Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
Well, that's a wrap for Silicon Valley Open Studios. After-action report will have to wait - it's late and I'm tired.
This was our celebratory meal from Craft Roots, though - almost identical to the one I failed to take a picture of a few days ago (yes, we went to Craft Roots just three days apart, it's that good).
-the Centaur
Pictured: Sandi's brochures on an unfinished table, and a meal at Craft Roots.
Brief placeholder I'm scheduling for tomorrow, in case we get caught up with Silicon Valley Open Studios stuff. But what it strikes me is how animals behave differently when we're not around. Case in point, Loki is pictured here, sitting in my rocking chair - which he rarely does if I'm present, either sitting on my lap, or sitting on the table. But never in the other rocking chair. I wonder why that is.
Or maybe it's Heisenberg's Cat Principle: if you observe a cat, you have disturbed it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, on MY rocking chair, disputing that "MY" part.
"No, it's not Master Strange, or Mister Strange, but Doctor Strange!" It still cracks me up that Dr. Strange's actual name is, like, Doctor Strange. "So, Stephen, what do you want to do when you grow up?" "Imma gonna be a doctor!" "Great!" "And then become a wizard superhero!" "You run along, Stevie."
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
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A brief one, as I have Silicon Valley Open Studios AND consulting work to do today, but a comment one of my wife's friends made once was "there's nothing so confused as a vegan at a vegan restaurant" ... because normally they have NO options or ONE option, but now have ALL the options.
I dunno, to me, it seems like a good place to be.
-the Centaur
Pictured: My wife at Craft Roots, a vegan bar and grill in Morgan Hill that we love a lot.
Not pictured: the meal, other than the buffalo cauliflower - I forgot to let my phone eat first.
Also not pictured: the dog which came BARRELLING past us, tied to a clanging metal chair that was chasing it down the street (AAA! AAA! Angry metal thing is following me AND I CAN'T GET AWAY!) I caught her by the leash (just as unleashed a load of pee, how fun) and my wife grabbed her and calmed her down until the owners, panting, ran up - apparently the male owner had tied the dog's leash to his chair, but the chair moved or fell over when he stood up, and the dog, scared, took off, the chair in hot pursuit.
Good doggie, though. Reminded me of my old dog Lady, from back in the days we didn't have portable phones capable of taking frequent pet pictures.
Cue "It's Happening" meme: Silicon Valley Open Studios is this weekend, May 18th and 19th, where my wife Sandi Billingsley will be showing off both her paintings and mixed media including furniture!
Our friend Diane, a glass artist, dropped in to help us manage the day, bringing snacks and champagne!
Sandi has a lot of artwork and furniture on display today, including some very nice large-format art. Above you can see "Kirsten Piig" and "Jim Dairy" from Sandi's "Animals are People Too" series, and one of the geode tables (along with Diane on the left, Sandi on the right, and my toe at the bottom); on the other side is "Missy Elephant" and several of Sandi's other pieces with custom art boards made to look like stone:
Another room has more pieces and some works in progress:
Below you can see "Collie Parton", "Yeti White" and another striking geode table:
This is an open studio, so several of Sandi's in-process pieces are prominently on display, like this bar and chairs set (and also the finished art "Moo Paul" and "Mllama"):
In the back room, this enormous piece is going to be a conch-shaped day bed:
It is so big that Sandi's actually going to partially take it apart and make the top into a removable cabinet:
Not because it can't fit through the door or anything. Not at all. Sandi also let me have a space to display my books, since we needed to find a place to put that bookcase (which I designed and built, I'm proud to say). The giant egg creature is actually one of Sandi's furniture pieces - a hat cabinet!
At the back there is the final geode table, which I think I showed yesterday ... oh, no I didn't, here you go:
We will be here working on art today and tomorrow from 11-5, so please come on by!
-the Centaur
Day 139, still going through Goldman's drawing techniques section. Again I appear to have hit the (admittedly foreshortened, yet barely visible) thumb with a hammer. But, it's a good exercise. For example, the texturing technique I used for the grey background got a little misaligned in the bottom middle, creating an apparent discontinuity where it should be continuous (and making the pipe or stick the back hand is resting on less visible in my drawing, though it wasn't too easy to see in the original).
Drawing on average every day; scheduling posts to go up once a day if I can.
-the Centaur
Contrary to yesterday's post, which was done after midnight so it fooled me about what day it was, TODAY is one day left to Silicon Valley Open Studios, where my wife Sandi Billingsley will be showing off both her paintings and mixed media including furniture, like the geode table above.
Below is one of my wife's pieces, Marylin Thumbtoe, from a series combining animals and celebrities into surreal combinations, like ... Marilyn Thumbtoe.
Perhaps the work should speak for itself.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Yes, I know, after midnight is the next day according to the calendar, but I count days as over when I go to bed, unless for some reason I pull an all nighter, so a 1am post is technically the previous day. I don't always hold to that, but for the purposes of the blog series, that makes the most sense.
More sketches from Wizard - How To Draw: Basic Training. I was curious about what happened to Wizard, and it apparently imploded with the big move to the Internet - just like many Internet publications imploded with the move to regurgitated garbage hidden behind sociopathic paywalls. But I'm not bitter.
