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bowl/nest

February 9, 2022
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2022 0209 bowl nest

Last I heard there were five different kinds of Life–Plants, Animals, “Protists,” and two kinds of algae. Maybe. Probably not. My brain is in cognitive decline, and I don’t have time to look it up, and the point anyway is that within the strictly-biological definition of “life” some enormous variation is possible.

But there’s non-biological life too. Human beings have developed a self-replicating form of mechanism. Maybe. Probably not, but something like that. My dim memory says it’s chimerical, and much like the “biots” Arthur C. Clarke presciently described in his rollicking, imaginative novel Rendezvous with Rama.

We also speak of artwork as if it were to some degree alive. We use words like “vitality” and “animated” to codify our viewing expderience. If the work of art is representative of wildlife, we may judge is in comparison with what it is meant to represent.

So we come to this, one of my recent creations. It began when I finished my oatmeal and took a second spoon and put it in the empty bowl with the first. I liked the way the spoons and bowl looked, so I took a pic and made a drawing based on the pic. It seemed to want a bone, so I drew a bone, and shadows. I decided to construct a double acrostic, “bowl/nest.” When I came to the second line the word “owlish” suited the meter, and it was an easy link to the endword “scene.” (Acrosticist’s Tip: ALWAYS start with the endwords, if you want your poem to rhyme AND scan AND make sense!!)

And then I looked at my drawing again, and I saw that I could make bowl, spoons and bone a literal manifestation of an “owlish outlook.” BOOM, I was in Surrealsville, where dwell Auguste Redon and Sal Dali and Tanguy and other guys and gals. And I’ve had years of sculpting birds of chimerical DNA. So, to use a wretched pun involving a letter of the Greek alphabet, a Chi-Miracle occurred, and suddenly the bowl/nest was nested in the eye socket of an improbable owl. I made the other eye a teakettle to preserve kitchenality.

Weird? YES, WEIRD.  I’ve laid the foundation for Weirdness in my first paragraph: LIFE IS WEIRD. And Art sometimes demands creation beyond the initial notion of the artist.  Here we see what happens when we let Art call the shots.

bowl/nest

bone & spoons & mindset clean
owlish outlook makes the scene
when the Elements amass
link your arms & hold on fast

Trio of poems inspired by a human Arcade

January 20, 2022
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2022 0120 bob and his mom0001

My Big Brother from Another Mother, Bob Kabchef, shared my poem “vapor trail” with his readership today, prefacing it with a description that tickles me: “The guy’s a veritable volcano of virgin verbaciousness.” Thing is, though, volcanic though I may be sometimes, I owe a lot to Bob throwing title prompts at me, during a weekly event that I produce for our Facebook poetry group Poets All Call. Yesterday he offered a bouquet of titles, three of which were

Eloosive
Pasta your prime
I never knew that

Funny how the mind works. “Write a poem, Gary” will yield brain fog, confusion, and unproductiveness. But “Write a bunch of poems using these titles, Gary” and I am off to the races. I cranked these out in less than an hour.

Eloosive

The loosely-jointed burglar
Squeezed thruogh the junkyard’s crevices
A dog much like a murderer
Was also on the premises
A silent lethal frothing beast
With much adrenaline released
His mission: see the thief deceased
But Burgle-Man was wily;
The challenge made him smiley.

He topped a mound of carcasses
Of Ford and Studebaker
The doggoe climbed sans barkuses
To make the thief meet maker
But slipped on chrome, an effort-ender
The thief said, “Thank you, Freddy Fender!”
He knew the dog would change his gender
If given half a chance;
Best leave this scrappy dance.

The thief slunk out of sight, and grabbed
A carburetor, slinging
It to a heap away, which clabbed
And rung a tone for zinging
And Hellhound was beguiled away
And our eloosive thief ran très
Vite to the fence and up, to sway
Atop, and yelled “Yoo Hoo,
Au ‘voir, O Doggie-Poo!”

Pasta your prime

One minute on the microwave
Another on your lips
A lifetime in your fat so brave
Engirdling your hips.

The pasta you so willfully
Devoured in your youthfulness
Metabolized so skillfully
And vanished, in all truthfulness,

But as the decades drift on by
We slow, we stroll, we’re no so spry,
And pleasures stir and goodies fry
And sing a glutton’s lullaby

Inveigling in its rhyme,
Your ribs are Pasta Prime.

I never knew that

I never knew that
Nor did I know this
Nor the other thing
But it’s not for lack of trying

And sifting through
A lifetime of Thisses
And all those Thats
And the host of Other Things

For that particular That
This specific This
And the like-no-other Other Thing

That we all wonder
And whisper
And worship
About:

This Unknowable
That Indescribable
Other Thing
On the Other Side.

