The Avett Brothers....LIVE

if you have the means...i highly recommend it

photo by Crackerfarm

and i'm spent

last sculpture of 2007

publication

Best of American Artists 2007

Sculpture vol. 1

Kennedy Publishing

George Singleton may be an evil literary genius. And even if he's not he's still a witty writer.
The thing is, he has a way of telling the truth by lying. Writers get to call lying "fiction" and while his short stories and novels are found in the fiction area of your local bookstore you'll have no trouble finding people, places, and ideas you know to be true brought to life inside them. Singleton has a way of telling the God's honest truth about these southern misfits in a way that never quite makes fun of them but rather endears them to the reader.
If you havent read his work...do it now. Find out more and read a couple of short stories at www.georgesingleton.com.
Anyone who wears this cap to a photo shoot deserves your purchase. Makes me wish I had gone to Furman too....just so I could wear the cap.

Yo Whatta Whatta?

TV is the devil. I'm not a big fan. Back in undergraduate school, I swore off TV for 2 1/2 years and was a much better (and more creative) person as a result. Though it has seeped back in to my everyday life in small doses I still believe TV to be evil at it's core. It rots your brain. It robs you of creative thoughts.
I was once told that when you have a child everything changes.
I will confess that I let my child watch TV sometimes. Not for him - for me. Call me evil, call me a hypocrite, but there are days you need 10 or 15 minutes of relative calm and silence in order to maintain your sanity. Don't misunderstand, my child is not much of a TV fan either. There are only a couple of shows that will hold his attention for more than 30 seconds. Most days he would much rather listen to loud music and dance around the house.
One of the shows that seems to captivate him is called "Yo Gabba Gabba". No, I don't know what that means. What I do know is the first time I saw a commercial for the show I shook my head and wondered what had become of our society. The commercial seemed ridiculous and crazy. There was a DJ and a robot and critters living inside an old school boom box. And there was this adorable little kid who stopped in his tracks to watch the commercial from beginning to end. He looked at me and pointed to the TV and said "Daa Eee Ah?" which of course is translated as "Father, will you please set the dish to record all new shows matching the search entry "Yo Gabba Gabba"? I reluctantly agreed.
Now that we've watched all the episodes together I can tell you that this show is weird. I can also tell you that this show is really great. This show is what you would get if you put an Atari 2600 game console, a couple of Monty Python movies, a few dance and electronica CDs, and an artist's brain in a blender and hit the "liquefy" button. It's fun and it probably will not make your child dumb.

and now...

"Poor Thing"

11" x 14"

ink on bristol paper

As promised, here is drawing number 52. 52 drawings in 52 weeks...crazy goal achieved. You can view all 52 (plus a few from 2006) on the "drawings" page on my website www.dougmcabee.com.

Trouble is, now I have to come up with a goal or two for 2008. This scares me.

And if you have a bare spot on a wall, I have a stack of drawings you may be interested in.

one of those days

If you've ever experienced the supreme joy that is sitting in a slightly uncomfortable chair while listening to an artist ramble on about their work - this will sound familiar to you. And not only because you're probably situated in a slightly uncomfortable chair reading about an artist rambling on about his work...but also because you likely heard the artist refer to their creative process.
This can be a very confusing idea to a person who is not normally engaged in such a process, and if we're all just honest for a moment, it can be equally confusing to the artist who is - even on a good day - struggling to understand what that process is all about. The creative process itself and the reasons the artist seems so drawn to it are intangible and generally these ideas like to hang out just out of reach of the artist's vocabulary. We are visual communicators, after all. Not verbal. You need only to keep reading or have a single conversation with me to see evidence of this truth.
Even on days when I am aware that I am experiencing the creative process...on days when everything just seems to click and I feel like I'm in the zone...I only catch glimpses of it's enigmatic self as it darts behind a piece of steel or slips under the cap of a sharpie marker. It is the southern specter that everyone in the house is aware of, but no one can actually see. And like that specter, the more you try to focus on her the faster she slips away completely into the mist.
My best days in the metal shop (with steel sculpture the term "studio" just doesn't seem to fit and has never been one of my words of choice) are the days that I am totally unaware of the process and only realize at the end of the day that it was happening when I was not paying attention. Thinking back over the events of the day I find myself remembering only what can be described as a gray, fuzzy type of memory. Details may surface over the course of the following week, but the design choices and aesthetic decisions that were made during that day were almost instant and instinctive....maybe even "intuitive" as mentioned in an earlier post.
Last Saturday was one of those days in the shop. I went in early and stayed at it all day leaving a good half hour after I was supposed to leave. As I was cleaning up at the end of the day I realized that I had forgotten to stop to eat or even drink anything. And please...I don't mean that in an "I'm so creative or artsy that my art comes before food" way...I simply mean that wherever my mind was, I was so focused that I didn't think about anything I didn't have to think about.
That night I found scratches and bruises I could not recall and discovered most of my muscles were sore. I was completely exhausted and yet completely happy.
Rilke offered advice to a creative sort in "Letters to a Young Poet" that amounted to: before you go out and attempt to be an artist, first ask yourself if you must be an artist. That is, ask yourself if you can possibly live and not create art....and only if you can not imagine life without being an artist should you set out to actually be one. (I am ultra-paraphrasing here)
I think many readers would ask what Rilke is talking about. We might even marvel at the silly notion that a person couldn't live without making art. I suspect that Rilke is hinting at something about the creative process. There is something about that process so enjoyable and so fulfilling that the artist longs for it and can even be driven by it.
It is one of those days that we all live for.