Googling Yourself – Part 2
A long time ago a friend of mine named Steve asked me to draw him a biker chick for a tattoo. It took me a while to get around to it, but when I finally did and showed it to him he didn’t like it. He said that she looked “too real”. That he was looking for something more exaggerated.
I knew what he meant, but I jarred him up about it pretty good anyhow. “Steve, her waist is a small as her neck and her boobs are big as her head…. have you ever seen any real girls?” He was looking for something more cartoony. Sometime like Joe Capobianco or Jime Litwalk would do.
I went back to the drawing board for him, but I liked the drawing so I hung onto it.
When I started painting and was poking around for ideas I stumbled back across the girl that I had drawn for Steve. That would work. I redrew it bigger and got to painting.
I was part way through the painting and pretty pleased with how it was going when Chris Dingwell got ahold of me. He was having a motorcycle themed show at Sanctuary and wanted to know if I had any motorcycle themed art that I could submit for it. Well, I have a biker pin-up that I am working on… would that work? Of course! Sweet, I will send her off in plenty of time to be there for the show.
She made her way to and from Maine for the show at Sanctuary without incident. I named her “She used to be Steve’s Girl” since she was.
What does this have to do with googling yourself? I’m getting to that.
A couple of years later a client is talking to me about googling yourself. Have you ever done it? No, it has never occurred to me.
So of course that night I go home and look for me. I know I didn’t find anything right away as there are a whole lot of TeeJays on the internet and I didn’t ever use my last name on anything until Facebook came along. I don’t remember what I used for search parameters to bring it up. But I will never forget the gist of what it said.
It was a review of the show at Sanctuary and I was the main focus of it. A pretty serious tirade about what a complete male-chauvanist dirtbag I must be. She even used the term misogynist to describe me. Explained that my painting looked like a cross between Ariel and the Mud Flap girl. Went on and on about how little respect I had for women.
Clearly she had no idea that I am one. Of course I don’t think it would have changed her opinion of me.
What I didn’t know until I read her review was that the name of the motorcycle themed show that I had submitted my mis-proportioned young lady to was called “The Ultimate Ride”.
oops
I was suitably amused. I sent copies of the link to the article to everyone who was in my address book at the time. “Look! I’m a misogynist!”
Now I wish I would have saved the actual article as well. Oh well. Maybe someday it will resurface and I will know enough to take screen shots of it.
You never know where the internet is going to take you.
Just TeeJay's Blog 
Haha, the old mistaken for a misogynist bit.