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variants, feat. bill campana

March 6, 2022
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2022 0305 campana06
Earlier today I worked on a self-portrait which eventually became “Ukraine Sympathizer.” (See previous post for that end result.) As the painting progressed I posted successive stages as my profile picture on Facebook. I thought my friends would enjoy seeing how the painting progressed…

…and one friend in particular, whom I have repeatedly referred to on this blog as “the funniest man on earth,” poet and humorist Bill Campana, went so far as to do extreme photoedits on my developing headshot, creating a total of SEVEN variants on my originals. Above is one of his two favorites, and I think it’s terrific. It captures a psychological facet of mine that whim compels me to call “Relaxed Bastard Face.” As far back as grade school, friends, especially girls, have remarked on my tendency to scowl, and urged me to smile. Sometimes, truthfully, I’ve responded “But I AM smiling.” Deep-set eyes and naturally downturning mouth corners, plus an undeniable lifelong struggle with non-clinical bipolarity, scowlify me.

These three range from slight solarization to an almost Francis-Baconesque distortion of features. Each is a different experience.

Color and detail variation evoke a ghostliness and then an electricity. And notice in the ghostliness on the left, there is an articulated eye in the orbital shadow on our right. It does not exist in the original. The line between editing and creation blurs.

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And here is Bill’s other favorite. This one is my personal favorite as well. He’s taken the ore of my painting and smelted Mystery and Depth from it.  Here is a shadowy figure with serious matters troubling him. Perhaps it is the weight of the world, perhaps unrelieved sorrow, or he could just be worried about getting home safely. “Still waters run deep” is a phrase that comes to mind.

Profound thanks to my friend Bill Campana, who did something special today, creative and revelatory. Thanks also, Bill, for graciously allowing me to share our collaboration with my readers/viewers worldwide.

feathered, tethered, weathered

March 2, 2022
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2022 0302 magnificent bird
This sketch is based on a photo of a bird who was bound by a length of cable and perched  on display at a nature fair conducted by the City of Avondale, Arizona. The photo was taken by my friend Patty after my camera randomly quit on me. Patty had me hold the leash of her dog Sparky while she took the shot I’d failed to get.

The bird seemed placid and resigned. Between the artistic/dramatic liberties I took in converting a photo to a sketch, and my limitations as a nature artist, this sketch is more “inspired by” than “based on.” “The next one will be better,” I told myself, as always, as I signed and dated the sketch.

horsemen

February 28, 2022
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2022 0228 horsemen
Here’s a sketching exercise done after freezing the frame of a DVD I was watching. The wonderful fact is, an expert director and director of photography and cinematographer and costume designer and makeup department have all conspired to give the viewer, and the sketcher, an excellent composition and value array, for delectation. From that, the sketcher can report what she or he is seeing, or play with it, or hybridize. This sketcher decided to focus on faces and gesture and leave out a few details.

first world driiink

February 24, 2022
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The conceptualization for this page occurred while I was walking home from a drug store/pharmacy called Walgreens, sipping and then gulping on the first-world drink I had purchased, a Naked Blue Machine. It tasted sweet. Research revealed that similar products ARE sweet, to the tune of about 13 teaspoons of sugar per unit; and the nutritionally-valuable fiber is been mostly removed in the juice-making process.

So this is a product that suckers people into drinking something that they think is good for them, and it’s priced for the upscale consumer. Anyone with fresh fruit and a blender can do much better for themselves with their own concoctions, which with experimental effort will ultimately result in a drink better, tastier, and FAR cheaper than this store-bought, blatantly First World product. (I refer now not to the product I had purchased, but to the satirical product depicted above.)

I tried to be funny when I did this,m but world events have deadened my funny bone. Please think of this page as a Caveat Emptor public service.

