Larry Winget Dares Me to Be Hated

May 23, 2011

Worked over the weekend on the Orme aerial map illustration and on two different Mickey Free sequences. One on Mickey's ride into Los Muertos (town of the dead). Found some good reference out of my sketchbooks, this one from September of 2006:

This was inspired by the famous Ansel Adams photo of "Crosses, Las Trampas" with the glowing crosses.

The "2,000 drawing" notation is a reference to my quest to do 10,000 bad drawings (started on November 12, 2005, creating six bad drawings a day, I finished on September 1, 2009)

As you can see, I mull these sequences for a very long time (five years, so far!). Here is another page of sketches from April of 2009, of the same sequence, inspired by a scene from the movie "The Wonderful Country" (1959), starring Robert Mitchum.

Found an unfinished wash attempting to capture this scene in my M file. On Sunday I tried to capture some of the integrity in these sketches. Of course, it's not finished, but. . .but. . .

The dust is excellent, but there is a looseness in the sketches of the wall that's hard to recapture. Probably because I wasn't trying to prove anything in the sketches and I'm trying VERY HARD to recapture the effects for the final. This is such a kiss of death for me. I guess I would compare it to why most musicians love to jam but they don't like the sterile starkness of the studio. Two different skills.

As artists we're looking for happy accidents, and you rarely find them when you are trying to control something.

Kathy and I had dinner on Saturday night with Larry and Rose Mary Winget. Always inspiring to hang with them. Larry is a Western Americana original. No B.S. As we traded stories of our adventures out west, he reminded me of something I knew when I was on the radio, but have forgotten in the last 12 years of publishing a magazine (actually, I think it was beaten out of me—ha!).

The premise is: dare to be hated. I knew this, but have forgotten it. Here's Larry's take on it:

"You can't have rabid fans without rabid enemies. And at the end of the day, you feel better about yourself. It can be a scary thing to take a stand and listen to the criticism and watch fans go away but there are always more to take their place and when they show up, they are getting the real deal."

—Larry Winget