Hand’s Scape
Holding one in one is bliss
As a moonrise yields a disc
Never letting go in sleep–a
Dream defines two hearts that deep
‘S all right when ye Lovers Leape
Inktober 7th: Hand’s Scape
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Tag Archives: art
Inktober 6th: Mount Rushmore Revisited
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.
Inktober 5: shape speaks
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.
Inktober 4th: Fied Fivefer
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.”
Inktober 2: Existential Clues
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?
Inktober 1st: Concert
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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Actor/Woman
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!
please. decide.
This page went sideways in more ways than one. At first it was going to be a triple acrostic, most likely built around Fizzler (or perhaps Fiddler), Puzzler, and Dazzler. But when I columnized Puzzler, it occurred to make of the words an end-in-itself structure. Suddenly there was an ambiguous artifact, perhaps of a lifeguard station or a large container or the upper torso of a breastplated, long-dead soldier. Then it needed to be populated. Then tied together…
The result would serve as an illustration to any of dozens of stories. When I look at it I feel a pang of loss for the late great Shel Silverstein. The stripped-down drawing style and the service to Story remind me of some of the things he did.
cold gold
Gold is versatile, being malleable, ductile, and conductive. Its true value might be more in the realm of symbolism, though. Most of us gold-owners want more, feeling better off with each additional acquisition. But there are those for whom a drawerful of Kruggerands is not enough . . .
Here are the words. Note that Ringolevio under slight name variations is a sort of combination of Tag and Hide-and-go-seek, originated in one of the New York City boroughs. Coventry is a place in England that has come to symbolize shunning, banishment, or quarantine.
Coventry’s a game of ring
O-levio with children’s lingo
Linger on the second level
Deviate and be bedeviled
Long ago and very early in his career the underground comics legend Robert Crumb drew a frog looking mournfully at the viewer and saying “‘ ‘Tis sad.” Decades later the President of the United States ended quite a few of his limited-character assessments with the word “Sad.” Crumb has made it clear in more than one of his creations that he regards Donald Trump as a personification of Evil.
Sam & Norm Rock Well
Sam Rockwell is an Academy-Award winning actor. Norman Rockwell was an illustrator who championed civil rights, most famously in a portrait of grade-schooler Ruby Bridges being escorted to a sanctioned-by-law non-segregated class by four hefty enforcers from the U. S. government. In contrast to these two gentlemen, George Lincoln Rockwell was the hate-mongering head of the American Nazi Party in the 1960s. On the laptop screen behind my drawing is a scene from the ROOTS saga featuring Marlon Brando as the Nazi Rockwell, who would have fit right in at that infamous rally in Charlottesville.
Here are the words to the quadruple acrostic:
See, some surnames make it rain and snow
And two fellows with a row to hoe
Make Art crafty on a carousel
And for our emotion’s sake excel
I drew Sam Rockwell from a freeze-frame from WOMAN WALKS AHEAD, starring Jessica Chastain and Michael Greyeyes. I drew Norman Rockwell from the canvas-sketch detail of his “Triple Self-Portrait.” I wouldn’t waste a gram of graphite drawing George Lincoln Rockwell, unless it was absolutely essential to do so for an image’s sake. Turns out it wasn’t in this case, so I cheerfully excluded him.
One with Clay, Image and Text 