My wife has been taking care of the neglected community garden at the local middle school, winding it down for the end of the year. As a result, there are dozens of little pumpkins on my porch, and last week was thus Pumpkin Week in my journal.
The sketch on the right was for a postcard I sent to my son, who is now way up at Michigan Tech, but has always been a fiend for Fall Decor (see below). The sketch on the left was done late in the day, after my wife had oiled our wooden dining room table. I often omit reflections when shadows are prominent, or vice versa. That sketch was the first time I ever questioned why I was doing that, and whether it might not be more fun to stop editing and just draw, for better or worse.
Otto in 2014-ish, mos def not loosing his shit in delight.
BONUS! Just in case the title got you mad nostalgic:
There’s a body shop on my daily walk that works in a lot of classic cars. The above shot is the reflection on the roof of a first gen burgundy Oldsmobile Toronado with a pearlized paint-job they’d been working on. I swear to god my dad briefly had a second or third gen Toronado in this same color (minus the glitter) when I was pre-school aged.
Extreme foreshortening is a really important compositional tool—it brings hella drama with little effort. It’s also hella mindbending: getting that sketch remotely right requires getting your brain to disregard all of the stuff it knows (A FIST IS WAAAAAY SMALLER THAN A HEAD!@!!!!1!!!!😱) and just let the hand make the pencil scratch out what the eye sees. It’s fun, once you get past tearing your hair out.
I’ve spent the last week and some change trying to sketch individual rocks. My son pointed out that rocks are arbitrary shapes, so you can’t lean nearly so hard into the viewer’s inborn pattern recognition; sketching a rock takes you back to a very basic place of making a lot of exhausting and unsatisfactory decisions about which lines and values and volumes are needed to communicate “rock”—all of which makes going back to something man-made or highly defined (like glasses) feel like a vacation, despite the collection of curves and angles and refractions that had previously bedeviled you.
Hence why I spent two weeks drawing rocks, and you are getting my glasses instead.
Proposal E is on your ballot for the upcoming election (get those ballots in by Tuesday Nov 3!).
I’m gonna vote NO on Prop E.
Here is the entirety of the ballot language:
Creation and Governance of a Municipal Electric Utility Shall Chapter 15 of the Charter be amended to require the City to establish a municipal electric utility and governance structure therefore?
Prop E has nothing to do with the SEU that something like 80% of us supported and is already doing really good work that brings together renewable energy and justice. Bravo!
Prop E is a totally separate parallel effort to buy the crappy power infrastructure we have (poles and lines and transformers and all the other things that blow down every time we have a big wind) from DTE
That requires a massive immediate investment (on the order of $500,000,000 to $1 billion)
That equipment has been neglected for decades (which is why folks are mad enough here to want to start their own power company), so we’d also inherit the maintenance burden on busted down old equipment
That price tag does not include any way to generate power; we’d still need to buy that on the open market. We’d just be buying poles and wires.
The only avenue to pay for this is basically rate increases, so power would get more expensive immediately (in a city already deep into a housing affordability crisis that is forcing out families and shrinking our schools), at a time when people are acutely aware of rising energy costs (data centers, A.I., wars in Europe and the Middle East, etc.)
There is no recent example of a community successfully buying out a local utility company and converting it to a municipal utility. Boulder (a much wealthier community than Ann Arbor—which is by no means economically deprived) tried and failed. The successful municipal utilities here in Michigan were formed in the late 1800–1900s and were the original power companies in those areas; there are only two examples of a community buying out a traditional power company in Michigan, one is Bay City (which was already running its own municipal utility and bought out redundant grid structure) and the other Traverse City—who did so in 1912. Point being: conditions are somewhat different now, and pointing to success in Lansing (Lansing Board of Water & Light, founded 1885) and Holland (Holland Board of Public Works, 1893) are not good priors for us buying ill-maintained second-hand equipment from DTE in 2027 in a city that has no power generation capacity and nowhere to build it.
This roundtable discussion composed almost entirely of environmentalists, activists, and developers with a track record for sustainability and eliminating reliance on fossil fuels helped me understand what I was missing when I looked at this inscrutable wall of text:
Give this a watch and don’t forget to get your ballot in early or show up in-person on Nov 3.
This week was Hair Week. My family preferred the Friday sketch (on the right above)—and they’re right, it was the best hair of the week—but I sorta liked Monday best overall (on the left). It got her expression and vibe right. Also, the glasses were fun. I hadn’t recalled that this was actually my third hair week in the last twelve months. Nice to have the chance to look back and see that, if nothing else, I’ve gotten better at capturing value and volume, not just line.
The recommendation from some website quoted on the news is to rape, cut the throats of, and throw female Jews off a cliff. But how far are the cliffs of Ithaca from Cornell, where the raping and throat slashing is supposed to occur? And if you don’t have a car, are you supposed to borrow one or can you Uber a body to a cliff and ask the driver to wait while you chuck it off? And what if you’re afraid of heights? It’s time we address the shocking lack of detail in antisemitism. It’s one thing to hate Jews but another to ask me to hate Jews without telling me how to hate Jews or why I should hate anyone when loving everyone is an option.…
Still lives were an almost inevitable progression after Fruit Week, I suppose. It was nice to move more toward ideal forms, and also juxtaposing the geometrically regular with the aggressively organic (Still Life Week also corresponded with me finishing off the last of the feral pears we swiped from the middle school garden).
My son preferred the two eggs sketch (he found the whole week “very poetic,” but this one spoke to him most. I preferred the lip balm and pear, which really felt more like a portrait of marriage than a still life.
“Fruit Faces” was my follow up to Pear Week. Again, there is a lot to be said for “volunteer,” garden, and farmer’s market fruit as reference models; they have much more character than what’s on display at a civilized grocery store.
‘course, now I desperately want to hear a mash-up of Julie London’s version of “Watermelon Man” and basically anything from Rage Against the Machine. Is there an AI 🤖✨ that can poop that out for me real quick? Or perhaps do one of you fancy folks have a musical inclination toward such perversion? If so, please send your artistic jipes and musical tomfoollery to dave@davideriknelson.com