****

Many thanks to my Big Bro Bob, who is a fine and expressive poet in his own right!

Wouldn’t It Be Nice vs. Make It Happen

December 4, 2020
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Something nice started with this lamentatious post I made on Facebook:

Friends, I am Bummed with a capital B. My Phoenix Center for the Arts wheel-throwing class has been canceled mid-stream. The center cites community benchmarks for COVID-19 infection risk. I applaud their proactive efforts to stem the spread, but I also feel like the rug has been yanked from under my feet, landing me on my oversized sit-downer.

I took some clay home. Not much–I was on public trans and on foot, and wasn’t up to lugging a lot of clay around. So I can hand-build, but until I find a reliable studio space/place, I can’t throw, and I can’t really sculpt–I need to bisque-fire what I make.

Rats!!!!!

Several friends commiserated, wished me well, suggested handbuilding, and generally made me feel better, though still bummed. Then I got a Facebook Messenger message from an amazing friend of mine, thus:

It was a link to a demo of someone deftly throwing miniature vessels on a tiny wheel. Looked like fun. We had this text exchange:

G: Very cool! The demo potter makes it look easy, but you’d need surgical steadiness to throw with precision on that scale. Worth exploring, though!!

N: LOL yes I know what you mean, but they are very sweet, something you could do at home

G: Quite so. Tell you what. Find me the product and how to order it, and if it’s under $100 US, I will buy it and make something for you. Deal?

It was a link to an outfit called wish.com. The little wheel was offered at $64. I was amazed that it was so inexpensive, and in fact it wasn’t, quite: what with tax and handling and timely shipping  the bill came to something over $118. 

And just this evening I made the second of two 3D sketches of Queen chess pieces. Neither looks remotely like her. Just getting my feet wet on subject matter I hadn’t handled in many years. I like the vitality of them, though.

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Long story concluded: As I say in the title and in the text exchange, there is “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and there is “Make It Happen.” I’m thrilled that, thanks to my wonderful friend, a setback turned into a new, exciting path.

Would you like to meet my wonderful friend? You bet you would–trust me. Her name is Nina Pak. I knew her as Nina Rogers when we were classmates and (briefly for me) fellow Yoga Club members at Glendale High School. She attended my wedding to Joni Froehling on December 10, 1988, and I have not seen her much face-to-face since, but thanks to social media we maintain our friendship. She looks like this:

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She also looks like this:

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She has been a model, a curator, an art director, a publisher, and many other things. Working out of Vancouver, British Columbia, she has created time-defying, gorgeous tableaux of bygone–or alternate-universe–scenes. The curious need only do an Internet search on “nina pak art” to be privy to a multitude of breath-stopping imagery. She has said of her work, “I am not opposed to making my art look good on someone’s wall, but I feel what I create has a spiritual depth and mystery that stirs something essentially vital:  a longing, a calling, an echo of something forgotten, deja-vu, or something you can’t quite grasp but want to share.”

And she is my friend, thank the All, and this week she helped me do more than daydream about how nice it would be If. Nina, please accept my humble thanks!

The Eight-Year Makeover

December 3, 2020
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Today WordPress sent me a nice note of encouragement because today is the 8th anniversary of my blog begun on December 3rd, 2012.

It has been a life-changer, this blog. It has drawn from me time after time after 1700 times and more the utmost I have by way of creative expression. With an archive of my drawings and ceramic works and poems and musings as an easily-accessed body of work, one big discovery is that I NEED this blog to remind me of what I’ve done. It is astonishing to pick a month at random and review a few consecutive posts. I forget the extent of my journey.

So today is a day of celebration, of where I’ve been and how it proves my well isn’t going to run dry any time soon. For fun, I have two headshots. One was taken the day before I started my blog, and one was taken this week. To my eyes the two guys in the photos seem only vaguely related.

makeover

mahalo holiday yom tov–o
arthur clarke and asimov
kaput kerfuffle truth or dare
envision bliss and climb a stair

Inktober 17th, 2020: Storm

October 17, 2020
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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.

2020 1017 inktober storm

Birdwork In Progress

October 11, 2020
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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?

2020 1011 bird

middle of a song

August 22, 2020
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20200822_115942

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. 🙂

Atlas on an Atlas

July 17, 2020
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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!!

You Dun Had Yer Fun (effaced)

July 3, 2020
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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.

2020 0703 toucan

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?)