After nine and a half hours on the job, the next five-at-least better be in Slumberland.
PS WIP equals Patrick Stewart Work In Progress. I tried doing a PS a few years ago; people thought the drawing was good, but they couldn’t tell who it was.
This is dedicated to all of us who have struggled against a bad habit and succeeded, however fleetingly.
Here are the words to the double (and double-entendre) acrostic:
YO! Quit that AWFUL habit! Play it straight
Your quality of H O P E will escalate
Obsequious, the vice purveyors win
Obliquely when the helpless rack up sins
Ubiquity might keep us on the trail
Uniqueness and good Purpose gets us hale
Astute observers will have noticed six of the letter Q lined up on the left side of the poem/array, and six of the letter P lined up on the right. Coincidence? Absolutely not. I have done my best to mind my Ps and Qs. [wicked smile]
Many art supply stores have wooden pose-able models in sizes from keychain to full scale. The one double-track-drawn here is about four inches high. I took approximately the same liberties with flexure and expression as Gene Colan did with his renderings of Iron Man, lo these several decades past.
(About seven years ago I sent “Genial Gene” a gushing fan e-mail, praising his storytelling illustration, and he quickly and nicely answered in true gentleman fashion. Just found out three minutes ago that he died in 2011. Alas! Here’s a link for the curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Colan )
Anyway, it occurred to me that these anonymous mannequinesques would make good chess pawns, and I’ve been into grids lately, so…
Here are the words, for the third time, sort of:
Participants should come a’board’–we’ll start ASAP
And then ‘square’ off in reenacted war or game or deal
Whine, loose or drawl: no ‘stale mate’ allowed, nor bargained plea
Nor b’rook’ing op’position’ via mattress glue–too sealy
To the spirit of Philip José Farmer. http://www.pjfarmer.com/
Yesterday, following my post on Patty Hoisch, my friend, classmate, and fellow insomniac Beth Facebooked-messaged me that she liked Patty’s jewelry and wondered if it were available online. I steered Beth to Patty’s Etsy presence, and, as if to prove that no good deed goes unpunished, Beth subsequently told me that she should have been trying to sleep, but instead bought earrings, and that therefore I owed her $15.00.
Of course she was kidding, and so was I when I asked if a $15.00 drawing would satisfy her claim on my assets. “Even better,” was her instant answer. And then came the alchemy: I decided to do the drawing, send it to her, and make a blog post of the drawing and how it came to be. Here we are, and bless you, Beth, for supporting the arts with your $15.00 earrings purchase. (By the way, my drawing is valued at $150.00. My friends get a 90% discount. [grins])
And here are the words to the triple acrostic:
Forsooth, vermouth, then toothy smile
Regaled, assailed, benailed & riled
Entrapp’d, enraptured, captured well
EGAD! Be glad! Your life’s Unhelly
Readers may hit a speed bump with that final seeming non-rhyme. But if you slop the third line a little into the fourth, you can use the E of EGAD! to make it work. (House rules, folks! [grins again])
PS: This is the second day in a row a page has come to be due to a woman of many talents. Beth has been a medical doctor; she is now an outstanding pastel artist, with still lifes to rival the Old Masters. She’s also, often, playfully edgy, and vice versa. No details on request; sorry! [grins yet again, the grinning fool!]
A few posts ago I featured my Village Gallery colleague Ricki Losee and mentioned that there was one other artist that I hoped to do a page on. Here is the page, and here is she. Patty Hoisch is a person whose talents include songwriting, song performance, lapidary, jewelry design and meeting management–and I’m just scratching the surface here. She is also patient and gracious, even in the face of a horrible pun perpetrated in her name: I asked her if she were familiar with STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION; she said yes; I then suggested she get a ST:TNG Patrick Stewart action figure, “…so you can be Hoisch by your own Picard.” She should have done me grievous bodily harm; instead she smiled, politely but sweetly.
She has a website, Wild Hare Arts, which showcases her beautiful creations. Here is a link: http://wildharearts.com/
Here are the words to the quadruple acrostic:
When a happy whispered Aaaaah
Infiltrates a cloister’s spa
Let coquettish smiles appear
Delicately chart [or chase] a sphere
In the background of my drawing is a page of the sheet music she wrote for the cello part of her song “Shadow on the Wall.” Her husband Tom plays electric cello, and the two of them make beautiful music together.
