002. Making Stuff / Gonzo Nature
February Recap
Hello, again! Let me start by saying I apologize in advance for the typos and poor grammar. I type as I think. It is what is, ya know?
The biggest news this month? I destroyed like twelve eight-year-olds at laser tag. High score winner. Domination. Blue team wins.
I know February isn’t over and I should try to wait until the actual end of the month to send this out, but I’m bored as hell and have some time to kill before getting groceries and basketball practice so this post is coming early.
Let’s get into our main topic…
Northeast Ohio Nature.
Like most young white dudes in the early 2000’s, I found myself drawn to a few stereotypical things… I loved punk and metal, the movie Fight Club, and Hunter S. Thompson. More importantly, I loved the art of Ralph Steadman and the idea of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. I wanted to scribble nasty drawings of people! For someone who never felt like they could draw that well, I could see myself in Steadman’s splattery scrawl. Little did I know just how nuanced and brilliant each mark he made was. I bought Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on DVD (the Criterion edition) just because of Steadman’s art. I eventually found his art book (the first art book I ever bought!) and I was hooked. I mainlined ink, splatter, and gonzo journalism. Traveling, getting into trouble, documenting it through writing and art… I knew right then what I wanted to be when I grew up. (Minus the drugs… which, I know, you kind of need for the Thompson/Steadman concept to work…)
Illustration by Ralph Steadman.
Cut to: My senior year of high school, Pre-Cal class. Our teacher was out sick and we had a substitute—a young guy named Matt Stansberry. I recognized him as a regular at the local metal shows my band played and his band played. He was fresh out of college and I was about to graduate high school. We hit it off immediately. I’d go to his apartment after school and work on my scripts (I was also trying to make movies at the time), listen to music and watch skate videos with him during study hall, play music together, and hit the local shows.
Matt ended up moving to the East Coast and we’d reconnect here and there. He eventually ended up hiring me as a designer/videographer for the data center company he was working for. We got to travel a lot, work on corporate tech related things, and he helped me get freelance jobs for all of his fly fishing activities. When he moved back to Ohio after having his first kid he pitched me on doing a monthly nature column for a local magazine. How could I say no? He could be the Hunter S. Thompson to my Ralph Steadman. It wouldn’t be documenting drug fueled road trips to across the country, but it was hiking and fishing and getting into some trouble.
Top: Matt with steelhead in the Grand River. Bottom: Matt sneaking into a fenced off area researching an article for fishing in the urban parts of Lake Erie.
Each month (2014/2015) our articles would cover a topic about nature in North East Ohio and how looking deeper at what’s around us is important to not only our environment but our well-being. Matt had just come from beautiful Oregon (with it’s beaches, mountains, rivers, amazing fishing and hiking) we felt like we could still showcase the beauty that Ohio had to offer—you might just have to look harder, turn up a couple rocks, walk through tall grass, endure cold rainy days, risk pulling off a few ticks or find the beauty in what the trash filled water near abandoned buildings had to offer.
Each article would have a main illustration focused on the editorial content accompanied by a spot illustration of the species we were highlighting. For instance, our first article was about Birder Watchers and focused specifically on the Warbler species. We went on to cover everything from saw-whet owls, frog orgies, grasshopper sex, evil lightning bugs, nasty gulls (maybe my most popular illustration ever), deer hunting, coyotes, bats, cicadas, rattlesnakes, and more. I wasn’t splattering a gaggle of off-duty cops yucking it up in Sin City like Ralph Steadman, but I did get to draw frogs in dominatrix masks.
Above: Illustrations by David Wilson. Samples from the Northeast Ohio Nature column.
It was awesome! We were on the ground—investigating the world around us, considering it, learning about the things beneath our feet, and sharing what we had found. We hiked trails and looked for the smallest of species, studied the trees for hidden birds, pulled fish from rushing waters, met local experts who donated their time and knowledge. Each month was a new adventure and I was living a professional dream—illustration journalism.
Top to bottom: Tagging and documenting Saw-whet owls on Kelly’s island. Matt listening to the sounds of bugs mating in tall grass. Reporting statistics after hunting for rattlesnakes. Rattlesnake found. David documenting rattlesnake — photo by Matt Stansberry.
Through all our columns my love for nature intensified. But one article Matt wrote rearranged my brain. Matt brought his kid on one of our excursions to the creek (I was currently kid-less) and wrote a whole article on the importance of raising children in the creek—Clarity and Abundance in the Creeks of Lake County. It’s a beautiful article and was a guide stone for me as a parent. Me and my two girls spend every season in the creeks—looking for small wonders, floating the river, fishing for chubs, flipping rocks, throwing rocks, and getting messy.
Matt and his son looking for crayfish in the creek.
