Three of my paintings are currently on display at D-Structure in the Lower Haight in San Francisco — two acrylic paintings (Figure on Canvas and Teal Nude) and one watercolor (Nude on a Draped Pedestal).

All three of these pieces are available for purchase, so if you happen to be in San Francisco over the next two months and you’d like to own one of these, now’s your chance. Click on this link for prices and directions to the store.

I spent a lot of time this year trying to figure things out about my art. Along the way, I came across a few books that spoke, if sometimes only indirectly, to the difficulties and confusion and emotional chaos of a struggling artist. These aren’t typical “artist books,” and in fact some aren’t about art at all. They don’t provide any specific advice on how to be an artist. Just meditations on how to feel about it.

For any other insecure artists that may be reading this, I submit to you this short list of required reading.

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
A sprawling ensemble novel about lots of different things, if you want it to be. Some may identify with it as an immigrant story, some as a novel about class tension in America. I identify with it as a story about being young and insecure, and facing the pressures that stop us from doing what we were really meant to do. There are no artists in this novel, but not for lack of art. Whether any of the characters ever decide to do the thing they love isn’t for us to say. But they aren’t alone in their struggles.

Confections of a Closet Master Baker by Gesine Bullock-Prado
The story of an ex-Hollywood executive turned Vermont-based small business owner and master baker. An inspiring success story of a person doing her own art on her own terms (in this case, the art of delicious cakes and pastries). Along the way, we get accounts of the frustrations of working in Hollywood (always cathartic), and, as an added bonus, each chapter concludes with a recipe for one of the many titular confections.

Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton (audio book version)
Like the previous book, this is also a story of an artist’s rebirth from the ashes of a former life in Hollywood. Unlike the previous book, however, this deals much more viscerally with the painful effect of years of constant failure, and questions of insecurity and self-doubt as the author tries, again and again, to do the thing he loves. It’s one of the most touching and honest books ever written about an artist’s vulnerability. Yes, there’s Star Trek in it, but it’s not a book about Wesley Crusher. It’s about an artist’s personal demons, public failures, and eventual rebirth doing the thing he was probably meant to do all along.

There’s an article up right now on IndieGames.com articulating twenty-four Indie Game Design Dos and Don’ts, which was then picked up at Cartoon Brew as good advice for independent animators.

The two points that Cartoon Brew excerpted (and indeed almost all of the list) speak to something I’ve believed for a long time: the idea that as an indie, you can afford to take more risks because there isn’t $150 million on the line if you fail (unlike if you were doing a big budget film at a studio), and the ability to fail without huge consequences means you have the freedom to do what big studios can’t, so you should take advantage of that.

But I’m surprised no one is talking about this one, even more relevant to animation, in fact much more relevant than it is to video games:

12. Grow up.
Chances are you’re not a fucking kid anymore, so if you feel like making a more adult game, do so. When you’re indie you don’t have to answer to anyone, so stop designing games like you have to have to pass ESRB. I’m not saying everyone should make porn games, but why do all video games seem to have immature themes? People aren’t stupid: stop treating them like they are. Speak through your work like you would to your friends, design for yourself and don’t censor your ideas.

I feel like I’m beating a dead horse here, but this is always my number one complaint about animated films. The medium can be used to make anything, and yet so often it always comes back to family entertainment or children’s films. This is, of course, this is the safe move. It’s what everyone knows will make money. And I do understand, the studios have a need to make a profit, especially since these movies are not cheap to make, so I don’t begrudge the big studios for making what the market wants.

Independents, on the other hand, aren’t trapped by their price tag the way big studios are. So let’s please use that to our advantage and take some risks, including more animated films in different genres. Let’s please let some of them be sophisticated adult stories like the best of our live action films are. And let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that stories with real people instead of talking mice don’t “take advantage of the medium” and are automatically better suited for live action. Animation, just by being animation, already takes advantage of the medium even before we start to justify its use with things like the twelve principles.

All the best stories being made right now are done in moving photographs. All I’d like is to see them in moving illustrations.

P.S. — I understand, of course, that making a feature-length animated film as an independent is a tall order; in fact, from first-hand experience I know what an incredible undertaking it can be. I know I’m asking a lot, here. And I know there won’t be any flood of feature-length independent animated films, in any genre, coming out anytime soon. But I can still want it anyway, can’t I?

P.P.S. — Two movies from the last few years obviously already did this: Persepolis and Waltz With Bashir. These are incredible films and exactly what the medium needs. However. Let’s diversify a little bit. We don’t want the only alternative to children’s entertainment to be weighty political memoirs.

Not the first new painting of 2010, since I actually painted it in December, but the first newly posted painting. This was a Christmas gift to my brother, last seen frolicking on the surface of the moon in Oregon. Pictured above.

Also, timelapse video of said painting, for those who, in these economic times, can’t afford to go to the moon themselves, you can live vicariously through the magic of streaming web video.

It’s a new year, and a new design. Happy 2010 everyone!

This redesign is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, now. The old site may have sufficed, originally, as a humble gallery to display my work, but as my interests diverged I needed to expand, and ended up creating a whole different site specifically for my portfolio work, leaving this site to house my growing body of (so-called) fine art. Well, very quickly that, too, outgrew the original site. A change was in order.

The site now features a Wordpress-powered blog for sketches and news updates, a new store page with prints and original art for sale, and a paintings section with the capacity for many more galleries than before, including entire series of works that previously had no proper home. This also, of course, allows for the expansion of paintings and series not yet painted, so no longer is my work limited by where to put it on the Internet.

Hopefully, this means I’ll be getting work online sooner and more often, and best of all would be if this encouraged me to make more art in general. That would be convenient, because that was my plan for 2010 all along.