d8311 bench________21 November, 2011
say hello to d8311, a gallery bench made from laminated cherry and stainless steel. unbuilt.
(click an image to enlarge)
E8111 chair________3 August, 2011
hey, gang! i hope everyone is spectacular. i’m gearing up for my traveling fellowship (but not before a visit to boston and my ol’ stomping grounds, new haven). in the meantime, i’m finishing up the second draft of metabolism (i’ve gotten to the bit where i am really glad i’m not the protagonist) and, apparently, designing furniture. please welcome the E8111 chair, my first chair design in awhile if not, uh, ever. i took a page out of eileen gray’s book for the naming convention (really more like half a page, since it’s just phonetic similarity). i’m not super-happy with the current incarnation of the fabric and may yet update it. as is or no, hopefully i’ll get the chance to build it sometime. it would actually be a pretty easy build–a bandsaw + drill would be enough, but having a table saw and a belt sander would help too. time consuming, maybe, but really very simple. enjoy!
a few new youths in sketchland________26 June, 2011
hey hey ladies n gents,
i hope you’re all spectacular-fantacular! for a few weeks now i’ve been back in the heartland of our great and greedy capitalistic sinpit: new jersey! it’s kind of funny that the things that the united states is most reviled for abroad (at least in france) is the same property that is its most successful cultural export…consumerism! people sure do love buying stuff. and it is with that in mind that i celebrate my reacclimation to the land of $48,000 per year advanced education, walmart, joanie loves chachi, and sanctioned individual rights of corporations to donate to political campaigns! at least i’m glad sometimes. despite all its problems, i do (at heart) <3 the us.
to celebrate my triumphant return, i’ve done a few sketches of real, live, imaginary american people. mostly with a view to developing a “new” style for the next graphic novel. there’s a lot of decisions to be made…! (click to enlarge thumbnails!)
a nineteenth century kind of guy________11 June, 2011
these days i’m doing a lot of reading and a lot of writing. in the months before i head back to europe, i’ve set it as my goal to get at least one manuscript written and hopefully a second started. by the time i come back, i will have twenty or thirty pages drawn, inked, etc in addition to a complete draft text. armed with these, the idea is to convince a publisher who, in the words of neil gaiman, “publishes the kind of stuff [you] write” to, um, publish the stuff i write. if possible, i’ll have previews for both novels, but i’m going to focus on one (the older one) for now.
when i’m not writing (the other 16ish hours of the day), i’ve been chipping away at several different books. i reread twain’s huckleberry finn and have made various piecemeal inroads on john gardner’s very-nearly-but-not-quite-insufferably-pretentious on becoming a novelist and as well on janet burroway’s guide to narrative craft which is a little bit more to the point than either gardner or dorothea brande. instead of brande, i’m getting my 19th century on with good ol’ leo tolstoy, whose anna karenina has somehow actually managed to live up to its hype. one of my favorite passages is reproduced below. it’s not that i find barbs like this, which appear on virtually every page, representative of the degree of hyperrealism he’s often accused of–it’s more that i think they’re incredibly deft instances of characterization. he’s like the guys in the 1950s who handled uranium isotopes through all these long, spindly tools. only he never dropped it. the passage:
“He saw out of the window how she went up to her brother, put her arm in his, and began telling him something eagerly, obviously something that had nothing to do with him, Vronsky, and at that he felt annoyed.”
next up on the reading list are nabokov’s lolita, david mitchell’s cloud atlas, something by chekhov because they were clearly badasses, and that stupid copy of ghost world that i managed to acquire despite my feelings toward daniel clowes. and goodbye, chunky rice. and also good-bye.