My first Athens, OH iPad drawing of a local landmark. Unfolding re-entry story to follow. Sketch Club app, Apple Pencil, iColorama, and an iPad Pro.
40 Court St.
See an accompanying video…it’s a kind of illustration of “value,” check it out:
5 minutes by car to OU, 2 Bedroom, 1.5 bath, Wi-Fi; Athens, OH. July/August 2023
5 minutes by car to OU, 2 Bedroom, 1.5 bath, Wi-Fi, Athens, Ohio
Photo on the wall in the men’s room at Little Fish Brewing Co., Athens, OH
The Pawpaw Pad: Athens, OH. Late June/early July 2023
The Pawpaw Pad: 5 miles from Athens & Hiking Spots
Ohio University
249 Franklinton/Downtown Condo: Columbus OH. June 2023
249 Franklinton/Downtown Condo
Deeptones, Columbus Art Festival
Serene Cozy Couples Getaway: Milton, DE Mid-April to mid-May 2023
iPad art
Spring unfolds in Milton, DE mid-April to mid-May
Cozy house on friendly, beautiful Baltimore block: Baltimore, MD Mid-February 2023
iPad art
Cool house a few doors away, used to be a church.
Emergence, Art Exhibit, Contemporary and Humanistic Artists Association (CHAA), November 30, 2022 to January 8, 2023, Merced Multicultural Arts Center, Merced, CA.
Digital Renderings: This 4 minute 37 second video consists of series of digital images, animations, and time-lapse videos that I have created on an iPad while living in Merced, CA from 2014 to 2022. Displayed in this video is a collection of digital-art expressions whose meaning requires motion for its significance to emerge. These expressions include: Miss the Basket; Hannah Arendt; Turquoise; Love Letter; Owl’s Wide Open; Jorma; Paint Swatches; Strategic Vision; Outhouse Bird; Abelike; Heavy Heart; Birdie Wine; Barber Pole; Pucker Danny; Old Man Face; Sí, se puede; Beginnings; Gyro; Lead Guitar; Bald Mitt; Bernie; Sphere Spade; Sniff Sniff; The Pundant; Whirling Skeleton; Hydrospurt; and Selfie.
Update: Summer 2025
I’ll keep the 04/14/21 post below for historical purposes, but I do need to update the information since my situation has changed. If you’re interested in learning English through conversation, please contact me via iTalki or in the comment form below. Thank you.
Oh, one more thing! In the original post I made reference to being the “luckiest person on my cul-de-sac.” Well that changed too! We no longer live on a cul-de-sac.” We moved from Merced, a small city in California’s Central Valley to the countryside in Southeast Ohio, less than 10 miles from Athens, OH. So, let’s just say that nowadays I’m the luckiest guy in my neck of the woods!
Update: 07/28/25
Click on video to experience the digital transformation.
Since late February 2021 I’ve been a Community Teacher on an online platform called iTalki, a Chinese company headquartered in Shanghai. You can visit my profile page by clicking on the following link: [CLICK HERE TO VIEW MY iTALKI PROFILE PAGE]
To date (4/14/21) I’ve completed around 75 online lessons with approximately 35 students. It’s conversation-based learning, so I target students who can already speak English at intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency. Each “lesson” is about an hour. I currently charge $10 per lesson, although I may increase that once I reach 100 completed lessons. Some students purchase packages of 5 lessons at a slight discount.
The conversation topics are completely open ended. Occasionally, I pause the dialogue to provide feedback on pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and expressive, interactive style. So far I’ve had students from Russia, Estonia, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Peru, China, and the list is growing. It’s a remarkably eye-opening and rewarding experience.
If you know anyone who might benefit from such a learning experience, please help them book their first iTalki lesson with me or any number of other qualified teachers. Thank you.
By the way, did I mention that I’m often blown away by folks who use our conversations as an opportunity teach this old dog new tricks? Yes, it happens; and that makes me the luckiest person on my cul-de-sac!
