my name is chris. i'm an artist, and this is my blog. it's also the home of my sketchbook archive, where i hope to archive almost 30 years worth of my drawings. you'll also find music, writing, and other miscellaneous projects i've worked on over the years.
Triumph.
We prepared to land our ship as it slowly drifted down through the atmosphere of our new home, and the feeling of triumph was overwhelming.
Our long journey was at an end.
We were born on this ship, as were our parents, and their parents. For 100 years our vessel traveled, rocketing away from Earth on a voyage to the nearest inhabitable planet. Generations had passed, and now we had finally arrived.
As we basked in our achievement, we also reflected soberly on the sacrifices our forefathers had made. They abandoned Mother Earth for the sake of exploration, for the advancement of the Human Race. They embarked on a journey they knew they would not see the end of, so that their descendants may be the first to reach a new level of Human Accomplishment.
The ship had been our home as long as we’ve known… it was a civilization all in itself, but deep within us we kept true to the original spirit of the mission. We were the emissaries of Mother Earth. Though we’d never seen her oceans or felt her winds and rain, She was dearest to all of our hearts, for She was the reason for our existence.
And now, at last, our generation of travelers was the one to finally reach our destination. We had fulfilled our destiny.
As the ship came to a landing and our new World stretched out before us, each one of us was overcome with awe. Some wept tears of joy and pride. We said a small solemn prayer for our ancestors who began this voyage, honoring their courage and selflessness.
Then, the hatch was opened and the first of us began to leave the ship.
Two people were already standing there.
“Hey guys! We couldn’t wait to tell you! Last year they invented this Faster-Than-Light Warp Drive, and we got here in like three days! It was AWESOME!!”
“WOO HOOO!! HIGH FIVE, MAN!”
Ever since I was a little kid, any time I walk past an apparently empty automobile I stare at the front seat as if I’m staring right at the driver. I do this just in case there’s an invisible man sitting there, so he’ll wonder: “Oh shit, can that guy see me? Has my power of invisibility failed me?” and then he’ll spend the rest of the day paranoid and doubting the effectiveness of his powers.
I think an invisible man has so much going for him, he needs to have his day ruined like that every once in a while just to keep him in his place.
in spite of her mother’s questionable taste in music, my little girl can still fall asleep to the soothing sounds of the final fantasy and dragon warrior soundtracks.
this little sketch was one of the most popular over the years.
it’s from the book power of the dark side from 1999.
back in february 2002, the times-picayune in new orleans ran a comic strip every monday called “team turtle” where a bunch of turtle-kids tell the younguns to eat right, don’t fight, don’t smoke, you know… crap like that.
here’s one of the comics, featuring turtle-kids Ferox and Diera:
so what, you say? well, it gets a little more interesting when placed next to something i pulled out of my sketchbook:
that’s right… for a very, very brief time i was actually writing comic strips for a living. i remember when i first saw the finished strip in the paper (it was long after i had been laid off from that particular job, so it was kind of surprising), but i think the final product is a pretty accurate translation of my little storyboard. as you can see, i also wrote that GRIPPING DIALOG.
that strip was based on an original concept sketch, which had to be slightly edited considering our target audience:
so there. i have had my work published in a major metropolitan newspaper and you haven’t. too bad the company went broke and laid me off. most of my subsequent jobs have consisted of me staring at a monitor all day wishing i was dead (or at least drunk). i’ll probably never have a job as rewarding as that again.
these sketches, as well as other TEAM TURTLE sketches are available in my sketchbook archive in the book titled Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit from 2001-2002.
note: this is a repost of something i wrote in november 2003. i thought it was still interesting so i’m reposting it
you know the old cliché that illustrates the way old people exaggerate stories: “OH YEAH I HAD TO WALK 10 MILES IN THE SNOW UPHILL BOTH WAYS” … well, it occurred to me that story itself is probably an example of the concept it attempts to describe. i mean, have you ever actually heard anyone claim to have walked 10 miles in the snow to school? uphill both ways? i know i haven’t. what i’ve heard is old people telling me that someone told THEM that. all we’re left with is some unlikely hearsay that in effect becomes the new cliché for illustrating the way old people exaggerate things.
hmm.
another thing that occurred to me: you know how when someone says something that you don’t want to dignify with a response, you say “i won’t dignify that with a response”… when in fact, that IS a response, and a message has been communicated on both sides. it’s a sad irony that a truly unresponded-to comment never knows that it hasn’t been responded to because it’s not worth it.
