Battle Rattle Cover: Tom Lea’s “The Thousand Yard Stare.”

I’ve not written seriously in years; what I guess that means is I haven’t written about things I take “seriously”. I’ve written and illustrated some books for my kids and done some cartoons for them too. But writing the kinds of essays and stories I wrote in the past stopped shortly after my second daughter was born. I have recently been motivated to think about things that I’d shelved due to a lack of time and energy. An unfinished novel that was supposed to be the big finish to the story of the characters in my books, Waiting for the Enemy, Battle Rattle, and High Desert Rats is just sitting under my desk. I frequently bump the folder the novel is stored in with my left foot while working at my computer. Yes it is just a coincidence, Hugh Martin. If I had put it into my filing cabinet then I may never have thought about it again. But I didn’t file it away, and I like to think about connections like this because they help me to maintain some hope that the world isn’t ruled by pure chaos.

In order to get back into the right head space to work on that novel, I need to reread my other books. The thought of doing so is not thrilling. I didn’t write them to read them myself, after all. But to do a good job I had to read them countless times when I was working on them. So the rereading needs to get done, and I will do it. But when I picked up Battle Rattle I realized something that I hadn’t been equipped to notice in the past. The cover is a cropped and photoshopped version of a painting done by Tom Lea.

I am a painter as well as a writer now, and because of that I spend a little time each week looking at art books to see what other artists have done in the past. This allows me opportunities to study the works that I really like, and to learn about artists other than the few who were discussed in my time in school. I wasn’t an art history major so I didn’t get much more than a “greatest hits” of artists; as a result, I didn’t even really think making art was something that more than about 10 people had ever done well enough for the world to remember them. I’d name them, but you already know the names because most of them are Ninja Turtles.

While at the library I grabbed a book called Art of War: Eyewitness U.S. Combat Art From the Revolution Through the Twentieth Century. This book was a random selection, but one that makes sense because I am working on a couple painting projects that deal with the military. As I read through the book, I saw a painting of a man staring into the eyes of the viewer. He wore a combat helmet, and there was a highlight that slashed across the front of the helmet from left to right at an upward angle that I recognized immediately from the cover of my own book.

This was jarring because I expected that Amazon would’ve paid someone to make a new cover for the book when they published it as a Kindle Single. I think they might have paid someone to do the cover, and I think that, maybe, the person who did it altered the image enough so that he or she believed it was different enough to be “new.” But when I saw it, and then saw that I had missed this great opportunity to learn about an artist who wrote books and painted, much like I am doing now, it made me a little disappointed.

Tom Lea died in 2001. So he was not around to be part of a discussion about the use of his painting as a book cover. I would like to think he’d be okay with it, but I’ll never know. I didn’t know him or his art prior to this discovery. But now I know his work, and I am glad that I came across it. I read a book of his The Brave Bulls. It’s a novel about bullfighting in Mexico. I thought the book was fine. It seemed to be written in a way that would look good as a movie or something. I don’t know how else to describe it. I like his paintings more than I like his writing, and that’s just fine.

What matters more to me is that Tom Lea was a writer and an artist who was capable of doing these two things that I am currently pursuing as a career, and he did them well enough to have a career and life built around making art in multiple forms.

Lea was with the 1st Marine Division at Peleleliu, and for anyone who has seen The Pacific or read With the Old Breed or Helmet for My Pillow, then you’ll know how deadly it was for the marines and the Japanese who fought there. Lea was there as an artist while the fighting happened. I assume, because I haven’t read anything to contradict it, that he did not storm the beach with the marines, but it was, by all accounts, an ugly and horrible place to be during the time he was there. So he wasn’t a soldier in the war, but he was an artist who was there while it was happening, and that is pretty amazing; I can’t believe they let him do it. The only thing I can think of that is similar (I’m sure there are a lot of examples of other artists doing this that I’ve not heard of) is MIchael Herr and his book Dispatches about the Vietnam War. There is something about occupying that particular space that fascinates me.

