I've inadvertently created a sad record of my artistic decline - again. I used to bring multiple sketchbooks and bags of pens in my art satchel (basically a purse made of army surplus material) everywhere, especially on vacation, where I would expect to be miserably uncomfortable for hours at a time, and could look forward to making anyone with me miserably uncomfortable by stopping at inappropriate junctures to draw whatever and whoever I happened to be sitting or sometimes even standing by, and the combination of physical discomfort and the intense performance anxiety caused from openly drawing live humans right in front of them would lend a sense of artistic seriousness and purposefulness to the endeavor. The absolute lack of any enjoyable stimuli would induce a trancelike focus to my drawing that I became somewhat addicted to. This is a true sklog, where the artist's social awkwardness and physical stress imbue the drawing with a patina of desperation and shame that makes it more interesting for the viewer.
I fantasized that I could recapture this feeling during our trip to the Oregon coast, so I brought a sketchbook and a small bag of pens. I thought about bringing the whole art satchel with multiple sketchbooks and pens but decided against it to save space. This unfortunate compromise of my artistic integrity bore bitter fruit throughout the whole trip.
Bitter fruit plate 1:
My favorite pen ran out of ink and I had no backup fine tip, so I had to use a cheap medium point, which made my already shaky lines look worse. And it smeared a lot.
Bitter fruit plate 2:
I disliked the cheap pen so much that I tried a few drawings with a light blue fine point.
Bitter blue fine point plate 1:
You won't see the bitterest fruit of the compromise in these drawings, but the discerning viewer will infer it from the location and setting of the previous plates: I drew them all in the beach house. We actually went outside, to more interesting places than the interior of the beach house; we actually wandered around on the actual beach, for instance. But I only brought the one sketchbook, which is too big for a pocket, and I didn't have the art satchel, which could have held the bigger sketchbook hands free, enabling me to ward off the physical attacks of my offspring while bringing the proper art tools right up to the ocean itself, with all its rich sklog material; rotting crabs, vicious seagulls, garbage washed ashore, obnoxious tourists too cheap to take their kids to San Diego (Here!).
We also went in a huge cave to look at sea lions, a dark and magical place that photos can not do justice to, but that with their unthinking detail, photos can give a viewer the dangerous and illusory sense that they have captured a place, so that the viewer does not know what they are missing, where a sklog would properly capture the total inability of the artist to capture the place, and would communicate that failure to the viewer.
In honor of that failure, here is the only drawing from the trip with any ocean water in it.
Bitter blue fine point plate 2:
Note how the failure to capture the ocean fairly leaps off this sad image, wistfully drawn from the front porch. You immediately sense that something ineffable has not been captured. And compare that with a drawing of an nautical setting I began long before the trip to the ocean and never got back to, the level of pointless detail, the absurdity.
Absurdist Escape plate 1:
The final stage in the artistic and moralistic decline, the drooling daydream, the escapist nonsense. There's really nothing more to do but to begin coloring them in
