It’s finally here.
Pasta
Pasta is a vegan’s friend. Almost all dry pasta contains no egg making it a vegan’s dream. Just add any type of sauce. Tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, parsley, olive oil, or whatever other vegetable strikes your fancy. This layout I drew would be perfect for a photographer to shoot for real.
Meatfree
A new U.N. report states that a major driver of animal-to-human diseases is increased demand for animal protein. Duh! As populations get richer, they eat more meat. Since 1961, global meat production has more than quadrupled. Americans are among the top meat consumers in the world. In 2018, each of us ate, on average, 222 pounds of red meat and chicken. Consumption in most other countries is far lower, but rising. In China, meat consumption has doubled since 1990.
Ezra Klein article, NY Times
All Dat Jazz
There is a young high school kid who lives in the building next to ours in Brooklyn. He has been learning the saxophone for the past 2 years. He’s gone from squeaking, squawking, and badly botching the scales, to somewhat acceptable. He practices in his room with the window open. I’ve grown to love hearing him strive. He’s very tenacious and plays with a lot of heart. I’ve got front row seats.
James Harden
Brooklyn actually has a very good NBA basketball team this year. The only problem is that their stars are never fully healthy at the same time. We are all wondering what will happen in the playoffs.
NRA
A video has recently surfaced of Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA (National Rifle Association), repeatedly bungling attempts at shooting an elephant in Africa. It is both horrifying and laughably buffoonish all at the same time. Surrounded by guides, he is shown an elephant to shoot from fairly close range. He hits the elephant in the ear, and it goes down. When they get to it, the elephant is still alive making rattling sounds. The guide stands next to the elephant and physically touches the spot that Wayne should shoot to end the animal’s life. Wayne, of course, misses. The guide asks Wayne if he is capable of doing it. The bungler says yes and then misses again. And then again. So, the guide has to take over because Wayne couldn’t hit the side of a barn from 5 feet away. I should also mention that Wayne and his wife seem to be dressed in new Halloween safari outfits in order to pretend to look the part. At another point, as they are walking, the guide grabs the barrel of Wayne’s gun and points it skyward for safety reasons because Wayne doesn’t seem too well versed in, wait for it, guns.
Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera was the husband of Frida Kahlo. He was a Mexican painter who was renown for his murals which depicted the working class. They are quite spectacular to say the least. At a certain point in his career, he went down a rabbit hole of making cubist paintings. Thankfully that didn’t last too long. I’m not sure if he got much praise for his landscapes but they are loving tributes to the beauty of his home country. Plus, he was visually wild looking himself.
O'Keefe
Another great American painter was O’Keefe. I loved doing this drawing because she resembles my grandmother. The irish influence. Her life is the stuff of art fantasy. Discovered young. Then instant success in New York City but the fantasy part was her moving to New Mexico and living in the midst of incredible beauty in her own adobe studio under the stars. The environment became her work and she morphed back into the environment. Plus, the environment had a cool name, Ghost Ranch. Lastly, she did the thing I really desire. She developed an outfit to wear each day. A look. Most days I wear my blue zip up coveralls, but it pales in comparison to her groovy outfit.
Andrew Wyeth
Another of America's greatest painters ever was Andrew Wyeth. There is a brilliant documentary about his life on PBS. It’s part of their American Masters series, titled, Wyeth. You can watch it on Amazon Prime too. After seeing this, I wouldn’t blame any artist putting down their brushes for a long hiatus. You’ll be left dumbstruck that one person could be so astoundingly prodigious for so many decades. Watching it made me feel wonderfully insignificant. So, I did this little Mad Magazine cartoon of him as a thank you.
John Singer Sargent
One of the greatest painters of all time is John Singer Sargent. Whenever I’m in a museum anywhere in the world, I always looks for the Sargents. Without fail, I usually find 10 to 12 in any given museum. I can always spot them, even from a great distance. The thing is, I had no clue what he looked like, as I’m sure most people don’t. So here he is making his debut on Instagram. Handsome bugger.
Spring
Springtime projects.
Bunny Girl
A Tommy Kane portrait is always a missed opportunity in getting proportions correct. That problem seems to be his strength.
End Of Fish
According to Wikipedia, the total number of fishing vessels in the world is now about 4.6 million. That is an awful lot of very effective ships vacuuming up every living thing for miles around their perimeters on a daily basis. About 20 to 30% of the global catch is done by illegal and unregulated fishing boats. With about 2.5 trillion fish caught globally each year, they don’t stand a chance against our efficiently. I’m not sure proving we can catch everything in the ocean is anything to celebrate. Greenpeace estimates that every year, more than 640,000 tons of nets, lines, pots and traps used in commercial fishing are dumped and discarded in the sea. 6% of all nets used, 9% of all traps and 29% of all longlines (fishing lines that are several miles long) remain as physical pollution dumped at sea. It took me a while to figure out that mankind is trying to replace all the living creatures of the ocean with plastic trash. Victory will soon be at hand. I wonder what kind of fish will be the last one standing.