Part of me is angry that his painting was used in this way, by Amazon, to put a cover on my book, and part of me is glad because had it not been used I don’t know that I’d have been pushed to learn more about Tom Lea. I could email the artist who did the cover to see what his rationale was, or if he was told to use that image by Amazon. But I guess there is not much good that could come from that anyway. It’s not like I (or Tom Lea’s estate) are seeking some kind of monetary settlement. I just wish they’d credited him at least because then I could have looked more into Lea’s art and writing without having just stumbled upon it by coincidence when I was in my local library.

But to keep this short for the time being, I want to just end by saying that if you are at all interested in Tom Lea’s work, then just give it a quick google. He has a lot of stuff that is not war related, but that, of course, is what I am most interested in.

Phew. I think

My mri showed, from what I understand, no concerns. So that means I don’t need to sit around fearing inevitable blindness. So hopefully I will be able to let it go, and focus my energy on finishing the book for my youngest daughter over the course of this fragmented week, and then get back to work on A Sick Child. There is also a student and faculty art contest at the South Bend Museum of Art that I want to have something new for, and although I’ve been able to work on some things over the past three months, I’m not sure I have anything that I want to enter in a contest.

I’m taking a pastel landscapes class with Cathy McCormick (and this is my first in-person, guided with assignments class that I’ve taken in art ever.) Her instruction has been invaluable. I don’t think that I’ll ever choose pastels as my first choice, but I’m definitely impressed with what they can do.

These are three paintings I’ve done since the start of the class. What I like most about the medium is that it is close to the same as drawing with vine charcoal, and there is actually vine charcoal in the darkest parts of all these. It allows me to work pretty loose and that forces me to stay away from fine details that will do little to improve the painting. I’ve got some larger canvases that I’m hoping to work with later to do some landscapes based on some of our trips over the past years so that we can cover up some of these imperfections in the paint in our house…I mean to make the walls look less bare.

This last one was done on the “chicken wire” side of the paper. It has more bite than the back side of the paper, and Cathy warned me not to use it, she warned all of us not to use it, but I did it anyway, and I immediately regretted it.

What’s Hap’ nun’ October 2024

I don’t know how many people actually read this, but I guess that’s never really been the point of writing here anyway. The past half year or so has been challenging with the loss of a couple pets and then just getting crushed by kids’ activities and parenting responsibilities. I do believe that the activities are a lot better than sitting around at home all day with the kids and trying not to fight. This feels like the correct path, so I’ll keep walking it despite the challenges that arise unless something happens that makes me realize I’ve been doing it all wrong; I suppose that is inevitable anyway.

I wanted to start back on the novel I spent most of the summer working on (which I restarted after it had been under my desk for seven years), but when I went to the optometrist the other day they noticed my optic nerves looked pale, and it is probably nothing, and if there is something then it seems like basically no matter what it could be that it should be fairly easy to remedy. I did, and still do (once in a while) fear I may go blind, and if that happens then I won’t be able to make art, at least not in the way I do now, and that is pretty scary for me. Fortunately my daughters keep me pretty busy so I’m not just sitting around thinking about it.

I’ve made both of my older daughter’s books in the past, but I have yet to make one for my youngest. So that’s what I’m focused on presently. She has sucked on two of her fingers since she was in the womb, and she’s also had pneumonia a couple times along with all kinds of coughs and other stuff that she may have had anyway, but, as you know, sucking on fingers that you aren’t great at washing is not a good thing.

So I am hard at work on a book for her called “Get Your Fingers Out of Your Mouth!”, and I’m making that my main priority. I get about 15 or so hours each week to work uninterrupted and I think I may get it finished in the next couple of weeks.

Here are a few of the images from the book so far.

Ousel Falls is Falling Apart

I had made quite a bit of headway on this, and then I decided to make some adjustments to the facial features, which at this distance (and size) were pretty silly to try and do. So I had to rub all that out and now you can see the war baby that is underneath the new painting. I’ll let it dry and then finish it up.

Tina at Ousel Falls

I started a painting of Tina sitting on a rock at Ousel Falls. I’m not sure if I’ll do a larger version or if I’ll just leave it this loose. I like the impressionist feel of it. So I may just finish this up and let it be.

Canon (of my own).