Here is a page with three prominent words. Each of the words may serve as both noun and verb. The three together, as verbs in the imperative, may serve as three simple instructions with optional complication: Puzzle [out truth through experience]; Play [with concepts and correlation]; Ground [your puzzling and playing with a goal-seeking algorithm]. The three may also be read as two ganging up on the third: PuzzlePlay Ground or Puzzle Playground. We’re going to squeeze these words for all they’re worth here.
I’m at a point in my journey as an artist where I feel everything I’ve done so far, and especially what I’ve done in the last seven years, has gained inertia and inevitability so that new work demands to be done independent of my will to do it, along a path I have less and less control in deviation. Example: I’ve been making crossword puzzle grids for months now. I’m not getting any better at making them, but something in the core of my art identity demands that I keep making them, night after night. Sometimes I use the grids to replicate the crossword patterns in the newspaper, so that I don’t mark up the newspaper to solve the puzzle, but this is happening less and less lately. And there’s a growing sense that soon I’ll be going 3D with resin or PVC, making cubes and other volumes that contain text-units (i.e. alphanumerics), and writing poetry more suited to three-dimensional space; hypercrostic poetry, if you will. Perhaps the hundreds upon hundreds of acrostic poems I’ve done have been merely preparative prelude to what I will be doing. It seems daunting/impossible to do what I’m describing, though.
True story: some years ago a friend of mine had a dream about me. In the dream I was painting three-dimensionally. –Maybe I’m just remembering her telling me about that dream, and now imagining what it would be like, best I can. (I don’t really have to imagine: Philip José Farmer described a means of doing so, as practiced by his protagonist Chibiabos Elgreco Winnegan, in his Hugo-Winning novella “Riders of the Purple Wage.” It is preposterous and wonderfully, wildly imaginative.)
Howbeit, here are the words to my unhyper acrostic:
Party’s dull–perhaps it needs some ZING
Ugly lull–small hope that most’ll linger
Ziggy Stardust’s not along–nor RINGO
Zebra stripes don’t translate to Urdu
Let’s a Maze–a labyrinthine BOON
Enter energy to knit a wound
And in conclusion, here’s something written in response to a challenge that reads, and I quote, “Write a poem about the Dalai Lama’s lost weekend.”
hello, dalai
who’s that guy at the bar
oh it’s me
lama lama ding dong
hey tarbender
gimme one with everything bwah hahahaha
ackshully
i’ll have a sloe gin fizz
but make it fast
[three drinks later]
hey babe
lao me to innaduce myself
i’m the fourteenth reincarnation
of the big eightfold cheese
of tibetan buddhism
no i don’ have a light
unless enlightenment counts
oh okay seeya
[three drinks later]
row row row yer bodhi
genly down the streeeet
mellowly mellowly mellowly mellowly
lives are too discrete
[three drinks later]
hey babe
lao mi to induce myselv
i’m the lama yer dreams
and i’m up for grabs
and when i undress
i disrobe
hey whey ya goin??!
geez
who yagodda drink to get a screw around here
My Journey presupposes the Guggenheim Museum will be engulfed by a tsunami and then rediscovered millennia later.
Settle down O Guggenheim
Entre nous you’re past your prime
Drift to ocean floor & then
If you’re found you’re Heaven-sent
There are two related but distinct sets of words on this page. Here is the first:
a mutter comes from cosmic convolutions
a sigh may be celestial sometimes
for fists & guns a lack of quick solutions
ensures no lack of tears nor fire nor rhymes
Here is the second:
Lamps have shades & lifts have load
Images & rocks erode
Gophers dig & bunnies hop
Humans flash & strobe white/hot
Thus we kill & mourn the moth
When I was building the image I thought of my erstwhile Drawing & Composition sensei, Darlene Goto, whose two main sets of words/advice for her students were “Darker darks!” and “Use a full range of value.” Ms. Goto, thank you.
One with Clay, Image and Text 