Nothing Matters but Everything Hurts. The Spike and Chester Dilemma...

...Is how I’ve come to describe what it’s like living with OCPD and depression. For those who don’t know what OCPD is, I’ll give a brief explanation:

We all know what obsessive compulsive disorder is, at least most of us should. I’m sure we’ve all seen that person who does a ritual around something, and it doesn’t make any sense for them to do so. A good example would be something I saw not long ago, a woman getting out of her car, locks all the doors, and then proceeds to walk around the car, testing the door handle three times and then touching the window of each door before moving on to the next.

At first glance you think, “there’s something wrong with this woman,” and then you move on with your day not realizing the terrible maze she’s trapped in inside of her head. What she’s going through is an obsession over locking her car, or maybe an obsession with safety and feeling secure, and to ease the obsession, she’s developed compulsions to try and alleviate her symptoms, ones that are painful at best, debilitating at worst, but i’ll get into that later. Ultimately the compulsions never fully relieve the symptoms and it can lead to debilitating compulsions if treatment isn’t pursued.

OCPD is Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, and basically what it means is that you can have an obsession without a compulsion. The term acknowledges a set of issues that can be commonly associated with OCD, but is incomplete as far as having the “solution” people come up with in a compulsion.

Some of the general symptoms of OCPD are being overly concerned with perfection, order and control over mental prowess and personal relationships, it can manifest in being a workaholic, and sacrificing family and friendships under the belief that those can hinder working or perfection.   

It’s important to note that while there are sets of typical symptoms, experts in the field in treating mental disorders as a whole will tell you that no two people have the same OCD, or depression, or anything else that might afflict the brain. Because the sheer complexity of the brain makes it nearly impossible for things to manifest itself in the exact same way. I can safely say that the problem of OCD and OCPD is about the brain being fixated on things that normally people don’t fixate on.

OCD and OCPD don’t often manifest by themselves, and what I’ve found in myself is that over the years I used to just think that I had depression. It’s a big umbrella word that can cover a lot of things. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve started to try and isolate what issues come from where, and what I might do to try and lessen them, because as I’ve said earlier, it’s actually painful dealing with OCD.

A good example of how it can be painful is this: Everyone has a thought on occasion that makes no sense, or might even be crazy sounding if you expressed it out loud to people. Sometimes when you get really angry at someone you might think, “fuck them, I hate that person,” now for me I’ll have that thought, only instead of it running it’s course, what will happen is that much like having a song stuck my head on high volume, all I can think about is what the person did, and that I “fucking hate them.” All day, over and over again my brain goes around in circles thinking the same phrase and the same action which ignited it.

The cycle keeps me amped, on high alert. What’s happening is the fight or flight response, the amount of anger that can come from these thoughts and reliving it in my head makes my body think that I’m in danger, and when I’m in danger I’m panicked, ready for action, and not interested in much of anything else until it goes away. It’s exhausting to get through a day of obsession because it takes that much more control not to explode over someone engaging with you in the most simplest of ways; “Hey Brian how’s your day?” might sound like a simple question, but imagine someone asked you that hours after you found out your only child is missing. Suddenly you're screaming about things that make no sense to the person who simply wanted to know what your day has been like.

Often it’s not anything anyone does which starts it, sometimes it’s like my brain is just ready to be obsessed over something and is fixating on one thing or the next until it can land on some kind of conflict, a mistake someone made, something someone said I don’t agree with, or even just the way someone looks at me. When it’s ready to happen it’s going to happen. Nothing I can figure out so far gets it to stop. I can lessen it, (which I’ll get into in another post as this one is getting long as it is,) or I can make it worse. But I can’t stop it.

Okay, so how does this work alongside depression? By comparison, if OCD is too much stimulation, depression is a complete lack of it. OCD is a cup violently overflowing, and depression is no cup at all.

From what I’ve found over the years is that one issue can jump-start the other. Usually it’s the OCPD leading to the depression, and from that observation I’ve come to think about the two like the old Looney Tunes dogs, Chester and Spike. Spike the bulldog is depression, lumbering and big and in the way and stupid, and Chester is OCD, seemingly small but annoying, snarling, nasty and shivering, peeing all over the floor when you scare it, and ultimately the one in charge where this conversation is concerned. I didn’t used to see Chester because Spike is the easy thing to see first. But the relationship between the two creates a “nothing matters but everything hurts” dynamic.