A lot of these posts are meant for my daughters at some point. In case they ever care to ask “I wonder why he thought that way?” Hopefully they’ll be able to ask me whatever they want for as long as they are curious to ask, but who knows what’s around the bend.

This is a canon of books; it’s mine. These books helped shape my thinking, and they helped shaped my idea of what art is. I’m just going to do it from memory at first and then add to it as time goes on. Any misspellings have nothing to do with a lack of respect for the authors or their work.

Le Canon de BDJ:

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Iliad by Homer

The Odyssey by Homer

Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe

Beckett’s Trilogy by Samuel Beckett

Dubliners by James Joyce

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

Beowulf by a bunch of dead people

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

All the Sherlock Holmes Stories (these got me through my deployment in Saudi Arabia)

Song of Napalm by Bruce Weigl

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Dispatches by Michael Herr

Barn Burning by William Faulkner (other stories of his too, but this one was the best for me).

The Stick Soldiers by Hugh J. Martin

The Quail Who Wears the Shirt by Jeremy T. Wilson

Okay, and that is it for now. I’ll do a canon of movies and music as well, but this is more than enough for one day.

Pastels for Plein Air

I’ve been trying to do more plain air work, but I am still mostly stuck in my home studio, so I don’t get many reps, and I don’t get many hours. Setting up doesn’t take forever, but 20 minutes here and there really adds up when you only have 3/4 hours 3 times a week, so I am looking for ways to speed up the process. I have a great easel and I like using the casein that I learned about from James Gurney, but I am not super efficient with it, and that is also a point of irritation. Each time I use it, I get better, and that is something that I want to show my kids as they get older, that it takes time and effort to master skills (and each type of paint has required many hours of practice for me to get to the point where I am now, and who knows if “mastery” is even a thing worth pursuing? But efficiency and confidence are important and can be gained by “doing” work, so that’s what I’m after.

I want to make sure I use the time as efficiently as possible too. So I will get some pastels to make sure that even if I can’t cart around a bunch of stuff for oil in the wild, then I will still have access to colors that can help me to capture what I am seeing and then have a better idea of what I want to do when I get back to the studio.

I did three pastel paintings this morning with three varieties of pastels. This first one was of a rock formation and a hot air balloon that my friend Hugh J. Martin sent me a picture of. These were Sargent Arts oil pastels that I got for 2.99. I like them, and I think I’ll try a simpler subject with them next time that will allow me to use the colors in ways that work to their strengths. I did the painting on earth toned paper, and there were a lot of earth tones in the foreground that I had to get creative with.

This one was done with Cray Pas expressionist pastels. It’s a flamingo based on a picture of a flamingo at the Potawatomi Zoo. I think I liked these the best.

This last one was of our firends’ son from our vacation earlier this summer. I disliked the way the lighter colors were so transparent, and then when I finished up, I realized they are water soluble oil pastels. So they’ll be good for something, but they are not good for what I want to do on my plein air outings. I am not sure why I have been so opposed to using these in the wild, but I think it was because I read one time that John Singer Sargent didn’t like them. Which is, of course, an absurd reason not to use them myself.

Maddie and Everett Fishing for Glasses

This is an oil painting I did of my daughter and my friend’s son. They were promised 20 dollars if they could fish my oldest daughter’s glasses out of the mucky pond. They were unsuccessful, which is a bummer, because new glasses are a hundred dollars or more.

Magnolia Blossom

Here’s an Alla Prima Magnolia blossom that I did as a gift. I’m hopeful it will dry in time for her to take it with her.

Girl on the Beach

I made some pretty significant progress with this Mother’s Day gift today. Most of the other work was related to writing. Sent out some submissions and will continue to plug away at the works in progress as time allows. The novel is starting to work its way back into the schedule and I have a couple logos that I need to knock out. I also need to get going on a painting commission that will not paint itself.

Naval Mine Park again.

