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3 Is For Thriving

December 1, 2018
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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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Finishline Finishline: UnFinnish Business

November 30, 2018
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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!

Finishline 11th: oath

November 11, 2018
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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.

Finishline 6th: P°E°N°G°U°I°I°I°N

November 6, 2018
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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. 🙂

Finishline 5th: pluslessness

November 5, 2018
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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

Inktober 28th: Atypical Diptych

October 28, 2018
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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.”

Punching Through a Block Wall (part 2)

June 3, 2018
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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.”

 

 

 

 

Punching Through a Block Wall (part 1)

May 29, 2018
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Friends, as of 8:27 PM, Mountain Standard Time, May 29, 2018, your humble host has been afflicted with a peculiar form of creative block for more than a week. It is not that I cannot draw or write. It is that when I turn these energies to a certain project, I choke up.

The project is a page that will include a quadruple acrostic. The pillars of the acrostic are the words Left, Lest, Fest, and Felt. The poem is inspired by a blog post of a new friend of mine, a poet named Marta whose blog is called MOMENTS. The magical, enigmatic post talked of sisters Left and Felt, and their influence on women named Laura, Selina and Maria. Here is a link: https://momentsbloc.wordpress.com/2018/02/04/left-and-felt-three-abnormal-women/

I was jazzed and energized by Marta’s post, and also could not but notice that the words Left and Felt, both of four letters, would lend themselves to a double acrostic poem. And then I realized that two additional words, Lest and Fest, if placed between Left and Felt, would imply a transformation from one to the other, one letter at a time.

Excited, I texted Marta for permission to use her post as a springboard for one of mine. She quickly and graciously granted permission. I thought I would have it done inside a week, and within a day or so had gotten this far:

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And then, my friends, I hit a block wall.

(End of part 1)

g l i m p s e d

January 9, 2018
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g l i m p s e d

gainsaid are the scarlet scoffers

all chagrined and aloe tropicked

spillways make decanted offers

plump seditionists thus topicked

Here is play with the acrostic form to third-time “glimpsed” and so make of it a motif. That the text makes sense, with a sly, subversive message that invites reader participation, is a bonus; but the priority is the image and what it evokes.

Blog Post #1100: run with the moon

December 3, 2017
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Five years ago today this blog began. My intention and goal was to do at least one blog post a week. One post a week would have made this Blog Post #261 or so. On the other hand, if I’d done a post a day, which quickly became my ambition, this would be Blog Post #1826.

But one thing I’ve learned, and relearned, in these five years: Quantity doesn’t mean much in blogging; QUALITY means much more. Post a thousand blogs, and the more you waste a viewer’s time, the bigger the crime you commit.

That said, the ability to draw, to sculpt, to compose poetry, to genuinely CREATE–generally, the more time spent doing creative things, the better we get at not wasting a viewer’s time. We become more creatively fit. We try things. Go down dead ends and beat ourselves against brick. Pull out something from our psyche with hard pliers, and hurt for it. Phone it in, and hurt for that too.

It is our job as creatives to be perpetually dissatisfied, to weep over the masterwork our efforts could have been but weren’t, to try, try again until we morph to some degree from tourist to native, and to not settle into a comfort zone of facile confidence. Ours is–must be–the most important job on Earth. Our job is to be a voice of the best that Civilization has to offer.

And so, both humbly and arrogantly, we must start with self-portraiture. We discover who we are, what we like, at what we excel, and at what we may never succeed. It is important, just as it is important for a hot fudge sundae to start out both hot and cold, that our focused seriousness be alloyed with relaxed, carefree play. This enables us to explore, and it gives our inner fire some motivation and Zing.

Today I started a page inspired by Billy Crystal’s “Fifteen Rounds,” which tells the life first of Cassius Clay and then of Muhammad Ali, from victory at the 1960 Olympics to defeat many years later at the hands of Leon Spinks. I have watched the two YouTube versions of this performance at least a dozen times. The theme is pure Ali: “It’s never too late to start all over again.” That mantra has helped me get through some tough times in these five years.

Near the end of “Fifteen Rounds” a determined Ali asserts that he wants to take on ol’ Leon again. “I’m old, I don’t like training, but I’m gonna do it. Gonna do my pushups, gonna do my situps. I’m gonna RUN WITH THE MOON!”

And so will we, Friends. When this work in progress is finished enough to be ready for your subsequent view, we will run with the moon!