Drawing, on average, every day.
-the Centaur
Just two more days to Silicon Valley Open Studios where my wife Sandi Billingsley will be showing off both her paintings and mixed media including furniture. Can't photo yet, we are currently scrambling to get the place fixed up, so let me present representative samples from South Carolina (not on display here).
These three, however, will definitely be on display!
Most of this art, even the large furniture pieces, are made from recycled materials such as paper and reclaimed wood, which I think is very cool.
Please come check it out!
-the Centaur
Pictured: One of the frames I helped assemble today, and some of Sandi's furniture.
Even thought this illustration in Goldman was designed to show off the viewfinder idea, it is useful for my "drawing every day" purposes because it has an unchosen subject that requires new rendering techniques. Getting the texture of the viewfinder right is tedious, and it looks like I took a hammer to this guy's thumb on the left. But it came out kinda nice regardless, and stretched my drawing muscles.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
The cleaned version of what I posted yesterday.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
In case I don't get internet access in time to post the cleaned version, here's a peek at Drawing Every Day 2024 number 136:
Yes, I am literally drawing every coherent illustration in the Goldman book, even if they are not intended as drawing exercises. This forces me to stretch with more complex compositions, and broadens the drawing eye.
Drawing every day, posting when I have Internet.
-the Centaur
On my way to Silicon Valley Open Studios to help my wife with her art show this weekend - both paintings and mixed media, including furniture:
Short layover, hit publish, please attend!
-the Centaur
... so here's a sunset dinner from a month or two ago that I thought was beautiful. Enjoy!
-the Centaur
Pictured: the patio of La Parrilla restaurant in Greenville at sunset, along with one of their excellent La Parrilla house margaritas - the best drink on the menu, actually, even though it is the house drink.
Mixing in some comics-style illustrations based on Wizard How to Draw Basic Training ...
Drawing, on average, every day; posting every day that I can.
-the Centaur
Wow, the Neurodiversiverse Kickstarter not only got funded, we reached our first stretch goal - bookmarks!
We had hoped to reach postcards or even the audiobook, but this was a great achievement, and I'll take it. Not only did we take in almost $9K to help pay our authors and defray other costs in the book, but also a hundred and eighty people backed and another hundred bookmarked the campaign. Which means that over two hundred fifty people liked it ... and probably ten times as many looked at it. Mission accomplished!
Next up, finishing the ARC (the preliminary version of the book for industry and sensitivity reader review).
Onward!
Pictured: Graphics from the Kickstarter, which were not only fun to do but taught me a lot, and an Old Fashioned from Select restaurant in Greer.
I thought about riffing on M. C. Escher by having the object being viewed in this finger viewfinder turn out to be another finger viewfinder, but I have neither the power nor inclination to follow the Hungarians beyond the Rhine. Still, I am feeling better about this drawing series as it progresses.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
More Goldman studies. Starting to feel a little three-dimensionality to the shapes; I should start leaning into that, as I think that's a limitation of both my drawing and my viewing eye.
Drawing every day (on average).
-the Centaur
Okay, I understand that many restaurants serve tomahawk chops like this because they're not really a meal for one, but actually a for-the-table sharing dish. But, for the love of Julia Child, please, don't do this.
You have here a steak cooled ON its long, frenched bone for its beautiful Fred Flintstone-cut appearance. But your kitchen has proceeded to cut if OFF the bone before the diner ever sees it.
And you have a THICK-CUT steak designed to retain both its juice and heat. Then your kitchen has proceeded to THIN-SLICE it before the diner can even take a bite.
In sum, don't slice your tomahawks.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a doubly ruined steak: first, because they cut it up, and second, because I ill-advisedly tried it blackened. Unfortunately, the already charred nature of a tomahawk doesn't go with blackening, so I cannot recommend this to you. Yes, I threw my body on that grenade for you. You're welcome.
P.S. This was supposed to be my celebration steak for funding our Kickstarter, which funded yesterday, but still has a day to go. I suppose I jumped the gun here and paid the price.
There's an ongoing debate over whether human emotions are universal: I, like many researchers, think that there was solid work done by Ekman back in the day that demonstrated this pretty conclusively with tribes with little Western contact, but some people seem determined to try to pretend that evidence can be made not to exist once it's been collected, if you just argue loudly enough about how you think it's wrong.
(The evidence is wrong?)
Yet my cat can look surprised, or scared, or angry, or alarmed, or content, or curious. It's fairly well established that some emotions, like the self-conscious ones of shame or pride, have highly variable, culturally-determined expressions (if they have consistent expressions at all). But when animals very different from us can still communicate emotions, it's hard to believe none of it is universal.
(The evidence is wrong? What's wrong with you people?)
-the Centaur
P.S. If you subscribe to the anthropic fallacy fallacy, please do not bother to tell me that I'm falling into the anthropic fallacy, because you're the one trapped in a fallacy - sometimes surprise is just surprise, just like a heart is still a heart when that heart is found an animal, and not a "deceptively heart-like blood pump."
Pictured: Loki, saying, "What, you expect me to do something? I'm a cat. I was busy, sleeping!"