Skip to main content


It seems what really makes a nice neighborhood, in my opinion, would be that there are trees lining the way to create shade (aside of course the fact that the houses should be pleasant to look at). The street of my childhood had trees, and though it hid the sky it brought beauty and life and shelter when the heat came. Now when I go back it seems as though more and more trees have gone missing. When I ask why I get responses of the aging neighborhood not wanting to maintain the trees, complaints of having to clean up leafs, and the lie that it was dying (the stumps left behind show that that was never the truth).

The whole town that my folks live in seems to be going through this phase of cutting down trees. I think that it might be a new marketing technique for the tree trimming businesses, but that is only an assumption. My father and I have long conversations on how to improve the image of the city, but it seems as though it has already fallen to far into the strip mall problem with rocks and weeds as landscaping. Billboards run rampant.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New Birth.

Hey. C'est moi.  It has been a few years. Since I last discussed into the void here I attended grad school for architecture at the University of Washington, finished the Master's program by the skin of my teeth, graduated into a global pandemic (I would not recommend this), gave away most of my worldly possessions, and am now flâneur-ing around Europe on the slim budget of my life savings. Allow me to reintroduce myself : I am the artist, Gaston. My interests include ; architecture, sustainability, art, vintage fashions, antiques, and flâneries. All while consuming massive quantities of tea. “I know where I'm from, but I don't know where I'm going.” I recently heard this line at a video playing at the Tate Museum in Liverpool, and it rang strong in me. In the film Casablanca, when Rick is questioned on his nationality he responds that his is a “drunkard,” insinuating that he has renounced his American nationality for that of someone who owns and runs a bar. From ...
1 comment
Read more

Windy Coffee. [part 1]

Fulya was looking at my sketchbook the other day and remarked that she liked the random sketch that I had made of some girl that I saw walking along with a little plastic cup of coffee during the wind storm a few weeks past. As I still have some small pieces of very good watercolor paper [that I had sized to be used for some small frames I had collected but did not have anything to put in them yet], I thought that perhaps I could transfer a little sketch to a little piece of paper to play with techniques. Namely the layering of water colors. Something that I know I have been working on a lot, but practice makes perfect. I also wanted to see how using my new mechanical pencil filled with blue graphite would work in hiding my lines as I initially worked. I forgot to take a picture of the transition between not having the girl inked at all to inking her and starting the background. I was having a hell of a time trying to figure out a setting in which to put her. At first I was th...
Post a Comment
Read more
French underworld tattoos at the turn of the century. The man sports a tattooed mustache intended to foil the prohibition of facial hair in the Foreign Legion. The World of Tattoo by Maarten Hesselt van Dinter. I can only dream of being anywhere near that combination of badass and crazy. Though at that point the Foreign Legion was probably still the best place for criminals to get their record cleaned so perhaps he is as well quite legitimately scary upon all of that. I find myself flipping back to this page time and time again to romanticize the French underground from around 1900. Give him an accordion, a beret, and some braces. Prostitutes who could easily kill you if you ever come up short and tattoo the names of their ‘actual’ lovers between their breasts, close to their heart. Tattoo ‘Je mother fucking t’aime’ in a tattoo cursive along my collar bones.
Post a Comment
Read more