Nothing matters because of the depression, leaving feelings of emptiness, worthlessness, and all the problems that come with it, but everything hurts in that any stimuli that I have to deal with, involves me having to think around this little annoying dog who wants to terrorize anything it can see. This is why the best method many come up with is to isolate themselves. Isolation becomes damage control, if there’s no one around for me to explode at, there’s no one whose feelings I might hurt.

The same can be said with anxiety disorders, as some of the functions of the disorder seem to run along the same path as OCPD, endless worry, stressing, a change in action to accommodate the mental side of it. I’m grossly oversimplifying anxiety disorders here, but if you take away anything from reading this, know that if you’re suffering from depression, it might be possible that you’re actually suffering from something more specific, or something alongside the depression that you’re not seeing. It can take people years of their life to figure this out.

But some people never do. One of the reasons I’m writing this is because yesterday is the anniversary of my cousin’s suicide. Two years ago this week I got that call, and suddenly I found myself at the funeral, realizing that many people of my family are suffering in many of the same ways. It claimed one of us in the most brutal way it could, and yet none of us talked about that. We sat there and listened to the priest, someone who never knew my cousin, speak in generalizations and never once did any of us say how fucked up it all was, or about how likely most of us could relate to what he did because we know what that feels like.

It got me thinking, we aren’t the only ones struggling through tragedies and not talking about it. How many families have had depression pick them all off one by one and no one is the wiser? My goal is to talk about this more, make art about it, and hopefully get people to see that a lot of us suffer, there’s no need to do it in silence. I’ve spent my entire life trying to figure out the labyrinth of my mind, and I think it would be a terrible waste not to share it. I don’t say that because I think I’ve figured it all out, I’m saying it because I haven’t, and by expressing what I think, will give me better odds of finding something better than if I had just stayed silent. And who knows, maybe something I say might help you, the reader.

The Ugly Duckling Phase.

The ugly duckling faze. It's that girl in grade school everyone loved to picked on until puberty, then you find yourself sweaty, slightly smelling of body odor, full of pimples and wondering if she's forgotten about the time when you tied her shoelaces together and she fell down and got a concussion. "Do I even have a shot will my pizza face? what's that smell?"...but I'm getting off track here.

This is a very basic block in for my Spanish Civil War painting. All of my paintings go through this stage. Here I'm using all cool earth tones, over a cool ground. I'm thinking very basically about general large tones and values. Everything is essentially two values, one being the light middle-tone, the other being a dark half-tone.

This stage always gives me anxiety because before getting my education this was about as far as I could get before being completely in the dark on how to proceed. I understand the desire a lot of painters have in wanting to get through this stage as quickly as possible, or skip it entirely if you're able.

But I think this stage is critical in some ways for as difficult as it may be to stay in, because it allows for the consideration of the whole in different aspects than from drawing. It gives me the chance to compose in color, to set myself up for juggling the harmonies that will help guide the composition.

Here is where the designing really starts for me. Going from line to color and value can alter the relationships of things and so there's the struggle of trying to be flexible, while not letting it derail me.  I did more than one color study, but here is when I can start to specifically visualize how I'm going to plot my color relationships. Every little character has to be dressed, which means it has to look natural while still being designed.

For this painting I'm tackling it in groups. Every group connects to every other group as far as colors go in one way or another. I feel that if I can do it without making it look obvious, it will help to unify the work. Thankfully, the further back you go in history, the more prominent earth tones become, especially in times of war.

With the block-in done, I had to sit down and reorganize my references, and break everything down into sections. As I work through more layers in this painting, I'm collecting a substantial amount of references, so keeping them all organized has really helped me gain more focus. It also makes working much easier as I don't want to have to stop for very long and go digging for reference material when I could be painting.

So the first pass is done! Now only a million more to go. Another blog about the second and third layers will be up as soon as I get through the second and third layers... But just to give you an idea I've included a shot here below, with the two figures in the foreground in the second stage, compared to the nearly indecipherable blobs behind them.