After a hiatus of two years, 2018 and 2019, the Mobile Digital Art and Creativity (mDAC) exhibition and conference returned. However, because of the pandemic, mDAC2020 took place online in a virtual manner a la Zoom. On the evening of Friday, June 26, 2020 there was the exhibit featuring the top 100, and out of them, the top 11, and on Saturday (6/27/20) and Sunday (6/28/20), two days of digital art workshops (click here to see the top 100 plus other details, including the jurors and the hands-on presenters). And if you had looked closely at the winners, you might have noticed that my piece, entitled Jerry, made in into the top 100!! How cool is that? What’s as cool is that I made it into the top 100 at mDAC2015 and mDAC2016.
Click on image to enlarge “Jerry”
I had already presented something about Jerry in a recent post about how cool it is to spend a little extra time with folks no longer with us in the flesh, click here to see that. Jerry was a dear friend whom I had gotten to know while living in Athens, Ohio from 1998 until 2005, but even after Ann and I moved away, we all stayed in touch. I’m so happy that Jerry was selected because, remembering this honor will always allow me to continue celebrating Jerry’s extraordinary life. See Jerry’s obit here.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve spent a fair amount of time on my iPad Pro rendering digital paintings of two friends, both musicians, both from Athens, OH, Jerry Schaffer and Bruce Ergood, who’ve recently passed away, and it’s beginning to become clearer to me that doing so, painting portraits of the dearly departed, creates an unusually liminal opportunity for me to spend bonus or lagniappe time with them. I’ve done it before, see my posts on Cuthbert or Lotfi, two examples that immediately come to mind; however, I’m only now coming to terms with certain dimensions of this experience.
The experience is obviously built on fond memories. Memories surface that evoke thoughts and feelings tied to familiar facial characteristics and other reminders as reflected in the photo references I use. Beyond that I can’t really add much; except that “muscle memory” and “day dreaming” are involved. It’s kinda’ improvisational and transcendental. In some ways it’s memory spilling into the Present Moment and being resurrected forever in the Now that tends to constantly escape us but that’s always there, or rather Here.
It was helpful in many ways having conversed by phone with Jerry’s Robin and Bruce’s Jane before digitally and free-handedly painting the portraits and experiencing this unexpected, extramural connection. The immediate grief embedded in those conversations continues to reverberate, which is helping me reprioritize things in my life as I age and, more broadly speaking, as we move into uncharted territories in relation to COVID 19. In both conversations this grief was scrambled and amplified by the pandemic, making what is already painfully real – really painful. And yet, grief has a way of shedding a new light on an old world, since, afterall, there’s no turning back.
Jerry Schaffer
Rest in Peace, Jerry (see obit):
Bruce Ergood
Rest in Peace, Brucito (see obit):
When we lived in Athens, OH, we were right up the road from the Fur Peace Ranch, where Jorma Kaukonen and other extraordinary maestros take beginner-, intermediate-, advanced-, and master-guitar players and move them along to their next levels over the course of a few jam-packed days, breaking now and then to strap on the gourmet feed bag, in a down-home, country retreat setting. It’s much more than a guitar camp, check it out.
Ann got so tired of hearing me play the same old stuff that she secretly registered me for a weekend at the Ranch! That was back in the late 1990s.
There were folks from all over the country, mostly good, some great guitar players!
One thing Jorma said about finger picking that I’ll never forget, “The secret is in the thumb!”
How true! How true! Fortunately, I learned a few things that have made an enduring difference.
What brought back this memory? I saw a Facebook post that the short documentary, Fur Peace Ranch: It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This!, has been selected for a screening at the New Jersey Film Festival on Saturday, January 31, 2015! Check out the preview.
Jorma:
(photo credit: Barry Berenson) for side-by-side, freehand drawing in Procreate.
Click here for an accelerated (24 sec.) progress video of the iPad drawing.
portfoliolongo 
