-expanded body of work

-production  

-clientele

in the end everything turned out ok. i found my legs towards the middle, and ive been readjusting my style to better exemplify what i truly want to do when i get out there in the real world, which i have taken upon myself to jump into it earlier than later, if everything works out in my favor.

this means that you will see a complete overhaul of the site eventually to better reflect what i have been doing artistically, hopefully it will be up and running by the end of summer.

in the meantime, thanks for stickin around! a lot of you have been linking me, that means a lot.

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“I have just read and signed the online petition:

“Boycott to the presence of Guillermo Vargas “Habacuc” at the Bienal
Centroamericana Honduras 2008″

hosted on the web by PetitionOnline.
com, the free online petition
service, at:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/ea6gk/

This man Vargas, claims to be an artist. Last year he chained a dog up inside an art gallery, and starved it to death, giving it no food or water, claiming it was art, while the public watched it die. The Spanish government now want him to do this again, with another dog.

Please sign this if you are against this cruelty. This being called art is an offence to all artists.”

END
—————————

can i be the wrench in the gears and say, that while i cannot in good conscience say that vargas’ adventures in dogicide is something i approve of at all, you have to think about art history for a second. how many times in history has there been an artist that has stirred extreme controversy amongst the local population at the time? biggest example i can think of is Manet’s Olympia.

art history has been privvied to some pretty fucked up shit, contextually, as far back as it goes. i am not trying to sabotage the petition, although i am telling you right now that i am not signing it. obviously it’s fucked up, but to me, i wouldnt go so far as to call it an “offense to all artists”.

if anything, Vargas is successfully creating controversy, which is almost always inevitably coattailed with debate, forum, and expression of individual opinion… which is a large part of what art is to begin with.

**my two cents.**

>>it has been about a month and a half since i’ve given up smoking.  it has been pretty crazy.  i have caved a couple of times, once because i found a brand new cigarette sitting in an old pack behind the TV (?!?),  and once because i went and had drinks with my friend Helice, who convinced me to indulge in my drunken state.  whatever, its not a big deal.  i can get over those hiccups, i told myself, and i did.  

>>what was really daunting was the rest of my life.  

>>for a short while i just felt like i had become unhinged, like there were gears inside of me that all of a sudden bolted off, belts and cables coming undone. i have been struggling immensely with time management, not just with my friends (as aforementioned in previous entry), but with my art, and my schoolwork.

>>this is something that has been dogging me since i first moved to SF, and i suppose you can say that my quitting smoking this time around was really the catalyst that set my desire off, to really want to figure out how to legitimately balance my entire life. i felt like i had let my lack of finesse in this seemingly moot but immaculately important department really ruin or deter some of the finer things that have come and gone in my life, including a romantic relationship that basically dissolved on the basis of me really not being able to configure myself and my priorities correctly.

>>i am still not 100% perfect, but i feel like i am getting better at it. for the first time in my life, i am actually planning stuff like casual hanging out very far ahead in advance. if i get invited to do certain things at certain points where i know that i am unavailable, i always make it a point to reschedule somehow. this is then all written down on a calendar, which i would never have started doing had i not needed it to keep track of my progress in quitting cigarettes. i hate to say this, but i can actually see myself “NEEDING” an electronic organizer of some sort now, to keep everything in check.along those lines, however, i believe i am just changing as a person, also.

>>gone are the days when i dont have to worry about my longterm, big pictured future, where i can just relish in the trade winds of life, enjoying the semesters and the summers and the winters, wasting fat minutes whenever i chose to. that luxury is far gone. in fact, with graduation looming, i now wished that i had spent more of those carefree moments diligently drawing, or in the very least, DOODLING. it is an understatement to say that i am now making up for lost time. there is a large part of me that even wants to excommunicate myself from my social participations and whatnot, and really focus on simply recalibrating my state of mind to always be artistically alert, and burn from within to create at all moments of consciousness.

