#59 "2-5-5-4-7-4-6" July 10, 2013

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This month marks the five year anniversary of the "Tim & Jeremy's Mind on Loup" series. Five years ago, on September 1, 2009, I posted the Very First collaboration drawing that Tim and I had ever done. I am sure there were more before it, but we had never taken the time to bring the drawings home to do anything more with them. In fact, Tim and I had been working together at that point for at least three years, so we could have been doing these things upwards of 8 years, or as long as we have known each other. It would be funny if we had started right from the beginning. In the five years since we started these things, we have made it to a grand total of 105 finished drawings (with countless loose doodles collected by myself, Tim, and Edie). The fact that we are only on number 59 on this blog is a little disheartening to me, as the writer, since that means that I am behind by almost half. Daunting, to say the least. I mean, as the time has gone on, the blog posts have gotten more and more complex, mirroring the artwork. If you go back to the first drawing, it is really just six doodles that seem to come together to form a narrative. It wasn't until years later that the drawings started to become a universe of their own, complete with backgrounds, themes, inside jokes, and substance. The first couple years there were a lot of growing pains, Tim and I both trying to figure out exactly what we were doing with these things. The happy answer is that, to this day, we still don't know what we're doing with these things. We still make them, and have a stack waiting to be finished presently in a drawer at the Cafe Loup. Some are almost ready, some are still in the premature stages, but there are plenty coming down the line. As long as we both work at the Loup in some form or another, these drawings will continue to be made, since when we are spending time there, we are adding, subtracting, and ultimately making more and more artwork. It has become ingrained in the daily life at the Loup. You go to work, you doodle a little bit, you serve hungry guests. Then you have a beer and doodle some more. It's just the way we do things there.
Over the past five years, the progress of both the drawings and the blog have gone through fits and starts. Had it not been for the years 2011 and 2012, I might be caught up with both; however, those two years I was spending my time differently. That time ended up making future T&J's heads and shoulders better than their brethren of 2009-11 (in my opinion). If you look at the early ones, you can see how inept I was at using Photoshop, the program I use to color all of these drawings. I had been using Photoshop since college, but I wasn't really that good at it. I could use the basic tools and even then I was lazy and would cut corners. I look back at those drawings and I want to recolor all of them, but of course I stop myself because they are a time capsule of where my skills were at the time. Taken as a whole, you can see the progression of skill and comfort gained merely by continuing the project. Then, once 2013 comes around, you can see a major transformation. The years 2011 and '12, I spent illustrating children's books that you can find here. Spending the whole year working on these books honed my skills to a whole new level, and it shows in the drawings from 2013. I always like to look back on the past and see that progress has been made, and it is clearest when you look back on artwork that you have created in the past. As an artist, you like to think you are always at your best. There are days and months that you sometimes feel like you are stagnant and doing nothing interesting, but then you look back at the work you did a year ago, three years ago, five years ago, and you see that back then you didn't know half of what you know now and that the quality of work was simply not as good. There are occasions that some of the things you made were good, but I feel like on the whole, you are always improving, or if not improving, then you certainly change. Brush strokes change, line quality, all of it. I mean, when I first started coloring these in Photoshop, I was using a mouse! It wasn't until almost two years later, that I started using a Wacom pen and tablet to color them. That technology changed the whole look instantly. I still use the same pen and tablet as I did then, and I've used the same version of Photoshop this whole time because I'm a cheapskate. But I got comfortable with the technology and so it has influenced the look of these drawings. To my eye, the more recent ones don't look dated to me, even though I am using outdated technology. But I also know for a fact that in a year, three years, and five years down the line I am going to look back on these recent drawings and think that they are very primitive and outdated. But, like the restaurant in which each of these drawings is conceived and created, everything changes while staying the same all at the same time. Tim and I have been drawing pictures on the Triple Dupe pads for 5 years. We'll draw on them again tonight, and tomorrow and on and on. No matter what happens outside of those walls, the drawing will continue as long as we are working within. 

