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Monthly Archives: May 2026

Torn Hawaiian Shirt on Floor, 2026

My beloved, bluesy Hawaiian shirt had left-side shredding beyond repair. I placed it on my front room floor to take a farewell photo, but the front & center, arms-at-sides pose made the poor shirt look like he was facing a firing squad, so I moved him around, and lo and behold, he resisted on direction, flowed in another, acquiesced in yet another. He ended up looking like a cartoon profile head of Picasso with a touch of Mussolini, depicted cubistically, the shirt tags providing the whites and the beads of his beady eyes. At the top of the back of his head he seems to have hatched a spectral descendant of the Warren Publications narrator Uncle Creepy.

This is an example of ephemeral art, Friends. It existed only until, seconds after I took the photo, I picked up the shirt and dropped it in the waste-paper basket for conveyance to the dumpster. The photo not only memorializes it, though; it extends its existence digitally, and multiplies it by as many people who see this photo. It will, as popular parlance has it, live rent-free in your head for the rest of your life.

I have been posting an image from my artwork daily in gratitude of the friends who have voted for me in the People’s Artist competition hosted by Johnny Depp. Today I offer this acrostic portrait of my fellow Glendale High School alumna Colleen Kennedy, who had a distinguished academic career at the College of William and Mary; the double-acrostic I made of her name is one of the few I have done with all the rhymes true rhymes, and a pretty near metronomic meter-faithfulness to boot. The illustration illustrates that I illustrate my acrostics more often than not, and is based on a sweet photo Colleen provided–WOW, that was twelve years ago.

Thanks again, Colleen!

Vegetable stock, diced turnip, diced onion, spoon, bowl

mosaic stochastic

few variables

but infinite possibilities

myriad myriad patterns

..

diced turnip floats

and crowds into an array

and the dicer of the turnip

suddenly remembers a byzantine mosaic

he saw in a book fifty years ago

..

the probability

of that snapshot memory

floating to the top of his thoughts

leapt from vanishingly small

to certainty

..

our memories cram a landfill

in the hinterlands of our souls

but make the right soup

and all is available

When you take a pot pie from the freezer to zap it, it is rock hard. So when you try to follow the instructions to put slits in the crust, the pie responds with extraordinary resistance. You have to do a Norman Bates with your knife to get a good slit…

Unless you first start the microwave, stop it about a minute and a half in, and THEN slit your slits effortlessly and much more cleanly.

I have been hacking away at pot pies since the 20th Century and it has never occurred to me to do this!

..

Where do you take a cat who has stopped purring?

The Repurr Shop.

..

Here, fulfilling a commitment to my People’s Artist voters, is image #7 of 10 of my artwork. This photo was taken in situ after my “Shuttered Bird” was juried into the Glendale Arts Council’s 62nd Annual juried show early this year.

“Glendale Bird,” 11″x11″x5″, ceramic sculpture, ca. 2002

Today I thanked all my Facebook readers who for me in the People’s Artist competition, urged them not to buy any votes on my behalf, and committed to posting an artwork a day for 10 days by way of thanks (and showing off). This is the one I posted today. I forget what I originally called it (it’s been over 20 years) but I think “Glendale Bird” is a good name because I am a loyal son of Glendale, Arizona, and the laser transfer on the bird’s flank is an image from the Great Seal of Glendale on the side of the Glendale City Council building that I took with my then-cutting-edge 3.1 megapixel camera in the early 2000s.

People who want to vote for me as the People’s Artist may do so once every 24 hours between now and May 13. If you are one of those people, and reside in the US or Canada, here is a link:

peoplesartist.org/2026/g-bowers

Please do not buy any additional votes for me! And if you do successfully vote for me, please let me know in the Comments section.

Thank you, Friends!

My sweetheart and future cohabitant Donna Sue Atkins has made some lovely beadwork in her day. When I posted some samples of her handiwork, one necklace in particular caught the eye of some of my readers.

See the one next to the heart pretzel on the right? It has a few nifty, cute skulls on it. Donna told me the skulls were expensive. “Darling,” I replied, “I will make you some out of porcelain.”

So I have begun to try, and it is not as easy as I thought it would be. But when I do a few dozen they will start to be cuter and better; and when I make Skull #500 or so they will be necklace-worthy, and I will have learned more about skull anatomy and the manipulation of itty-bitty spheroids of clay. A fun adventure awaits!

my vessel was almost too dry

but it needed a trim job at the foot

so i secured it to the batt with ropes of clay

and trimmed away ticklishly, patiently

..

now the trim scrap looks like an artist’s concept

either of the oort cloud or of an electron Shell’s

probability distribution

and i rejoice in my connection

to the minuscule and the vast