>>it is for these ongoing trains of thought in my life that i decided to head out to Ocean Beach today and draw whatever came to mind (PICTURE BELOW). with everything thats going on in the world, with the mess that is the Olympic Torch Rally, the imminent elections and that ever-present malaise that is Iraq, and with all the shit thats been going on in my life regarding time and my ill-mannered concept of it, it has not been very fun to be alive…. but the cool thing is, it is moments like these that make it fun as SHIT to be an artist. i had a million things going on, and i just busted out my copic wide colors and started laying colors down.art has a funny way of knocking life into perspective. it really puts everything in HD, a new angle on things that sometimes isnt welcome, but always very much needed. 

>>

>>for example, the other night, chris and i went and saw Les Claypool at the Warfield. anybody who knows me well enough knows that i am a huge Primus fan; i have seen them live 4 times, and this particular night would be the 2nd time that i would have seen Les Claypool as a singular unit sans Primus. as we waited for Les to come out, i was subjected to the opaquely stupid hippies that surrounded me. these fuckers seriously werent even old enough to BE hippies… if anything, they were probably the end products of a long, broken-condomed and LSD-barbed night back in 1968.so in more or less words, these lousy motherfucks were Gen X’ers who WISHED they were hippies. not even real hippies!!! everything from their hippie dancing to their incessant howling in between sets, and obviously their excessive joint sucking……all a pathetic attempt at touching a nerve in a movement that they themselves were too young to even be a part of.fine, i’ve been to Primus shows before, these crowds are old news for me.

>>but what REALLY disturbed me was the 40-year old yuppie/hippie/MILF, hanging off the nutsack of her 25-year old boy toy, trying to make coherent conversation with everybody in a 5-person radius. fine, again, old news. overly enthusiastic hippies trying to talk to me simply in hopes of me potentially pulling out a joint at any second to share with them, nothing i havent put up with before. it was this particular yippie-woman’s blatant peer-pressuring of the 16 year old kids standing next to me that really, REALLY got to me, like needle nose pliers to my spine. fine, do your drugs, but encouraging irresponsibility and making TEENAGERS feel square for not partaking in yours??? wat the fuck is that all about??? i seriously wanted to turn around and box her in the ears, but it was then and there that Les trotted out on stage with his clicks, pops, whammys and shammys, taking us on a decadent journey with his bass guitar, one that all of a sudden felt a little bit too familiar and not all that interesting to listen to anymore for a second.

>>by the end of the night, (going back to my original point), i just felt like i could have spent all that time at a cafe, sketching robots or sumthing. dont get me wrong, i will still continue going about doing the things that i love, and i am still a Claypool fan for life, but it really made me think about seriously grafting my artistic universe together with my social universe. i know tons of my peers do it with zero to no flaws, but this is a new concept to me…. one that i wish wasnt so new.it is all about looking forward now, though. i do not want to look back on this time and say that ive wasted myself away artistically, rather, i feel like ive been gradually becoming more aware and awake, and plan on building on that energy from there. as ive mentioned, i feel like i am about to turn a big corner artistically, i feel like something big is going to happen, and i am very excited about the possibilities that it holds. —jon   

- i have become absolutely obsessed with Metalocalypse. pretty much the funniest show on television right now.

- FINALLY purchased the new WEEN album (La CucaRacha), although i can hardly call it new, as it was released last autumn or so. it’s really good, although i wish that it had more songs, and that the second half of the album wasnt so mellow. still a solid listen, though. Blue Balloon cracks me up every time i hear it.

- happy that baseball season started. i joined a fantasy league with Joe, so it ought to be an interesting experience, rooting for players on teams that you wouldnt normally support. what im not too happy about though, is the Giants, helmed by a shaky Barry Zito, dropped the opening day game to the Dodgers. boooooooo those blue bums.

….even though brad penny and rafael furcal are on our fantasy rosters. boooooooo still.

it has been about 3 weeks since i’ve quit smoking, and it has been a very strange time for me. with the assistance of the patch, i have managed to stay smoke-free for every single day since, except for one night when i was (too) drunk and got suckered into a menthol by a pretty girl. and while it is awesome that i have basically lost the urge to smoke, it has not been without its unpleasant side effects: bad skin, bad temper, moderate headaches, loss of sleep, and loss of focus.

