Here is an odd approach to an image: quote some song lyrics, and illustrate something related to the lyrics but not directly illustrative of the lyrics. I did the drawing first, and then heard the song in my head, and realized that the last words of the song would add a touch of Storminess to the page.
Here’s something I’ve been working on for a long time. It’s at that fork on Creation Road where I the artist must decide whether to put a LOT more work into it, or wrap it up as a cleaned-up As Is. I am uncertain so I am soliciting input from whoever reads this, i.e. You.
This drawing is heavily avian. The temptation is to throw in not only more birds, but anything Bird-related, such as Larry Bird, Brad Bird, Harlan Ellison’s psuedonym Cordwainer Bird, Nicolas Cage in the movie Birdy, the American Eagle, etc. Maybe throw in an obscene gesture or two.
What is most likely to happen is I’ll do a LITTLE more Bird-stuff, clean it up, post it, frame it, and then consider the use of its basic structure as a springboard for a MUCH larger piece, either a large canvas or a mural. Give the elements a little more living space. Study Hieronymus Bosch and various Breughels to go to school on myriad-detail structuring, then set to on canvas, wood or wall.
Note about the fellow in the foreground: on his chest is a triple=acrostic, “Aero Dyna Mics.” It goes like this:
As Clara Blandick’s Auntie Em
Eliminates Your rootless stem, I
Raise a Sting and fell an Orc
Or skewer Bad Guys with my Forks
Any thoughts on where I should go with this piece, Friends?
A performance is an event in time, made up of many sub-performances. A drawing or painting is a different kind of performance. All you see is what remains on the page, or the canvas, when the artist stopped.
But when I stopped working on this drawing, I intended the viewers to have a different experience, one that would be interactive whether the viewer chose to interact or not. To at least a small extent the viewer will “finish” the page in her or his mind. And, imperfect as my technique is, there is an opportunity for the viewer to create an image, and acrostic poetry, superior to what I have done.
Of course, all of the above paragraph might well be rationalizing nonsense by someone who is too lazy to finish the drawing and the poems…
But no. The pair of couplets at upper right establish that I meant to leave the image in glorious disarray.
Inglorious disarray, I tell you. 🙂
On Facebook there is a poetry group called Poets All Call. I am one of the group’s moderators, and I contribute with my poetry and with a weekly feature called Title Tuesday, in which I provide five titles and invite the poets to use the titles as prompts.
It’s Friday, and there hasn’t been much activity in the group–perhaps a sign of these pandemical times. So, since I think both writing poetry and reading poetry is good for the soul, today I tried to lead by example by starting a poem without any inspiration whatsoever. As the poem unfolded I got some illustration notions, and I went back and forth beteeen the poem and my drawing.
Here is the poem that inspired the drawing.
grab those bootstraps
(to my fellow Poets All Call members)
i have nothing to say
and only the vaguest set of urges
chief of which is the fear
that my word-engine will heave
a sputtering sigh and die
if i let it idle too long
hey, i just said something
this is first gear
and i remember thinking
about atlas this morning
atlas according to greek myth
supported the entire Earth on his shoulders
and i was thinking cmon greeks
any five-year-old would know that that
is stupid
what’s HE standing on when he does it?
why doesn’t he just rest the Earth
where he is standing?
and why isn’t there a theme park
where his beyond-gigantic hands are?
(the word-engine is revving)
(rev is short
either for reverend
or revolutions per minute)
(there are reverends
and then there are right reverends
but none will admit to being
a wrong reverend)
(another way of abbreviating
revolutions per minute
is rpm
pronounced arpeeyem
and easy to say fast
as befits an abbreviation
that an inebriate
can abbreviate
and not deviate)
speaking of deviate
we did
we were speaking of atlas
the laughably improbable
and got sidetracked
but it all ties in
an atlas is a collection of maps
in other words it holds
all or part of the earth
and the earth spins
at approximately 1/1440 rpm
for 1440 is the approximate number of minutes
in a day
as for the poetic nonsense
of certain reverends
it neverends
but this little poem
this bootstrapping jaunt
must end
i will snip its umbilicus
and send it out into your eyes
for i am its mother
literarily speaking
and the being of a mother
is so sacred
it has raised empires
and flared hope
with the promise of renewal
you might enjoy some motherhood yourself
if not tomorrow (who knows?)
then right now–yes, now!
you have a notion
knocking about in your fanciful head–
i know it!
please share it!
start from scratch–
grab those bootstraps!!
