.

Aside from returning me to vocal music, Abigail (and the people associated with it) has/have also allowed me to finally kick the trauma I experienced during my time with The Mimsies out of my psyche and reclaim my joy, period.  I have been living under the thumb of deep, black energy for nearly a decade now — that awful energy holding me on one side and music on the other, giving me glimpses of the joy and glory possible, but always keeping me separated from it, beating me down every time I’d try to return.  It held me hostage with sadness, angst and guilt.

No more.  In the rock opera, Abigail, like me, finds herself forced to relocate from a place of joy and song to a new world of guilt and abuse.  Like me, she tries to find her joy and song in this new place, and like me, she found ways of getting it that weren’t entirely healthy for her or the people around her.  In the end of her journey, however, she is embraced by a new light, a new love, a redemption.  So it has been for me.

The best is yet to come, but if I had to go tomorrow, I’d go with a smile on my face.

Michael, Danny, Kurt — and everyone in the cast/band — thank you so much for the opportunity to be a part of this magnificent and important work, and for giving me what I needed to reclaim my joy and song.  (And Ace, thank YOU. I owe you a big one, Buddy!)

Love,

case.

In the shadows, intentions are made.  Intentions wrapped in paper and string.  Colognes are opened after baths and caramel skin is anointed in Tres Fleurs and Saint Teresa water.  An effusion of Bay Rhum and roses floats out a window on an upper floor, and down to the passers-by, acknowledgment that even in this soporific heat, someone stirs.

Cigars, dry, their outer wrappings peeling, are lit and left to smolder as long as they will.  Cones of brown sugar are placed on floors, surrounded by feathers and photos.  Veves are drawn in chalk and housepaint.  Shirts are swapped for beads.  Flames flicker in a hundred glass cylinders, making tiny church windows from images of saints and orisha.

In the heat of the afternoon, someone will be uncrossed.

As with the last set of Perilous flyers, I love these.  Since the client supplies the artwork, culled from vintage pulp fiction covers, I am charged with the tasks of layout and design.  Not having to focus on illustrating the main image myself leaves me free to experiment with colors, fonts and layout tricks.  The reverse side of the This Charming Band flyer proved to be an insufficient amount of eighties’ art-school inspiration for me, so I carried over that sensibility to the Perilous job.

The older I get, the more I appreciate being made to work within limitations.  Though it would take years to gel in me, I was introduced to this appreciation by noted watercolor artist Doug Walton, when I was sixteen.  During my junior year of high school in Honolulu, I was blessed with the opportunity to attend one of his watercolor workshops.  My mother pulled me out of school for the duration (one of the best things she’s ever done for me, and she’s done a lot of great things), and I spent five, eight-hour days being taught by a master. 

Doug then used a technique he called “Spirit Cards”.  On a 24″x36″ sheet of cold-pressed watercolor stock, we were to paint non-objective lines, dots, splotches of color — anything non-representational, so long as it filled the sheet.  After the piece dried, we measured and cut it into 4″x6″ index cards.  These Spirit Cards were to be our first echelon of inspiration for the watercolor paintings we created for the remainder of the workshop.  We could reference them by making use of the colors on the card, the shapes, or both.  Whichever manner of reference we chose, at least one had to be present in all our paintings.  My first Spirit Card piece was a large, jewel-toned image of two horseheads racing against each other, interwoven by ribbon shapes from the card I chose at random.  I named it after an Echo and the Bunnymen song which had also laid inspiration for it — The Cutter.  I wish I still had that piece; it was the first time I ever took real satisfaction in having to work within prescribed limitations, and it was good.  Up to that point, the idea of creative limitations was anathema to me; my writing was stream-of-consciousness as was my art, and while I still stand behind the quality of both, they were immature.

I’m not sure when my mind changed about it, but as an adult, I’ve come to find immense satisfaction in creative limitation.  When you sit down before a blank page, a blank canvas or a blank screen without prescription, the infinite possibilities can be stultifying.  As hard as I railed against it in my youth, even then, I craved direction.  Please, give me a starting point from amid all that which could be; otherwise, it will overwhelm me and I’ll do nothing!

