Some charcoals I did back in Florida

I've done a lot of art throughout the years. Though I went to college for history, I had several people strongly suggest I go to art school instead. One of them was my dad, in an inversion of the trope. "Son, you're an artist, I'm an artist, and it's time for you to go on to the family business." "But I wanna measure the preponderance of clay tobacco pipes in sediment to establish population figures in colonial Maryland instead, Daddy!" So I did. But I never stopped being good at art, and I've sold pieces for real cash over the years.

Not gonna lie, I'm kinda hoping to do the same on here. Some of my more intricate originals are fairly expensive, because I'm not parting with something that literally took me a month to draw for ten bucks. I doubt there's a huge market for art in that price range these days, but in those instances I'm perfectly willing to sell high-quality prints for closer to ten bucks (depends on what exact kind of print one would want; prints themselves can also get intricate these days). I guess it all depends on the demand I find out there; if I find a lot of you buying art from me, I'll come up with a more standardized price list.

So what's there to know about my artistic proclivities? I'm best at drawing. I've done painting before, but I wouldn't dare sell any of my paintings because they're... passable, but not inspired. I can do any drawing medium professionally, but my favorite media are mechanical pencils (not a popular choice, but I've gotten good at drawing with precision with these bad boys), colored pencils (your bog-standard Crayolas are the best, I have Prismacolors but find them wanting), and charcoals. I really like drawing cityscapes and have done that since I was little, but I've consciously tried to branch out from there to draw other things. My college studies got me drawing a lot of maps of the various Mongol khanates, at which point I discovered I really liked doing that, and was really good at making functional yet artistic maps, so I got into cartography. There will be plenty more about that later.

But today, I'm showing off some charcoals I did when I lived in Florida two years ago. I went out to Tampa for a girl, and she was lovely, but she was middle class. It was with her that I realized that my class treason wasn't a theoretical exercise: I had to make a choice, either to rededicate myself to middle class values for her sake, or to rededicate myself to class treason for the sake of the working class. I chose the latter, broke up with her, and moved to Nevada. But while I was in Tampa, I took full advantage of the scenery. She lived right next to a bird sanctuary on the Anclote River, and sometimes our broke asses would walk along there for a date. Sometimes she'd have me bring my art supplies so she could watch me draw.

The cool thing about charcoals is that it's almost meant to be quick, dirty, and impressionistic. Charcoals are not exact, and cannot be made so. You throw your emotions onto a piece of paper, and it almost can't take longer than twenty minutes to make, assuming it's a standard-sized piece of paper. My art professor back in college, Mr. Zaruba, taught me about how to use white charcoal and colored paper to make charcoals more vivid, and I took that lesson to heart here. The little rolled-up paper cones you can buy at Michael's can make gradients out of black charcoal rather easily (although cheap paper towels are just as good at this, or even in a pinch, your fingers), but white charcoal adds the points of light. White charcoal is the sun, the glistening vanguard of the waves, the imprint of bird tracks in the sand. The background you choose is the predominating color of the piece against which the black and white is set off. In a digital age I suppose I could go in and render these backgrounds to be different colors, but something about being only able to choose one seems more honest somehow. The palm tree silhouetted against the sunset is swathed in soft pink clouds reflected in the sea and the sand, so I chose pink for that. The vernal forest below was a palette of greens, so I went with that. The jetty on a fog-swaddled day was bleached white, so I chose white paper. The blue sky and turquoise sea dominated the frame in the first picture here, so the background was blue. Each of these pictures had other colors, but I chose to emphasize only one.

That part of my life is done and over, but every time I go to Florida, I don't regret it. Even now, thinking back to the Anclote River makes me happy. It's a completely different place from most of America, a literal rainforest filled with exotic creatures. The whippoorwills's strange cries, the turtles and crabs you only see on nature documentaries, the musty mangrove swamps, the poisoned green oranges you must never ever touch, let alone eat... words can't do it justice. America's other west coast must be seen to be believed. I hope some of this remarkable biome survives the climate catastrophe, and that future generations can enjoy a place like this too.