Michael D. Davis.

One of my favorite living artists is Johnny Sampson. He’s known as the “Last Idiot Standing,” because he is pretty much the last artist creating original artwork for Mad Magazine. Mad started mainly reprinting their classic comics a few years back, but Sampson still creates a new fold-in for the back of every issue.

Alright, so in Sampson’s online shop, he has had a limited edition art print poster for a long time, and every time I would look at his site, I would ponder getting this poster. The print is of a face contorted in pain with, among other things, a knife, razorblade, hammer, pencil, and screwdriver sticking out of it.

Under the face is printed “FOLLOW YOUR BLISS!” The face always captured my attention, I just loved it, but I never got the print. Then last week, at about four in the morning, I was going to the fridge, and the poster popped into my head, and I got the meaning of it. I hadn’t even been thinking of it, but suddenly knew what the poster meant to me.

I don’t know Sampson’s original meaning behind the poster, but what this poster means to me is, it’s hard. Follow your bliss may be easy to say, but like most things in life, it’s hard to do.

The main bliss in my life is art, and for the past 15 years, I’ve shown my work up at the Toledo Library. And I love and appreciate the Toledo Library because they have hung with me as my art has taken some odd turns.

I won’t go into it all, but one year my display had a lot of baby doll heads. Anyway, this year I thought I was going to be sharing the case with another artist, so I was mainly focusing on one section of the case in which I’d make a creepy paper doll village type of deal. Well, things happened, and I got the full case. So, I decided to bring up some of the paintings I’d done throughout the year. They aren’t Octobery or Halloweeny, but they are weird.

Another thing I did this year was the skull table that I am lending to the library for the month. That brought struggles all its own. The cutting, the sanding, but then the wood sucked up the paint making it twice as long and hard to paint.

Then I set the table up in the living room to cover it in resin, and since not one room in the house is level, the resin didn’t end up being level. And when the resin dried, I realized I missed a few spots with the paint so you could see some of the light brown of the wood sticking through. But at least I got it done.

The paper doll village took forever between measuring, drawing, shading, cutting, re-measuring, and taping, only to have the tape not hold. One special incident with this project was the creepy clown. The first clown I drew out had more of a John Wayne Gacy clown vibe going on — it was not good, especially for a library display that I thought children would be enjoying. Don’t worry, I redid it and got more of a monster vibe the second go around.

Other than the paper village and the paintings I’d done throughout the year, I have in the library case a dark, creepy charcoal drawing of a woman. I drew this, I believe last Saturday, mainly just so the village wasn’t the only Halloweeny type thing in the case.

The paper I used is from a sketchbook my dad had given me earlier in the day. My father, The Old One, and his friend, Colonel Mustard, were out at a garage sale, when they acquired two things, among others.

Firstly, the sketchbook, which I believe was free. It is also older than I am, how do I know? Ben Franklin price tag on the cover, and the book is partially filled with someone else’s art dated 1993. The second item the duo bought was, if I remember right, a 30mm shell casing that said “depleted uranium” on the side. After the purchase, they got curious about this casing and decided to call one of my uncles who used to work for the military.

Once they described the item and gave him a few numbers, my uncle apparently said, “Bury it deep, then wash your hands.” The casing they bought was more than likely still a little radioactive.

All these trials and tribulations happened on my journey to put my art up at the library this year. Nothing is ever easy. I may have gotten a metaphorical push pin to the cheek here, and a hammer to the temple there, but I’m still following my bliss — just like it says to do on the Johnny Sampson art print that’s now hanging in my house.