snap shot stage one

March 18, 2022
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2022 0318 snap shot stage one

This morning I unblanked a page to the extent that you see above. There is a temptation to make two dozen or so artworks based on this image, and challenge myself to make them different enough so that each piece offered something none of the others did, and yet the whole of them would make a worthwhile exhibit in a reputable art gallery or museum. Ambition fuels achievement, and even if the goal went unachieved, or otherwise a failure, I have some confidence that the six months or so effort I see going into the endeavor described would be time well spent.

On the other side of my psyche, there are these wild horses stuck in their gates at the start of the race, and they want OUT and they want  to RUN and STRAIN and FINISH THE RACE will all due speed, and some undue speed that risks injury.

In the middle and reasonable region of my mind, there is a person who looks a little like Groucho Marx and a little like Morgan Freeman and a little like Eleanor Roosevelt, and that amalgamated chorus of reason says to explore some, but don’t get carried away. I think this imagined trifold of humanity makes the most sense.

Why do artists makes artwork? There is no one reason, but there are a few main reasons. One is the simple urge to bring something into being. One is to advocate a point of view, be it “Isn’t this bowl of fruit lovely?” or “The End of the World is Nigh.” One is to have something to trade for groceries or adventures. One is to try to make sense out of a tiny square footage of the Universe.

What drives me may be nothing more than addiction to expression. I’ve been drawing since I was two and a half years old, and I wrote the first of my thousands of poems and other creative writing when I was seven. I like making myself, and then my friends, and then the world, something to look at and something to think about. So today, to kick things off, I started drawing tiny circles on the page, one by one, asking and answering “Where should the next one go, and how big should it be?” Soon there was dialog, with circles saying “Concentrisize me” or “give me a sister” or “Geez it’s crowded in here.” A few said “Convey a gravity well.” And then they all said “Make us the background of a double-acrostic poem.” Instantly “SNAP SHOT” came to mind. It feels like it pushed itsd way up from my subconscious.

End of stage one. Stage two follows, sooner or later…

Inner Workings

March 15, 2022
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2022 0315 inner workings

Long ago T. S. Eliot said “Our beginnings never know our ends.” And much longer ago, legend has it, Alexander the Great anticipated the Indiana Jones scene where Indy, menaced by a guy brandishing a fearsome, whirling array of sword steel, shrugs, takes out his gun, and shoots the guy. But in Alexander’s case it was a complicated knot that no one had the wit and dexterity to untie. Alex shrugged, whipped out his sword, and hacked the knot into non-knottedness. It was both a naughty and an unknotty thing to do, but it solved the problem and left the rest of his afternoon free.

Earlier today I had a complicated work in progress, and showed Facebook and Instagram folks what I was up to, thus:


I captioned the above image with this: “Here’s a drawing in an early stage, with some photoediting. It might be called “non-objective” but human beings can’t help objectifying everything from cracks in the sidewalk to clouds in the sky. ‘That looks like…’ starts many a sentence in an art museum. Faced with the blank page, I asked my hand and carpenter’s pencil to show me something that evoked Energy and Connectivity. An hour later here we are, and the drawing is starting to tell me what it needs, and asking me: Remember the vapor trails out of White Sands? Remember the motion of the caterpillar’s tiny legs? Can you wrap a few tendrils around this form, and give that spiral over there a hint of majesty?”

Minutes later, my music-loving, fellow 2D artist friend Myra Smith responded: “I thought inner workings of a human ear,” and my instant, flip response was “Huh?” But even as I was being a smart-aleck, that potent phrase “inner workings” resonated, echoing between my human ears. I loved it as a title. And I loved it as a quick, Cut The Gordian Knot solution to the work in progress: superimpose a face on this swirly stuff, tweak the drawing a little, and call it a day.

My thanks to Myra for some superb, catalytic conversion.

bird n russ

March 14, 2022
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This morning at 7:44 AM Russ Kazmierczak the text equivalent of a Bat-Signal to me and Birdie Birdashaw:

“Good morning, you guys free to hang and draw at Sip’s this morning?”

We were. We did. And it was a fine morning to hang and draw. And when I got home I took a look at one of the pics I’d taken of Birdie and Russ, and then drew some more.

