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2020 0805 art and bird

In a sense, this drawing has taken more than six years to do. In late Spring of 2014 I was working the graveyard shift at Sedona Winds Independent Living Retirement Community. A small part of my job was recycling the day’s menus, about 150 of them, into scrap paper. We had far more scrap paper than we needed so I would use some for myself. One use was the making of 15×15 grids so that I could do the newspaper’s crossword puzzles without marking up anyone’s paper. I also drew grids for my own crossword puzzle construction, and for my artwork. The grids on this page were done in that longago faraway time. The checkerboarding and the drawing and the word balloons and the though balloons have all been done within the last 24 hours.

The bird is saying “Well, this is AWKward.” Scrutiny will reveal that the bird has left a calling card on the steps.

The man is thinking, “Very Funny, Guy Who Drew Me, putting me in underwear and naming me Art.”

My signature is saying, “It gets worse, Dude. Your last name is ‘Saek.'” His full name may well be Art 4Art Saek. In Latin Art for Art’s Sake is “Ars Gratia Artis.” For many years the Latin phrase graced the MGM roaring-lion logo. The implication was that Louis B. Mayer and Sam Goldwyn didn’t care about money, just Art. Hooray for Hollywood, Friends!

The Pawn leans toward all three but does not say or think anything. People who use Pawns sometimes get uncomfortable if the Pawns don’t keep their thoughts and words to themselves. To me, my Pawn seems to be in “Watch And Learn” mode.

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When I was a night clerk at Sedona Winds Independent Living Retirement Community, I had about 5 hours of work–preparing menus, folding napkins and setting tables, collecting bags of trash and meal trays from outside resident doors, preparing  coffee and distributing newspapers, plus other odd tasks–in an eight-hour shift. The rest of my shift my main job was to stay awake and alert in case of emergencies and/or phone calls or visits from residents. So I formed the habit of drawing 15×15 grids, because the N.Y. Times and LA Times crossword puzzles were 15×15. Sometimes I tried my hand at crossword puzzle construction. Two such efforts, never finished, are on this page.

Crossword grids make good backgrounds for artwork, and I’ve used them suchwise many times. Here I have tried to make them more like main characters.

 

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Above is a playful riff-o-rama on the Probabilistic Quantum Multiverse, wherein for every way things CAN happen, they DO, and each possibility gets its own private universe. There is no one acrostic poem above, but here is one variation:

Grant this logorithmic soul
Righteous lack of wrongish troll. O
Isthmus straitens bric-a-brac
Deviathan devoids the rack.

I thought I’d coined a new word with Deviathan (quickdef: Deviant Leviathan), but I find to my dismay there are over 13,000 search results. [sad face]

Though this is playful, it is also a try at Art with a capital A. The illustration is a visual pun for Gridlock. It is a forbidding, Cartesian-coordinated box, and visual pun #2 is that all my subversive/versive thinking is done outside the box. Plus, the bottom row of boxes is a wordless, step-by-step lesson in how to draw a 15 by 15 grid freehand with nothing but paper and pencil. This is handy for crossword puzzle constructors who want to go Commando.

How? Why? Let me close both wordlessly and wordfully with this work in progress:

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