Here’s another drawing exercise, graphite on Stonehenge sketchbook paper.
obelisky business
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Monthly Archives: July 2020
As Dawn resolves
As Dawn resolves/the forest wakes//The boy repents/of his/mistakes//A leaf/a bird/a boy/enthralled//A creaure/by no/known name/called
Stop•Look•Listless
During the two official World Wars people made huge sacrifices for their country, and that not only included life and limb, but also road trips, certain foodstuffs on certain days, and–alas!–liberty, in the case of many Americans of Japanese ancestry.
During the Cold War, when there was fear of nuclear war, some people built fallout shelters and stocked them with canned goods and water, prepared to “shelter in place” until the devastation had ceased. And kids and adults alike were trained to “duck and cover” if they saw a blinding light. Never mind that this strategy was demonstrably ineffective–it was better than nothing.
But now, with a highly contagious and potentially deadly virus infecting all corners of the Earth, many of my fellow Americans cannot even be bothered to put on a sputum-blocking mask. The masks cost anywhere from near-nothing (a bandanna and two rubber bands) to a hundred-plus dollars, depending on how effective and/or fancy and/or stylish you want them to be. And many establishments give them away to their paying customers.
There is a direct correlation between the enforcement of mask-wearing and the halting of the spread of COVID-19. That many in the US ignore the correlation is partly due to the maskless example President Donald Trump sets. He has turned a public-health issue into a political issue, even though back in February he scorned the Democratic Party for “politicizing the Coronavirus.” Sadly, even his detractors have been so desensitized by his daily-basis hypocrisy that it is hard to work up outrage any more.
This has been a year of such bombardment of calamity, in fact, that people are flat-out getting used to apocalyptic conditions. As so today, triggered by a childhood memory of a “Safety Walk” in which we grade-schoolers were encouraged to “Stop, Look, Listen” before crossing the street, I flashed on the phrase “Stop/Look/Listless” as being more endemic to our situation now. And so this acrostic came to be.
So GROUNDLINGS gasp & swell
Succumb to slouched ennui
Tympani BOOM? O wells
Tsk not, mon cher petit
Oppression’s Oddly DULL
Oft RUMOR ONLY, see
Per PELIKAN & gulls
Pretend a keepsake frees
Those last two lines are a bit obtuse. Pelikan is a brand name for the India ink I used when learning to draw with a crowquill pen. “Gull” is not only a bird but a verb that means “to fool [someone].” And what kind of keepsake makes someone feel free? Could be a St. Christopher medal, popular in the late 1960s. Patron saint of Travelers. Don’t leave home without him! 🙂
Stay Safe, my friends. Fighting Listlessness will help.
some a em e qui d
Here is a modest visual puzzle. The solver’s task is to supply the missing letters and to discern what the rectangles and oblongs and hybrids have to do with each other. Further thought may reveal a steady stream of metaphors.
n.e.s. #149 of 480
You may think you’ve seen something like this before. If you have, yet more Symmetry falls into place.
queen & crew
There are a few sounds that non-mimicking birds make that sound like words. One of those sounds might be transliterated to “Awe!” I put “Awe!” in the bird’s word balloon, partly because [bird noise sounding like “Awe!”] might be confusing and distracting, and partly because it delights me to think that a bird taking off might FEEL the Awe that her noise implies.
queen & crew
quarantined &
ultra-chic
everclear & somewhat meek. her
enmity is just for show. she
need some Friends with need to know
drawing exercise
My mother has, or had, a drawing I made when I was two-and-a-half years old or so. It was a drawing of her. So I’ve been doing figure drawing for more than 63 years. I still cannot draw consistently well.
So I still need drawing exercise. This one is an exercise in patience and visialization. I didn’t allow myself to use a model or photo source, although I did take a peek at my drawing hand–and the drawing-hand part of the drawing is a botched disaster.
