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Here Are the Elsewheres

April 21, 2020
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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.

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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.

 

Throes of Creation

April 21, 2020
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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:

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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!

n.e.s. #36 of 480

March 11, 2020
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Artists will tell you that their creations “talk” to them. And my experience has been that with many of the things I make, it feels more like a collaborative effort than something entirely my own.

So it is with this series. The woman I am drawing has been at me to let her be more herself. Let the look, the conversation, and the philosophy be less me and more her.

Weird, isn’t it?

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Welcome to a Sliver of My World

March 10, 2020
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About twenty minutes ago I was Saving a study of a trumpet player I was working on when I noticed that the screen on my laptop, with its thumbnails of my drawings and other miscellany, was more than just a way to select a file. It is a record of what I’ve been up to and when, due to my naming convention of date before description. I also noticed that I had preserved stages of some drawings, so there is some preservation of the creative process.

Here is a tiny slice, preserved via screen capture, of what I was up to during two or so months of last year.

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33 snapshots in monochrome. Enough to see the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of what I do.

 

Coming Soon to a Poem Near You

December 15, 2019
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Some time last month the eminent Slam Poet Bernard “The Klute” Schober reached out to me via text, inviting me to collaborate with him yet again. He’d written a new poem based on a maritime incident that to this day is enshrouded in mystery. Would I care to try an illustration?

So I read the poem, and pondered it, and read it to my ex-wife Joni and daughter Kate, and got input from them, and pondered some more, and then tried my hand at “concept rough” sketching. And I bombed. My sketching captured NONE of the essence of the poem, and was lackluster and confusing to boot. More sketching didn’t help.

Then I got the lightbulb. SKETCHING was the wrong approach to this visceral, gutslamming piece. Try SCULPTING. See what happens.

What happened is what you see. It is not the final version of the image, which will involve apparatus and Morse Code, but it is the essence. Today I’ll do more ceramic sculpting, not with the trepidation that went with the sketching, but with the confidence and “high”ness of someone who has found the right track.

The moral of this creative-process story is “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, but try a different approach.”

Please stay tuned!

INKtober 2019: Overgrown

October 14, 2019
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2019 1014 overgrown

No poem today, Friends, but a few “making of” notes. The prompt is Overgrown, and it made me think of a big baby, and then a baby impossibly big, and then the worst parenting chore made even worse. So I found royalty-free stock images of a seated, diapered baby and a forklift. (A crane would be more useful but less visually feasible.) Drew everything with a ultra-fine tipped pen that was running out of ink. Scanned and realized the midtones needed to be darkened to the fullest extent of the law, but that would destroy the pleasing midgray of the sketchbook surround, so I made a copy of the image and darkened it in MS Office 2010, then went to Paint and manually fixed up the lettering some and then copied the page area only, then while still in Paint opened the original and pasted the page interior, which effectively erased the wishy-washy original drawing but preserved the gentle background.

Auld Time Sake

September 15, 2019
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Artists need to push themselves, and push the boundaries of the possible, but it’s not always particularly exciting, controversial or wrenching to do so–sometimes it’s even mundane, as you see. I’ve got this genre niche, acrostic poetry with a graphic component, and today it was time to have another go at minimalism. The triple acrostic reads “Auld Time Sake.” There is one word per line.

Amateurs are people who devote time to doing something they love. Ultimata are declarations that things must happen a certain way or there will be dire consequences. Leemerik is an odd spelling of Limerick that is a near-anagram of Lee Remick. Demesnée is a woman’s name derived from Demesne, defined as land adjoining a mansion that is owned and enjoyed by the mansion’s owner. Demesne is pronounced dehMANE, phonetically similar to Domain, which I’m guessing isn’t a coincidence.

This all may seem random, and the word selection odd, but a sizable amount of deliberation went into the acrostic’s construction. “Auld Time Sake” is phonetically nearly identical to “old times’ sake,” but now the words are of equal length. Each line has two characters between “Auld” and “Time,” and three between “Time” and “Sake.” This is a more pure-acrostic approach than I usually take.

