birthplace
begotten in the void and flip
incipients await or crawl
rotation makes a spinny trip — a
torus warps a free-for-all. etc
heterogenous, ye Blippe
birthplace (v2)
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Tag Archives: art
Title Tuesday, 8 March 2022
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)
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
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
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.
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.
feathered, tethered, weathered
This sketch is based on a photo of a bird who was bound by a length of cable and perched on display at a nature fair conducted by the City of Avondale, Arizona. The photo was taken by my friend Patty after my camera randomly quit on me. Patty had me hold the leash of her dog Sparky while she took the shot I’d failed to get.
The bird seemed placid and resigned. Between the artistic/dramatic liberties I took in converting a photo to a sketch, and my limitations as a nature artist, this sketch is more “inspired by” than “based on.” “The next one will be better,” I told myself, as always, as I signed and dated the sketch.
horsemen
Here’s a sketching exercise done after freezing the frame of a DVD I was watching. The wonderful fact is, an expert director and director of photography and cinematographer and costume designer and makeup department have all conspired to give the viewer, and the sketcher, an excellent composition and value array, for delectation. From that, the sketcher can report what she or he is seeiing, or play with it, or hybridize. This sketcher decided to focus on faces and gesture and leave out a few details.
first world driiink
The conceptualization for this page occurred while I was walking home from a drug store/pharmacy called Walgreens, sipping and then gulping on the first-world drink I had purchased, a Naked Blue Machine. It tasted sweet. Research revealed that similar products ARE sweet, to the tune of about 13 teaspoons of sugar per unit; and the nutritionally-valuable fiber is been mostly removed in the juice-making process.
So this is a product that suckers people into drinking something that they think is good for them, and it’s priced for the upscale consumer. Anyone with fresh fruit and a blender can do much better for themselves with their own concoctions, which with experimental effort will ultimately result in a drink better, tastier, and FAR cheaper than this store-bought, blatantly First World product. (I refer now not to the product I had purchased, but to the satirical product depicted above.)
I tried to be funny when I did this,m but world events have deadened my funny bone. Please think of this page as a Caveat Emptor public service.
Technical note: The “iii” in “driiink” is pronounced “three.” So the phrase becomes “snort or three.” The acrostic construction process makes for strange bedfellows, in this case triplets.
first world driiink
find your bliss with wet, not weed
in the kick your totters teeter
riffing with your snort or iii
savoringly in between
tasty and the kitchen sink
Still Life with Cards, Gouache Tube, Fan Brush, and Moons
This was fun to draw, and I felt blissful while it unfolded. it is a candidate for a larger-scale drawing or painting. 7″x10″ is good for working out main compositional details but 20″x30″ and up would provide more detail breathing room, and more opportunity to knock people’s socks off.
On Da Warp Path
On Da Warp Path
Once upon a time we got our stuff @ A & P
Now we get nostalgic at the sound of Sha-Na-Naa
Dreaming of the Dark Age with its LSMFT
As the next Apocalypse draws nigh–YAY!! Sis Boom Bah
Notes
“A & P” refers to a chain of grocery stores, the #1 chain in the United States for most of the 20th Century. (“A & P” stands for “Atlantic & Pacific.”) In 2015, following Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, the A & P stores were liquidated.
“Sha-Na-Naa” refers to a band with a similar name, Sha Na Na, formed in 1969 and still active. {romulgators of the musical genre Doo-Wop, their perhaps most famous hit song is “Good Night, Sweetheart (Well, It’s Time To Go).”
“LSMFT” stands for “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” The Lucky Strike brand, now owned by the British Tobacco Corporation, is no longer readily available in the United States.
“Sis Boom Bah” is part of a cheerleading chant originating in 1867. The Sis and Boom are intended to be imitative of an ignited firework going up into the air and then exploding.
One with Clay, Image and Text 