Tom Bubul .info
tom.bubul@gmail.com, @tombubul. Last modified .
Studio chair: Sept 2025
It's been about 10 years since I last tried to blog about the studio. I'm just going to get started again here without thinking too hard about it.
Status
I just finished the third draft of "Three Renés," a domestic fiction/etna gothic genre-minotaur that accidentally ran to novella length. This has been my main project since, I think, the new year. I'm happy with how it turned out and am excited to figure out where to put it. I blacked out inside the computer working on this - day job on the computer, editing at night on the computer - but, being "done," am enjoying a moment of being able to take a higher view.
Queue
My new year's resolution was to finish my open paintings; that's next. It's been about a year since I worked on paintings, but I think I'm ready to go back. The studio has been fully setup in the basement at New Spahouse (where I live with Natalie) for months, but it hasn't felt possible to paint and work on Renés at the same time, especially while also doing my workday in there. I intend to have at least one of my four open paintings done by next month.
It's been another incredible year for drawing down here on planet earth. I made a nice handful of gig posters and learned a lot about digital illustration/tablet work that way. (TODO Need to put some consolidated page together for these on here.)
I'm also about halfway through a prototype round of drawings with a Dremel on bricks... "drawings you can throw through a window." The idea here was that the recent ~5 years of small drawings on creased printer paper have about the most miserable possible object quality you could imagine for "Artwork." This has been a feature, in the sense that it has freed me from trying to make "Artwork" at all in that format, just pure drawing, but at the same time, it forced some thought around what object Artwork made from drawing maybe could look like, with the further constraint of keeping the process entirely zero-computer, since I have no appetite at all for any further computer. Drawing on the bricks has been the result, and man, they certainly have object presence. Looking forward to sharing some of these some time soon, possibly as a little section in the Great River Review, via Bryan.
Elsewise, my next writing projects are around finishing an essay that kaleidoscoped out of my viewing of Ricky D'Ambrose's The Cathedral (2021), backburnered since like last year, and a longer fiction about a family curse that gets broken by pasta sauce, started about a month ago, but with the sort of kinetic quality that gives it the clear designation as "the next one". I have three other fictions in various states that are on pause - one about sphinxes I got halfway through last year and then got confused about, one about Prometheus that's very fun to think about but not figured out, and one about a gun that's been too heavy to seriously work on. Me, Bela, and Mark have had a monthly writing group for about six months or so now; that's been incredible.
After finishing Renés I immediately went to home depot to buy plywood to build a plant table. I don't generally think of house projects as being "studio," but the plant table is made in a way sort of following from how I made my dirt palace window, like 14 years ago, and sort of bears mention here as being from "my line". I am going to make two more (possibly today), and also have a few lighting ideas that I'm developing and looking forward to building. I'd like to document some of that stuff here too, once it's a bit further along and like, "production ready."
Misc
- Overwhelming feeling lately of "my website is behind, I need to update it" ... probably try to do this some time soon
- "Need to make a zine" ... I have a lot of sphinx & prometheus material that would be suitable for this, just haven't had any desire to do the production work
- Return to new yorker cartoons ... I might be out east a little in October, and if I am, I'd like to pitch while I'm out there ... this is like painting, in that it's the thing I desire to do most, but as such is sort of the hardest thing for me to actually sit in front of ... maybe saying this here will help
- I finished my big digital draculas collage recently, my second one of these ... this is a really fun category of work, I have two more of these planned, one of GR pics, one of Blarney Stone-related stuff, but both are still in acretion phase. These are straight up decorative projects I intend to make editions of at some point.
- Need to make business cards and probably matchbooks for GR season 4, eternal desire to make a zine of GR stuff too ... we did a bar event at Lee's Squaredance Weekend last month and collated all of our recipes ahead of that, and there is quite a lot of drawing ephemera from the menus ... the material is there!
- Audio projects are "didactic house" and updated "teachers mix" with like four or five new findings, but this is deep in "nobody cares" territory so I'm trying not to think of it as "urgent." Looking fwd to House for the Holidays #3 tho!
- Me and Jacob talk on the phone twice monthly now, and honestly, Jacob talking about updating his website made me think, you know, I could do it, I could update my website... thank you as always Jacob
Desires
- Would like to show the paintings here at home in Minneapolis when they're done
- Would like to control the music at another party sometime in the next six months, really anywhere
Recent Media
- Sonido Bigboy @ TPH, fucking incredible, thank you Jeff!!
- Nellie Kluz "The Dells" (2025), literally yesterday
- Blake Mills / Pino Palladino "That was not a dream"
- Pepe Bradock eternal
- We Are... w/ Paul Camo episodes kind of all the time this summer
I'm hoping blogging again will add some accountability to tracking my media consumption a little more closely? For now that's all.
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