Total drawing time was about six hours, far longer than I normally spend on a given drawing. I hope to be doing this more, soon.
n.e.s. #148 of 480
Imbibement of Bubbles reduces your Troubles.
Unfinished Business, Part 241
Res ipsa loquitur . . .
You Dun Had Yer Fun (effaced)
It might help to think of this blog post as a carnival ride. Take or leave all the backstory and poetry, if you wish. At heart it’s an improbable occurrence that may if let mess with your middle earbones a little bit, pleasurably I hope.
Many years ago I read Cool Hand Luke by Donn Pearce for the first time. It was about a man who found himself in Florida, in the Raiford prison chain gang. Every 4th of July the inmates got the closest thing to a holiday the prison offered, with free lemonade and some latitude, with the thought that a positive association with Independence Day, the springboard of the United States of America, would help instill in the convicts more love of country, and therefore of law and order. Ironically enough, though, in this scene from the book, some convicts were quietly sawing through the wood floor of the building, through which some would escape, thus declaring their independence. It’s a well-crafted scene, but the only reason I bring it up is that Carr the floorwalker at one point announces, “First bell. You done had your fun.”
The sentence “You done had your fun.” has been echoing in my head for over 50 years. I use it every time I need to tear myself away from self-indulgence and get back to chores, work, or other responsible activity. Many is the time “You done had your fun.” has compelled me to walk away from a gambling venue before I put my debit card in the ATM yet another time. (I am a recovering gambling addict, what Mario Puzo called in his too-neglected novel Fools Die a “degenerate gambler.”)
I’ve been in a creative slump of late, and the combination of self-quarantine due to COVID-19 and serial movie-watching and overindulgence in various tasty treats has undermined my creative output further. Finally I grabbed myself by the scruff of the neck, figuratively speaking, and said, “You done had your fun.”
Then I realized that with alternative spelling that would actually make the phrase more Southern-sounding, “You Dun Had Yer Fun” was a perfect quintuple acrostic. It would be a bear to write, but the challenge might well pull me out of my slump some. So here we are.
Since it is a quintuple acrostic, and I took on the further challenge of keeping the verbiage to a minimum, with as little sacrifice to rhyme and meter as possible, the logic of the poem’s content goes afield more than once. But that turned out to be serendipitous, because right at the last few words there came unbidden the perfect subject matter for the illustration: an Undressed Toucan. “What kind of clothes would a toucan wear??!” “Why, self-expressive HAWAIIAN SHIRT and HAWAIIAN SHORTS, of course!!”
Nobody else on Earth, except MAYBE the latest, bleeding-edge Artificial Intelligence Artist, could have created this page. Like Peter Pan, I gotta crow about that, though with the subtextual knowledge that no one else on Earth would WANT to.
****
You Dun Had Yer Fun
You’re riding high and then you eyeball stuff
You so doubt what you’re saying off the cuff
Of course your sense can intercede for you
One scene’s unclear and typeset in Urdu
Urbane and sleek, of dearth you’re not a fan
Unless until y’undress a mere toucan
****
About that powder-blue, fizzy effacement: It is sort of a way of marking my territory. When an intaglio plate, or lithographer’s slab, is deemed by the artist to be unworthy of reproduction, the plate or stone may be slashed with an appropriate tool, indicating that any further use of the plate or stone is unauthorized. About 38 years ago I had one of my intaglios professionally printed in a limited edition. The printer included with the prints and ancillary materials the declaration: “The plate has been effaced.” Remembering that, and wanting to jazz up the image a bit, I used photoediting software to efface this too-canny effort.
Maybe it was all for a Bad Pun. In the Arizona Wildcat, the school newspaper for the University of Arizona, reviewer Bryan Johnstone called the comments by my artwork in the solo show I had in the Hall of Fame gallery “self-effacing.”
Thank you, O Reader, for reading my Bad Pun of the Day. (Actually, there are two Bad Puns in this post. Can you spot the other one?)
One with Clay, Image and Text 