JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

Next week, Maverix Studios is hosting yet ANOTHER AUCTION. After raising money for many international charities, this time the Maverix crew decided to help a charitable organization in the Bay Area community, Glide Memorial Church. The proceeds from this particular art auction will support Glide’s Children’s Creative Arts Media Center. Past Maverix Auctions have typically raised $9,000-$12,0000 and it is hoped that a donation of such a size will make a huge difference to a small local charity.

The evening will include food, drink and music and, of course, artwork from local artists will be up for bid in a silent auction, with the evening culminating in a live auction for the most sought after pieces! This is a great opportunity to get an early start on holiday shopping while supporting a wonderful organization working with and for the under served children of our fair city. The theme of the show is INSPIRE: GIFTS THAT GIVE TWICE.

I have a busy week ahead, as I try to tie up a lot of loose-ends before I head off to Australia in December, but I will absolutely make time to do a few art pieces to donate to the cause. Then I hope to pick up some artwork at the show to give to family and friends for Christmas.

Check the MAVERIX BLOG over the next week for updates on donations as they come in. The fun all goes down on Sunday December 2nd from 6PM to 10PM. I hope to see you all there!

I’m still in scanning and archiving mode. Here are some of my very rare life-drawings, done on a cold winter’s day at Tokyo’s UENO ZOO. The apes had gone inside to escape the cold, though they couldn’t escape prying eyes, as we human beings could observe them in their little shelter, from behind super-thick plexi-glass. The observation room was relatively warm and a good place to do some sketching. As other visitors came and went, I got to really study the gorilla as he sat in a very relaxed pose apparently not even noticing the crowd. Suddenly, he sprang into a classic SILVER-BACK pose and banged his fists on the glass so hard that the plexi-glass pane went BOOM!

This terrified everyone, and sent them running and yelling out into the cold, clearing the observation room, only to slowly fill up again with a new group of people who were unaware of how much jeopardy their underpants were about to be in, because over the course of about 40 minutes, I saw the gorilla pull this move about once every 7 minutes or so. After the first time, it was pretty funny to watch him affecting this “I’m not watching you guys” attitude but then, with a little tell-tale glance at the crowd (just to make sure that the observation room had filled up) he would again unload a KING KONG moment, which was guaranteed to scare the ramen-noodles out of everyone– me included.

These are some of the illustrations for an English Language text book for Japanese readers. I drew them many years ago while I was working and living in Japan.

In the early months, my income was mainly from Teaching English, so freelance illustration jobs were a welcome distraction from my limitations as an English Language teacher…. I didn’t teach at a school (if you can call what I was doing “teaching” at all) instead, I put on a tie and an ill-fitting suit (bought from a shady tailor in Bangkok) and went to teach on-site at several businesses around Tokyo (including National Electronics and Toshiba) that had conversational English classes as part of the training program for their employees. I spent a lot of time travelling around Tokyo by train, going from job to job. Using Google Earth and WikiMapia I was recently able to figure out where some of my old teaching posts were.

This was part of a long period in my life where I rarely participated in a fluent conversation. In the evenings, my students mangled my own language (under my earnest direction) and the for the rest of the day I mangled theirs, as I tried to learn Japanese. Though I was a language-teacher at night, in the mornings I was a language-student myself, attending Japanese language classes. I am sad to say that I never got very fluent, despite my very best efforts (a Japanese friend tells me that I speak Japanese like a little girl) but I managed to pick up enough “survival” Japanese to get around, order food and have limited conversations with anyone patient enough to listen to me shred the verb conjugations of their language.

Thankfully, both for me and the well-being of my English-language students, I soon found a job that I was better qualified for; working in animation (at TOEI Studios, on a Superman TV series) and so I quit being an English teacher. Though the full-time job meant that I unfortunately had to give up my morning Japanese classes, it was a relief to be able to take off the baggy suit and neck-tie and draw all day. I continued to do freelance illustration jobs, in addition to the animation work, right up until I left Japan.

Often, when I buy a big hard-cover sketchbook, I’m intimidated to even draw in it at all. Instead, I do most of my drawing on scraps of paper, and glue these into the sketchbook, using it more like a scrap book. I buy sketchbooks with the intention of drawing from life but instead I mostly fill them with doodles, things drawn from out of my head.

When it comes to drawing realism, I have always admired people I have worked with who can pull plausible images out of their minds without resorting to reference. Even when the subject matter isn’t some fantasy-land or goof-ball cartoon, I enjoy seeing a personal stylisation that informs drawings of the “real” world. I think that has made me want to be capable of the same. But I realise that part of the reason that people can draw from memory or imagination is that is that they have spent the time puting images INTO their heads first.

I can be sloppy about using reference too… Though not always out of pure laziness. I have learned that I draw better caricatures from memory than I do from looking at a photograph directly. Memory seems to record a shorthand record of a person’s dominant features and attitudes; a good place to start in doing a caricature. Seeing myself as a cartoonist rather than an artist gives me a bit more licence to exaggerate and fudge the details…

I suppose that the reason I started drawing in the first place was that it was a form of escapism. It wasn’t about representing reality but coming up with an alternative. Anyway, as much as I enjoy doodling from my imagination, I have been thinking that I need to more often feed it it with some reality; life drawing or sketching from life, or even copying images from books and magazines, is something that I need to do more of… in order to find that balance of personal style and plausiblity.