Recent Gig Recaps

The Fairbanks Library Foundation's "Alaska Author Series" went absolutely wonderful: a full room with some literary luminaries amongst the crowd. I actually got a little choked up while dedicating the talk to the memory of my reference librarian mother, and reminiscing about the convoluted adventure my cartoon life has been leading up to now. Nevertheless there was much laughter and I did manage to maintain a pace that pulled off over a hundred slides in forty minutes, followed by questions and a demo and signing some books too.

As evidenced by the super-soaker sweaty tshirt shot while at the demo table, I was really nervous about this talk. Since I'm away from my comfort zone of a  campus classroom it reminds e how much I empathize with students in the my art classes who are nervous about not only putting their pieces up on the studio wall for critique and review, but oftentimes just the simple act of having to do it in front of agroup of people can be terrifying. In fact my energetic antics are probably nothing more than one long sustained panic attack."I'm a visual artist not a performing one!"

Seems like as of late been sitting & sketching at a lotta tables for so many venues, and that includes several gigs for the university, the college, and the department; I manned tables at three campus events  like for orientation, for a student job fair (hiring models) and  a celebration of the second week back for the fall semester. As it happened, I had just introduced a Life Drawing class to the concepts of Urban Sketching, and so half of the event was spent on the other side of the proverbial easel with a posse of aspiring talents, sketching around and about the crowds.

Faculty show 2026 opening: Just like last year's annual fall semester faculty show, this current one is also held over, so it'll be up for another few weeks (September 24th it'll come down). On display now I have another experimental printed canvas of a panel (that'll be posted about later on this year here), along with a couple other "best of the year" Nuggets that still haven't been printed or posted yet. But a nice 18x24" color poster of "Seasons" is up along with a framed print of "Fir Baby" are included in the suite.

This truly is an amazing assemblage of outstanding artistic ability + truly impressive academic instructors of all their respective mediums. It's a distinct honor to show alongside the work of my peers who all continue to inspire me on both sides of the easels after all these years, and this is the strongest faculty I've yet to see in this department.