In Paul Madonna's Studio you'll find a range of work: weekly cartoons and sketchbook pages posted since 2002; All Over Coffee, the unique strip running every Sunday in the San Francisco Chronicle; Small Potatoes, a below-the-belt comic strip; Album, a new art book series; original drawings and prints for sale; and events, books, press materials and more.

Working on several different projects allows me to get distance from one while working on another, so that each time I come back to a project, I get, in theory, new insight on what I'm doing with it. All my projects stem from the root of working with drawing and writing, so rather than being separate, I think of them each as variations of those elements.

The above diagram depicts how I interpret my work habits (as opposed to a plan I hope to follow) and how each of my series relate to each other. Each colored arc represents projects by frequency. The small black arcs are my weeklies; postings on this site, All Over Coffee and Small Potatoes. The green arcs are side and yearly projects, such as a new publication Album, where each issue will feature a different body of work (first issue due out November 2009). The red arcs are larger projects, between 3-5 years, like the first All Over Coffee book collection, and future collections. And the blue arc represents something I can't identify yet. Either a sea change marking an era of work, or the totality of my work at the end of my life.

Having drawn this diagram, I'm now comparing it against how I actually spend my time.


Paul Madonna 03 29 09

paulmadonna AT paulmadonna.com

History of this site:

After graduating Carnegie Mellon University in 1994 with a Bachelor's in Fine Arts, I moved to San Francisco and self-published a series of mini-comics. As a way to get the work out, I left each issue for free in cafes and public spaces, and eventually met my wife through one of those books.

In 2000 I launched the first version of this site. My work was a mess at that time and I was searching for a way other than zines to get work out of my studio and into the hands of others. At first this site was just an online portfolio of sketchbook pages and excerpts from past mini-comics, until in 2002 I began posting a weekly cartoon and sending it to friends and family as an exercise in discipline.

For the first year, the weekly posting was the main work I was finishing for anyone to see, but when All Over Coffee was picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle in late 2003 (to begin running February 2004), it became a stress free spot to tack up whatever I was in the mood for, and I stuck to the weekly posting as both another outlet, and to keep the plate of discipline spinning.

Since then, paulmadonna.com has gone through several major redesigns and has grown to include all my ongoing work and series. This current site is, hopefully, designed to include whatever comes next.