Once I drew every day. I have lost my way but might find it back. Here is a try.
grid iron
greetings, salutations, hi
rite this whey & G_d nose why–yer
individualists flo
dansons mais oui regardez non
..
Many flaws, but Inertia is well broken.
some of my drawings have been unearthed
from my primitive single-acrostic days
and fearless experimenting with colored markers
portraits of alfred stieglitz and jennifer hudson
musings and meanderings
done in a different lifetime
..
they distract
and i must get back to what i was doing
so I will put them aside
aside from this one
of my piano-playing
angelic
tongue-sticking-out friend
who has since found her soulmate
and changed her last name to his
My phone’s Camera has photoediting tools and among them is a nifty enhancer called Portrait Blur. It sharpens the focus on the focal point you choose and the further away from the focal point you get the more automatic blurring takes place.
This gave me an idea for an acrostic poem. Since the word Portrait has eight letters, and Blur has four, my acrostic could have four couplets, and the end-rhyme words would have their last letters be the B, L, U and R of Blur. The illustration would be a switcheroo, with the background in shap focus and the face, the Portrait part, all blurry.
Then my thoughts jumped to the notion of adding the word Self, creating a triple acrostic with Portrait in the middle and Self and Blur as bookends. I might then create a blurry self-portrait and have in the background a still Life with a few of my ceramic birds (I have made dozens) in sharp focus. This would yield the nice possibility of it becoming a psychological self-portrait, with the quirky birds as my alter egos.
So here we are in the blissful throes of creation, with a firm foundation for a work of art and a long way to go to reach fruition. One of the phrases I will tag this post with is “creative process.”
If you look at the attached photo you’ll see a placeholder drawing of cotton swabs, which I use to blend pencil marks for shading and will be handy for blurring as well, and a layout of the Self Portrait Blur acrostic with subject-to-change end rhyme words drab, lab, quail, derail,lieu, caribou, sector, and nectar. If I am a sufficiently nimble wordsmith the resulting poem will have a consistent meter and a theme related to “Self-Portrait Blur,” and when read out loud will not seam like an acrostic at all. My confidence that I will be able to do this is sky-high, because in the last eighteen years I have done it hundreds of times.
I sort of went Medieval with my chess-piece sculpting today, with a dim echo of the little I know of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales informing my tool-wielding hands.
Menagerie
Making friends again with clay
Efferversced your mood today
Notwithstanding sky-so-gray–
Amplified that riff-strewn sound;
Gotten butterflies astound
Everyone with what you’ve found.
Raise a glass to absent friends.
Iridescent dusk descends
East to west where rainbow wends.
This morning brought a three-hour session of improvisational sculpting at PIP Coffee & Clay. I broke some new ground by doing the heads of the larger-scale chess king and queen using pinch-pot technique rather than wheel-throwing for their heads. It seems a more intimate, tactile way to do portraiture.
The Queen woke up as
I was adding a bulbous earring.
“You have changed me completely,” she scolded.
“I do not recognize myself.”
“Gone is my patrician nose
And my delightful androgyny
And the angular cut of my cheekbone.
Why?”
I shrugged.
“You are more You now.
You have defined eyes
And the innate regality of a survivor
And the hint of a smile
That sees you through the worst.
You are more real.”
She made me widen her eyes
And put a teardrop near the right lacrimal duct.
But of course when I did that
I had to do a dozen other things.
“You are making me more homely,” she complained.
“No. I am sculpting you, and you are sculpting me
Just as much. You are uniquely lovely
And your daughters will be lovelier still.”
This silenced her
And soon I was finished.
Monday I made these four mugs.
Tuesday I had an appointment with the urologist.
Wednesday I set about trimming the mugs.
Not all of the mugs survived trimming. I went too deep with one and cut through it. So I reconstituted the trim scraps and remade a fourth mug, a sort of big brother to the others.
I had enough reconstituted scrap to pull four handles, and one by one I affixed them to the mug bodies via the Slip&Score method.
This went well with the three smaller mugs, and I still had session time, so I carefully trimmed the still-soft larger mug and put the last, largest handle on it, completing the quartet.
The NCAA’s annual basketball tournament is colloquially known as March Madness. For one who strives to be One With Clay, March Mudness is a better fit. 🙂
Today I saw the surgeon/Who’d sliced into my hands/To help my hand health burgeon/And sculpt as clay demands.
The good doctor says that the healing meets expectations and will likely continue for the rest of the year. After a year, he says, I can’t expect any more improvement. As of now, the only two symptoms of significance are a slight stiffness in my right middle finger and continued tingling of the fingers of my left hand.
I set the wheel to spinning/And formed a mug or two/With confidence a-ginning/And symbiosis true.
The clay body, Ironstone by name, was wonderfully supple and cooperative, and results felt more collaborative than solo-showish.
The serviceable Wareboard/Took on the two with glee/Then Thusséd and then Therefored/”Three fourths of Four is Three.”
The sound of the wheel’s motor augmented with the earcup-like acoustics of the splash tray can sometimes seem like the hum of the Cosmos itself. It is a lovely Alpha Wave maker when the wheel-throwing is smooth sailing.
Alas, the Fourth went sideways/A clay wall bent, then tore./The Clay Gods’ sometimes snide ways/So humble Potter’s core.
Here is when Failure and Success prove they are brother and sister. Big Bro says “Ah well, three out of four beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” But Little Sis whispers, “Let’s take the scrap clay, which is plenty enough for another mug, to the wedging table and reconstitute it better than new. It’s a good exercise, and it’s also good exercise.”
The scrap clay resurrected/Was centered, shaped, and trimmed/And Gloom was redirected/With Wareboard’s glee undimmed.
“Try, Try Again” is ancient wisdom well suited to artisans. Every effort, be it success, failure, or “learning experience” mix, is another rung on the “ladder to the stars” that Bob Dylan sang of in the song “Forever Young.”
Now wrap them, keeping moistness/For handle-adds tomorrow./You’re happy, and your poisedness/Is free from theft and borrow.
The clunky last lines reflect giddiness and satisfaction. Time well spent is truly priceless.
Driving to work/A piano piece by Johannes Sebastian Bach plays/On K-Bach Radio/89.5 on the FM dial/The cultivated- and accented-voiced Charlotte Wilson presiding
I know little more than crap about music/But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about this composition
I do know about prolificty/And I know that to keep the rocket-burner fires burning/The creators must surprise themselves, entertain themselves, delight themselves first
And in this piece Bach seems to lull and then startle his audience/Building his tone structures with logic/Then opening up a trapdoor of slight dissonant strangeness/Then adjusting the off-putting with new structural logic/To put things right again
He keeps making and breaking these patterns/And in the end he breaks the pattern-breaking too/And ends his tinkling journey with a perfect landing
Joe, I tell his vagabond spirit, that was a party and a half. Thanks.
One with Clay, Image and Text 