I am getting a better sense of where I need to go now that I’ve spent a fair number of hours getting reacquainted with this. It’s been tough focusing on it because of the current writing projects and also just because more and more ideas for paintings keep interrupting my focus. But here I have added a MOAB in the background that I’ll get to work detailing once it dries. I still am not sure if I want to add one more kid in the foreground or if it’ll just make things too busy. I do think it could create some interest in the foreground, but, honestly, I think the boy up on top of the Naval Mine is waving at the viewer. That’s the person’s attention he wants. Is it his mom or dad? Is it some other kid he wants to join him? I don’t know. It’s probably me. I think all those kids are me. Who else am I allowed to paint anyway?

“Naval Mine Park Update

After a long time with this thing staring at me from the new easel my parents bought me for Christmas, I finally squeezed out some paint to work on this thing again. One of my main goals for the year is to finish the things I start, and in order to achieve that goal, I have to work on those things even when they seem overwhelming. I am still not sure what’s going on with the horizon, but I like a lot of the changes I’ve made to the original block in. I’m going to add a lot more artillery shells, and I think that will help to create a busy foreground and let the openness of the sky in the background feel more expansive. I don’t really want this one to be on fire in the background like my Quality Control painting, but I think the sun needs to be setting or rising so there is an interesting glow. The thing I am struggling with most in a lot of these now is just painting what I want vs painting what I think is “right” and I believe those things are at times working together to make the best work, but there are also times when the “right” thing will not be interesting to look at, and if I don’t find it interesting to look at then I wouldn’t expect anyone else to.

The Banner

This is version of the banner i submitted. Godspeed, War Baby.

This one is “Which Came First, the Baby or the Bomb.”

Festival of Banners

We’re dealing with some kind of stomach/cough situation in the house, so things have slowed down a bit. I also am digging into some old writing from a book I had hoped to finish about 6 years ago. So far things are going in a good direction. I get to drop off my painting “War Baby: Quality Control” to the SBMA for art around bend this weekend and I’m working on submission for the festival of banners. I had hoped that would be a festival of Bruce Banners in various stages of Hulkification, but it seems they are the kind of banners one would hang or put on a website or something. I’m not done with it yet, but this is saying what I want to say I think. The first baby I drew was the one in the flak helmet, and as I worked more that one became less like the rest. In addition to that, I changed the skin tone and the color of the t-shirt for the final two drawings. I think it needs one more image in the cycle, but I may just do the color correction and redraw the baby with the grenade and then focus on the background. I think red is the right color, but it’s easy to change it digitally and see what other hues do.

War Baby: Fresh Cut Flowers

I have been thinking about this one for a while now. This is a very early photo, but the idea is clear. I don’t want to explain paintings, but these are kids growing out of sunflowers and they’re wearing flak helmets. The surprised on is holding an M16 round. But what does it mean? Probably what you think it means. Unless you’re wrong. And that would be sad.

Painting for a million occasions.

Somehow I finally had the guts to pull my novel in progress out from beneath my desk this week. I revised the opening chapter (or what I see as the opening chapter right now), and I actually sent it out for consideration. In addition to that, I have had about a thousand ideas for paintings. I have been able to get a few of those ideas down on 11x17 watercolor paper as sketches, and I am grateful that I’ve been able to do that. I know that I need to work larger than that, and I have struggled a bit with letting the 12x12 requirement of a local contest force me to try to work in that size. If I had something that small that I wanted to share, then that’s when I should submit to something like that. I do not have anything that size right now. So I am going to stop trying to force it.

I finally was able to see my oldest daughter in an environment where she was “in the moment” so much that I captured her true spirit in a photo. This was done using a technique that I learned from James Gurney. I used gesso on top of the pencil sketch, and then I used oil paint on top of that. I’m hopeful to have this one completed enough that I can give it to my wife as a birthday gift. Fortunately I bought a couple things to make sure she gets something even if I’m not done with this in time. I can’t get the orange of the jersey right, but I’m not surprised by this considering I’ve never mixed that color with oils before. I could change the color to something else, but the contrast between blue and orange in the jerseys looks good. I don’t like painting geometric shapes onto spheres, so I am probably not going to do much more to the ball than what I’ve done aside from adding a bit more shading to give it more roundness. I had the number on the orange jersey before, but I did it too soon before I had any of the folds and one of the shoulders was wonky, so I’ll have to do it again. Other than that, all I may change will be to get some branches and things into the background to get some more depth in the painting.