It might help to think of this blog post as a carnival ride. Take or leave all the backstory and poetry, if you wish. At heart it’s an improbable occurrence that may if let mess with your middle earbones a little bit, pleasurably I hope.
Many years ago I read Cool Hand Luke by Donn Pearce for the first time. It was about a man who found himself in Florida, in the Raiford prison chain gang. Every 4th of July the inmates got the closest thing to a holiday the prison offered, with free lemonade and some latitude, with the thought that a positive association with Independence Day, the springboard of the United States of America, would help instill in the convicts more love of country, and therefore of law and order. Ironically enough, though, in this scene from the book, some convicts were quietly sawing through the wood floor of the building, through which some would escape, thus declaring their independence. It’s a well-crafted scene, but the only reason I bring it up is that Carr the floorwalker at one point announces, “First bell. You done had your fun.”
The sentence “You done had your fun.” has been echoing in my head for over 50 years. I use it every time I need to tear myself away from self-indulgence and get back to chores, work, or other responsible activity. Many is the time “You done had your fun.” has compelled me to walk away from a gambling venue before I put my debit card in the ATM yet another time. (I am a recovering gambling addict, what Mario Puzo called in his too-neglected novel Fools Die a “degenerate gambler.”)
I’ve been in a creative slump of late, and the combination of self-quarantine due to COVID-19 and serial movie-watching and overindulgence in various tasty treats has undermined my creative output further. Finally I grabbed myself by the scruff of the neck, figuratively speaking, and said, “You done had your fun.”
Then I realized that with alternative spelling that would actually make the phrase more Southern-sounding, “You Dun Had Yer Fun” was a perfect quintuple acrostic. It would be a bear to write, but the challenge might well pull me out of my slump some. So here we are.
Since it is a quintuple acrostic, and I took on the further challenge of keeping the verbiage to a minimum, with as little sacrifice to rhyme and meter as possible, the logic of the poem’s content goes afield more than once. But that turned out to be serendipitous, because right at the last few words there came unbidden the perfect subject matter for the illustration: an Undressed Toucan. “What kind of clothes would a toucan wear??!” “Why, self-expressive HAWAIIAN SHIRT and HAWAIIAN SHORTS, of course!!”
Nobody else on Earth, except MAYBE the latest, bleeding-edge Artificial Intelligence Artist, could have created this page. Like Peter Pan, I gotta crow about that, though with the subtextual knowledge that no one else on Earth would WANT to.
****
You Dun Had Yer Fun
You’re riding high and then you eyeball stuff
You so doubt what you’re saying off the cuff
Of course your sense can intercede for you
One scene’s unclear and typeset in Urdu
Urbane and sleek, of dearth you’re not a fan
Unless until y’undress a mere toucan
****
About that powder-blue, fizzy effacement: It is sort of a way of marking my territory. When an intaglio plate, or lithographer’s slab, is deemed by the artist to be unworthy of reproduction, the plate or stone may be slashed with an appropriate tool, indicating that any further use of the plate or stone is unauthorized. About 38 years ago I had one of my intaglios professionally printed in a limited edition. The printer included with the prints and ancillary materials the declaration: “The plate has been effaced.” Remembering that, and wanting to jazz up the image a bit, I used photoediting software to efface this too-canny effort.
Maybe it was all for a Bad Pun. In the Arizona Wildcat, the school newspaper for the University of Arizona, reviewer Bryan Johnstone called the comments by my artwork in the solo show I had in the Hall of Fame gallery “self-effacing.”
Thank you, O Reader, for reading my Bad Pun of the Day. (Actually, there are two Bad Puns in this post. Can you spot the other one?)
There’s a sort of warning in the background of this image, a sampleresque homily which has been, to my knowledge, as yet unwritten. It says “Ambiguity S O C K S.” it is sort of self-demonstrating.
I got ambitious, and my have overreached my ability –I KNOW the viewer needs all the help she or he can get, yet there’s a lot of chaos here. The double acrostic poem, “Kitchens Sync,” gives another clue as to why. A lot is thrown in.
kitchens sync
kundalini yoga sends
intimation to yr friends
take a ride on grammerly
challenge all yr fammerly
help a sea or gutter urchin
end a quest 4 what yr surchin
need of job r wife r clinic
seeds yr future megacynic
When Kitchens Sync, i.e. become synchronous or achieve synchronicity, the phrase “everything but the kitchen sink” expands to become “everything INCLUDING the sinks of more than one kitchen.” I hope and trust that some enjoyment of this poem/image may be derived by looking for patterns. One example that may be missed if I don’t mention it is that the poem has one instance of the shorthand word “yr” (for “your”) in every other line of the poem. That wasn’t done gratuitously. It’s intended to reinforce the connection between the reader and the poem’s arc. Whether it works or not is a matter of opinion–YOUR opinion.