There is bound to be a good deal out there written on the subject, but I’ll add my two cents — true creative freedom often comes from having to work within restrictions.  It’s why I appreciate burlesque and the Blues; both art forms present you with a template and ask you to create something new by working within those parameters.

The Perilous flyers above arose out of me playing a little game with myself.  I could have just sliced the main, figural images out of the pulp covers Jim sent, but I liked the original layouts too much to chop them up — I find the art on each cover makes very interesting use of its 5″x7″ limited space.  Rather than cutting out the extraneous text and imagery, I started blocking them out with geometric shapes that referenced the underlying original shapes used.

The result pleased me more than cutting-and-pasting without guidance ever would have.  The end product definitely references the work it came from, while evoking a completely different emotional and stylistic tone.  Having hit upon this technique that both challenges my layout skills and saves me time, I’m very much looking forward to the next round of Perilous flyers, and the opportunity they give me to exercise it again.  Creative limitations = layout playground!

I’ve been using the Hubba flyers as a personal forum for artistic growth and experimentation, and with this Wild Animals! edition flyer, I attempted to tighten up a few things that had been bothering me about my previous Hubba offerings to this point.  Happily, I think I succeeded.

First, this was a fun theme to tackle; the theme of Wild Animals! calls a number of visuals immediately to mind, and lends itself to lots of light and color, two things I find myself increasingly craving.  Creating a double-sided flyer for a new theme each month is a definite challenge.  Some themes are easy to illustrate and practically form themselves (Soviet Union!), while others require some serious research, and a good bit of trial-and-error before hitting on the right look or being able to condense the possibilities into something that will fit onto a 4″x6″ piece of card (Caveman Show! Around the World in 80 Girls!).

Further adding to the challenge are the strictures of 1) conveying the pertinent textual information in a clear, legible manner, 2) finding a clear and obvious way to carry the theme over to Side 2, 3) keeping the overall look similar enough to “family” this flyer in with all the others that came before, 4) do justice to that month’s Flyer Girl and 5) not do anything that looks like I’m ripping off R. Black.  Throw all those challenges together with one of the more general themes like Awards Show!, and I’ve got myself a real brain-scratcher.  Thankfully, Wild Animals! only presented a couple of those challenges and I was able to go from conception to execution relatively quickly.

The challenges I faced with this flyer were the last two — doing justice to Gigi and not ripping off R. Black.  In regard to the latter, I’ve deliberately avoided (to this point) working completely in vector because I didn’t want to accidentally cop his style, which would be easy to do given that he single-handedly created the tone for the Hubba flyers when he started doing them five years ago.  I used to work completely in vector quite a lot, but when I picked up the Hubba job seventeen months back, I decided to use actual photographs and Photoshop them in my way, adding illustrative vector flourishes, specifically to distance myself from crossing the R. Black line.  I love Black’s work, but I didn’t want to step on his toes or lose my own style.  In regard to doing Gigi justice, well, I still don’t feel I entirely succeeded there.  Gigi has such a great face — she possesses one of those smiles that lights up a room, and while she’s absolutely physically beautiful, she also has this wonderful, sweet, light spirit that makes her even prettier; it’s a very difficult thing to capture in two dimensions.  This doesn’t quite look like her, but the resemblance is passable for my tastes.  If I wasn’t under deadline with it, I would have worked to hone it further.

Prior to beginning this flyer, I decided I wanted to inject more sexiness and more playfulness into the images.  This theme provided me with a good opportunity to do both.  Fortunately, with Gigi’s incandescent smile, the playfulness was pretty easy to come by.  Jim suggested Gorilla X’s hands reaching for the cake, and that certainly upped the “playful” factor as well.  As for sexiness, well, I’ve loved safari chic since the Hungry Like the Wolf video.  I was raised on Indiana Jones, Banana Republic flightsuits and Simon LeBon in a panama fedora.  Safari chic is just…sexy.  You don’t have to do much other than unbutton an extra button on that khaki fatigue shirt, and my curiosity is piqued.

