Here’s one last spoonful of February.Thanks for “listen”ing!
Silver Spoken
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Tag Archives: art
Ricki Losee and Her World of Happy Things
Today I had the privilege of working with two of the true Sweethearts of the Village Gallery. One of them was Ricki Losee, as above. I hope to devote a future post to the other of them, but for today she will remain anonymous.
As for Ricki, her artwork in Prismacolor pencils is a celebration of vibrant, color-saturated life. She is at one with nature, especially with those creatures she deems Happy Things, which include birds and butterflies. Every nature drawing I have seen of hers has love, loyalty and creature-fellowship in it.
This page occurred mostly during a lull in the early shift, when Ricki asked me about my poetry and I decided to demo it for her, noting the happy fact that both of her names, Ricki and Losee, are five characters long. While I worked I talked to her about things important to her. Reverence for life is way up there, as is her love for her ornithology-inclined daughter, who is studying raptors, golden eagles in particular, and in pursuit of a Ph.D. So I have surrounded Ricki with not only a few sketchnails of her drawings, but also a golden eagle in full wingflex.
The words to the eponymous double acrostic are these:
Reverence for life ensures you have a tale to tell
If you see some Happy Things they just may say Hello
Cackles, birdsong, cacophonic squawks–and so it goes
Keeping conversation with a Condor? Do not grouse
It may turn to dietary issues–like a mouse
ank is to ankh as let is to lett as acorn is to oak (part five of seven)
Creation begets digression begets more creation. You want to know more about Latvia. You find a map of Latvia. It occurs to you that the curvature of a bisque-fired teapot might suit a drawing of the map of Latvia more than flat paper would. You draw Latvia and surrounds on your teapot. Lacking a good camera, but having a webcam that works if you record video, you do so. You do a print screen of a still from the video. It is none too good, but intriguing. You click “New Post” and copy and paste the title of the previous post. You tweak the title, which itself a tweak of the one before that one. Here we are. No guarantees that we’ll be stopping at “seven of seven.” There may well be an “eight of eight” or even an “eight of seven.” That’s Creation for you.
ank is to acorn as ankh is to lett (part four of seven)
Since my last post I’ve learned that Catherine the Great was Latvian. Hers is a true rags-to-riches story, and no wonder Mae West strode the boards in her honor in Catherine Was Great.
I found this young woman in an Internet search for “Latvian woman.” Her garb indicates she is unmarried. She is Lithuanian, not Latvian, but just south of the border.
ANK(H) : ACORN :: LET(T) : OAK (part three of seven)
Here is a shameful false start on the verses. The meter is fine, the rhyme is good, but each line is self-contained platitudinous nonsense that does not advance story, symbolism nor truth. I have stacks and stacks of such in my seven-year history of acrostic poetry.
It’s time for research: history of Latvia, significance of the ankh, anklet styles then and now. Stay tuned!
ANK(H) : ACORN :: LET(T) : OAK (part two of seven)
The title for this series owes its colonscape to the Miller Analogies Test, Interested parties may quickly find a website that has the lowdown on the MAT, and free sample tests to boot, but all you need to know here is that ” : ” means ” is to ” and ” :: ” means ” as “.
:: you may recall, the double-acroticist looked at his (my) ANK LET beginning, and quickly epiphanied opportunity toappend aitch and tee, yielding ANKH LETT and enabling a DOUBLE Double Acrostic, which is not to be confused with a Quadruple Acrostic. The twin-twin challenges remaining were to 1) finish the acrostic a) so it would makes sense either way; and 2) do the illustration, which must b) incorporate the acrosticization in a single image. The above study is a possible serving suggestion, imagining a Lett woman (identified through her choice of having the flag of Latvia on her ankle) wearing an anklet that bears amongst its links an Ankh. What about LET? some astute observer may ask. Well, my Sweet Girfriend, who shall go named–Denise–LET me take a photo of her lower leg, and I based my drawing on the photo.
Two parts down, five to go. See you fine folks in a couple of days!
O I C Her/Heroic Extras
I keep getting possessed by a lovesickeningly romantic Sap who thinks life is hunky-dory as long as She Loves Me and, contrariwise, life is horrible if She Loves Me Not. Every so often I let him ride the Pencil and the Rhyme-Scheme-atron. This is one such time.
Here are the saccharine words:
Overtures at any other time may have been rash
Out of their contextual ensconcement–likely hash
If, however, frank assertions from a soulmate’s cache
Infiltrate a heart it may restore one’s hope, for sure
Cats who are enthusiastic tend to preen and purr
Catch a wholesome ecstasy: just meet a gaze and stir
The Sap wants me to point out the hidden message of the middle words: other contextual assertions restore enthusiastic ecstasy. Sap, it is done. Now please get lost until I need you again…
ANK(H) : ACORN :: LET(T) : OAK (part one of seven)
Index cards, four inches by six, ruled on one side and blank on the other, are the antibane of my existence. A few dozen of those babies and a couple of sharp Ticonderoga Black pencils and I can fly intercontinentally and be kept engaged and amused throughout the flight. Get a hundred-pack at any office supply and for less than four cents each you have the ideal unthreatening Idea Playground. Bad ideas can be tossed, good ones added to the uncut-diamond pile.
Today I have the acorn of what I hope will sprout into the oak of an exemplary journal page. I started with ANK LET, perhaps a next-in-the-series to my previously posted GOB LET. As I was working out end words ANK and LET were staring me in the face and ANK started hankering for an aitch at the end: ANKH. Ankh: powerful life-symbol from ancient Egypt. “Spirits of ancient Egypt..,” Paul McCartney sang once.
But what about LET? Well, add a tee and you get Lett, which means Latvian. This can go any number of good ways.
End of Part One
Air Getter
This is being written during the Winter Olympics of 2014, held in Sochi, Russia. I happened to tune in last night during a ski jump event. I learned that the competitors do not use skis with the traditional edge; that they sit on a crossbar till they’re ready to slide; that their landing area is cross-striped with red and purple and guidelined with what looks like rocks; that many ski jumpers can’t give it up, and go back to the jump even after they retire from competition. Hearing that, and seeing the exhilarating jumps, led me to this drawing and acrostic:
A floating specter seems to be from antigrav.org
Agility will keep him from the ER or the morgue
It helps to have a musculature up to the contort
It doesn’t hurt to NEED the thrill that only comes with sport
Restrictions are made moot yet new conditions are severe
Revel-lations liberate though icy wind may shear
prep work
This image is self-referential in that it involves a screen print of the prep work I did for the blog post.
For some reason I’m thinking of the funeral expenses my mother has just incurred. One line item was the rabbi’s fee, which was $400. There is no doubt in my mind that he earned his money, and then some: my mother was comforted by his well-chosen words, which showed an astonishing familiarity with the relationship my mother and stepfather had. Yet his “face time” with my mom and all of us was less than two hours. His own Prep Work for this task, though, began well before his thirteenth birthday.
Indeed, Prep Work for truly important work takes far more time than the work itself. My Prep Work for my first marathon began July 4, 1983, and more than 1500 miles of increasingly long runs and higher mileage per week. Yet when I took my place amongst the 10,000 other runners on August 19, 1984, I felt unprepared, and this proved true: my finish time of four hours, eight minutes and change was a bitter disappointment. (Now, however, I’m proud and happy about what I did, and what I’ve done since then. Age sometimes brings at least a little wisdom.)
In the largest sense, of course, everything we’ve done in our lives so far is Prep Work for what we’re going to do next. How’s by you? [smile]
One with Clay, Image and Text 