I drew the napkin and wrote the commentary way back in 2012 but it is an evergreen post that is always appropriate to revisit at the beginning of any year. Let me know your thoughts.
Think of all that has happened in the last year (2011). I started speaking at conferences for the first time, three of them to be exact. Over a year ago I submitted a proposal for an exhibition of my photo-collages but hadn’t heard back anything by 1/1/11. Now I am 4 days away from the exhibition’s opening night (Living Arts of Tulsa, Friday, January 6th, 6-9pm). I had one daughter living in Tulsa and one in Seattle. Now I have one in parts unknown and one in Berkeley, CA. Those are just a few things among many. Two of those events I made happen by putting myself out there. My daughter’s life events I had very little control over, watching mainly from the sidelines.
What about you? What happened this year? What happen that you had some control over? What happened you had very little control over?
Stuff is going to happen to you in the next year. Stuff you can’t control and have no say in. But there will be plenty of things that will happen ONLY if you decide to make them happen. Are you going to push to make things happen, believing they can happen if you set your mind to it or are you going to let opportunities pass by, believing you are not able or being fearful of possible bad outcomes?
Will you look back on 1/1/13 and feel you did what you could?
This is a napkin drawing and commentary from the last day of 2010. I am republishing it on the first day of 2019 as the first in a year long series of looking back at the evolution of The Napkin and myself. I hope you enjoy!
Make your resolve in 2011 (and 2019) to be about what YOU can control. Don’t make a resolution for your husband or wife, your child away at college, your boss, your neighbor or your friend. Resolve to be, change, move, defeat, create, win over, help, build, enlighten and grow yourself. If in that process you save the world, great. If in that process you are just a better mother or father to your baby, then guess what? You have just saved the world as well.
Drawing and commentary @2019 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
When I was a young boy I was big into model building. My dad was an aviator so I made a lot of airplane models. But what I really loved making was monster models. I had them all, from Frankenstein and Dracula to the Creature From the Black Lagoon. I spent hours gluing, filing the edges, and painting them. I had them on display in my bedroom and was very proud of them.
A few years ago I got the bug to read some of the original monster novels. I read Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde among others. They were all over the top in emotion and language, and they were a hard slog to get through. But I did it and it gave me a new appreciation for the subtlety of these characters as originally invented in the mind of the authors.
In 2018 I decided I would draw some of these characters. Not as they had been imagined in the books or in the movies, but just as I saw them in my own imagination.
Here are the first two in the series, Mr. and Mrs. Frankenstein. The first, Frankenstein’s Monster, was done on my iPad mini using the Sketchbook app. Bride of Frankenstein was done in my sketchbook then reworked digitally in Photoshop.
The Elegantly Dressed Beautiful Woman | Ink on Paper | 2004-2018
‘The elegantly dressed beautiful woman with the cat as her carry-on wearing black and an orange scarf and visiting her parents in San Diego who can’t have pets and thinks her nose is bigger than I drew it but was flattered and thinks I am lucky.’
I created the line drawing portion of this drawing in December of 2004 while at the airport waiting to go to San Diego. The woman and I kept in touch and I sent her a photo of the drawing. 14 years later I decided to finish it with color.
