Archive

Tag Archives: drawing

Pet Ownership/Owned Pettership

May 29, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Image

The great majority of pet owners are owned by their pets. This is usually a satisfactory arrangement.

For a change and for the sake of a less busy composition, I excluded most of the text of my two acrostic poems from the image, but the complete poems are here:

Pet Ownership

Pooches, kitties, even ferrets make a home ho-ho
Periwinkle dusks are calmed with Spot or Puff in tow
Presents are less tense and savor comes with what is sown

Easy does a daily stroll that helps two hearts cohere
Equanimity and trust–a modicum of cheer
Elegance of passing time and quell of mortal fears

There’s a wordless closeness that’s surprising in its depth
Tantalizing glimpses of a heaven’s stair to step–I
Thank the Cosmos for these beasties of contagious pep

Owned Pettership

Owlish eyes of impish cat watch for a treat to drop
Oven-baked or rawly sliced or purchased in a Shoppe

Wistful calf-rub, raucous meow but dignity intact
Waitlessness will yield a softie’s morsel–that’s a fact

Now it’s time for dinner and perhaps some scraps to share
Nighttime brings a shed of clothing down to underwear

Early morning wants a meal that need not be foie gras
Ecstasy is wet food but the dry is strictly blah

Dressiness is optional: Milady goes capri
Dare she sit? Mifurry wants her Lap–L-E-A-P

Portraiture Prep School

May 27, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Image

There’s a distinct possibility that I’ll be setting up a table at the Village Gallery for $5 5-minute portraits. It was discussed at the Management Committee meeting last week, and it will probably come up at the general meeting this evening. So I’m prepping; and lucky for me, a recent TIME Magazine featured “100 Influential People.” Last night I spent an hour doing this page. I averaged fairly close to five minutes per subject. (I did better with some than with others, but I’ll keep practicing…)

So–if you are in the near vicinity of the Village of Oak Creek on the evening of Friday, June 6, and you have five bucks to spare, and you want a souvenir of a five-minute visit with yours truly…come on over to the Village Gallery! [smiles]

Blast from the Past of a Blast from the Past

May 25, 2014
Uncategorized
2 Comments

Image

Here’s one from my very early art-journaling days, more than seven years ago. I was using a Sharpie Ultrafine (or was it Microfine?) on a notebook my sweet daughter Kate gave me for Christmas. Note the smiley-face shield in the middle.

Here are the words to the single acrostic:

The ship and crew were viking
A stiff wind stretched the sail
The weather to their liking
The gleam of shield and mail.
Eyes squinting, tearing, blinking red,
Rows blister hands, moans tell of dread,
Still gladly wayward, and not dead.

TO Index Cards, ON an Index Card

May 24, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Image

I just love Index Cards, so much so that I think of them as friends, as benevolent messengers, as the Type O Blood of information conveyance. They go in pockets, on refrigerators, in those nifty little metal boxes with the cute dividers. They are big enough to contain the hugest ideas. Write small enough and you can put a decent-sized short story on one. They’re great for five-minute portraiture, ten-minute dream capture, fifteen-minute landscapes, sixty-minute meeting minutes. For reminders, Valentines, plot outlines, and affirmations they are hard to beat. So here’s to ’em:

It’s RED WHITE & BLUE on one side–the other blanc
N is for NOTES or NOTIONS or NOSTALGIA
Dreams need not fade if this & a pencil serve as recorder
Edifying, talking points, & love may be conveyed
Xylophone music written & drawn with gravitic graphitic pyrotechnics

Special thanks and manifold gratitude to my Sweetheart, Denise, for not only introducing me to the Index Card Project but also for giving me a pack of 100 cards, one of which I used for this post. Sweetheart, special as they are, the entire pack of cards could not thoroughly describe your wonderfulness!

Spider/Golfer

May 23, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Image

At last there’s a payoff on the hours I have spent drawing and filling in checkerboard grids. A golf club and a spider’s legs require straight or near-straight lines in the drawing, and I now can draw them quickly and easily, up to a certain length.

This image is entirely faked. Nor golfer nor spider posed for me, and I didn’t do my usual internet image search to remind me of what what I want to draw looks like. I’m sure I’ve made egregious errors in both arachnoidal and human-golfer anatomy, but a) the dymanics of the drawing depend less on anatomical accuracy and more on pattern interplay, and b) the next time I see a spider, or a golfer, I’ll notice what I did wrong this time, and my future drawings of either or both will benefit.