I’m grateful that these two fine gentleman include me in some of their sessions. They’re both quite a bit younger than I am, and they’re doing a lot more of what they should be doing, creation-wise, than I did when I was their age. They keep it up and they’ll go places. And then I’ll show them this page and I’ll remind them that I fully recognized their potential a bit before the World did. 🙂

bird & russ

buds abide & score a coup — or
iridesce & Gobsmack you
razzmatazz & comic sans
diving deep & clanging pans

Happy 100th Birthday, Jack Kerouac

March 12, 2022
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2022 0310 what the hell

Jack Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922. Today is his Centenary, just as March 12, 2072 will be his Sesquicentennial Year. We have fancy names for points on our number lines.

I am not too strapped for time, but I am leaving part of my page-image unfilled-in. Call it Compositional Whim, or call it Laziness, just don’t call it late for lunch. (Inside American joke there.)

But the poem will exist complete as soon as I codify it below:

Nick Nack Kerouac’s

New Waves of change, of Parry & Attack
Irreverence as tasty as Shad Roe
Concocting journey’s chapters of a slacker
Keelhauling preconceptions to & fro
Now we must fit the Bride to her Trousseau
And mark when Heads called Marijuana Tea
Concluding that this Beat who’d reached High C
Knew habits that are Bird’s as well as Bee’s

Here are some facts, fun and less so, about Jack Kerouac. Though he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, he spoke nothing but French till he was 6 or so due to his immigrant parents, and it took him till 11 or so to lose his French-Canadian accent. (Tip of the hat to my French-Canadian friend Michel Lamontagne!!) His birth name was Jean-Louis Lebris de KĂ©rouac, which has an odd resonance with Hercule-Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac of legend. He wrote his famous novel-but-not On the Road on a single, enormously long sheet of uncut typing paper. A movie called Heart Beat loosely adapted from his reality was made in the early 80s, starring John Heard, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, and a manic Jeff Goldblum as the guy who was supposed to be Allen Ginsberg. Kurt Vonnegut wrote this about him: “I knew Kerouac only at the end of his life, which is to say there was no way for me to know him at all, since he had become a pinwheel. He had settled briefly on Cape Cod, and a mutual friend, the writer Robert Boles, brought him over to my house one night. I doubt that Kerouac knew anything about me or my work, or even where he was. He was crazy.”

I read On the Road in my early 20s, when I was still involved with my college sweetheart, and I still had romantic notions that made On the Road as enticing as catnip to a cat. It was a good, quick read, but I remember little except the reference to Fort Lowell near Tucson, and a description of steak and milk as a “protein feast.” I bought The Dharma Bums but do not remember a word of it besides the title. (How Time withers the Mind!!)

But the title did come in handy today. My poet friend Richard Davis Facebook-posted a Happy Birthday to Kerouac, and in minutes this pastiche came to me:

This old man
He was Beat
On the Road and on the street
With a trick knack
Kerouac
Was and now becomes
Saintly
To us
Dharma Bums.

Happy Birthday, Jack, however you are.

PS: The late Harry Dean Stanton would have been perfect for the role of Jack Kerouac, I think.

What [?] Thee [!] Hell[!!]

March 10, 2022
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2022 0310 what thee hell
Here is an image on a 3×5 card that sat on the table for weeks, faces vaguely sketched, no words. It was either throw it away or finish it. It is almost always better to finish it, and I did finish it, or at least bring it to a stage of completion, but  it may still be better off shredded or otherwise destroyed.

This one’s uniqueness of composition and the aptness of the drawing to the acrostic poem gets it  indefinite stay of execution. When I review my 2022 output in 2023, I’ll have fresher eyes and judgment. Meanwhile, it seems to be something done by the lovechild of Franz Kafka and Sally Bowles.

What [?] Thee [!] Hell [!!]

Whip’n out the sour mash
Hoist it high for dear Estelle
Aye a serpent of the lash’ll
Take grotesqueries unwell

Title Tuesday, 8 March 2022

March 8, 2022
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Most Tuesdays I do a feature in a Facebook group called Poets All Call. It’s called Title Tuesday, and I invite my fellow Poets to write poems using my titles as prompts. Today I had so much fun with it that I now want to share it with my WordPress readership. So without further Ado…

Title Tuesday, 8 March 2022

“Hey Good Lookin
What cha got cookin?
How about cookin somethin up with me?”

Hank Senior

Friends, I’ve been doing a lot of Crock-Pot cooking lately. Today I am also Crock-Potting poem titles, changing one word of famous game shows to fit the theme.

The Spice Is Right
Let’s Make a Meal
Wheel of Four-Cheese
You Bet Your Lime
The Spatch Game

Spatch is short for Spatula.