In contemplating both qualities of “playful” and “sexy”, I found myself also reaching for Nagel (again), particularly in his earliest work for Playboy.  His work from the 70′s isn’t as refined as the 80′s work that made his name.  I love it just as much as I do his later, more famous catalogue — it’s just different.   I wish there were more of it to be found; the rare images I’ve come across are far freer in spirit and execution than his 80′s work, though, like his 80′s work, his 70′s images still perfectly embody the decade in which they were produced.  While Nagel’s 80′s women are all business and polished to a perfection that makes Bacarrat crystal look rough, his 70′s women are a little more down-to-earth, a little more accessible; you get the sense that they still cook at home, instead of taking every meal at Dorsia or Ivy.  I tried to inject my impressions of Nagel’s 70′s work into this flyer; glossy, but not-quite-polished.  Sunny.  Light.  Breezy, like rainbow-tailed kites over Waikiki and the logo for Maui Shave Ice.  Airbrushed by hand, not by filter.  Rendered in colored pencil, not in matte acrylic.

Getting back to vector, this is the first Hubba flyer I’ve done that is primarily rendered in vector.  I stepped out of my fear about inadvertently referencing R. Black and just did it the way I was going to do it.  I’m very pleased with the result; it may be vector, but it still looks like it came from my hand.  I’ve been working in my own style, my own idiom, for most of my life, but with the Hubba flyers, I’ve been working very deliberately at developing a cohesive body of work wherein my style is evident, but it doesn’t overpower the message of the advertising itself — this is, after all, advertising.  My artistic goals and whims are secondary to the client’s needs.  It’s (again) a challenge I relish, but it does require a lot of thought, trial-and-error and good old fashioned elbow grease.  With the Wild Animals flyer, I feel I’ve turned a corner; I’m getting my techniques down to be able to readily access my personal stylistic bag of tricks while remaining true to the client’s intent — it’s getting easier to marry those two notions.  I’m getting faster, my work is getting simpler and less cluttered, and I’m finding more and more satisfaction in it.  That is what we call an upward trajectory.

I’ve had The Wild Boys stuck in my head since I finished this thing…

When This Charming Band hired me to illustrate and design the posters for their annual show celebrating Morrissey’s birthday, I jumped at the opportunity to take a jaunt down memory lane and pay tribute to three bands I’ve loved since childhood.

It was a kick to translate my teenage-daydreaming into a legitimate career skill with this job.

These are the moments I feel I live a charmed life. Even with all the hell my body has put me through (and it’s been a full inferno), overall, my life has been blessed.  Blessed with opportunity, blessed with good clients, blessed with the chance to earn my keep doing what comes naturally to, and satisfies, me.  I’m very grateful for that.  (Although, given the subject of the poster, I feel like I should be mincing about something instead of waxing optimistic.)  I’m pleased with the way this turned out, generally, but I get a tickle every time I look at it and realize Moz is glaring at his birthday celebration with disdain.  Really, how could it be otherwise?

Thanks to the guys in This Charming Band for their business; I wish them a wildly successful show (I’ll be there, reliving my youth).

Credits:

Fonts:

IFC WildRodeo by Anton Krylov

Gipsiero by Bumbayo Font Fabrik

Anderson Thunderbirds Are Go! by Steve Ferrera

and good ol’ Copperplate Gothic Bold.

I also owe R. Black a credit on this one, as I riffed off the colors he used for a previous year’s TCB poster; I thought they would family well together.  (And they do!)

They were quick and dirty, but for featuring lo-res, vintage pulp art nicked from the ether, I think they shine.  I credit their effectiveness to the color palette, as much as to the original images.

Inspiration comes from far and wide, and the inspiration for the colors used here came from an anecdote the client, Jim “Poogie” Sweeney, shared, about recently standing in line behind someone wearing cloying “old lady perfume”.  In my gray matter, the words “old lady perfume” immediately dial up one word — Emeraude.

Someone, somewhere, far back in the annals of my existence, gave me a fragrance sampler for an adolescent birthday.  I was thrilled, until I began removing the bottle tops and discovered all four perfumes to be nothing more than four unwearable, escalating levels of “cloying”; the type of cloying that appears to have been favored by perfumiers and women everywhere until about 1960.  Either our olfactory receptors have mutated, or tastes really do evolve that much.  I can’t imagine a woman wearing any of those fragrances now, without someone nearby calling the CDC.  One drop would shut down a yoga class faster than you can say “fragrance-free studio”.  While I can’t recall the names of the other three levels of cloying contained (barely) in those bottles, I know the fourth-and-utmost of them was Emeraude.

