Rich Sigberman Art & Illustration 90

For the past three days, all I've been working on is a 5' wide piece of cartoon art that has been consuming. It is a piece full of characters, some 70 in all, from a most colorful theater production called the Velocity Circus. And, it's great.

Any artist knows when they're doing great work, or at least the best they are capable of producing. That's what is going on with this piece. I don't want to count the amount of hours that has gone into it, as I'm not being paid an hourly rate wage, and I don't really care that much. The budget is good enough. The piece, by dint of its size if nothing else, is making me stretch. It's more than that, though.

I freehanded the entire piece, which means it is much more lively that if I had projected tracings from photos. The composition is all based on one point, with all the characters seeming to explode from that point. And the background is entirely black, which gives everything a lot of "pop". Doing that background has taken the better part of two full days of work. It's exhausting, but exhilerating too. And now, the hardest work is over and it will soon be time for all the color to be applied. It's times like these, with commissioned work like this, that makes me glad I stuck with art and dildn't go into Civil Service, like my parents urged me. (Of course, had I done that, I would be nearing retirement now, and have a fine pension. The only price would have been my heart, soul, and mind.)

At least that's what they used to call it: tithing; giving a percentage of your money to the needy. I have a version of tithing that involves my giving no money (that's good, since I still hae fear over the issue of generating income), but does involve giving. I make pictures in watercolor for people and give them away to them. These are custom pictures meant for specific people, and the pictures are quite specific too. No one else could really appreciate them.

The last two weeks have seen me make a number of such gifts. Some of them only take 15 mnutes, but others take quite a bit more. I consider it an honor and my duty too, to be able to make art that has some healing properties. If the art is not able to do that , at least it shows acknowledgement and love.

One recent recipient, whose gift I left at the door of her workplace, called me a few hours later crying. She was so touched by the piece I did for her, commemorating her late husband, that she had been crying all morning. She thanked me repeatedly. I didn't say much, just "you're welcome".

Now I'm working on another most touching piece: a verbatim projection from a woman's diary, depicting a particularly vulnerable period in her life. It is a poem and illustration she did some 30 years ago, and it is most poignant. I am recreating it in watercolor.

Why do I do these things? Heck, I need to market, outreach to new clients, generate income, don't I? Yes, I do, but I need to do this too.

At the moment, I'm working on a humorous depiction commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1967 "Summer of Love" in San Francisco, or Sham Francisco if you prefer. I was only 15 years old that year, living in Queens, convinced of my total invisibility at the awful High School I was attending. It would be another 18 months before my conscisousness began to get awakened, alth0ugh the music was already getting to my imagination.

By 1969 and 70, I was convinced that something big was going on with the anti-establishment, pot-smoking, go back to the land living, alternate-lifestyle, peaceful new order of younger people in this country, and maybe the rest of the world too. I was not alone in this, although it turned out to be much less than that. By and large, the hippies were materialistic too, looking out for themselves as much as anyone else, as imperfect as most of the rest of the human beings, or human be-ins, that populate this paradise known as Earth. While it was disillusioning, it wasn't all that surprising to me, who was, after all, an outsider by outlook and inclination.

All that said, some aspects from the 60s have trickled down into the national consciousness in the form of organic food, concern for the environment, a somewhat jaded outlook on ambition, and the idea of generosity. At least for some, it seems, there is an influence from that era.

Now I, and most of my friends, are in their mid-50s, and have their lives, and some have health concerns. I'm wondering what it's all about, where it's all going, was it all a silly fad back then? At least, for me, there is still a sensibility that never quite went away, of being interconnected. Best of al for me, I began to get my first positive reinforcement for my artwork in 1969. I'll be eternally grateful to my generally stoned first audience of peers who made me feel like I might have talent and might be on to something after all.

Around 1978, I bought an lp by McCoy Tyner called, "The Real McCoy" on Blue Note. It was a cutout at $2.99, and I still can recall the store off of St. Marks Place in Greenwich Village where I got it. Most of my 3300 some odd records were purchased in this manner, which allowed me to really stretch my budget for music. But, I digress, as usual.

Upon listneing to the record, I decided it was ok, and nothing more. Over the years, I would listen to it again, and my original assessment remained the same. Two nights ago, I decided to pull out music by artist whose work I had more or less neglected recently, and McCoy Tyner came up. I put on one of his Columbia albums, "Looking Out", which I found to be an awful piece of commercial pap, far below him. Even Carlos Santana guesting was no help. Then, I put on "The Real McCoy". Heck, I was hard at work on a tight deadline and the music would do just fine in the background.

Something happened this time that I can't even explain. I found the music exhilerating, very well writeen and very well played by a stellar quartet. And then, one title came on, "Song for Peace" the album's only ballad. I could barely believe how beautiful it was, especially when Joe Henderson's tenor comes in. I walked over to the record player, lifted the tone arm, and placed it down again on the same number, this time turning up the volume considerably, and listened again. This time I stopped painting. "How could I have never thought this music was great?" I asked myself. I then listened to "Song for Peace" one more time, and then again the following morning. What happened to change my mind after 37 years?

I wish I could tell you, but I really can't. It's very rare for something like this to happen for me. All I can think is that , for some reason, I was in a much more receptive place this time around. Maybe working so hard at my craft opened my ears up in some way. Maybe my Integral Transformative Practice (which I haven't been practicing so much lately) changed me in some way.

All I can tell you is that I enjoyed this music in a deep way, and inhaled it like a breath of life-giving air. My conclusion is not to stop and smell the roses. It's more like, "we often have overlooked gems right under our noses. " While I wouldn't try to force myself to like something that I have not yet learned to appreciate, I was open to a chance encounter for soemthing I had thought I had already gotten as much from as I ever would. I was wrong.

For a daily blog, I sure skip a lot of days, don't I? I guess it's been a week since my last entry - sorry about that to anyone who is reading these.

It's been a great run of steady work for me since July, and it's far from over, BUT it's not as if I'm overwhelmed by the income. So, when a prospective project comes in with a budget of $6000, I do my best to get it. This one would have been 100 small watercolor paintings of particular flowers, not the easiest of tasks, but one I would have been well able to do. I happend to be pretty good at doing flowers, although I make fun of the artists who do them obsessively, all recalling Georgia O'Keefe.

To make a not-so-long-story shorter, the job fell through and went to some other, obviouslly inferior, artist. I never had much of a chance to compete for the job, which is for the best, since I really dislike doing any spec work, exercises in futility as they tend to be. And, I was about to do two pieces on spec for this one. Just the same, it came as something of a blow when the bad news came.

In the not-too-distant past, this sort of setback would plunge me into depression, fueled by thoughts like, "If I were good enough, this wouldn't have happened." and other forays into the road of misery and self-deprecation. To my credit, I never once had that thought and Id id get out of the bog of loss and mourning in about 2 hours or so, which may be a world record for me. And, in the future, when I have my next professional disapointment, I'm gong to be over it and have it processed in no more than one hour. I'm aiming for 30 seconds of procesing or even the Zen Buddhist record: one nano second, and it's over and done with. Hey, you gotta have goals.

As a moral to the story, the next day, a nice job came in. This one not only will pay better on the hourly rate, but has much more potential for the long run. So, we'll see if I'm able to parlay it into something better.

I'm still hard at work on the Telluride Blues poster, which is coming out well, and there are a few other good things in the offing. I'm doing too well to let one little disapointment ruin my day, or my life, whichever comes first.