Bruce Lee drawing

This is the drawing that really started me in a whole new direction.  I'd been doing my Sharpie "scribble style" drawing for about ten years, and I tried a whole bunch of different visual looks.  But none of them got me really stoked.  They were fun to do, but I knew something was missing all that time. 

Then, back about last November, I was still out of work, and couldn't find a job.  Between my weight, my age, and my last 12 years of work history which was made up of taxi driving and gaps in employment, I was not hearing back from any of the jobs I applied for.  Having spent most of my adult life in Southern California around people in the action sports world, my thought was, "OK, I'll create my own job."  On that day, I decided to quit thinking of myself as "unemployed," and start thinking of myself as a self-employed artist.  Basically, I reframed the situation.  A couple days later, I woke up in the morning and thought, "man, I really need to step up my artwork."  That night, I sat down at the computer and spent a couple hours looking at all kinds of art online.  I was trying to figure out what really got me stoked.  I'm a big fan of graffiti art, especially the really intricate murals.  But I noticed that I kept going back to stencils.  Stencils are a simple, high contrast form of street art made famous by UK urban artist Banksy.  As a zine publisher in the 80's, I'd worked a lot with Xerox art, which was also high contrast images.

As I looked through page after page of urban art, I asked myself, "What would I want to put up on my wall?"  It's a simple question, but it changed everything.  As a kid from the 70's, martial artist and movie star Bruce Lee was a big influence on me as a kid.  So I found this image of him, blew it up, and drew it in my own style.  I put his quote, "Be like water my friend." under it.  I finally made something that I actually wanted to put on my own wall.  This drawing started me in a whole new direction, which I've only begun to really explore.  Sharpies on paper, 12" X 18".

Reframing the situation and Bruce Lee

Halloween was just over a week ago, and it just happened that on that day I woke up and decided to stop thinking of myself as an"unemployed blogger/artist," and to start thinking of myself as a "self-employed artist/blogger."  It seems like semantics, but sometimes simply reframing the situation can make a huge difference.  That afternoon I started this art blog, doing several posts with my earlier work.  That night, I made some fliers up and passed them out to parents at the downtown trick or treat event.  I didn't get any work out of that, but a bunch of people checked out this blog.  That's a start. 

The next night, I spent a couple hours on the computer looking through different kinds of art, trying to remind myself what kind of stuff really got me stoked.  I kept coming back to graffiti, street art, and in particular, stencils.  Maybe it's because I did a lot of Xerox art as a zine publisher over the years, but I've always liked simple, high contrast pictures.  But I also like stuff with lots of color.  All the images I checked out online whirled around my head as I went to sleep that night.  One question kept resonating in my head, "What would I really want to put up on my wall?"

I woke up the next morning with another thought in my head.  That thought?  "I need to step it up."  I got back on the computer and looked for something, some image, that I could put my own spin on.  I picked one of my childhood heroes, Bruce Lee.  That day I made the picture above, with the caption, "Be like water my friend."  I set it across the room when I was done.  "Now THAT is something I'd want to put on my wall," I thought to myself.  And with that, my artwork, the Sharpie marker "scribble style" that I'd been doing for ten years, took a completely different direction.  It felt good.

Now, a week later, I have three drawings to do for other people.  In my case, reframing my thinking changed everything.  Flow... be like water, my friend.