The word cloying, Virginia, was coined for Emeraude.

It’s a shame it smells the way it does, because the imagery Coty used for its Emeraude ads is positively luscious.  I generally find greens challenging to work with, but Emeraude greens call to mind decadent afternoons spent in the Florida rooms in and around Beverly Hills in Hollywood’s Golden Age.  I envision Ava Gardner wearing a celadon-green, magnolia-print dress, while serving iced tea to Vivien Leigh.  They both laze on kelly-green barkcloth patio furniture, shaded and cooled from the Burbank sun by white lattice and rattan ceiling fans.

Emeraude is the jumping-off point for jade-green milk-glass-hobnail candy dishes, creamy-cool wormwood cocktails, dense emerald foliage, sharkskin and taffeta.  My Lord, the green taffeta!

To wit:

Mild Digression:  If you don’t know about ColourLovers, and you’re into this sort of thing, prepare thyself for the color wonderland. My designer/drummer-buddy eObelisk turned me on to the site.  Once he did, I was ruined for most other activity for the entire winter of 2010.  For months, I was more than a kid in a candy store — I was bleeding Charlie in the Chocolate Factory.  I put in so much time and effort on the site, I was tapped for a personal meeting by Willie Wonka himself, otherwise known as Darius, the genius behind ColourLovers and Hands.org.  That meeting with Darius was the best birthday gift I could have received this year, and in an hour and a half, he taught me more of what-I-need-to-know-to-make-things-manifest than anyone (or anything) ever has in so short a span of time.  Since then, things have been popping, and I’m quite sure that’s been due to me being ready to accept his advice and implement it.  That fortuitous meeting kick-started me into launching MatchGirls, an enterprise I will discuss at length soon.  For now, I return you to Emeraude.

Emeraude.  Miserable fragrance, gorgeous advertising.  Thinking of Emeraude and Coty leads me to Houbigant, another fragrance house from the Era of Cloying.  As Coty did with Emeraude, Houbigant rolled out some god-awful scents, but their advertising was (and remains) utterly delightful.  

I cannot look at this Wistaria image without thinking it must have been a box on Scarlett O’Hara’s dressing table when she got dolled up in the white-and-green “Barbeque” gown.  Pay no attention to that thought’s inherent anachronism or to the strictures of fiction.  This was there, next to the pearl-handled silver filigree handmirror and the white Irish lawn hankies.  It’s just that charming.

This is a circuitous route to get to the Cabaret Perilous palette, I admit, but there’s the creative process for ya.  All this thinking of Coty and Houbigant led to a search for Focoltone greens, and I hit the motherlode:

From there, it was a matter of sampling the wine-red from the back image and presto — recycled pulp art becomes swathed in very effective, engaging, modern housing, while paying homage to the era in which said pulp art was created.

I’ll be fixated on Emeraude and Houbigant greens for the next poster job as well; there’s more to be explored in the mid-century swimming pools and Cypress Gardens-souvenir-postcards these continue to call to mind.  ’Til then, I leave you with thoughts of spring, 1952; the clink of ice in an emerald-rimmed glass, gins-and-tonic served with lime and mint, waxy blue-green juniper berries on the bushes by the front door, and natty, clean, green-argyle golf attire laid out on the bed in preparation for your weekend in Palm Springs.

Don’t forget to pack the Emeraude.

Kellita, San Francisco’s own Queen of Carnaval, recently paid me the kind of compliment you want to bronze and display on a mantle:

“You ROCK at including a lot of info but maintaining clarity, beauty and cohesion.”

Reading that was a “Wow!” moment for me.  Maintaining clarity, beauty and cohesion when including a lot of information on a poster is a skill at which I was not quite adept until recently.  Typefitting is very much a skill unto itself, and a skill I actively work at improving with every job I earn.

I freely admit, I’m a font nerd.  I love letterforms.  I really don’t care for much of what the art world considers “Art”; my heart lies with what the museums and cognoscenti tend to dismiss as illustration, advertising art and/or popular art. There are several reasons my tastes run that way, but the most consistent of these is the inclusion of letterforms in those art modes.

