I had the spoon to look at. The rest of the elements of this drawing were invented. The awry-ness was a good fit for the incongruity of the elements, I think.
Still Life with Invented Elements
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Monthly Archives: May 2014
Dippy Diptych of the Day
One is the latest of my Spoon studies. The other is a concept rough of a sculpted bird commissioned by my poet friend Deborah Berman. The bird seems to have something to say to the dummy, and perhaps to the spoon as well.
Maud/Lynn Monday
Last week my friend Bob Kabchef created a feature called Maudlin Monday in the poet’s group we both are in, and I joked that I was working on a dual portrait of Maud Adams and Loretta Lynn for Maud/Lynn Monday, but it would take some time. This week my friend Genevieve Lumbert, another member of our group, reminded us: “POP CALL TO MAUDLIN MONDAY ARCADE.” (Arcade was Bob’s username in the now defunct seniors social site Eons, where we all met.) Spurred by Gen’s nudge, I did the above. Since the index card is a little beat up, it didn’t lay on the scanner flatly, and so I put a CD-R atop it, remembering that there’s a cool prismatic effect when you scan a disk.
Words:
Made their marks with smarts and toil
Anguished; languished; knew true joy
Upped their cred despite their men
Do let’s see them both again
The Shakespeare quote is apt for these two ladies, and for several of the ladies in our poet’s group Poets All Call, including its originator, Socorro Olsen, and Genevieve, and my Sweetheart, Denise.
My Mother, Jane Stoneman
This morning I bought some more Tracfone phone minutes, and then called my mom to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day and to fact-find and get permission to do an unadorned account of her life as a mother. She cheerfully and at some length reviewed certain of her life events with me, and granted me carte blanche to write what I would.
Here is what I wrote, but not unadorned: atop my account I made a sketch of her.
Heirloom Tomatoes
Hard to get is Pierrette; less so is Pierrot
Enterprises roll the dice and change the status quo
In the red await the seeds for placement in the loam
Ripened, swollen, injured, with stigmata or with stoma
Less-than-purists come along and…à chacun son goût
Ouch the horse that you rode in on OUCH your puppy too
Obsolescing Nature’s way creates a North untrue
Modify perfection and you miss a rendezvous
What Heirloom Tomatoes are, and why this is therefore a polemic against genetic modification, is left for the reader to explore.
The Cosmic Wait Staff Takes Our Chaos Order
Call a tune–away we go
Half-lives pass a broken door
Aspirate an inswept load
Ossify & be hard-core
STARS make DAWN–that’s what they’re for
Umbrella
Unfurled, it is your private shield, protection on a pole
Much needed in a downpour or to give Romance some Soul
Bestow a small one on a drink & let the good times roll
Regardless of how much you’ve had, you’re gonna want Samoa
That last-word Punchline Pun owes something to my college days in Tucson in the mid-Seventies, and a TV commercial for a Pacific Islands restaurant called Kon-Tiki. They had a Big-Kahuna-type guy say stuff like “Little Chief LIKE Kon-Tiki!” in a fake Polynesian accent. His next to last line was “Little Chief misses his island home!” and the curvy hula-skirt-clad girl by his side asked, “Samoa?”, whereupon Little Chief grabbed at a goodies-heaped plate, dropped the Polynesian accent, and said, Texas style, “Ah don’t mahnd ef Ah DO!”
The Cat Signal
The Cat Signal
The purr may mislead
So look instead
for the squeezing
of the eyes
That reveals a cat
So content
That the contentment
must be contained
How to Be Your Own Best Psychic; or, What Did Jeane Dixon Have that You Don’t?
A few days ago I read a heartbreaking article in Reader’s Digest about Jude Deveraux, best-selling novelist, being taken for approximately $17 million by a predatory monster who claimed to be a psychic. Years before, I’d seen an infomercial for Dionne Warwick’s “Psychic Friends,” and noticed the disclaimer at the bottom For Entertainment Purposes Only or somesuch.
Now, I don’t call myself an atheist or an agnostic, but my tendency is heavily toward skepticism; even so, I LITERALLY don’t know what to believe. I ardently hope there is more to the Universe than random purposelessness. Being a sentient being with a mind and what amounts to free will, I am free to decide what makes sense, and what my own reason for living is–subject to change, of course. Consequently, I will find myself at night looking at the inside of my closed eyelids and seeking answers from beyond my insignificant self. I’m sure almost all of us have asked: What’s my next move? How do I handle THIS major issue? And one overwhelming question, which comes in many forms: What’s wrong with this picture, and what needs to happen to make it unwrong?
When we ask these questions, and dream on them, and hope for an answer to come to us in the form of a thought popping into our heads unbidden, or other sign from outside ourselves, we are being our own psychics. I am positive that Jude Deveraux would have been much the much better off if she had been her own psychic. The trouble was, she was insecure; she didn’t trust that she’d come up with good answers on her own.
So now, let’s walk through it: If we’re going to be our own psychics, how are we going to be the best psychics we can be? Here’s what I’ve come up with, but I am 100% sure that you who read will come up with something that suits YOU, and YOUR circumstances, better.
