Artist: Ellen Gormican
Twitter or Website: Neither. I like the whole, “I can find you but you can’t find me” way of living.
City: Minneapolis
Stuff She Does: Read. Covet fashion I cannot afford. Watch Masterpiece Theatre.

What do you call this?
“The Adventures of Raisin Man”

What inspired you to draw this?
Complete and utter boredom brought on by sitting in a cube for 8 hours. It’s a throwback to my days of boredom in 3rd grade. My doodling has not progressed beyond the elementary school level.

How often do you draw and/or doodle?
Never. But for Rebecca, I’d do anything.

[I'm honored!]

Categories: Simple Little Pictures
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photo by keith pille

SPRING CLEANING
I’ve been doing some preliminary spring cleaning lately. I have yet to get out into the yard due to the lack of nice days. The only truly nice day in recent memory was Easter Sunday, and that required us to take the bikes out for a ride and then sit in our chairs in the back yard while enjoying the first fire of the year. I’ve never been so happy to have a face full of smoke and ash raining down on me as I drew sketches of Freja pouting.

She hates fire. It seems like a good instinct for an animal to have – self-preservation and all – but it’s annoying the way she moves about the yard, making a show of not going near the fire but being within eyesight as she curls into a Pout Ball.

Spring cleaning… I went through all my socks and decided that I am simply not the kind of  person who wears mid-length sock. They have to be low-rise for exercise and knee-high for daily wear. I don’t want a sock that pouches somewhere around my ankle. It’s good to have this cleared up.

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Categories: Wednesday Outlook
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As the Royal Wedding Hype Machine rolls and grinds its way towards Friday, April 29th, American “news” outlets are going crazy. The way they act, they are seriously sad that we don’t have our own crumbling royal family to dote upon. The past couple of evenings, Keith and I have had Entertainment Tonight on, our default, self-torture device in the evenings as we eat dinner. Usually in the spring we have dinner out on the porch but it was a cold, rainy day and we resigned ourselves to the couch.

Every night this week so far, a “reporter” on ET has talked about the death of Princess Diana (because what better time than a wedding to get maudlin and morbid?) and called it “the saddest day in the history of Britain.” And Keith and I exchange a look, his much more pained than I. So tonight I suggested that he please provide a list of the much sadder times in British history. Considering how long its been there, there have to have been some pretty bleak days, much bleaker than the death of Diana, who was cool and all but… well, you know.

So now we have this list to provide us all with some perspective:

DAYS IN BRITAIN’S HISTORY SADDER THAN THE DAY
PRINCESS DIANA DIED

1. Death of Prince Albert, December 14, 1861: The event itself is fairly sad (he died of typhoid fever) but the especially sad part is that Queen Victoria spent the next 60 years mourning, naming everything in the country after him. True love never dies.

2. The Great Fire of London, 1666: Gigantic fire that gutted the central part of the city. Of 80,000 people living in London, 70,000 lost their homes. Candle in the wind, indeed.

3. The First Day of the Battle of Britain, July 10, 1940: Germany started bombing the crap out of London, laying waste to the city until October.

4. The London Bombings, July 7, 2005: Coordinated suicide attacks on the London public transport. Four bombs went off, killing 56 people and injuring 700.

5. Every day of World War I. Britain lost an entire generation of people. Total lost: 1,114,914 soldiers with an additional 2 million wounded. Weigh that against one woman dying in a car crash and… my heart is with all those soldiers on the battlefield.

Categories: Lists
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I’ve been experiencing a phenomenon lately in which I get interested in something because I see it in a book, movie or just a random photo and then there it is, showing up online or in fashion spreads, etc. I can’t really claim, “I was thinking about that first!” because there is a weird collective conscious, I think, among humans in which we all kind of start grooving on the same stuff at once. It’s hard to say how this happens but it’s probably that “circle of life, we’re all connected” thingy again. You just can’t escape it unless you live in a cave. And that gets lonely.

So here are some of the things I’m thinking about, a lot, and we’ll see how it plays out in the next few weeks.

PERGOLAS

I started thinking about pergolas because I love the name. I was walking along and the word popped into my head. “Pergola!” It’s one of the best words. I knew they were like arbors but I had to check what they actually look like – thus this drawing. Pergolas are popular in rich people gardens, or should I say grounds, because you can walk under them and stop to whisper about stuff – either gossip or money. In a book I found at the library (Garden Retreats by David & Jeanie Stiles) with directions for how to build a pergola, it said, “The pergola’s visual appeal is the repetition of the roof elements, which create a rhythm of light and dark as you pass under them. It’s charm lies in the fact that it appears to be a strong architectural element with classical details, yet it really serves no purpose except to show off climbing roses or clematis, and therefore might be considered a “folly” by some.” I love things that are there purely for folly, don’t you? Traditionally, pergolas are for walking under but there’s no reason you couldn’t build one over a stone patio for a lovely effect.

PINK JEANS/CIGARETTE PANTS

I hope you appreciate my handiwork with a marker here! Colored denim is definitely on the rise but the only colors I would consider would be red or pink. I just don’t go for teal jeans. I don’t even wear white jeans. But red or pink jeans are HOT. Also, if you could find them, cigarette pants in pink. What’s that? Cigarette pants are slim-cut pants made popular in the 1950s. They are longer and slimmer cut than capris. Please, do me a favor and burn your capri pants. I was in Target recently with a co-worker and there were two women there shopping the clothing and one of them said, “I told my kids to give me gift certificates for Kohl’s for my birthday because I NEED, NEED, NEED capris.” Really? Don’t you want to be a bit more dignified than that? Anyway, the best example I found online is brought to us by Roberto Cavalli – a pair of jeans that are HOT, HOT, HOT but that few of us commoners can afford. I share them anyway, although I’m not condoning the top. By the way, when I say pink I don’t mean Chadwick’s pink or Liz Claiborne pink. Not bubblegum. Think brighter.

