birds. birds. birds.

I've got a piece in the works that is about three years in the making. That sounds ambitious, you say. Sort of, say I.

There is a piece that I've had in my head for about three years now. Various ideas about the idea have made to finish but they were all only inspired by this one idea. I hadn't the power three years ago to make this piece but now I feel it is within my reach.

It's a spread in the forth coming Ticket.

Here's the thumbnail for it:


I don't think this is even the original thumbnail. Even so, it's the one that I've had tacked up on my desk at work taunting me for the last 1,000 or so days. What's so complicated about that? -- I see a crude thumbnail of maybe a giant bird, or several, some Grecian style columns, possibly a foreground. I think there's some people, in the foreground, perhaps gathering something off the ground. Hm. Hopefully grapes. Or olives.

I know, who knows. For whatever reason it has eluded me but I've still been interested.

Here's a piece that almost came from that idea, just the birds, really. It would it have been the above thumbnail but the power eluded me and it veered off into smoke and war.


Here's another. I guess about a year later, still not it.


Other than these two pieces having big birds, they both bear the distinction of being pieces which started out as my stab at the top thumbnail but they veered off into their own territory, the second one a little more successfully so-- it had another idea pulling it in another direction:


So now what?

Production on Ticket is underway and under a fantastic deadline. I've got all my thumbnails and storyboards together, everything is in place.

I don't think this particular spread in Ticket is going to blow any minds like a piece "three years in the making" ought to, but that's not the point in any case. The point is that, hopefully, it'll be a great piece surrounded by other great pieces and no one will ever need to know that I've kept a doodle tacked up at my desk for three years.

I read once a quote by Fitzgerald, "in life every person searches for reincarnations of a former aesthetic experience. The writer or painter tries to approximate some moment in their life when they had very real contact with awe."

Awe? Maybe. Giant birds? Defiantly!