i’m reminded of a quote from sun tzu that i took from an article on sirlin.net which reads as follows:
“His victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom, nor credit for courage. For inasmuch as they are gained over circumstances that have not come to light, the world at large knows nothing of them, and he therefore wins no reputation for wisdom; and inasmuch as the hostile state submits before there has been any bloodshed, he receives no credit for courage.”
there’s a story by Robert Louis Stevenson called The Bottle Imp that contains an interesting paradox. the main gist of it is this: you get a magical bottle with an imp who lives in it. the imp will grant your wishes, but there are conditions: you have to sell the bottle to someone else. you’re not allowed to give away or throw away the bottle, and you must sell it for less than you bought it for. you are also obliged to explain these rules to the buyer, so they are aware of what they’re getting into. if you fail to uphold these rules, you will be damned to hell for eternity.
the paradox then is something like this: would it be possible to ever sell this bottle to anyone?
if we start at the bottom of the pricing scale (assuming US currency, of course), no one would ever buy the bottle for 1 cent. they wouldn’t be able to sell it for less, as the rules demand, and so they’d be stuck with it and sent to hell. since no one would want to buy it for 1 cent, no one would ever buy it for 2 cents, either. if they did, their only option would be to find someone willing to buy it for 1 cent, while being fully aware of the rules. since this would be impossible, they’d be foolish to buy it for 2 cents.
working your way upwards, you could make the same argument for any given asking price. logically, no one would want to buy it at any price, because they’d be certain that no one would want to buy it at a lower price, and they’d be stuck with it.
but it seems that if you start high enough, there’s no reason why someone wouldn’t agree to buy it. for 50 or 100 dollars, it seems reasonable that they’d be able to sell it again for a slightly lower price.
so i got to thinking, and what occurred to me is that this paradox sounds very much like the paradox of a person’s last conscious thought.
when someone dies, people will always throw around words like “the last thing that crossed their mind” or “the last thing they see”. but by the nature of being the “last” thought that occurs before death, as soon as it happens, it is gone. no one will ever know the last thought you have. you will never know the last thought you have. or the thought immediately before that, because that thought will also be gone almost instantly after it comes to exist. and it follows that all thoughts that you have ever had will simultaneously be gone, much like any chance for selling the imp in the bottle.
but here we all are, alive and well, and certainly aware of our own thoughts. so where are we in the paradox? how high in price is our own bottle imp? and what happens when we finally reach 1 cent?
i guess if we were able to make sense of that, we’d be closer to unraveling one of life’s most ancient mysteries.
one day when i was in high school there was a total solar eclipse. i wrote a poem about it at the time, since back then i was always writing poems or something.
a little later on, i put the poem to music, and it became this song.
the lyrics:
luna ate the sun today
bite by bite she gnawed away
leaving only the core behind
to be thrown on the compost pileluna ate the sun today
“now you know what it’s like” she’d say
“to be phased and wax and wane
as i get in your way for a while”luna ate the sun today
bit by bit she chewed away
digesting him in whatever sort
of digestive system luna hadluna had her day today
as she ate her sun flambé
“and i gotta tell you” luna says
“he really didn’t taste half bad”
this illustration was actually created to accompany this song, based on a sketch from one of my early massart sketchbooks: “a fleeting glimspe” 1995-1996.
i’m the same way with music as i am with art: i “sketch” a lot but rarely bring anything to a state of polish. i’ve jotted down lots of little melodies or chord progressions that i’ve never really fleshed out into full songs.
recently i’ve been playing around with Reason, a pretty awesome sequencing program, and i actually took one of my little melodies and made a track out of it.
i think the result sounds like something out of a super nintendo RPG soundtrack; the “melancholy theme” maybe. but that’s probably just because i’m a nerd. it doesn’t have an official name, but i’ve always referred to this melody as “the crystaline one”. So that’s where the filename comes from.
i enjoyed the process of putting this together with Reason, so i’ll probably do it again with some more of my musical sketches.
a couple years ago i participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). while i didn’t reach the goal of 50,000 words, i did finish the story i had begun, which weighed in at a pretty respectable 12,000 words and 45 pages. i called it “the ghosts of january” and it’s about a band of british soldiers after the battle of new orleans in 1815, and some scary stuff they find in the swamp. it’s historical fiction and horror rolled into one! amazing!
so after taking some time to revise it a little, i am now making it available for download in PDF. criticism and movie options are welcome!