Our column had a great run and it changed my life in multiple ways. On a personal level, it brought me closer to the place I grew up and live in now. It’s easy to not explore or venture out into nature but the reward of doing so is immense. On a professional level, the nature art I was doing fueled my workload for many years to come (fishing clients, a book deal, a tarot card deal, prints, etc.) and allowed me to spend time drawing and painting things that are important to the world.
Norah swimming in the creek at Hell Hollow.
So what’s the point of writing about our little Northeast Ohio Nature column this month? We’re in a moment where everything moves at light speed—the news, entertainment, our schedules, sleep, dinners. We’re also at a time where our National Parks are being defunded and more and more of our plant is being drilled and/or destroyed for corporate interests. Doing the nature articles with Matt taught me to take time and observe, take a breath, and pay attention to the immediate things in front of me. We all know how important nature is but being immersed in it on a deeper level—writing, making art, hunting, fishing—gives great clarity at how amazing and fragile our existence is.
The nature article job also made me take time.
Lately, taking time feels like it’s taking too much time… I find ways to justify not spending time on something. There’s work to be done! The kids need my attention! If I’m not making creative output, who am I? Something important in the news happened and I have to process it! I have to remind myself to slow down and find joy in the smallest things—centipedes under the log, a frog head poking out from the water, a heron nested along the river. That patience and allowance of time translates to how I make my art as well—drawing the perfect shoe, taking time to build the background in a comic panel instead of rushing to the next panel, being deliberate with my color choices, finding joy in the happy accidents and being okay with messing up and starting over.
There’s correlation between experiencing nature and making art—an awareness to your surroundings and being open to experiencing whatever you may or may not discover. Letting go of total control and let the process take the wheel.
I also got the chance to make friends with an owl.
Matt Stansberry is a brilliant writer. I highly recommend checking out his work if you’re interested in nature, magic, arcana, or looking to deepen your understanding of our world and what might be (yes, that’s ominous). He’s also launched a new podcast, Campfire’s Edge!
Making stuff.
I’ve been working hard (above: during my kids theater practice) on our second middle grade graphic novel. I’m currently finished with layouts and moving onto tighter pencils. Then will come inks, colors, dialogue bubbles, and final lettering.
Still mailing out Pantone Postcard collages via my instagram.
I also picked up a ton of colored paper the other day (at Hollo’s Papercraft in Brunswick) and am thinking about doing a little art series. Maybe I’ll start when the weather warms up and I can get some energy from the sun. Ohio winters and the three straight months of gray really suck the life from ya…
I’ve also kept up with my sketchbooks… mostly as a way to procrastinate from doing other things.
Sharing stuff.
Tunes
I’m coming off of a death-metal high but the transition hasn’t been smooth… Converge’s Jane Doe might not be death-metal but it’s just as loud and abrasive (if not more…) and on constant play in the mini-van. Contrast that against late night jamming of Bon Iver’s Blood Bank album and one might think that I might be going through something… yeah, Ohio winter…
There are also a few singles I’m in love with that are definitely worth mentioning…
Fireball Whiskey by Angie McMahon
Waiting by Alice Boman
The Ghost on the Shore by Lord Huron
Watching
Do we all remember NOT having the freedom to watch whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted? Cable? Local stations? Antenna only stations? Friday night trips to the video store? When I was younger, at my Grandma’s house, we had severely limited options—it was mandatory Wheel of Fortune at night and soap operas during the day… OR… the only VHS she owned… The Creature From The Black Lagoon. That was my choice—the first real movie I ever remember seeing and the first movie I ever loved. Fiona and I put it on the other night and it’s still as amazing as I remember. Even Fiona liked it, although she didn’t like when the creature killed the two guys at the beginning of the movie.
Misty and I have also been watching The Pitt, HBO’s new ER drama, and I gotta say, I love it! It is a show FULL of humanity. It’s no frills, chaotic, the acting is amazing, and the character development is nuanced and well paced. The show moves and you never feel like you’ve spent an hour watching. Misty was a nurse at one point in her life, so she’s filling me in on how realistic everything feels. Highly recommend!
Reading
I’ve started two books (She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark and It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne De Marcken) and both are going great. Lately, I’ve needed really short books—novellas and short stories. Both of these are hitting the spot. She’s Always Hungry is so strange and so weird and so wonderful. It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is even stranger but I’m along for the ride.
She’s Always Hungry
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "BEST HORROR FICTION OF 2024"
From Eliza Clark comes a fierce, visionary and darkly comic story collection. Unsettling, revelatory, and laced with her signature dark humor, Eliza Clark’s debut short story collection plumbs the depths of that most basic human feeling: hunger.
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
WINNER OF THE 2024 URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE
CO-WINNER OF THE 2022 NOVEL PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARD
A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader's mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader's imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.
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