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?
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.
33 snapshots in monochrome. Enough to see the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of what I do.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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! 🙂
Last month I had a session inside a torpedo tube, or so the MRI chamber seemed. I got to hear classic rock music and odd, Techno-like machine noises. It lasted about forty minutes, and resulted in over 500 cross-sectional views of my brain. Here is a detail from one of the pages, which I have tinted for dramatic effect:
From top to bottom, left to right, the images start at the top of my head and end at about the middle of my eyes. Since I now know almost nothing about brain anatomy I don’t know what structures, other than my eyes and the corpus callosum, are being heightened by the contrast. I knew more in grade school but have forgotten most of what I learned.
In this early stage of my drawing and poem, I’ve done thumbnails of several of the views, and have decided on the acrostic spine, MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING, and seven words and one phrase. The decision on the spine is final, even though the leftmost word, MAGNETIC, has eight letters, and the rightmost, IMAGING, has but seven; and RESONANCE has seven elements since I have RES occupy one line. Most likely I’ll use the final G of the acrostic for both lines of a final couplet, and they will rhyme, but we’ll see.
This is by no means the clunkiest acrosticization I’ve done. Once I used MARS SOUPY AL as my triple acrostic, which is a wretched pun on “marsupial” and ended up needing a line arrangement similar to a freeway overpass to five different highways. But the result was absolutely unique, with drawings of Mars and Soupy Sales and Al Pacino heading the three words, and a duck-billed platypus overlording all three. I was reasonably certain that no one had ever brought the four together, and equally certain that no one would ever know why they SHOULD be brought together, until they had seen the acrostic. And even then I imagine head-scratching and the thought “This is nuts.” But that’s where the idea for the acrostic came from–the Duck-Billed Platypus is one of the most improbable creations on Earth, seeming to be a cut-and-paste job from several species. My poem, in my humble opinion, was a good analogue, an honorary marsupial.
The acrostic I’m working on above comes from a different place. My working intention is to poetically discuss the way that lump of fatty tissue in our skulls relates to who we are. This subject was well plumbed by the late Oliver Sacks, and if you have never had a look at The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales it is available in PDF form for a mere $2.50 US, and I also found a used hardcover, good condition, on the Barnes & Noble site for $2.30. SO well worth it, Friends, and I hope you will find it in the library or elsewhere, if it’s not on your bookshelf already.
The words and phrase I have put into the acrostic already are subject to change, but I hope I don’t have to. If I can make them work in an array of meter and rhyme that makes sense and speaks to the subject I’ve chosen, it will be a lot like a magic trick. Stay tuned, please!
I’ve been watching an Amazon Prime series called THE BOYS, about a group of superheroes who not only, as Stan Lee once prescribed for such, have feet of clay beneath their super-boots, they also have a degree of wrongness to them that goes from corporate sellout to bad to the bone. My suspicion is that the title derives from the Shakespeare quotation “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”
Be that as it might, it got me onto superhero conception and creation, and here is what I came up with. Townes Cryer, a talk-jock who has an emotional-catharsis program in the wee hours, gets hit with Earth, Air, Fire and Water one fateful night, when a mudslide strikes his station just as lightning hits the antenna and a fire springs up–and then the sprinkler system comes on, and a kindly Fairy-Godmother type of alien creature, a fan of Cryer’s show, effects his rescue, and a side effect of the instant-healing she subjects Cryer to changes him radically. He now has Magic Tears, no hair, and a row of cranial appendages that can fuel his lachrymal glands with moisture from the air, and can expel his tears as steam, as ice projectiles, as fog, or as saline.
Odds are I will do nothing else with this character, but that hardly matters. He lives.
A fuller title would be “icad xxxviii: pane full/sens less/onward & expert” but it’s panefull enough as it is.
No transcription for this one, Friends. It would create more confusion than resolution. The words are mostly there for their visual impact.
After I finished the inked work, I got the whim to take a pastel pencil to it and so there are hearts and a would-be creator thinking of yet another heart. Part of the glory of the Index Card A Day project is the testing-ground aspect: you tend to not worry about trying and failing, since they’re just cheap index cards, and so you follow your nose more fearlessly, and either succeed or learn something or (as in this case) semi-succeed AND learn something. I think I learned that it can work with a lot more practice.
One with Clay, Image and Text 