Another new piece! This one is larger than the others at 16″x20″, the biggest I’ve worked with watercolor. I had a strong mental image for this and it came out kind of precise because of that. I like it but I want to work more spontaneity into my watercolor work, more pretty bleeds, textures, all the things that make watercolors themselves.
Enmity in the Sanctum of the Swelling Sun // 2025 // watercolor and gouache ๐
Solid pseudopapillary neoplasm by Omid Savari, M.D.
โNovels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no; with a few exceptionsโฆ literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenesโฆ But of all this daily drama of the body there is no recordโฆ To look at these things squarely in the fact would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.โ
Woolf, On Being Ill
Authorโs note: I wrote this because a lot of people reach out to me on social media to ask about my experience having a Whipple. They are either getting one or supporting a loved one who needs to undergo the procedure. Despite this procedure being pretty rare, this request for information happens fairly frequently. I wanted to share my experience and give people an in-depth view of having this procedure and the recovery process while also offering some encouragement. If youโre wondering why this is in second person, its because I initially started writing this in response to someone asking what they could expect with the Whipple. But then I started talking to my past self, a different self than the one writing this paragraph. I hope you find it helpful, whoever you are, and good luck.
Recovering from surgery again, though this time not anywhere near as intense as my Whipple. Still, its been three weeks and I’m just getting my feet under me. I have a longform piece of writing I’m going to share documenting my experience with the Whipple soon that I’ve been working on the past month.
For now, here’s a little collection of art work from the past few months! Some intensive pieces at the top which are more recent and some experiments further below from several months ago.
The Fullness Of Emptying All Thy Faithful Plenitude, watercolor and gouache
Ramulose, watercolor and gouache
Sunprints my partner, Tess and I madeMarbling experiments
I used to do this on an older blog of mine, collect a bunch screenshots and pages and art I find then sort it and let it coalescence into something thematic. This post is to archive some of those older collections of snippets.
Today is my 35th birthday and I’m thinking about my body. How’s it endured for me and carried all manner of pain, but also how often I’ve ignored it. Taken it’s annoying but manageable chronic illnesses for granted. 35 is an age, like many before it, that I didn’t think I’d ever reach.
Well, let me tell you this was a wild, life-altering year: My partner traveled over 1000 miles to live with me. I found out I had a low-grade cancerous pancreatic tumor and had a Whipple, one of the most complex abdominal surgeries (period!) and the most invasive surgeries I’ve had in my life at the start of October. I’m still in recovery and will be for the next year before I’m normal-normal. In March, I started working full-time at Wizards of the Coast and became a Visual Designer for Magic: The Gathering. A little out of order but whatever. And that isn’t even the half of it but thats all I’ll share for now.
Here’s some more of my work that released this latter half of the year!
Honored to be in Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Artedited by Indrapramit Das, a fantastic speculative author who I’ve admired for a long time. The story I have in this collection is called No Future But Infinity Itself which follows a guardian-artist and his wife in a far future world where he must make mass-scale art to dissuade a remnant humanity from unearthing its past mistakes. The book copy:
In this volume from the Twelve Tomorrows series, Deep Dream, ten writers imagine the different ways in which art forms might evolve, devolve, shift, and transform in the decades and centuries to come. They consider how the rapid progress of technology will interact with different mediums of art or give rise to new ones, and what the lives and inner worlds of different kinds of artists might look like in the future as they adapt to rapidly shifting eras amidst anthropogenic global threats like climate change and fascism.
Also astounded that my story The Blade and the Bloodwright was chosen for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024edited by Hugh Howey, John Joseph Adams! I’ve coveted being in one of these collections and it feels good for one of my favorite stories to be acknowledged by these editors. Still amazed by this lol. And the back copy:
โThese are dangerous stories. The kind that warp reality and threaten to change the worldโ warns guest editor Hugh Howey in his introduction. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 promises a treasure trove of audacious characters, daring worldbuilding, and twisted realties. A sibling duo of supernatural hitmen. A traveling spellbreaker and his trusty alligator mount. Superheroes registering for work. Sentient spaceships with an AI-human interface grow up together with their human pilots. From a Korean folk-tale retelling about the goddess of shamans, to a car, resurrected from obsolescence via automancy, for a road trip from California to Maine, these are stories that, for Howey, โchallenged my worldview, that made me exercise new mental muscles, and that brought me to tears.โ
An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific brings together fifty writers and artists from across Moananuiฤkea working in myriad genres across media, ranging from oral narratives and traditional wonder tales to creative writing as well as visual artwork and scholarly essays. Collectively, this anthology features the fantastic as present-day Indigenous Pacific world-building that looks to the past in creating alternative futures, and in so doing reimagines relationships between peoples, environments, deities, nonhuman relatives, history, dreams, and storytelling.
Wonder is activated by curiosity, humility in the face of mystery, and engagement with possibilities. We see wonder and the fantastic as general modes of expression that are not confined to realism. As such, the fantastic encompasses fantasy, science fiction, magic realism, fabulation, horror, fairy tale, utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction. We include Black, feminist, and queer futurisms, Indigenous wonderworks, Hawaiian moสปolelo kamahaสปo and moสปolelo ฤiwaiwa, Sฤmoan fฤgogo, and other non-mimetic genres from specific cultures, because we recognize that their refusal to adopt restrictive Euro-American definitions of reality is what inspires and enables the fantastic to flourish.
As artistic, intellectual, and culturally based expressions that encode and embody Indigenous knowledge, the multimodal moสปolelo in this collection upend monolithic, often exoticizing, and demeaning stereotypes of the Pacific and situate themselves in conversation with critical understandings of the global fantastic, Indigenous futurities, social justice, and decolonial and activist storytelling. In this collection, Oceanic ideas and images surround and connect to Hawaiสปi, which is for the three coeditors, a piko (center); at the same time, navigating both juxtaposition and association, the collection seeks to articulate pilina (relationships) across genres, locations, time, and media and to celebrate the multiplicity and relationality of the fantastic in Oceania.
Art by A.C. Esguerra
The third annual Minicomic Awards virtual ceremony will be held TODAY 3/14 at 3pm PST where FIVE winners will split our $3700 PRIZE POOL! Leslie and I have organized this the past 2 years and we’re excited to fold this into the Co-op so it has more support and longevity. Come celebrate minicomics with us!
I have a short story in Dark Matter INK’s 2024 anthology THE OFF-SEASON ed. by Marissa van Uden & featuring 25 brand-new tales of mysticism, psychedelia, outsiders, obsessions, weird sea life, and more! Pre-orders are available.
The Cartoonist Cooperative turned 1 at the end of February! Here’s an adorable little image of just a small portion of our 800+ (!!!) members to celebrate!
Death in the Mouth Vol 2 is about 75% completed and I’m sending out the first round of backer rewards next week! Here’s the shirts I made for it, very pleased with how they turned out!
And a little bit of paper clay sculpting! I had this idea to make frames but we’ll see how they hold up once I hang them with the thin chains I have in mind…
trust not the eye; make of your meat an imaging device 