It Was Twenty Years Ago Today...Again

One year ago today I had a similar  Sgt. Pepper inspired title on my blog post, noting the anniversary of the start of my notorious Fourth of July woodcut project.  Today is the anniversary of the day I finished it.  A lot of people thought I was a bit crazy for attempting it (including my print professor at the time), and my students (college and local woodcuts) often react with amazement that I completed the 366 prints in 366 days, as they often struggle to get one block done in 2 weeks.  But, as I regularly point out, taking on such a huge task probably advanced me 10 years as a woodcutter, forcing me to find new solutions to that 5" x 8" composition every day, not to mention the challenge of depicting so many different textures and objects.  My bound photocopy version is practically a handbook for beginner woodcutters.  The above photo shows the most recent display of the whole set, while all the individual images can be seen here.


One of my classmates from those days was a painter named John Lustig, who was an influence on the series, in that our whole first year there (the year before I started my series) he worked on a set of four large paintings.  From that I got the idea that I didn't have to just work on projects that would be finished when the semester ended.  The saints would also span multiple semesters, and it was all good practice for when I was done with school and had to motivate myself to get work done.  John had a tradition in those days of working in his studio on New Year's Eve- he liked the idea of starting the new year working on art.  Me, if I'm working on anything on New Years's, it's probably trying to get my Christmas cards done and out in the mail, but thanks to my big series, July 4th is kind of an art spiritual holiday for me.  We had a lot of rain today, spun off of Hurricane Arthur (which luckily passed well off the Jersey Shore) making a good day to stay indoors.  I'd like to get going on something significant soon, and as I was telling Molly the other day, the most logical choice is to get back to the boardwalk series.

I had a boardwalk block in progress back in the fall of 2012 when Hurricane Sandy showed up, and in some ways we are still all trying to recover from that.  At the time I was working on a general boardwalk daytime scene, to go along with the general night time scene I had done a few years before.  This was a little different in that it was set specifically at Asbury Park's boardwalk, although there won't be anything (other than some iconic architecture) that couldn't be found on any other New Jersey boardwalk.  I had worked out general composition by that fall, and fixed some details as recently as December 2012, but haven't touched it since.  What it needs now is figures.  So, stuck indoors for most of the day, I went through some accumulated material I had- photos from publications, written notes, and figure sketches done when I had models in the Studio for other projects, like the rough one below of a girl putting on sun screen.

Nothing was decided today, much less drawn, but it was good to get a reminder of what I have to work with, and what kind of references I will need to find.  I'm thinking the best time to research and get sketches is probably during the summer, when everyone there is dressed for the experience.