The text on the image is very difficult to read. Here is a transcription:

Solitary critters, both, and two you daren’t bug
Pester either, you may turn a Nancy to a Sluggo
Irritation makes detractors wish they were unlawful
Destiny gave one a web and one a hat to doff
Expertise is gained with practice. Dancers at a barre
Rarely work as hard as they to bring things up to par

Rest Easy

May 22, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Image

Yesterday all was Sleepless Despair. Today promises to be Restful Serenity, and I will try to help it along with this affirmative page.

Here are the words:

Ruffled dispositions need a welcome cooling breeze
Energizing Solitude may calm that choppy sea
Savored armchair plush & drink & gently rustling trees
Take a soul from rough-milled grit to smooth tranquility

Brother Sleeplessness, Sister Despair

May 21, 2014
Uncategorized
4 Comments

Image

Friends, it is now 21 May, the Year of Our Lord 2014, 5:10 PM Mountain Standard Time. I am sleep-deprived, owing some to attendance at three scheduled-when-I’m-normally-asleep meetings in four days, owing some to disorganization, owing some to inability to sleep at will. With the sleeplessness is a creeping despair, exemplified by the fact that the original working title of this post was “The Future Futility of Human Existence.”

Usually the moral of the story comes at the end, but here it is now: “Get good sleep, or you will be sorry.”

The above image is a great mashup of The Thrill of Victory and The Agony of Defeat. A still life of plate, chair, spoon, table and floor provides the background. The spine of a triple acrostic is at upper right; of a septuple acrostic, from top midleft to bottom right; of a quintuple acrostic, from bottom left to bottom midright. The crucial middle words of the septuple and the quintuple have been determined, and I know from experience that that’s the hardest part. I know that sooner or later, with patience and some research, I’ll eventually have the poems that will complete the acrostics, and I will have done something that represents the utmost in what I can do in this peculiar genre I’ve plumbed for more than seven years.

But I also “know” even if I expend that effort to the tune of hundreds of hours, draw better than I ever have before for the final incarnation of the image, and dress it in the perfect frame–that it will have been a waste of time.

I put “know” in quotation marks because I suspect that that’s the sleep-deprivation talking.

It’s now 5:27 PM, MST. Time to wrap this up and get as much sleep as I can before clocking in at 11.

Sleep well yourselves, Friends…

Laugh, SARAH, Laugh (to Suzy C)

May 17, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Image

I have a friend now named Suzy Jacobson Cherry. When I met her she was Suzy Jacobson. Here she is with her man.

Today I got an invitation from Suzy to participate in an “Invitation to Take Part in a Collaborative Art Project.” Here are the details:

Below you will find scriptures that describe the life of a character named Sarah.  Please read it with literary/artistic eyes.  Think about the things that affected her, and consider what kind of person she is.  The drawing below is by my friend Cecilia O’Brien.  This is her rendition of Sarah.  Study this drawing, and put together an idea of who Sarah is and what she might be like, what her concerns might be, how she might feel about the things that happen to her and the choices she makes in the story.  Think of her in terms of this ancient past AND today’s world.  THEN, in the comments below, share words and phrases that describe her and/or her world.  Share thoughts of current events in relation to this woman, if anything comes to mind. This is an artistic endeavor, faith tradition should not come into play.  If you choose to take part, have fun and thank you for helping out with this!

And here is what I did:

Image

What struck me in the story: Sarah (then named Sarai, but that’s another story) was thought to be barren, i.e. unable to have children. She sends her man, Abraham, to conceive a child with the slave girl Hagar. (Sidebar for American comic strip readers: the Horrible? One wonders…) Years pass, Abraham is about 100 years old and Sarah 90, and the Lord God decides it’s time for Sarah to have a baby of her own. “So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?'” Yes, you shall, dear old Sarah, if it be His will.

Here are the words to my triple acrostic “Laugh, Sarah, Laugh”:

Lady pushing 90-plus is laughing fit to howl
As she cuddles ISAAC she just bore–yes, life’s a luau
Unto her nonageneric self–a CHILD!! HA
Gosh, and when much younger she was BARREN as a log
HEY–can’t spell Jehovah without ending with an Ah

LORD, I hope Suzy likes this!