September 14, 2006 Bonus Blog
Sprinkling at dusk. Dave Daiss said today at lunch it’s the seventh wettest monsoon season on record. Well, we needed the rain and the clouds are still spectacular.

The History of My Art Studio: Part One
In the beginning there was the dining room table—and it was good. Or, it was good enough. From the age of about three (my first memory of drawing) until the year 1986 (37 years!), almost all of my artwork was created and produced on a dining room table. First at my parent’s homes in Swea City, Iowa, then in Kingman, Arizona in three different houses, the last and favorite being on legendary Ricca Drive. When I came home from school, the dining room table was where I landed. While my mother made dinner I would draw until my dad came home and if I was lucky, he would stop and say, “Pretty good, kid.” (actually, I still love to draw at the dining room table, and from time to time Kathy will kick me out saying, “You have a 1,500 foot state-of-the-art studio. Go use it!”).

When I went to the University of Arizona (1965-1970) I was miserable for the first semester because there was no dining room table in my dorm, Cochise Hall. Luckily, as a sophomore, I moved into Park Lee Apartments, where I immediately commandeered the kitchen table for art projects, much to the chagrin of every roommate I ever had.

When I got married to Kathy, the dining room table was still my domain, until we had kids. That’s when I lost my dining room studio privileges. I remember the day it happened: Deena was tiny, with a big, bald Baby Huey head, and I had to babysit her, but I was on deadline and had a New Times comic double-truck spread due the next day. Kathy was gone, so I put Deena up on the dining room table where I could sort of keep track of her and work at the same time. Well, you could have phoned this one in. She was content for about ten seconds, then casually reached out and grabbed my open jug of Pelikan black ink and dumped it over everything I was working on, including Dewey Webb’s favorite movie book which I had borrowed for art reference. The stains never came out of that table or the book (it took me two years to find a replacement for Dewey and I still have the ink stained version, filed right here next to my computer and I’m looking at the black stained edges even as I type this).

Coming next, Part Two: I graduate to a spare bedroom, but I’m still not happy.