In the waning moments of the calendar, I feel like I ought to write pithy, witty, essential words that encapsulate the year that’s been and launch good vibes for the year ahead. And then I remember that social pressures and sentimentality around this time are constructed by humans. We get Read more…
Poetic notings of an afternoon in July 2021 while reading on my front porch in Colorado: A winged yellow insect appears on the page I am reading, walking northward, parallel to the epic’s spine. It pauses in the gap where the sentence soon will end, “Music erupted in the [insert Read more…
Time and again I look at something I’ve created and feel some childlike wonder that this thing before my eyes happened at all. Gratefully. Only minutes before, this space, now so colorful, textured and full of story and life, and provocations for the curious onlooker, was a blank canvas, nothing Read more…
In a separate blog post, “What Art Is Really About, Trippy & True,” I wrote about a common question of the curious who asks about an artist’s work, “What does it mean?” That blog post includes hints of where art comes from, how the meaning evolves even for the artist, Read more…
Sometimes I look at my work, my visual artwork, and think, “Someone is going to wonder where this came from.” The answer generally is, “I don’t know.” Not satisfying, I know. When we look at work and get curious about what it “means,” and want to know what the artist Read more…
Many writers or otherwise creative, artful beings know the story below well, I dare say. Here is an abridged version of “Christmas poem to a man in jail” by Charles Bukowski. hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if Read more…
Below is a noteworthy quote by Debbie Millman, writer, artist, designer and host of the renowned podcast Design Matters, on what she’s learned about making decisions in moments of change. These comments came in conversation with her friend, and fellow artist and illustrator, Lisa Congdon on the Lisa Congdon Sessions Read more…
I’ve never been a comic book, sci-fi, Marvel superheroes kind of guy. I was drawn to nonfiction stories more than fiction, in general, and more than fantastic space-alien types of fiction especially. But in the past couple years, I’ve become aware of my own superpowers. This awareness has helped me Read more…
Notes from an evening walk with my wife on my birthday’s eve, 2021: Archipelago of clouds infused with hues of lavender and pink, something feeling more refined and elevated than mere references to cotton candy in the evening sky, a chain of islands ephemeral and conjuring the Pacific, serene Read more…
It’s not news to me that I think too much. Do you? If so, do you not already know that? Yeah. All of us who think too much know it, and we think about it. Too much. I’d like to think that my thinking over time is not so much Read more…
I’m still buzzing with a WTF-just-happened creative exuberance the morning after. Five hours last night, including dinner break with my family. Seventy-six (76) iconographic works, made from 5:36 p.m. to 10:36 p.m., an exactitude that was as unplanned as every other aspect of this singular evening of creative explosion. I Read more…
My work tends not to be overtly political. I say “overtly” because it’s said, and I think it seems reasonable to say, that everything is political. Every expression of ourselves is read as something in the mind of someone else. Maybe now more than ever. Our clothes, our words, our Read more…
In Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers,” she writes: “Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone longing to be ground down, to be part again of something livelier? Who can imagine in what heaviness the rivers remember Read more…
The work I posted a while back about emerging from a yearlong hiatus continues to stack up and evolve. I have posted some on Instagram, a tool I do not use much these days. So much is lost in viewing these works at such a small size on a phone Read more…
Emerging From Hiatus, New Artwork // I’ve been making new work after nearly a year of creative hiatus from the Humanitou podcast, art making, blogging, poetry and the Humanitou newsletter. With this new visual artwork, I’m speaking more to current events, to what exhaustingly feels like years of brinkmanship with Read more…
“The Fish,” a poem, comes from my forthcoming chapbook, San Agustinillo. I wrote it in the winter of 2020 before a pandemic sent the world into upheaval and my sons came home from school to stay. I had been working steadily on the chapbook, then set it aside. I’m now Read more…
When I recently talked with artist and illustrator Rukmini Poddar for the Humanitou Podcast, one of the many things we talked about was the creative value in producing quantity as a means of getting to quality. I’ve struggled with this idea in years past, at least in certain areas of Read more…
When the artist Taylor Spence, a.k.a. Savannalore, recently joined me for the Humanitou Podcast, we talked about conformity and breaking free (among other things). We talked about paths to being our true, full selves. That’s a topic that comes up over and over, in some form or another, with many Read more…
Circles have been regarded and created as spiritually significant for several hundred years, at least. They especially are connected to Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhists create mandalas. Mandala, in Sanskrit, means circle. Zen Buddhists create ensō. Ensō, in Japanese, means “circle form.” In the first line of the foreword written by John Read more…
The path of learning and growing as a creative being is as much one of unlearning as anything. Or as Julia Cameron describes it, recovery of who we really are. In the process, we get to shed the answers and definitions we were handed and come to believe as true. Read more…