And, of course, there will still be more and more paintings dealing with war-related stuff. Isn’t mothers’ day coming up soon too? I might start just doing stuff with a palette knife so I can’t blend anything into mud. That might help me to get things done faster. Will they be better? Maybe not. But at least there will be more of it.

War Baby: Day at the Beach

I was able to get some decent beach reference photos while on our trip (some great wedding pictures too), and I plan to do some paintings of the kids and my family from our trip, but I am also still very much seeing the children in the flak helmets in the drawings I do, so I’ll just keep at it until I run out of interest. My plan with these paintings is to start submitting to some contests and galleries within the next couple of weeks. I was doing some stuff in watercolor, but when it comes to these war paintings I have found it difficult to do what I want to do unless I use opaque paint. This one is acrylic over a watercolor and pencil sketch. It was done so that it’ll fall within the 12x12 size guidelines for a local contest. I don’t like working this small, but I decided it would be an opportunity to create an artificial deadline since that can often help me to light a fire and get some things done that I may otherwise spend too long fiddling around with.

War Baby: Day at the Beach is below. This one seems more like a war “toddler”, but I think it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. A couple things might change on this one if I go back to it, but I am really trying to follow my own advice and let these things go so that I can move on and make something new.

Mother and Son Dance

I worked a bit on a painting of my brother dancing with my mom yesterday and finished it up as far as I want to take it. I definitely feel like I’ve reached a point where I feel a lot better about getting to a point with a painting that says all I want to say and then stopping because I’m finished. There are things I would change, and I think that would be the case for eternity. So rather than pushing and pulling forever, I will step back, say “Good enough” and then move on to the next one. This is, of course, a position that I am in because these things are not commissions and as a result it doesn’t matter what someone else wants from the paintings.

I did this one on gessoed watercolor paper, a technique I stopped using for a while, and I am glad that I did it that way. This was a moment I captured where my brother and mom were dancing to Country Roads at the reception. It was a very happy moment for me, and I wanted to make sure I did this so that, hopefully, it will remind them of how wonderful that night was.

Back from the Beach

I didn’t get a ton of time to paint this past week because I was on SPring Break with my family and got to be the best man in my little brother’s wedding, so even though I was feeling pretty restless in regard to art-making, it was for a really good reason that I didn’t get much done. Fortunately camera phones exist so I was at least able to get a lot of pictures that I’m able to use as references. One of my favorite days in Sarasota was spent on the beach and then Kayaking after lunch at a Colombian restaurant. We paddled through mangroves and when we were on open-water, birds dove under us and swam around searching for fish. We saw a few catch and swallow their meals, and it was really a great time.

This watercolor I did yesterday in the little time I had to work, and I was able to take this pose and turn it into a painting that will be added into the War Babies series that I’m working on currently. I made headway on that one this morning as well, but didn’t have a chance to take a picture of it yet. There’s a gallery show in Michigan soon, and they need 12x12 art. So that one is 12x12 and as of this moment it is the one I’ll submit for that show. I’ll also get the info for the show and post that later along with a picture of the painting in progress or completed.

The Aloft show in downtown South Bend is coming up soon as well, but I need to find out dimension requirements for that one before I submit anything, and if I need to do something smaller then I’ll have to get on that too.

It feels very good to be back home even though the week has been so nuts. Soccer is upon us now, and it seems every single evening requires me to drive my kids around right about the time they’d normally be sitting down for dinner. All I can do is pray we don’t become a McDonald’s family. Maybe I can just get a portable microwave for the van.

Waiting for the Enemy: Illustrated

I made some more headway on this cover for the illustrated version. I did a lot of it on my iPad directly which went a lot better than I’d anticipated. This cover is more graphic design heavy than my work is normally, but I think, if nothing else, that this looks and feels a lot more like the cover should be than the one I did based off the watercolor painting I did the other day. The thing I like about working on covers in this way is that I can just keep on adjusting it without needing to start over from scratch if I take some risks that don’t work out. I’m not sure where it’ll go from here, but this will be the way I go.