EAMES ELEPHANT

Isn’t he cute? I saw an orange one is a photo in a book – it was in a living room, tucked on a shelf. Although you can’t tell it from the line drawing, this is done in one sheet of molded plastic. I scanned the picture from the book just because I loved how the orange elephant looked… and then two weeks later I saw it featured in a magazine. The store Design Within Reach has them in red and white. One thing that has always baffled me about Design Within Reach is its name. Clearly it’s not really “Within Reach” unless they mean just a few inches away from your fingertips and you can grasp but you won’t be able to grab hold. Everything seems expensive – expensive enough that it’s a store for the well-to-do… but couldn’t they shop at any number of design stores or get the real thing from artists? So then… who is that store for, exactly? I digress. I love this elephant, is what I’m trying to say, but I doubt I will pay $300 for one.

SWING CHAIRS

I saw a photo in the magazine Dwell, which we get at home because Keith is a member of the Walker Art Center and got it for free and which I never understand but then I’m not a Dutch designer of wooden toys living in a prefab home, in which a swinging, basket-like pod is suspended over a body of water like a creek or river and a guy is sitting in it wearing a white outfit. I can’t remember if he’s just looking out or reading a book but my first reaction was – I want to do that. I want to read a book (more on which book coming up) while swinging in a pod over a burbling brook. Is that too much to hope for? I think it captures several human longings at once – solitude, the love of water, comfort. Lady Gaga is on to something with her entrance in an egg from a few months ago. We need to retreat and be reborn sometimes. Anyway, this Swingasan chair from Pier 1 is not quite the same as the pod I saw in the photo but it comes close… It requires it’s own stand but if you are handy you could suspend it from a very strong tree in your yard. Maybe you could position a plastic pool below you to get the water effect. Anyway, again, I stumbled across this online after seeing the photo in Dwell… proving that many people in the world are thinking about pod-like swings.

THE GREAT GATSBY

The Great Gatsby is one of the all-time classics. This is my summer to reread it for about the 5th time. I think the country is going to be in a Gatsby mood this summer, maybe because a lot of us know what it feels like to lose right now, or at least feel a bit battered. Which is a good thing. We could use a time of melancholy to balance us out. There has been much talk on the Internet of the next Great Gatsby film adaptation – Baz Luhrmann, 3D, Australia – all thing that make me a bit nervous. How can we put The Great American Novel, written by a Midwesterner no less, into the hands of the man who made Moulin Rouge and loves Nicole Kidman? My suggestion is to skip all that when it comes about and get your dose this summer instead – curl up in your pod swing with the old-fashioned novel version. And, while you’re at it, try to draw the eyes on the original, iconic cover as I’ve attempted to do here. Pretty darn hard! Love that cover? Now you can wear it.

Categories: Zeitgeist
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One of my favorite things to do, when I come back from an afternoon or evening out that didn’t include Keith is to find out what he watched while I was away. I think it’s very telling of his tastes when he’s not obliged to please me. I should say, however, that he  does try to watch things he finds interesting that he believes I will find uninteresting so that I don’t miss out on something we would enjoy watching together. That’s love.

1. The Venture Brothers

2. David Lynch’s cut of Dune (its very important to him that I clarify that it was David Lynch’s cut)

3. Star Trek I – VI plus Star Trek Next Generation First Contact (His ratings: II is “fantastic,” IV and VI are “pretty good,” I has its charms but “tries too hard to be 2001,” III and V are both “unbelievably shitty.” First Contact not too bad.)

4. Stripes

5. Triumph Of the Will (Yeah, I don’t know either. When questioned about this, Keith said it’s an important historical document but that it was boring after the first few minutes)

6. Moon

7. The Final Countdown

8. George Carlin: It’s Bad For Ya

9. Duck Soup

10. Citizen Kane

11. Deadwood (I’ve seen Deadwood, this was a repeat watching)

12. Star Trek Next Generation episodes

13. Letters From Iwo Jima

14. Iron Eagle

15. Futurama

16. 2001

17. The first two X-Men movies

On deck:

HBO’s John Adams miniseries
The TV series The Prisoner, which he borrowed from a friend. Let me amend that – which he had pressed on him by a friend. This was 8 months ago. No Prisoner has yet to be watched but Keith’s feeling the pressure. What to say when the friend gets around to asking him if he enjoyed it? I maintain that watching an entire series just because someone pressed their box set on you is being too Midwestern.

Categories: Lists
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Artist: Jay Gabler (@jaygabler)
City: Minneapolis
Stuff He Does: Arts editor at the Twin Cities Daily Planet and an editor at The Tangential. For more on my various endeavors, see my Tumblr.

What do you call this?
Self-portrait.

What inspired you to draw this?
My art teacher in high school, Mr. Tebbutt, encouraged us to draw self-portraits—he was big on the basics. Also, this way you don’t need to find a photo of me to put on the blog.

How often do you draw and/or doodle?
Almost never, but now that I can do it with an expensive device (drawn on an iPad), maybe I’ll draw more often!

Categories: Simple Little Pictures
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