I believe the highest form of art is that which reaches people on a variety of levels; it’s why I’m a die-hard South Park, Marilyn Manson and U2 fan.  If you can create something that satisfies your artistic sensibilities and appeals to the populace (i.e. “pays the bills”) while simultaneously making a greater statement, you’ve really got something.  (Extra points for making that statement about the very system in which you’re working.)  A great lot of illustration, advertising art and pop art manages to serve those three masters — art, commerce and legacy — and that is owed, in large part, to its elevation of text to an art medium.  All the art that I wanted to emulate and possess as a child was Ad Art.  I wanted to live in magazines because they so eloquently married the media of illustration, photography and type.  As young as three, I spent hours poring over books, magazines and (my favorite) comics, tracing and copying the letters.  As a teenager, I filled notebooks just drawing the alphabet and whatever foreign syllabary I was enamored of that week.  My contribution to my senior yearbook was a watercolor character for every main section page — Japanese, Korean, Sinhalese, Sibo, Devanagari — I lost myself in the study of letterforms familiar and not-so-familiar.

Letters are the ultimate in high art; they function so effectively at their intended purpose, many people don’t notice them for what they are — symbols.  Even our eminently functional, seemingly rational, gloriously effective Roman alphabet is merely a collection of late-generation symbology.  Every letter has a history and a genesis, and more often than not, it began in the same way Kanji did — as an pictorial ideogram, or pictogram.

This digression deserves a whole post unto itself, but in the interest of quickly returning to my intended topic, I’ll just cite the letter “A” as my favorite example, and I’ll let Wikipedia do the illustrating for me:

Every day, we write and type hundreds of little upside-down Phonecian ox heads.  (I’m particularly fond of “A” because I have an affinity for bulls, in general, and also because it’s the letter of beginnings in our Western frame of reference.)

End of digression.  I’m a font nerd.  I’m a type nerd.  I have long been so wrapped up in the beauty and versatility of the letters, that I often gave the information second billing; not a good policy if you’re trying to make a successful go of advertising art.  I can’t accept sole responsibility; I cut my design teeth in the ’90s, an era in which Raygun magazine utterly destroyed all the rules about typefitting held immutable up to that point.  Raygun culminated this trend in 1994, when they published a now-famous (or notorious, depending on your perspective) article on Bryan Ferry, fit all in Webdings:

I loved this when it came out.  I saw it (and continue to see it) it as a necessary step in the evolution of type.  However, I can’t imagine Bryan Ferry’s people were too thrilled with it.  After Raygun laid waste to the Old Rules, in the early part of the Millennium, came the inevitable backlash and (thank you, Apple), a rash of everything being set in Helvetica, one of the oldest rules of all.

True to my form as a balance-seeker, I strive for something in the middle.  I look at every job as an opportunity to improve my skills unilaterally, but I’ve paid peculiar attention to the challenge of wedding the Art of the Type with the Clarity of the Message.  I feel blessed to live in an era when so many talented fontographers and font foundaries exist and and make their products readily accessible, and available with generous licenses.  With such a bounty from which to choose, it’s sometimes difficult to limit oneself, but I’m finding intense satisfaction in working within those limits.  When a job comes my way demanding a file folder full of information be fit onto a 4″x6″ postcard, I get a little giddy.  I relish the challenge, and I thank God for the universal availability and legibility of good ol’ Franklin Gothic.  A classic never goes out of style, and a workhorse typeface like Franklin can let your Bleeding Cowboys header shine, while dutifully presenting a shit-ton of information, even at 5.5 points.

Typefitting.  It’s a good thing.

For illustrators and poster artists, he set the bar.  His architectural drawing style, his unequaled attention to detail, his ability to strike a balance between realism and graphic design, all with magnificent results, merit him the illustrator’s gold standard.  Even when we don’t try to emulate his style, he has a way of sneaking in a cameo appearance.  This “Caravan of Boom” image is an excellent example.  When I conceptualized the visual from the client’s brief, I wasn’t thinking “Mucha” at all; I had an entirely different direction in mind.  Clearly, Alphonse is still working and he slides into illustrators’ brains when we are unaware.  He’s there in the color palette, he’s there in the curves and circles of the hair, and he’s there in the ornamentation.  Now, let it be known I am not comparing my work to his — I have many years to go before I come close — but his voice guides me, even when I don’t hear it.