1. Learn what you REALLY want out of life. Do you really want to be a millionaire? Do you want to be suspicious of someone you don’t know wanting to be your friend? Do you want constant demands on your time and your money by people who think they know better than you do what to do with your time and your money? (By the way, your time is of equal or greater value than your money; I’ll try not to waste yours here.)
2. Formulate five questions you’d like God, or Nature, or the Cosmos, or Whoever, to answer. Here are mine:
What is the best use of my time, today, this week, this month, and this year?
Who in the world do I most need to learn from?
What do I not know that I need to know?
How much lifetime do I have left?
What is making my life more tragic, what makes it more joyful, and what can I do about this?
These are kind of fudgy questions in that there are subquestions in some of them. But my important question list is subject to change, especially if I learn something new (and I’m bound to) or my circumstances change. The thing is to keep asking these questions, and keep looking for the answers both actively (“Time to go to the gym and put another brick in the Life Extension Wall”) and passively. (“Hey, look at that! There’s my answer right there!”)
3. Beware the easy answer. It is tempting to, seeing a rainbow, infer that God or the Universe is trying to tell you something. But a rainbow is merely the organization of visible light at certain frequencies via its refraction in a myriad of water droplets. You can have a rainbow any time you want one if you have a sunny day and a garden hose; just use your thumb and turn until the angle is right. But if you get a burning bush, or gigantic text carved out of a mountain before your very eyes, I’d pay attention–BUT I’D STILL QUESTION THE MESSAGE. Try the answers you get out on your intuition, and do your best not to inject your own wishful thinking.
4. Live for more than yourself. When you do that, your psychic connection has more than you to answer to, and will consequently give you (and yours) a clearer picture.
Essay/Lecture over. That’ll be Zero Dollars and Zero Cents please. [smiles]
Susan Groce, Printmaker (take 2)
Some images uplift; some claw & dig
Some put your thoughtstream in a whirligig
Uplifting, whirling, digging–a Creator
Unleashed her Chi, then ran it through the grater
She rosined up her plate AND bow–allegro
Sustained her dark/melodic Montenegro
A g r e a t Intaglio’s an Analgesic
And fitting as Buckminstrel’s geodesic
Non-toxic seekers on the astral plane
Now find her in Orono–that’s in Maine
I put the poem before the image because I think I was more successful with the former than the latter. There is sometimes an inverse relationship between how much I worry about a getting certain subject RIGHT and the quality of the image that results. Simply put, I tried too hard on this one, and it got out of hand.
But that’s OK, because–as I indicate in the signature line, deliberately made to look like a signature at the bottom of an intaglio print (and notice that the poem is subtly framed in what vaguely looks like the beveled plate-edge of an intaglio), that this is an a/p, which is printmakerese for “artist’s proof.” It’s another way of saying “work in progress, not yet suitable for an edition,” or “I didn’t go yet.” And indeed I hope, perhaps in my retirement years, that I’ll have access to an intaglio studio and press, and I’ll turn this crude drawing into old-school gold.
The thing is, the Intaglio process is obsolete. It was invented sometime around the 14th Century almost by accident, an offshoot of the engraving of gold with incised accents, which were then rubbed with contrasting pigment. It became a way for artists to translate one image into many salable prints. But it’s a demanding process: take a copper or zinc plate, sand off the milling marks and then polish it with jeweler’s rouge, bevel the edges so they don’t cut into the roller, and then incise the plate with an image that is the reverse of the one you want, using a burin or other engraving tool; or coat the plate with carborundum and use a carbide scribe to etch through the coating, then to be submerged in an acid bath; or put the plate in a box full of rosin dust and diffuse the dust into the air above the plate, so that it settles on the plate to become maskable tone dippable in acid–ah, it is so much more gratifying to DO these things than to describe them, but it is a real chore to learn how to do them with skill. Susan Groce has taken time and pain to translate her kaleidoscopic visions into editionable form, and for that she has my respect and admiration. She stuck to it, made a career out of it, and flourished.
And she’s taken a concern with the environment and with physical health to investigate non-toxic means of printing. A good thing, too: the print room I remember had air that was a minestrone of fumes: carborundum, burnt plate oil, kerosene, denatured alcohol, the mustiness of paper soaked too long, nitric acid–and I’m far from done; haven’t even gotten to lithography chemicals, which were in the same room. Good for her for seeking safety for herself and her contemporaries.
And good for her for her multi-talented creative soul. As I indicated in “take 1,” she is an accomplished violinist. Thus the line “She rosined up her plate AND bow–allegro” refers to the fact that both the Aquatint printmaking process and the bow of a violin require rosin. I was also glad to mention “Buckminstrel” Fuller in her sphere, as he was a like multitalent with a care for the environment and human quality of life. His notebooks and Susan’s have some overlap, and I commend both to the viewer’s attention.
I invited Susan to offer a quotation from any of her artist’s statements, or a link she’d like readers to be steered to, for me to include in the image. She graciously declined, being very busy with the Semester-End Madness aspect of her professorship. But she’s easy to find as department chair at the University of Maine at Orono, and I hope any interested parties take a look at her artwork and her benign-materials investigations.
One with Clay, Image and Text 