"Those blob creatures are coming right for us!"

It's not a religion, it's a way of life.

*Warning, this is a work of satire, any resemblance to actual, pretend representational art movements is purely a coincidence*

Welcome to a new way of life.

Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps. Le singe-peintre,
dit aussi interieur d'atelier

I would like to introduce you to my new creation, the dawn of a “neo-life” if you will. It’s called PoKoNovitsch.

You see the art scene is big and confusing, and art history is even bigger and more confusigner. I came onto the brilliance of a system of thought that is PoKoNovitsch after seeing the growing rise in a desire to start art movements. I noticed that I too held a brush and a pencil, and by taking part in that craft means that I am a part of its history, and by being a part of history this means that I have opinions that matter. The first and foremost tenet of PoKoNovitsch is that for an opinion to matter one need to be either fairly good at drawing and painting, have relatives who were good, or be friends with someone who has skill! With high skill in one thing, you can have high skill in all things related to it. This is the magic of PoKoNovitsch.

So what is PoKoNovitsch exactly? Let me tell you. “PoKoNitch” we’ll call it for short, is NOT an art movement, instead I hope for it to be a style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists in the immediate future, in other words it's a way of life. You see it’s like sex, you know how when it sometimes feels really good? PoKoNitch...or we’ll shorten it again to “Pokes,” is like that good feeling. When it happens do you question it? Do you deny yourself feeling that good? No, of course not, why would you?

When doing research on what Pokes really should mean, I realized that intuition needed to be my guide, that I shouldn’t clutter my mind with the confusing ways of Postmodern intellectualism, or historical “facts” as it were. It was the intellectuals of academia who started the need for a way of life like Pokes, in their destructive quest to rid the world of all representational art. They created a way of life that glorifies only destruction and chaos, and anything under that banner needs to be ruthlessly obliterated without question.

But enough history, I would like to introduce one of the many benefits of Pokes, and that is a new interpretation on aesthetics, I call it Intuitive Aesthetics, or, “Intu-Ase”. There once was a great need to read books and do research, to study history, philosophy, sociology and so on. Artists of the past needed to read these kinds of books before Modernism turned them all into lies by rewriting them. The representational artists of the future will never need to look at a book again. Through the beauty of Wikipedia, and most importantly intuition, I discovered that by simply having participated in the act of making art, you can make fairly true assessments about art history and aesthetics as a whole. Not only can you do this about representational art, but you can also do it about other kinds of art which consists of mostly non-art, and philosophy.

I realized that I had been carrying Pokes around with me all these years and not known it. Everything I had been doing was Pokes, from trying to seduce my models, to showing off my penis to everyone to prove the point that by painting myself doing it, I was making it art in the face of the irony that is me going against anyone else doing it in another medium.

Non-representational art is bad at its core, one of the reasons is because it goes against man’s instinct to procreate. You see by making something that looks like a thing, the other person can see how much or little of what you made, looks like the thing you’re trying to make. I apologize for being deep here, but this is called being “objective.” Before Modernism came around, it was easy to get the women to see how well you could draw something. It was much easier to not have to come up with reasons for why we were all drawing naked people.

But what are you to do if someone makes a thing that doesn't look like the other thing he’s trying to make!? Well that means that this person is saying that there is no truth, that anyone can create anything, and well science has long disproven the categorical imperative. It’s a man of evil who wishes to construct for himself a reason for doing something that just doesn't make sense. Do you want to see buildings and clothing, for instance, in our society that don’t make any sense? That is the world Postmodernism wants for us. Which is why we need to not only be post the post modernists, post the Popo Coco Contemporary...but we need to be Pokes. We need it now more than ever, not just to distinguish ourselves by excluding the people we don’t like, and including people under its name who we never asked permission to do so, but also we need it to create hype so buyers will jump on a new wave in making art. We all want to make money right? You need to in today’s age, unlike what it was for the old masters.

And so this is why I give you PoKoNovitsch.

You’re Welcome.

The art of the study.