I remember the first time I learned his name; I recognized his hand long before I had a name to which to attribute it.  I only knew I loved the work — I loved the work beyond measure.  It was so glorious, so perfect, so engaging, it was surely breathed into being, fully formed, at the whim of some Olympian god.  When I learned those two words — Alphonse Mucha — the work became even more impressive to me, because my child’s mind understood it was made by human hands and was therefore attainable. Once I was aware that there was a human being behind the breathtaking images I loved so much, I knew I had a mentor.  That he had been dead for forty-odd years was merely a formality.

I sat for hours, first tracing his lines, then drawing them myself.  Sketching bored me; I wanted long, clean, uninterrupted lines and sinewy curves.  Unfortunately, at that time, I clung to the misguided notion that drawing aids were verboten. Perhaps that was for the best, however, as it has led me to a newly-discovered talent for pinstriping.  I still love working on something so large that I can use my arm as a compass.  Mucha taught me how to do that.  His “sketches”, made without aid of French curves, speak to such a skill.  I filled entire notebooks just making lines and arcs.  I eventually internalized what I imagine would be his direction for a drawing student – commit to a line.  After the pencil is on paper, free your mind from conscious thought about where it should go, and let the physical forces move your arm freely.  Draw from the elbow.  Draw from the bicep.  Be bold, be precise, be free, but most importantly, commit. I still have a very difficult time sketching.  I commit.  It’s ingrained in me.  I don’t like drawing with pencil for the same reason; using a pen means you are married to what you begin.  You can’t think about it; you just have to intuit.

Patrick Nagel must have spent similar long hours mimicking Mucha’s lines; the work at his career peak is based on them.  There is such energy captured in that kind of line — it moves into space beyond the boundaries of paper or canvas.  It pushes on into the ether where all creative energy circles and cycles.

I’m still learning how to translate the drawing skill Mucha taught me to the digital medium, and I have a long way to go.  With Bezier points to make mathematically perfect arcs, I try hard to keep the “human-ness” of imperfection in my work — the quality the Japanese call wabi sabi. Striking that balance between realism and graphic design, for me, hinges largely on using the digital platform as I would any conventional art tool.  I don’t want the Bezier points to do all the work, so I try to find ways around them.  I don’t want my lines to be mathematically perfect; I want them to be Mucha-perfect.  There is so much to learn, but I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to continue studying with the master.

Alphonse, there will never be another like you, but God bless you for giving us all something to strive for.

[Below are two pieces of "stationery" I drew for a then-boyfriend, when I was sixteen.  All Bic on typing paper, all committed line.]

Photo by Jonah Celebrado

You want an illustration to accompany this post, but you’ve got too much to write to wait; too much to purge to make it through the few hours it would take to create an appropriate visual.  It doesn’t matter.  You’ve held this in so long; you tried so hard to push It away — to find every avenue that might circumnavigate It, but here It is, back in your life as though it never left.

For this moment, for the first time in your existence, no one else’s opinion matters.  You could tabulate all manner of ways your words here might be considered vain, foolish, pretentious, self-indulgent.  You don’t care.  You paid for this one.  You earned it.  Nearly thirty years, you tried so hard to do right by other people that you held yourself back so as not to step on their toes; so as not to hurt them.  You punished yourself for not being able to provide more for those people who elected to come with you, and you questioned what you knew to  be right, in deference to them.  You were so confused.  You sat in silence and fear for seven long years, fighting the specter of What Might Have Been, fighting the threat of Irrelevance.

This time, it doesn’t matter if no one else understands.  It doesn’t matter what A&R schmuck from what label is standing by the bar.  It doesn’t even matter that they aren’t your songs.  You stood up on that stage and you shook hands with It.  Wham, bam, thank you Ma’am, Rock & Roll is back in your life.