the biggest one has been my loss of focus, concentration, and ultimately, motivation. ive been patching it since right before spring break, and since then, i have been practically dragging my knuckles to school, and always felt completely out of it. i just didnt ever know what to say whenever it came time to critique or offer my two cents about stuff, and i’ve been late on a couple of assignments already. it is even affecting the way i normally function and talk to people. sometimes ill forget what i was going to say mid-sentence, and as a result have been stumbling around like a child in the dark, dialogue-wise at least. i am just thankful that i have had a week off, not so much to relax, but really evaluate myself and figure out what the hell to do next so as not to tank the entire semester.

initially i was nervous about entertainting the idea of going off the patch, but then i realized that the patch itself has become almost a psychological crutch, that i was relying too much on this thing to get rid of cravings instead of really challenging myself and motivating myself to truly quit. the choice became easy after i talked to my mom about it one day, who merely gave me a bunch of support, and suggested that i start eating healthier, drink more tea, and take more vitamin B.

there are different things i can do in my life now to move forward without cigs, both long-term and short-term, but like my mother pointed out, while the patch was probably a good starting point, the ultimate oppurtunity cost doesnt really come in my favor if it is severely hampering my artistic endeavors.

another interesting aspect of my life that i have been dealing with since i decided to quit smoking is my concept of friendship. maybe it is just me dealing with a bunch of weird mood swings and my mind doing weird things to me, but i have felt out of synch with just about everybody for the last month. like, EVERYBODY. i cannot think of a single person who has not rubbed me the wrong way, either by doing something while we were hanging out, or by saying something, or by acting in a certain way. i just couldnt fucking relate to anybody 100%, not even my closest core group of friends. no offense, anybody. and i felt like i had all this emotion and all this stuff i wanted to express, but if i did, nobody would understand. i guess i have always felt this way, but with the quitting of smokes it has just magnified these emotions in both directions.

needless to say, while i have surrounded myself in friends and company i dont normally get to have on a regular basis, i was almost always someplace else in my head, somewhere between loneliness and the infinite melancholy. i really dont want to disrespect anybody, and i hope nobody feels personally singled out, i am not trying to be malicious or critical, it is just something that i am going through right now that i feel like nobody can really relate to.

i hope things get better. it is easy to say that it will, but making it happen is definitely going to take a lot of hard work.

-jon

when school started, i got really sick. in fact, i was sick the entire first week. i had stopped smoking, but had resumed before i fully healed. bad stuff. by the end of the month, not ONLY had it taken longer for me to recover from whatever it is i had, i was now smoking more cigarettes daily than i ever was before.

averaging about a half pack a day, i was now hovering into three quarters to a full pack, daily. if you asked me why, your guess would be as good as mine. eventually it was a rare occurance to see me at any given waking hour without at least 2 or 3 cigarettes sucked down. it was getting so bad to the point where even when i had left my cigarettes at home on purpose in an attempt to curb it while outdoors, i would go out and buy a pack. this happened every day for an entire weekend, and by the time the dust had settled, i had 5 packs of cigarettes at home, all consumed to various degrees. call it overindulgence. or sheer addictive stupidity.

luckily for me and everyone around me that cares, it wasnt crack, right? after that weekend, i really sat down and looked at the big picture for the first time in awhile. if i were to continue this, i would probably be dead before i hit 45, if im lucky. so after my last pack of marlboros (that i obliterated in about 13 hours or so), i hurried over to safeway, and picked up a box of nicoderm patches.

today is day 1, and i can happily say that these things do actually work. obviously it is a different-strokes-different-folks kind of deal, but for me personally i can already say that it is doing its job. my arm is a little bit sore and it feels a bit cold from where the patch is, which i found odd at first, but i got used to it pretty quickly.i have NOT had a craving all day, and i have NOT gotten that “edge” yet, that very tangible combination of impatience and irritability, like someone just poured broken glass into my bloodstream.

i have felt an odd calmness the entire afternoon. the booklet says that a side effect is vivid dreams if one wears it to bed, so i think i’ll give that a shot tonight. haha.  anyways, i figured if everyone knew, itd be a source of accountability. wish me luck!!!  —–jon

my weekend really sort of began last wednesday, when my school threw a free pizza/portfolio swap night. thrown as a collaborative effort between illustration and advertising, it was a chance for people to network, and possibly find matches as far as projects go. admittedly i figured it was going to be a dud, having heard so many horror stories of previous pizzafolio nights. i remember showing up to one a while back and there were stacks and stacks of cold pizza, no advertising majors, and a very displeased Chuck (director of illustration). ive heard stories here and there of payment disputes, wherein some advertising kids will ask illustration kids to draw something for them on the house, only for the illustrator to find out that it was a paid job.