The center figure seemed to me to look a bit like the late Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson once ran for public office, and used a symbol of his own design for the political party he was trying to get off the ground, of a two-thumbed hand gripping a peyote button. My guy doesn’t have two thumbs on his hand, but including the thumb there are six fingers. I think I owe the whimsy of that to Marc Chagall, who once gave one of his figures a seven-fingered hand. After I post this page I’ll see if Chagall had any other reason for doing that other than the sheer anarchic joy of it. If not, that was plenty–doing a little time in the Anarchic Circle is good for an artist’s refreshment. 🙂
Today Russ Kazmierczak, Karaoke Fanboy and creator of Amazing Arizona Comics, texted me while I was working on my latest page. Russ was letting me know that he had finished, and was printing, Volume 2 of the COVID-19 micropoems he’d written, with minor contributions from me.
We bantered awhile (example: I told him about my latest Bad Pun, “Gatored Community,” and talked about how to get it to work), and then I showed Russ my work in progress, in steps as we texted:
GB: Work in progress. Not much drawing left, but a boatload of dialog in word balloons…
RK: Looks great!
GB: Thanks. Good thing it doesn’t have to. 🙂 Gil Kane once discussed the “Little Orphan Annie” strip–said the artist may as well have been drawing lumps of coal. The illustration took a back seat to the word-ballooned story. Somehow that is comforting to me. 🙂
RK: Oh, I’ll hang my hat on that one!
GB: Ha–your drawing is quite serviceable. John Byrne Jr. with a touch of Fred Hembeck. –Only better, he hastened to add…
GB: Now it’s just a race to the punchline. –Oh, and coming UP with a punchline…
I see I left out a parenthesis…
GB: Then “And YOU are captain AND crew.” And then maybe “Where to?” Or “GO BIG or GO HOME–wait, you ARE home…” or “Bon Voyage…”
GB: One thing I like about word balloons is they are composition-balancers.
RK: Absolutely, I wish I used them like that a bit more.
GB: And you can get playful with the tails…
RK: Definitely
GB: And sometimes tilt the words for dynamic angling. That’s rarely done in what I’ve seen. There’s a right-angle anality to almost all lettering…
…so when you throw that off the reader is a bit frissoned without knowing why.
RK: Definitely serves to reveal a disorientation in the speaker…or like you said to GIVE disorientation to the reader…only in comics art!
GB: All done but the cleanup. And..you…were…there… 🙂
RK: Awesome to see and read the process! Thanks for sharing this
GB: That was fun! So, what DOES “n.e.s.” stand for?
RK: Boy…that could be a stumper…Neo Existential Sketch is the first to come to mind
GB: “Existential” IS a word in one of the candidates! Well done! –Hey, is it OK with you if I include this exchange of ours in my blog post?
RK: Ha! Awesome…and of course
GB: Great! Thanks!
RK: No problem!
GB: ETA 8pm. Or nine. Or next week? 🙂
RK: I’ll keep my eyes peeled
GB: Painful!
RK: Ha!
****
Here then, Friends, is how this one particular work (almost) came to be. I say Almost because there was more than Cleanup involved–a whole other stage, in fact. Next post is the Reveal!
I was hoping to get this piece done by midnight. I am eleven hours early, having rushed its completion, just as I said I DIDN’T want to do (see my previous post, “Throes of Creation”). But that’s a good thing, as I will explain.
Behind the “finished” page is the copy on which I thrashed out the penultimate draft. The missing lines of the acrostic are written wraparound-style outside the right and top page borders.
