auto play
a 1987 ski trip
undocumented al
tic of fan by sea
o she was lovely
ICAD 2021 card twenty
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Tag Archives: ICAD 2021
ICAD 2021 card nineteen
I drew a face trying to think of no one in particular. To me he looked like the illegitimate son of Salvador Dali and Adam Driver. And he seemed to be looking intently at something right in front of his face. So a waspish creature came to be, singing a lyriuc corrupted from “Summertime.” So my surreal actor corrupterd the word “Awesome.”
ICAD 2021 card eighteen
Here is a portrait of my co-worker and friend Karina. It is hard to capture her beauty, fierceness and sweet nature all at the same time. “It looks like my aunt,” she said of an earlier attempt. This is the best of five tries
ICAD 2017 card seventeen
I had lightning on my card, but nothing else. drew a house to give it context. More townstuff wanted to get in there. And then like a bolt from the blue came the realization that Mother Nature was playing a part.
Personifying Her was a challenge. She needed to be no particular race, and yet all races. I gave Her angel-like garb and a slight suggestion of dreadlocks. Her breasts swelled with the milk of human kindness, yet she wore a stern expression with a touch of sorrow, knowing Her lightning was necessary for life, yet caused death.
Lightning IS necessary for life. I went into detail on the Nitrogen Cycle that lightning makes possible, on a blog post long, long ago–early 2013 if my memory serves. But a lightning bolt can destroy a tree, start a fire, electromagnetic-pulse a man. My friend Doug was unalterably changed after lightning struck him, but thank Goodness his champion’s spirit and gentle good humor survived the strike.
She Looses Fit, Full Lightning
When Mother Nature comes to call
Ball Lightning in Her hand
The En-Two’s fixed and then is all
So f e r t i l e in the land.
ICAD 2021 card sixteen
A drawing that came out of nowhere.
ICAD 2021 twofer
Friends, my eyesight is worsening. After doing these Iresolved to get my eyes checked and get a new prescription. If surgery is indicated I will probably get it. –So I’m afraid “Feast your eyes” is not the right thing to say right now. Perhaps it would be better to take a tip from the bald man’s face and “read between the lines.”
ICAD 2021 card thirteen
There may be a lot to be said about this one, but it won’t be by me. An explanation would be inaccurate. It might be a good springboard for speculation, though.
ICAD 2021 card twelve
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Cataclysm, catatonia, catarrh and catastrophe all start with Cat. Doesn’t mean we can’t love them.
ICAD 2021 card eleven
While working on this card, thoughts came of mathematics, and then the Symbolist artist Odilon Redon. The math thoughts began almost immediately as I drew some ovals and then made them into flat toruses. It occurred to me that I was inventing laws for them. Examples: the ovals must not touch each other, but they will follow some sort of hard-to-discern alignment. Round-sided triangles will intersect them and change the shade of their insides. The background will have a similar tone-change, seen through the insides of the ovals.
And then, as I ground my pencil into the index card to make the background very, very dark, I thought of Redon, who lovingly called some of his charcoal drawings mes noirs–My Blacks. He liked black. “Black is the most essential color,” he said.
And it came to me that one of his noirs had the title “The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity.” Looked at the card I’d near-finished and something went clickclickclick. Some of the math I learned as a first-semester calculus student, almost half a century ago, had to do with summations, and limits, and what happens when the value of the unknown labeled x approaches . . . infinity.
The summation symbol is the greek Sigma, which looks like this: Σ (lazy M? Broken E? Yet in the Greek alphabet, it represents the S sound. Go figure!). A loose interpretation of the way I Sigma-ized and finished this card is “This is the limit of ICAD 2021 card #11 as G Bowers June 2021 approaches Infinity.” Mathematically all wrong, but artistically acknowledging the influence of Odilon Redon (and also my Drawing & Composition teacher Darlene Goto, who urged us always to render “Darker darks!!”) and revealing a greater truth than the false mathematics: Everything, and all of us, in however minuscule a way, approach Infinity.
ICAD 2021 card ten
I have a new electric eraser and here and elsewhere I am having fun with it. It is easier to draw with than then other erasers in my arsenal, though I haven’t reached sufficient proficiency to do all the things I want to do with it, even when I sharpen the end to a point. Time will take care of that.
As with many of my cards this year, here I’m using the back end of one of my little sketchbooks for dark-backgrounding of the card. I like including the holes the metal binding-wire went through. They remind me of old process-photography film, and of the sprockets that convey the sound in film movies. In both cases there is the sense of being a part of a continuum, most of which the viewer cannot see.
Another thing I want to share is that I’ve more and more gotten the sense that my finished pieces are too sketchy, and my sketches are too finished-piecey. But for most of my work the conveyed concept does the heavy lifting, no matter the sketchiness, so it’s all good. I’m also preparing for my future dementia: I may, and dreadfully soon (to me even thirty years is “soon”), not have very good or very many ideas. When I see that obviously happening, I intend to do remakes of my “greatest hits,” more finished and polished versions of my older work. I will be collaborating with my younger self. And I’ll be using state-of-the-art equipment to assist my effort. So I hope to be able to make a contribution to the visual arts right up to what my lifelong friend Tom Sing calls “stepping up to the turnstile.” Thinking about that helps quell my mild panic about my life’s endgame.
One with Clay, Image and Text 