Sketches from blues dancing

I'm in Portland! As you may have noticed, my art output tends to decline sharply when I've got an exploded tour all over my hands and am trying to make my way cross country. But now I'm safely landed, in Gaylord's Paradise (not a slang term for Portland, in fact, but the name of my house) and I have the opportunity to Make Things again. This is exciting.

Tonight, I went to support one of my oldest friends (who I seem to inescapably keep ending up in the same cities with) at a blue dance competition she was participating in. The environment itself made me hugely uncomfortable- it was like walking into a room where heterosexuality was so thoroughly coded into the action I felt suffocated and overwhelmed by straight people being capital S Straight. The close quarters didn't help much either, of course. I mostly focused on the queer couples and scribbled in my sketchbook until my friend was done dancing.

Text reads: "Planet Queer (is very far away from planet blues dance)". My usual coping mechanism for uncomfortable spaces continues to serve me!

Back? Oh, I think yes.

It's been exactly one year and one day since last I haunted my little artistic corner of the blog world. In those 366 days, I graduated from Evergreen, spent a summer in Olympia running my screenprinting studio, drove cross country, moved to Brasil for six months, learned to speak Portuguese, trained my ass off in at an aerial school in Sao Paulo, and didn't produce nearly as much art as I did when I was in college.

I am endeavoring to change the last part of that (although I'm also coming back to the US from Brazil tomorrow, so the rest of it will change fairly drastically as well). I have a sketchbook of drawings that are just waiting to be scanned in and see the murky light of the internet, so we'll start with those.

Hi, world. It's good to be back.