The artist's study is one of those cherished entryways into the working methods and mental states of the craftsman doing them. Some seek them out from others they admire as one would a cipher to a code that could unlock secrets of lost technique. Studies also tend to have a charm to them in a way not always found in the finished works. The sketch has in its own right become an art form in itself, where once artists did them to gain a better understanding of the subject they were about to paint, artists now have taken away from the subject and turned the object of the studies into the primary focus.

I would argue that some of Ingres studies are better
than his finished paintings.

I don't see the point in this, but I do see the purpose of doing studies in preparation for a painting, there's really no end to the amount you can make before starting one. Here are a few key points I keep in mind when doing my studies:

Trying to get a feel for the likeness of the
main character, Edward Norton.

There's no place for worry; It's a study, you can't forget that. A study is for you, not your facebook friends, or a competition, or other painters perceptions on what something should be. I've never been able to paint well when there were worries on my mind. You have to freely attack the study, see what comes so you can build off of what you discover.

Experiment; Any inclination you might have, any chance of a 'what if,' or 'why not,' you should indulge. Try things in a study that you would never try in a more serious work because you simply never know what can come from it. Instead of copying someone else's technique, experimenting allows you to develop your own solutions to the problems you are about to face. Develop your own voice, just copying technique is trying to fit your message into another painters tune.

Stop and start and stop and start and...; It's a study, you have no obligation to it other than what it can do for you, but think about it like this, in every other art form, the artists tirelessly practice in order to get ready for the end performance, or final draft. Your final painting is the opening night of a play, would you dream of going into it cold? A dancer spends months preparing their bodies so that when the task comes to delivering the performance, they don't need to think about the specific movements, just the expression of the movements inside the harmony of the music. If you want your final painting to be as good as it can be, you must prepare. 

Portrait study of my beautiful girlfriend. Getting the
feel of flesh tone in the light I want, and the various
colors of  stone that will be in the painting.

Educate yourself; I'm sure I'm not the only painter who thinks back on their past pictures and wonders how much better it would be if I had to paint it again. I try to get into the mentality of the object, I ask myself why it feels a certain way when I look at it, what kind of impression gives it its substance. I try to gain that insight when doing my studies.

What is the purpose of this? This is the most important question I ask myself when painting. Everything you put into a picture can either add or take away from the narrative. Is what I'm adding helping or hurting the work? What is its relationship to everything else? A multitude of questions come to me from asking what the purpose is of the object I'm putting into the painting. This helps me stay critical of myself. There's a fine line in a work of art between having a good idea firmly developed, versus a number of good ideas all competing for attention, and never fully realized because one is competing with another. It's easy to lose harmony and cohesion by indulging every whim. 

The more I paint, the more I see the need to get as many of the obviously stupid mistakes out of the way, make room for the more clever, stupid mistakes. The things that end up giving me a hard time are never what I expect.

Scribbles and lines.

Okay I've finally finished the corrections, and have gotten the go ahead. This is the evolution of the composition;

The first rough, more exactly based off my sketch. The problem with not developing the much smaller cartoon was that I hadn't fully worked out the background on the left. This made for an awkward, simplistic and unimaginative setting.

Having developed the city further, I added more figures and started playing around with the placement.

Here just the figures on the right have changed, I'm seeing if placing them partly out of the canvas helped with the tension, but realized that the woman's feet was crucial for keeping her attached to the scene.

The final composition, the patron wanted more focus on the two main figures the story is based on, and wanted them interacting with the scene more than what they were, in addition to more emotion. There also needed to be more of an emphasis on the executions happening, which meant getting rid of one figure, and moving around some others.

 My biggest enemy throughout the entire composition was/is scale and perspective. Yes, I learned perspective in college, but it's not something that comes easy to me. Also, figures in space going into perspective on a slight incline...not exactly things that get covered at an Atelier.

I've come to realize that I need to do more landscapes of cities, those objective buildings and their straight lines and unbending forms! Not fun, it made me wish I had a nude to work on. I used to use landscape as a way to get away from people, but when doing a painting about people in a landscape, all the tree paintings in the world won't help with solving the problem of scaling a figure properly in space.

