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night light 2019 0120

What with the total eclipse of the Moon coming in scant hours, and my recent acquisition of black paper and white chalk, it seemed time to draw with light.

Here are the words to the double acrostic:

Night Light

Now we were wombed in waters warm and still
In peaceful amniotic near-lanai
Go down where water gives you Zero G
Henceforth let velvet DIMNESS see us through
To be by loving Darknesses enwrapt

This is a non-rhyming poem, so I didn’t begin composing it with the end-words. Instead, and since I wanted to wrap my spot illustration of mother and child with a sort of uterus of words, I wrote the last line, “To be by loving Darknesses enwrapt,” first. And so, curiously, the poem also makes sense from the last line up, if we just change one word on the new last line:

To be by loving Darknesses enwrapt
Henceforth let velvet DIMNESS see us through
Go down where water gives you Zero G
In peaceful amniotic near-Lanai
Now we are wombed in waters warm and still

Writing poetry last-line-first is just like the way Mickey Spillane wrote his Mike Hammer mysteries. He claimed he always started with the ending, then figured out how to get there. Poets, if you ever find yourself running dry, you might do worse than to give the Spillane method a whirl!

I had a second cup of coffee this morning. Then I put on a pair of dirty jeans that need to be thrown away due to a rip near the inseam, gathered a load of laundry and got a wash cycle going, and found a public-domain photo of Chloë Grace Morentz, whom I had just seen in the DVD of THE EQUALIZER, starring Denzel Washington.

cgm 2018 1230

This is proving to be a good way to ease into a productive first-day-off. Washing takes about half an hour; drying, 45 minutes. The breaks are just right for stretching the legs, going out and coming back, and having a fresh look at the work in progress. I paid enough mind to this portrait to deem it “finished sketch” so I signed it and scanned it. The scan revealed a few flaws that I tweaked.

Time to go back out to the laundry room . . .

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This was all done under the influence of a severe toothache, but I am happy to say the work was engaging enough to distract away the pain for awhile. Now that the work is done the ache is back in full force; but I earned this toothache, and I own it. –The heck with THAT phony-baloney posturing–I’m going for the Oil of Cloves pronto! 🙂

family & vortex

famine & color TV
anthem & o sole mio
migraines & 4 on the floor
insight & clever retort
lattice & tree felled by axe
yelling & time to relax

Note: I have a dentist’s appointment for 11:30 this morning. Please wish me luck!

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Andrew Meltzer came by Matt’s Big Breakfast and handed me an envelope.  In it was a letter of gratitude, a pin with a 3 on it, and a voucher worth $20 toward a meal at any SSP America restaurant at the airport. (There are over a dozen, and soon there will be many more.)

As far as I know, Andrew is unaware of my artwork and poetry. He is acutely aware, though, of how Matt’s Big Breakfast is performing, and what I and everyone else  are up to, because SSP runs all kinds of data on their establishments. They also have video cameras here, there and everywhere.

And I’m aware of them, and of Andrew, watching. And that is liberating. It makes a workday rather like a video game. Get people seated, see to it that they are glad to be there, keep it flowing, let the diners know that we are grateful that they chose us–this is the best of Capitalism, to be able to make an experience valuable, both for the bottom line and for the uplift and empowerment of the weary traveler. As Samuel L. Jackson put it so bluntly and with such panache, “You gotta put butts in the seats.” Matt’s reputation is so solid that airport volunteers, airline employees, and even TSA agents send diners our way, knowing that we are the real deal.

And my work at Matt’s not only funds my artist’s exploits, it also makes me a better artist and poet. The phrase “Work hard, then play hard” comes to mind, but it needs some tweaking to be a good fit. “Build cathedrals with gusto” is slightly better. Every day, working with solid, sincere effort at a host stand, then a drawing board, then the treasure-laden landscape of the English language, is another well-fired brick for the cathedral that is my artist’s life.

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Someone in Finland sees and reads some of these posts, or so says the WordPress statistics generator. Person in Finland, hello. I am a fan of your country. I hope to visit it soon. I got a hint as to your country’s greatness when I read Robert A. Heinlein’s advice in his polemic “Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry? Stand Up and Be Counted!” He said, “…remember brave little Finland–and keep your powder dry!” So I am remembering Finland, and though I use the American pronunciation of “Finnish” to make of the title of this post a bad pun, my admiration for your country is unalloyed.

Today I provisionally conclude Project Finishline. Since I learned during the project that “Finish” is merely when you cease focus, I have exercised irony and presented a seemingly Unfinished second image. Consider it an opportunity to view the creative process mid-stream, and possibly to finish it yourself.

Thank you, readers, especially the Finnish contingent, for your attention!

Sometimes the impulse to draw springs from a mind’s-eye full-blown vision, with all the conceptual exploring already done. Other times there is a vague notion, of a character or a setting or a quotation, perhaps, and some exploration occurs while drawing. Yet other times the artist just grabs something to draw with and thinks, “I FEEL like drawing, but I have no idea. So let’s just see what happens.”

I have only a slight, tickly notion of what I was thinking when I made the original drawing, which likely happened at least eight years ago. I think I was imagining the taking of an oath of office in a future where doing such would be much more reflective of the person elected, and not straitjacketed by hand-on-Bible or other arcana.