#58 "Magic Wanda" in color! May 15, 2013

(Click on the Image to make it seem way bigger)

(small talk)
Well, it was an interesting summer. In New York, the weather was pretty mild and I only had to turn on my ancient air conditioning unit a handful of times. I don't know if it was a historically mild summer or if it just felt mellower than years past, you'll have to consult some sort of online almanac for that information. Tim and I had an art opening at Hifi bar again in July and the show is still up in the back room of the bar if you would like to go check it out (probably for a couple more weeks, so see it while you can). I opened up a couple Etsy shops, (the one in the link is not for T&J prints, that one can be found here) but I have only sold a couple of things.

(theoretical rant)
However, I thought the summer was successful overall and felt like I made some progress in my life. Sometimes it's hard to see if you have made progress or not in your life. Time, for the most part, seems to drag along and it's not until you turn around and reflect that it, all of a sudden, seems like the time sped by. The day to day grind of life seems to take so long, and then you look back on the summer, and it seems like not only was it a year ago, but it also seems like it went by in the blink of an eye. I guess when you think about the universe in the universal scale, it did go by in the blink of an eye, and actually, much faster than a blink. But we usually don't think of our lives on the universal scale, because it is too big to grasp. That sort of thinking can be depressing, since the conclusion is always that life is incredibly short and that in the universal scale of things, anything that we do, short of super novae, is not going to leave the slightest mark on the history of the universe. Or, you could look at it from the point of view of chaos theory, that believes in the Butterfly effect. This is the theory that states that even the flapping of a butterflies wings can have enormous consequences days or moths or light years later. If we were to believe in that theory, then every single thing we do is affecting not only the space directly surrounding our person, but is affecting the entire history of the universe henceforth. That is kind of interesting to think that even the breath we are taking in and out of our lungs, all day, every day, could have an effect on the future history of the universe. The sad part is that we will never be able to witness the effect that we had on the history of the universe because we presumably won't be around to witness the effects.

(conspiracy nonsense)
I was talking about that over the summer as well, but on a more celestial plane. I mean, it is depressing that we won't be able to experience the future, but the really sad part, I was saying, is that we'll never know all of the secrets that have been kept secret from us. Or all the knowledge that we will never know. These truths are slightly depressing. Take the universe, itself. We will never know how big it is, who or what made it, and what is on the outside of it. Scientists generally agree that the universe is finite and that it is expanding, but what is on the outside if the "outside" is not made up of "matter?" These questions were on my mind this summer. But also, on a smaller level, I was waxing that in my life time, we will never know who shot JFK or ever get any answers to the great conspiracy theories of our time. I guess on the one hand, it's more interesting to live in a world where all of the answers are not readily available, for if that was the case, everything would be boring because you would know the outcome of every event ever. It would be nice from a gambler's standpoint, because you would never lose on the ponies, but other than that, it would be boring. Also, I am willing to bet that even people in power don't really know all of the answers to all of the conspiracy theories. JFK, for instance; I doubt our current president knows or even cares about who shot JFK because he has so many pressing issues on his plate that he couldn't possibly care less about that 50 year old mystery. Now, when he first entered office, he strikes me as the kind of giddy person who's first questions were to unveil all the national secrets, but then almost immediately he had a country to run, so the excitement was probably short lived, if it happened at all. It's fun to think that when you die you could ask someone all the questions and get all the answers, but then you're dead, so what's the fun in that?

(final thoughts)
I guess you have to accept that you will never know the answers to all the questions, so the least you can do with your life is try to get the answers to as many questions that you possibly can. Then, when you die, your brain will be so heavy with knowledge that when you collapse from death and your head hits the pavement, the impact will tilt the Earth off of it's axis and create a domino effect in which the universe destroys itself, thus rendering the rest of universal history obsolete and no longer worth talking about.