What I did to understand the scale was pick a street that had the incline I needed and then I took references using the lines in the sidewalk as markers. It turns out sidewalk lines here go by five foot intervals, so every five feet I got a shot of a figure going back about 150 feet. Here are a few for example.

 Working on this street, in the overcast light like this, allowed me to stage the scene. Mapping out how wide and how deep it really would be, and what the figures look like in that space. The sidewalk gave me lines to work from while getting the figures on the canvas. It set me up to be able to compare all of the figures to the five foot intervals. Otherwise I would have had no basis for comparison because I didn't have 28 or so figures to pose all at once.

From there I drew the figures directly in charcoal because I said to myself, "I hate doing transfer drawings," stupidly not accounting for the fact that I would make mistakes and need to move things around. Moving things around meant having to re-size and transfer the figures way too many times to count. My only regret here is that I wasn't better at digital work, I could have drawn everything out digitally and moved them all around much easier. This is something I'm slowly working to rectify.

But the composing and sketch is done, time to start painting. I would like to thank some of my friends who were kind enough to lend their careful eyes and minds to critiquing these little scribbles. It really does help to have people you trust look over your shoulder once in a while.

Bust-a-move with your pencil!

I'm still in the composing stage for my Civil war painting. The patron wanted some changes made, as expected, and so now I'm finishing up those changes and will be posting the evolution of the drawings from start to finish as soon as I'm given the final approval.

For now I want to say a little something about references. For something like this project I'm on, it would be impossible to do it without taking reference shots. The aim for this painting is to capture a moment in time, the moment happens to be one of war, and that means lots of movement.

So instead of having my models pose, all of my first references are video instead of pictures. capturing someone walking by having them pose in a walking stance doesn't teach me about how a human walks. But studying a video of people walking, pretending to be in the scene I want them to be in, does.

Andrew Loomis shows a great way in blocking in
a gesture in action, when mapping a scene.

You capture movement by studying movement. What this does is give you a better idea of what is possible anatomically, in an action pose, or I should say a gesture that gives the impression of movement.

The gesture is crucial. It is the difference between a character looking bored, and a character about to act, or is feeling tense, or is about to fall asleep. Look at this screenshot from the movie Akira. Not only studying actual action, but going to the people who do it best, professional animators, to see how they solve the problems of capturing movement in gesture.

In this clip, look and ask yourself what makes each figure look as though they are doing and feeling a certain way, just in the gesture. It is far more than just a face that can tell you about the emotional status of the person you are trying to capture.

This is where it become very essential that as an artist you get into the mentality of the people you're trying to convey. Go and put yourself in the position, the action and mental state of the persons you're attempting to draw. This will teach you much more about how to capture a gesture in action than anything else I can think of.

Don't get soft flabby boy.

There's this irrational fear put into classically minded artists, I don't know if it happens directly, not always, or we just absorb it via osmosis from the rigidity of the method, but across the board one of the common fears I've noticed talking to friends, and ones I face personally, is that you will grow weak or get soft from only working with references, or going any length of time not working with the figure directly from nature.

Frazetta must have gotten all of his cro-magnon  friends
to model for him in this easy to hold action scene...

Whenever I have this fear I stop myself and think about how many artists who I admire who worked from photo's and out of there heads alongside working from nature, and who I still can't even touch in skill.

It's not whether or not you use references that will lessen your drawing skills, you can't let that fear eat you because it does nothing to help you become a better artist, aaaaand it's not true. Using photo's won't inherently lessen your skills, but what will hold you back is a lack of discipline and ability to creatively solve problems as you come across them in making pictures.

So long as you are practicing you will be gaining skill. Repeat that over and over to yourself, the act of painting and the desire to do better than you did last time at all costs whether it's from life, references, out of your head or in another dimension, it doesn't matter, just paint and you will get better. The more important thing is that you don't get stuck being able to only work one way, the longest and hardest road to be on is the one where you are the most versatile, if trying it one way doesn't work, you let it go and approach it in another way no matter what anyone has told you is the supposed "right way" to do it.

I think about making art as I would having infinite resources to go exploring in a hypothetical world where there aren't so many people everywhere, always be asking "what if," especially if you get stuck, but if the inclination strikes you to try something different, give in, you will only gain from it.