Technical note: The “iii” in “driiink” is pronounced “three.” So the phrase becomes “snort or three.” The acrostic construction process makes for strange bedfellows, in this case triplets.

first world driiink

find your bliss with wet, not weed
in the kick your totters teeter
riffing with your snort or iii
savoringly in between
tasty and the kitchen sink

On Da Warp Path

February 19, 2022
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2022 0219 on da warp path0001

On Da Warp Path

Once upon a time we got our stuff @ A & P
Now we get nostalgic at the sound of Sha-Na-Naa
Dreaming of the Dark Age with its LSMFT
As the next Apocalypse draws nigh–YAY!! Sis Boom Bah

Notes

“A & P” refers to a chain of grocery stores, the #1 chain in the United States for most of the 20th Century. (“A & P” stands for “Atlantic & Pacific.”) In 2015, following Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, the A & P stores were liquidated.

“Sha-Na-Naa” refers to a band with a similar name, Sha Na Na, formed in 1969 and still active. {romulgators of the musical genre Doo-Wop, their perhaps most famous hit song is “Good Night, Sweetheart (Well, It’s Time To Go).”

“LSMFT” stands for “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” The Lucky Strike brand, now owned by the British Tobacco Corporation, is no longer readily available in the United States.

“Sis Boom Bah” is part of a cheerleading chant originating in 1867. The Sis and Boom are intended to be imitative of an ignited firework going up into the air and then exploding.

bowl/nest

February 9, 2022
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2022 0209 bowl nest

Last I heard there were five different kinds of Life–Plants, Animals, “Protists,” and two kinds of algae. Maybe. Probably not. My brain is in cognitive decline, and I don’t have time to look it up, and the point anyway is that within the strictly-biological definition of “life” some enormous variation is possible.

But there’s non-biological life too. Human beings have developed a self-replicating form of mechanism. Maybe. Probably not, but something like that. My dim memory says it’s chimerical, and much like the “biots” Arthur C. Clarke presciently described in his rollicking, imaginative novel Rendezvous with Rama.

We also speak of artwork as if it were to some degree alive. We use words like “vitality” and “animated” to codify our viewing expderience. If the work of art is representative of wildlife, we may judge is in comparison with what it is meant to represent.

So we come to this, one of my recent creations. It began when I finished my oatmeal and took a second spoon and put it in the empty bowl with the first. I liked the way the spoons and bowl looked, so I took a pic and made a drawing based on the pic. It seemed to want a bone, so I drew a bone, and shadows. I decided to construct a double acrostic, “bowl/nest.” When I came to the second line the word “owlish” suited the meter, and it was an easy link to the endword “scene.” (Acrosticist’s Tip: ALWAYS start with the endwords, if you want your poem to rhyme AND scan AND make sense!!)

And then I looked at my drawing again, and I saw that I could make bowl, spoons and bone a literal manifestation of an “owlish outlook.” BOOM, I was in Surrealsville, where dwell Auguste Redon and Sal Dali and Tanguy and other guys and gals. And I’ve had years of sculpting birds of chimerical DNA. So, to use a wretched pun involving a letter of the Greek alphabet, a Chi-Miracle occurred, and suddenly the bowl/nest was nested in the eye socket of an improbable owl. I made the other eye a teakettle to preserve kitchenality.

Weird? YES, WEIRD.  I’ve laid the foundation for Weirdness in my first paragraph: LIFE IS WEIRD. And Art sometimes demands creation beyond the initial notion of the artist.  Here we see what happens when we let Art call the shots.

bowl/nest

bone & spoons & mindset clean
owlish outlook makes the scene
when the Elements amass
link your arms & hold on fast

Lonership

February 5, 2022
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2022 0205 lonership ownership

A few days ago, on Facebook, I posted a photo of some chicken bones I had arranged in a pattern similar to the ones drawn above. I spoke about an art class I’d had long ago whose teacher, Darlene Goto, had me doing bone drawings. People inferred that my photo was not a photo but a drawing I’d made, and they were impressed by the photorealism. Despite my assertion that it was a photo, the notion that it was a drawing persisted. So here I’ve done a drawing, and when people see it on Facebook, they will know how different my drawings of bones look from my photos of bones.

As for the words, they serve to meet a challenge I set myself, using the acrostics “Lonership/Ownership” and “Boned/Owned.” Both acrostics are two sets of two words per line. With the first, the words on the left are nouns, describing something variable. (The bottom word “P” may be found in the dictionary as “the sixteenth letter of the alphabet,” but in mathematics P means Pressure.) The words on the right are specific cities.

