The phrase “old white guys” has cropped up in current American parlance to describe an obsolete ruling class. Last century a monument to four old white guys was carved out of a mountainside. So I started noodling out what might be a 2018 re-imagining of a monumental sculpture of heads, not four, not old, not exclusively white, not exclusively guys. Tried not to think of any person in particular.
A mountain in the distance is a shape. There is one in my Valley of the Sun that is called Camelback Mountain. It especially looks like a reposed camel when the viewer is a few miles west of it. When the viewer approaches, she sees a knob of rock on the mountain that has come to be called the Praying Monk. Shape speaks to the viewer.
A hurricane viewed beyond the atmosphere is a shape that speaks. So is a frost pattern on a bedroom window. So is the rising Moon. And a backlit person, a cloud, another cloud, a farm landscape. Shape shapes us.
The window of Inktober opportunity today is small, so I punched out this acrostic quickie during my post-shower coffee:
down year
daffodil has said goodby
oleander makes you die
we ignore the bougainvillea
nevermore to be familiar
At the same time I had four more images, one made in September. There was a brief inner tussle. “Pre-Inktober. Can’t use it.” “Fie upon it. I am using it.”
In the art world, “found art” is something someone (or something) else made that the artist appropriates. Now suppose the artist made it, put it aside for a couple of years, found it in a pile of papers, jazzed it up some, and thus appropriated his own stuff. Here below is a piece of Lost and Found Art.
My updated driver’s license arrived in the mail yesterday. It says a lot about who the State of Arizona thinks I am, and some of it is true.
Elsewhere in my wallet are various IDs and other clues as to the nature of my existence. There’s a 31 day full-fare bus pass, for instance. In a year I will be able to get one for half-fare, unless they change the rules.
I’ve put my drawing in a context that Sherlock Holmes would have some success in learning much more about me. But none of it, nor all the data an exhaustive FBI search would reveal, nor all the memories of everyone who ever knew me, nor my own increasingly spotty memory, is sufficient to describe who I am. And a good thing, for I am always straining to become someone else. Aren’t we all?
Long ago Elton John sang, at Big Surf in my own Valley of the Sun, “You’re gonna hear electric music, solid walls of sound…” At least that’s what I heard, and wondered: What would that look like? Then, approximately ten years later, I was on an airplane, and Dire Straits invited me to “Check out Guitar George. He knows all the chords…” Then, approximately four years later, a former classmate nameed George Gilman, who did indeed know all the chords, helped serenade my infant daughter Katie with guitar and voice. She was fascinated and silent.
Now, approximately 28 years later, the image below fulfills its approximately 42-year destiny. Inktober has begun!
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Last night the Muse whispered “Inktober is nigh.” So I froze a frame from JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM and sketched Bryce Dallas Howard quickly in pencil, then did a do-over with the ink from a Papermate Flair pen. I’d left plenty of room for minimal acrostic poetry. Two things occur when regarding BDH: Actor, and Woman. With WOMAN as the end word the poem, though minimal, can end with a triplet, if we cheat a little by hotwiring the last line with the indefinite article “A” from the end of the fourth line. The final form of the poem is a couplet and a triplet, in ultra-minimal iambic biameter, including such elements of stage plays as Scrim and House Lights, and such (for me, anyway) Woman-associated words as Silk, Rousing, and Lift. And the total word count, including the acrostic title, is 20.
But is it smooth as a downy forearm? Does it read as easily as the pep talk in HENRY V? Let’s present the words with no line breaks and see how it reads.
Ah, yes, the show can lift you so through silkscreen scrim old houselights dim–a rousing hymn.
My muse holds up her verdict: 9.2. Far from perfect, but great dismount, and it stuck the landing. 🙂
Uh oh. She’s holding up another number for the portraiture: a dismal 6.7. 😦 Thank Goodness this was the prelims, and not Inktober itself!
One with Clay, Image and Text 