It’s silly, but you can’t make any apologies for that anymore.  The only things that have ever really made sense to you are encapsulated in three or four minutes of amperage.  That electricity is your conduit to God.  You’ve heard the Divine voice in everyone from Merle Haggard to Buddy Holly to Janis Joplin to Andy Bell to Marilyn Manson to Johnny Cash to Brett Anderson to Bobbie Gentry to Ray Charles to Layne Staley to Eminem to Corey Glover to Bono.  Popular music.  Rock.  Rock.  Why should it be so important?  Why is it so maddeningly present in your psyche?  Other people can listen and hear a good song, but for you, it’s Kaballah.  You find the 72 Names of God scattered among lyrics from Simon LeBon and Scott Weiland.  The Sephirot have all been to rehab at one point or another, and they’ve all spent months crammed into the back of a bus, listening to the wheels turn on the asphalt, mile after mile after mile into the dark, American night.

Why is this history so important?  Why does it turn your gut inside out like only the IBS does otherwise?  Is it even important to understand?

The faces set you aflame.  You step out among the crowd and are impaled on the sound and the lights and the faces; your eyes sting from the sweat and the smoke; if you were a Baptist, they’d say you were slain in the Spirit.  Your voice cuts in and out from overuse and the ambient chemical soup in the air, but it doesn’t matter — you’re screaming a blue, ecstatic streak.  All the times you’ve cried out in agony, curled up in that naked ball on the bathroom floor; all the times your voice has cracked with tears because your body failed you again, or because someone else’s insecurity was being used as a whip on your back — they are swallowed in the joyous wail now.  The Aum.  The Blessed Word.  The Frequency Bliss.  It doesn’t matter what it looks like to the bystander; you have your face behind the veil.  You can catch glimpses of the divine jaguar Borges wrote about.  You’re stone sober, and you’re quite sure you’re privy to the snake Morrison rode.

Your body begs you to stop.  Gravity pulls at you with all its might; slow down, come away, come back.  But you fight, you kick, you scream because you are in the presence of Glory and you don’t want to come back.  You see God in all his aspects, in all his emanations, in all his genders and forms.  You see the Subatomic and the Infinite.  You see the Wholeness, the Oneness, the Alpha and Omega.  You see the Word, as it was, is and shall be, ever humming, fierce, confident, eternal.  Hell, math makes sense!  You see the Truth, and you want to stay in it and be held in its arms forever.

That’s what Rock & Roll is to you.  It’s not sex and drugs; sex and drugs are merely Man’s way of attempting to access the same channel to the Divine, just like religion.  Rock & Roll is lying supine on a concrete floor, dirty, spent, half-naked and bruised, not caring that you look like you could use a sit-up, not caring that tomorrow,  you’ll have to do dishes and beg the state of California for another month of food stamps, not caring that tomorrow, your gut will launch a coup against you on you while you’re stuck in traffic, on the way to meet a friend.  Rock & Roll is being lifted beyond all that; rising out of the corporeal and all the fucking bullshit rules humanity places on itself.  Rock & Roll is touching the Aum.  You’re quite sure that, when God spoke the universe into existence, it sounded like a Les Paul through a JCM900, cranked up to eleven and overdriven to within an inch of its life.

Welcome back, Friend.  Welcome back, Soul.  Welcome back, Padre.  Welcome back, Stairway to Heaven.

It’s only rock and roll, but I like it.

Preparing for this show has also been a kick in the head for me, in terms of nostalgia.  Back in the 90′s, I was ears-deep into the neo-British Invasion; I listened almost exclusively to bands like Suede, Blur, Pulp and Oasis.  I didn’t have  TV and eschewed the radio for the entire year of 1994, so I was out of the loop for most of “Seattle”.  It wasn’t until a couple of years later that incoming members of The Mimsies introduced me to the likes of Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots and The Black Crowes, all three of whom I now count among my favorites.  Back then, I wouldn’t have been caught dead in a plaid flannel and cargo shorts, but suffice it to say, the intervening twenty (Really?  Twenty?) years have mellowed me somewhat.  I’ve been giggling to myself at the novelty of being onstage in Docs and an old t-shirt.  At the time, I wanted to look like David Bowie circa 1972.  There’s still place for glitter, but I’m very much looking forward to my little foray into “Grunge”.  Yea, I detest that term, too, but it’s all in fun.  As far as I’m concerned, the three bands mentioned above supersede the Grunge-era and have taken their places in the pantheon of timeless, classic Rock.  It will be my privilege to be able to sing some of their work at this show.