passionate about

I'll post today's lunchtime moleskine sketch tomorrow, because I left my sketchbook up at the studio tonight. oooopth.

i had two really good "bookends" to my day happen in my office today.

this morning, really early, the guys i meet with on tuesday morning (TGIMWoTM) met inside my office since it was drizzling. we talked passionately about passion. what our passions were. our wives' and friends' passions. what gets in the way of doing what we really want to do. or that which God wants us to do. chris helped me shed light on a personal discovery, personal change, in which i am eschewing large paintings in favor of creating these smaller journal-sketches as my primary medium. even if it's (especially since it's) not as marketable or commodifiable. i've noticed you guys out there, both in real life and in blog life, commenting on and interacting with the sketches in a way that you never, ever did with the huge (cumbersome, frustrating, expensive) paintings. chris understood this right away. i didn't. as a detached observer, he could see that my [acrylic] paintings, both in scale and content and context, were much more impersonal when contrasted to the smaller, hand-held (or flatbed scannable) journal sketches. i guess he noticed how they 'fit' me in a way the paintings never did. i didn't really 'get' that until this morning.

the evening, i was able to talk about graphic design as a career and a little about the print production process to a class of grad students from Incarnate Word University who came by the studios. my spring intern steven was there to assist and did a good job. talking to student groups is something i'm passionate about, but it's like reciting poetry or playing an acoustic gig at a restaurant*: all of those get-up-in-front-of-people things leave me very ambivalent. stage fright mixed with the compulsion to fight the stage fears and go on and get up there and share. the class went very well, i think, once i got over myself. i think the astute ones came away with something in the process as well.

i hope your lent is going well and that you are finding yourself a few steps closer to Christ and his cross.

*(which, by the way, jeff deverter and i did earlier this month, but i don't think i blogged about it)