after making a few adjustments, i think they definitely got it right this time:
-leveling the playing field by insisting that all collaborations must be just that: no payment of any kind.
- to make things interesting, actual art directors who WERE looking for artists to pay were brought in, without anybody’s knowledge.
- advanced classmen in both majors were “required” to show up.

the last point made it a HUGE success, actually. more than 100 people filled our tiny little ballroom, eating pizza, having fun, and through it all, i actually kind of got a taste of what it’s like to shop my portfolio in an ACTUAL setting, sans pizza. i felt like a kid on training wheels, and it was a very important learning experience, considering what happened in the following weekend.

alright, so onto WonderCon. for those of you who do not know, this is my first comics convention of any kind. my inner geek basically was the kid in the candy store, the bull in the china shop. not ONLY did i get to meet Dave Crosland and Jim Mahfood, my most favorite artists of all time, but i also got to hang out with them for a little bit. i was already running around on really borrowed time as it was, so instead of making them both mixtapes as i had heard they’d enjoyed, i just grabbed a couple of vinyl records from my collection and gave one to each of them. i gave Dave a Star Trek storybook, and Jim a Frank Zappa. they both geeked out. it was awesome.

aside from the sheer entertainment value, i also had a semi-business approach to the whole thing. i had plenty of tearsheets leftover from my pizza/folio night from school earlier, so i just brought all of those and began handing them out to whichever booths would take them. by the end of the day, i had none left.

the lone official portfolio review came on the first day, when Lucasfilm was holding a session. THAT was an interesting experience. they had us all in one room, waiting in line, and the Lucasfilm people were sitting right there at a table, roasting everybody publicly. it was intense. the best thing about these “live” interviews was that i could observe how the Lucasfilm peeps acted, what they liked, what they didnt like, and i had plenty of time to make adjustments mentally and mechanically (tossed a few bad portfolio pics out). everybody was REALLY nervous, and spoke very timidly to mr. Lucasfilm man, so i made it a point to project my voice when i got up there. seeing everybody so stressed out made me very aware of my surroundings, and made me feel like i could do better, like i had an edge. in the end it was a good experience, the guy noticed that i was a bit more loose than the others, and thus gave me less of a hard time, and more insightful feedback.

“you’ve got plenty of talent,” he said, “but you clearly need more direction.” 

after three days of nonstop action, i decided to call it a complete experience early on Sunday, as i was completely exhausted from basically walking for 5-6 hours straight a day all weekend long. i am definitely considering going to more Cons in the future, PARTICULARLY COMIC-CON in san diego, as many of the publishers/vendors are hosting more portfolio sessions down there (why not up here?!? makes no sense). maybe not so much to geek out as much, but to really do some more portfolio shopping, and get that art down to a science. i have to say, that im glad im getting into this culture NOW, rather than a couple years ago when i had essentially nothing to show anybody folio-wise, and woulda just been a sucker spending 300 bucks on comics. not that i didnt do that THIS time.  UP NEXT: FU MANCHU @ SLIM’S, Birthday Parties this weekend, etc. later.

-jon

i was given a thick black pen by the hostess, Tai, insisting that it would be an honor if i were to grace their walls with my artwork. i began drawing on the walls around 11pm, and literally did not stop until about 5 the next morning. again, i want very much to talk about the art, but i just feel like it would not mean much of anything to the general public. you simply had to have been there, and in all sincerity, i wished that all of my friends were there to witness it.

in the end, i felt like i had awoken something inside of me that had been dormant for a long, long time. it was a very ethereal experience, one that truly inspired me. the impromptu mural, which eventually spanned 4 different rooms, is available for viewing in my SKETCHBOOK…. i dont really know where else to put it, but yeah, it’s in there, under CHICO HOUSE towards the bottom.

enjoi it! i look forward to sharing more live art experiences with all of my friends.

-jon