Just have fun, Kids. And for more fun for all of us, post a pic of what YOU are Cookin, just like I did.

The Distant, Joyful Screaming of the Spheres (v1)

March 8, 2022
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2022 0308 spheres 001
We cannot hear the stars and planets scream. Not from here, not with such buffers as near-vacuum and huge dust sheets between us and them. Yet if you held a microphone up close enough, you would hear the screaming of cycling fusion, tectonic shift and celestial childbirth. I prefer to think that if any emotion were associated with that violence of noise, it would be Joy, gladness to be turning the gears of Reality. So let us pull the microphone  back far enough to make glad whispers of the screams.

The Pain that Poisons Your Heart

March 7, 2022
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2022 0307 corelli
Even people unfamiliar with opera have heard these famous lines:

“Ridi, Pagliaccio,
sul tuo amore infranto!
Ridi del duol, che t’avvelena il cor!”

And they hear an operatic voice in perfect pitch singing these words in declamation. They can tell the singer is portraying someone in deep pain. They may have heard the phrase “Laugh, Pagliacci, laugh.” And they probably know Pagliacci is a professional clown.

But till today I, an almost total opera ignoramus, did not know the meaning of these three lines, nor what exactly made Pagliacci suffer so. Here is the translation:

Laugh, Pagliacci,
your love is broken!
Laugh at the pain that poisons your heart!

Pagliacci, the Clown, has just discovered that his wife has been unfaithful to him.

Even in the 21st Century, well after the Sexual Revolution and in the midst (or so I perceive) of a new, liberating attitude toward polyamorous relationships, the notion that a significant other having sex outside the relationship evokes words like “cheating” and “unfaithful.”

Long ago, and more than once, I felt that pain that poisoned my heart. Though I’ve become more philosophical about it now, those episodes still twist my face. One of my flaws is that I can only let go so much.

However, how I got to thinking about this, and how I came to draw Franco Corelli, is a bit comical. A Facebook friend of mine published a picture of a cat with its mouth as wide open as that of a striking rattlesnake. I saw that cat and in two split seconds thought “Operatic!” and “Pagliacci!” So I did a little digging in order to make a comment that was, verbatim, the famous Pagliacci lines. And one source provided YouTube links to performances by Pavarotti and by Franco Corelli–and to my untrained, ignorant ear, Corelli’s voice was purer and more expressive. And he was a handsome dude, back in the day, so I did the sketch above.

I’m not going to laugh about The Pain that Poisons My Heart. I think it’s healthier to write about it. Hey–I just did!! 🙂

variants, feat. bill campana

March 6, 2022
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2022 0305 campana06
Earlier today I worked on a self-portrait which eventually became “Ukraine Sympathizer.” (See previous post for that end result.) As the painting progressed I posted successive stages as my profile picture on Facebook. I thought my friends would enjoy seeing how the painting progressed…

…and one friend in particular, whom I have repeatedly referred to on this blog as “the funniest man on earth,” poet and humorist Bill Campana, went so far as to do extreme photoedits on my developing headshot, creating a total of SEVEN variants on my originals. Above is one of his two favorites, and I think it’s terrific. It captures a psychological facet of mine that whim compels me to call “Relaxed Bastard Face.” As far back as grade school, friends, especially girls, have remarked on my tendency to scowl, and urged me to smile. Sometimes, truthfully, I’ve responded “But I AM smiling.” Deep-set eyes and naturally downturning mouth corners, plus an undeniable lifelong struggle with non-clinical bipolarity, scowlify me.

These three range from slight solarization to an almost Francis-Baconesque distortion of features. Each is a different experience.

Color and detail variation evoke a ghostliness and then an electricity. And notice in the ghostliness on the left, there is an articulated eye in the orbital shadow on our right. It does not exist in the original. The line between editing and creation blurs.

2022 0305 campana01
And here is Bill’s other favorite. This one is my personal favorite as well. He’s taken the ore of my painting and smelted Mystery and Depth from it.  Here is a shadowy figure with serious matters troubling him. Perhaps it is the weight of the world, perhaps unrelieved sorrow, or he could just be worried about getting home safely. “Still waters run deep” is a phrase that comes to mind.

Profound thanks to my friend Bill Campana, who did something special today, creative and revelatory. Thanks also, Bill, for graciously allowing me to share our collaboration with my readers/viewers worldwide.