Some day I’ll take a drawing as incompletely formed as this one was, make a hundred copies, and finish them a hundred ways, each as radically different from all the others as reality, including my imagination, allows. It will be an odd hat-tip to Andy Warhol, for reasons obvious and not.

 

 

There’s an energy drink called Red Bull whose slogan is “Red Bull gives you wiiiiings,” give or take a few i’s. Since penguins already have wings, and they’re as visually whimsical as the slogan, I thought I’d throw some i’s at them and see how they liked it. They have not objected.

The original unfinished drawing was done for a 3D design class I had at Scottsdale Community College last year. It was for an assignment to sketch ideas for a cardboard stratification sculpture of an animal of our choosing. The instructor, the superheroically-named James Gamble, didn’t think the penguin form was right for the assignment, since he wanted us to have the sculpture be built on legs and build volume on the way up. He regarded the penguin as too static, even though my sketches were trying to sell that they were anything but. So he had me work from my sketches for a gorilla instead. My gorilla sculpture was a disaster. I hope to make a decent sculpture of a penguiiin some day.

As a final bit of whimsy, I drew without looking at any photo source two impossible reflections of what I tried to make look like Emma Thompson in the eyes of the penguiiin seemingly staring at the viewer (Note: penguin eyes don’t work like that. But since this is not a Penguin, but a Penguiiin, these eyes do. And that goes for all other anatomical discrepancies!). Two reasons: 1) I adore Emma Thompson–she gives ME wiiings; 2) it’s a REALLY WEIRD RIFF on the song “Bette Davis Eyes.” Ladies and Gentlemen, behold, for the first time in human history, a Penguiiin with Emma Thompson eyes. 🙂

 

The good and the bad news about this one is that it was rushed. I spent the day caregiving for my mother, went home, took care of a few things, felt a wave of exhaustion, took a nap for longer than I intended–and when I woke up, the midnight deadline was staring me down, less than two hours away, and there was much to do. So this is “finished” but still quite raw, but there is energy in the rawness.

pluslessness

pathways are trammels and therefore contain
limits and curbsides to drive us insane
undercut circumstance tends to diminish us
slipped-in obscurity threatens to finish us

 

I was an Art Major in the mid-70s. Then I was graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Arizona. Then I became an Engineering student, in a special program for non-tech undergrads. It was fun at first, and I got all Bs in my three semesters of Calculus, and an odd A here and there, but my horrible study habits caught up with me and the fall semester of 1977 saw me taking Incompletes and Withdrawals from my classes. I wrote a letter to Dear Abby, an internationally-acclaimed advice columnist, about my misery, signing myself “Round Peg in a Chi-Square Hole.” I doubt if she got the Prob&Stat reference; she may not even have gotten the letter, since she never answered it publicly or privately, though I think I included a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Then I went rogue, sort of. I entered a drawing I made on an Etch-A-Sketch and signed “Johnny Incredible” in the 1977 U of A Winter Show of Student Art. (My Etch-A-Sketch tied for third place among more than 80 entries.) And for the Spring 1978 semester I took advantage of a loophole in matriculation to take, not engineering classes, but Poetry, Special Problems in Drawing, and Lithography. Somewhere in there I got a letter from then-Dean Robert Svob telling me that Professor Ferrell (Russ Ferrell, smart, great guy, taught ergonomics, published in the IEEE Transactions with his “Models of Man-Computer Interaction”) had expressed concern about me. I answered cryptically and included a five-minute line drawing of a plump man falling off a tightrope at the circus.

Long story short: Got A in Poetry, A in Lithography, and B in SpecProbDrwg. Decided to take a semester off from the stress of the U of A. That “semester off” is now 41 years, 5 months, 13 days, and counting.

Today’s images are an atypical diptych. The title might be “Art and Engineering.”

In part 1, I described taking on a new art/poetry project, getting to the beginnings of the page design, and then hitting a block wall. The wall came up when I looked at what I’d done and found it foolish and amateurish. The acrostic lettering was floppy and scrawly. The end words I’d chosen seemed like seeds for verse idiocy. I got a hint of the worst F word there is in English: Failure.

So I put aside what I had done and tried to loosen up my drawing hand and build up some mojo. One thing I do to practice portraiture is watch a DVD and freeze the frame when I see something I want to draw.

 

 

So here are Karl Urban and Matthew Modine, from their movies BENT and FULL METAL JACKET. I was medium-happy with these, though I should have taken more time with them.

I also worked out  a set of words for the acrostic, thus:

Loneliness lets birds to feed on half

Effervescence gives us a giraffe

Finding a subjunctive scheme’s a goal

Tactile predators will touch a colt

The lines relate, though not sequentially, to Left/Lest/Fest/Felt. Loneliness relates to being Left. A giraffe seems intrinsically Festive. The word Lest is subjunctive, i.e. conditional. And tactility and predation relate to Felt.

The lines got tweaked when I calligraphed them, and became this:

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I also worked on the illustration some, but the results were so bad that I will not reproduce them here. Still, I gave that block wall some of my best punches, and cracks are developing in the masonry. For good or ill, part 3 of this multipost will include the final form of “Left/Lest/Fest/Felt.”