****
Here Are the Elsewheres
HOPEWARD bound, on wings of raging Flame
Endless Void the Heaven, Sol the Hell
Righteousnesses seem like voodoo games
Empathy the Childe of Beast & Belle
Angst, Begone. Come Progress swift AND slow
RENT from shackling History’s catarrh
Emphasis on Health from head to toe
Then comes TRAVEL meaning-full and far
HOPE is Blissful Silence–just ask these
Everlasting Peacefulness agrees
****
So here, Friends, is a poem in Trochaic Pentameter, ababcdcdee rhyme scheme, all but one pair of lines perfect rhymes, and that one pair of lines varying merely by the difference between Singular and Plural. I am proud. It is a sort of sequel to the decades-old song “After the Gold Rush” by proud “Canarican” (as of January of this year!) Neil Young, which includes the last stanza
Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceship flying
In the yellow haze of the sun.
There were children crying and colours flying
All around the chosen one
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun…
Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed
To a new home in the sun.
Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed
To a new home…
Tomorrow, April 22, 2020, is the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day. Neil’s song, and his album of the same name (the lovely word eponymous means “of the same name”) were recorded that same year. So here’s to Neil Young, and also to Dennis Hopper, whose movie The Last Movie (a “follow-up to Easy Rider” according to rock historian Nick Hasted) inspired Mr. Young to write “After the Gold Rush.”
So–why the rush job? I promised an explanation. See, if you look at the drawing/illustration, the middle lines of the poem seem most hastily placed. They are. Two reasons. A, the faster you skate across the (Stonehenge White, thick, super-absorbent) paper with a (Pilot PRECISE V5 Ultra Fine Rolling Ball) pen, the fainter the penstroke appears to the eye, and I wanted to have my cake and eat it too as far as shape-repetition of the floating rectangle-with-cutout was concerned. B) This drawing is a Qualifier, meaning that I deem it worthy of the time and trouble it will take to use it as the basis of a large-scale painting.
Now it’s time to talk, briefly and glowingly, about my ex-wife, Joni.
A couple of months ago Joni was cleaning house, and she had decided that it was a shame that the art supplies she’d acquired during her time of journaling and other creative expression were going fallow. She asked me if I knew of someone who could put them to good use. I nominated myself. And Joni, bless her sweet soul, not only gave me a boatload of art supplies, including a COMPLETE, UNUSED set of acrylic paints, and a FIVE-DRAWER CABINET containing all manner of other media, but she also HELPED ME PUT THEM IN MY APARTMENT. She has not let the dissolution of our marriage interfere with the kindness and compassion she extends to a fellow Creative. But since my acquisition of these fine supplies, I have made sparse use of them–some sculptural enhancement here, some sketching on a pad there. Now–and I will devote Earth Day (and probably beyond) to this endeavor–I will use the paints and brushes she endowed me with to make a more fully realized version of this page.
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I’ve been working on a page in sporadic fits. There are still a thousand ways it can go, yet it’s “mostly” done. What I did this morning is take a black&white copy of it, and use that copy to explore, freed from the stricture of “ink is forever.” Here’s a pic, with the original on the left, and the worked-on copy on the right:
Notice the final couplet was already done. Like many murder mysteries, this poem started with a theme (the double acrostic HERE ARE THE ELSEWHERES) and the “reveal” (the final couplet “Hope is Blissful Silence–just ask these/Everlasting Peacefulness agrees”). The bestselling mystery author Mickey Spillane once said cheerfully in an interview that he wrote all his books backwards, starting with an ending and then figuring out how to get there. And, Friends, speaking from the experience of the construction of, no kidding, more than a thousand acrostic poems, starting with the first line is the rare exception, not the usual way to succeed.
With my copy I composed a draft of the first four lines, but did it beyond the page border, using white Conté crayon. This is out of a concern that if I fill in the acrostic on the page itself, it might spoil the visual effect enjoyed by the similarity between the letters and words already on the page and the floating, flexing rectangle-with-cutout in the foreground. Also, the lines are a draft, and so subject to change. (I’m not sure, for instance, that it’s such a good idea to have a “Beauty and the Beast” reference in a poem addressing more eternal issues. But maybe it will be more relatable this way. SO many ways this thing can go!)
I filled in the letters for HERE on the left acrostic column and the HERE of the ELSEWHERES in the right column. Trying the resulting motif-tension on for size. I like it–it seems to work. The final version will include that.
I did a few other things too, and the reader is welcome to look for them. But this post is all about the anatomy of the creative process, and I felt it valuable to preserve this one step. There will be many more decisions to make, and more lines to compose. I hope to be done by midnight, but one BAD decision that has afflicted much of my work is to rush things. Don’t want to ruin this one by rushing it!
A) Don’t paint yourself into a corner B) and don’t paint yourself AS a corner.
One with Clay, Image and Text 