The “Boned/Owned” acrostic has colloquial or slang words on the left, and what those words might be interpreted to mean on the right.

Does that seem silly? It does to me, now; but when I was constructing these arrays, I looked at them as exercises that may make me a better acrostic poet. It’s also like a Ouija board in that maybe, just maybe, certain words come out a certain way for a reason, if only to better understand our own motivations.

The acrostics themselves are more straightforward. If you are in a state of Lonership, you completely own your behavior and your circumstances. If you are unhappy with either, the more you own them, the more you are in a position to improve them. As for “Boned/Owned,” I acquired the chicken bones I photoed and drew from a chicken that I bought and ate. I owned the chicken carcass, and so own my carnivorousness, my callousness in lack of empathy for the chicken, my enhanced nutritional health as a result of eating that chicken, and all intellectual property, including the page above, that I derive from the use of the chicken bones as subject matter.

Lastly, the parody of “When You Wish Upon a Star,” so familiar to watchers of Walt Disney’s Sunday TV show when I was growing up, was done both to fill space and as an oblique protest/statement. It is not enough to wish for something without action. But there is substance to a saying I remember from reading What Color Is Your Parachute? in 1991, when I was out of work and seeking guidance on how to find some. “Pray, as if it were all up to God, then work, as if it were all up to you.” No matter what I believe or disbelieve, I have found that piece of advice invaluable. 

diss tort shun

February 5, 2022
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2022 0205 diss tort shun

It’s 2022. It’s more than fifty years since the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. told a cheering multitude of a dream he had. Part of his dream was that people would be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. Who could argue with that?

All kinds of people are arguing with that, here in 2022. Some of my classmates (Glendale, Arizona, Glendale High School class of 1972) cannot bring themselves to say three simple words: “Black lives matter.” Yet those same people have no problem saying the three simple words “Blue lives matter.” (For those of my worldwide readership that do not know, “blue” in this case represents law enforcement.) A husband of a classmate of mine sent me an article that posited that the man who put his knee on George Floyd’s neck and kept it there till he died was a “fall guy.” There is derisive response to the accurate teaching of history. A Pulitzer-Prize-winning graphic novel with accurate information about the Holocaust has just been banned in a Tennessee school. I conclude from these symptoms, and many other things I have seen and heard in the last few years, that Racism in my country is on the surge.

What can I do about it? For all it’s worth, I can denounce it. I can try to understand it and codify it and urge anyone listening to do the same. I can become more aware of its presence. In short, I can do almost nothing.

But I must stand up to be counted. The image above is the best my artist/poet self can do to make something that is relevant and unique to my perspective. And my perspective includes the notion that Racism is insidious and murky and omnipresent, that it thrives on denial and suppression, and that there are powerful forces at constant ready to divide us. So my image includes a smple from Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of Ruby Bridges, who is almost exactly my age, and of a Black man getting a drink spilled on him while doing nothing more than tying his shoes. I have a quotation from Paul Simon’s “Blessed,” written long ago, which I took the liberty of substituting one word to fit my theme. The other elements of the image are ambiguous, and the acrostic poem is somewhat effaced, as if censorship and/or vandalism was in play. But here are the unoccluded words:

diss tort shun

doesn’t take an awful lot a People to oppress
if you have some folks on top to scourge unwonted flesh
sadists of fascisti circumvent a pervenu
slow your roll, Utopians–the time is WAY too soon

As with most of my acrostics, there is some “loss of signal” due to the Procrustean strictures of meter, rhyme and acrostic spine. I would have liked a better word than “parvenu” but it was the closest to the Them vs. Us syndrome that words-ending-in-u had to offer. But I felt I got lucky with “unwonted” because it is so phonetically similar to “unwanted” that most of us will subconsciously connote one for the other.

I hope a change for the better will come in my lifetime. But I don’t have all that much lifetime left to me: even if I live to be 100, the journey is more than two-thirds over. But I intend to denounce Racism until my dying day.