Of these seven words together like this, endless collage-like images may come to mind, and limitless storytelling along previously unexplored avenues is possible, just as a selection of three main ingredients and four subordinate ones might keep a chef busy for years.

I placed the sketchbook containing the page in front of an image of Emma Thompson and John Lithgow embracing as they perform in the recent release LATE NIGHT. Their tandem performance in this scene brought tears to the director’s eyes, and to mine. The addition of that frozen frame in the background somehow added a good context to my page.

Razor Sharp

August 12, 2019
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I have been advised by several of my friends that my facial hair imparts a sinister quality to my face. Consequently I shave every workday, and often on my days off. But I envy people for whom facial hair is a good enhancement.

Razor Sharp

Rumpled, stilled skin–let it pass
A clear-cut Face is full of flash
ZAP goes the Beard Burn; time 4 mash–a
Once-a-Lifetime thunderclap, or
RIGHT that Wrong–should be a snap

Note that there is a seeming irony in that this image/poem/page is not “razor sharp” at all. It is crude and slapdash. It could be that my creativity “razor blade” needs sharpening, or changing.

But no apologies nor apologia, Friends. I won’t lay the “I meant to do it that way” line on you, because I didn’t; it just came out that way. Time will tell if it’s worthy of doing a remake, with photorealistic illustration and crisp calligraphy. Intuition says it would have to wait in line behind hundreds of other images I wish I’d done more finessedly.

magnetic resonance imaging w.i.p. iii

August 4, 2019
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2019 0804 magresimg

With the meter/rhyme scheme established, but not too rigidly enforced, the construction of the poem is becoming easier. Here is how what has been written reads:

Mazes, spark plugs, forests, thruways make us cognoscenti
An arabesque or two or four comprise an idiom
Gendarmic membranes won’t enshroud nor would they be placenta
Nor would they glad participate in telepathic gleaning

It is kindasorta iambic septameter, but the first line is trochaic. Sonnets will sometimes tack a syllable on the end of a line, and if you do that, you are being “non-heroic” because landing right on the correct last syllable is called “heroic.” (Similarly, quantum physicists use terms like “charm” and “strange” and “spin.” Words ALWAYS fail, to some degree, to echo Reality.)

Line 1: the “mazes, spark plugs, forests, thruways” referred to are failing-badly approximations of brain structures. Probably the best of this sad lot is “spark plugs,” which analogizes the superstructure of the synapse.

Line 2: from the Merriam-Webster definition of Arabesque: “1 : an ornament or style that employs flower, foliage, or fruit and sometimes animal and figural outlines to produce an intricate pattern of interlaced lines. 2 : a posture (as in ballet) in which the body is bent forward from the hip on one leg with one arm extended forward and the other arm and leg backward.” Line 2 crudely describes brain-embroidery in the imagining of a more advanced form of expression than the starkly descriptive.

Line 3: I owe “Gendarmic” to Robert Heinlein: in his apocalyptic story “The Year of the Jackpot” he has Potiphar Breen refer to big rock pillars on a mountain as Gendarmes. Gendarme is a French noun meaning Guard. And the corpus callosum, the separator of the brain hemispheres, may be viewed as a guardian of electrical activity between the hemispheres. (I hope I’m not being TOTALLY inaccurate here, but I’m certain my analogy is off the mark to some degree. Poetic License!!)

Line 4 mentions Telepathy, a probably mythical phenomenon in the literal sense. It means Mind-Reading, that is, the ability to listen to thoughts. Some people can read body language so well that they have an idea of what a person is thinking, but there is no hard evidence that telepathy exists. Certainly there is a wealth of anecdotal accounts of alleged telepathy, but I for one don’t believe it exists.

Since all the principal drawing for this page has been done, all that remains before final cleanup is to finish the poem. It’s quite likely that the next stage will be the finished page. We can hope! 🙂