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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!]

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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.

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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

 

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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

Seven-odd years ago I did a page contemplating obsolescence and the fight against it. My first line was “Tyrannosaurus Rex was once a Large & Sexy Beast.” The page entire looked like this:

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A couple of days ago I posted a picture on Facebook that my Sweetheart, Denise, took of me after I’d worked a graveyard shift and then slept a few hours, acquiring an epic Bed Head. Here is the picture:

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I labelled it “Celebrities Without Their Makeup (Non-Celebrity Edition).” Got over 30 Likes and this echoic comment from my dear and Magic friend Mary: “Sexy Beast.” So if my arms start shortening, I’ll know I’m in real trouble.

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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.

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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

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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!