To the spirit of Philip José Farmer. http://www.pjfarmer.com/
Loga’s Rhythm
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Tag Archives: illustration
Remember That Work In Progress? It’s Done…
…sort of. I intended to overlay it with an acrostic poem, but reconsidered.
Had I done so, the double acrostic spelling OFF THE/GRID might have read like this:
O wish us well who have an other Calling
For we are out, at risk, and fun to slur
Forthrightness none too often gets one Hi
The sad fact is that most think it’s absurd
Would the image have been better off with these words overlaying it? Probably not; it’s busy enough; but words and image may one day share a page in a book of my illustrated poetry.
Freehandedly: a $15 Drawing for Beth
Yesterday, following my post on Patty Hoisch, my friend, classmate, and fellow insomniac Beth Facebooked-messaged me that she liked Patty’s jewelry and wondered if it were available online. I steered Beth to Patty’s Etsy presence, and, as if to prove that no good deed goes unpunished, Beth subsequently told me that she should have been trying to sleep, but instead bought earrings, and that therefore I owed her $15.00.
Of course she was kidding, and so was I when I asked if a $15.00 drawing would satisfy her claim on my assets. “Even better,” was her instant answer. And then came the alchemy: I decided to do the drawing, send it to her, and make a blog post of the drawing and how it came to be. Here we are, and bless you, Beth, for supporting the arts with your $15.00 earrings purchase. (By the way, my drawing is valued at $150.00. My friends get a 90% discount. [grins])
And here are the words to the triple acrostic:
Forsooth, vermouth, then toothy smile
Regaled, assailed, benailed & riled
Entrapp’d, enraptured, captured well
EGAD! Be glad! Your life’s Unhelly
Readers may hit a speed bump with that final seeming non-rhyme. But if you slop the third line a little into the fourth, you can use the E of EGAD! to make it work. (House rules, folks! [grins again])
PS: This is the second day in a row a page has come to be due to a woman of many talents. Beth has been a medical doctor; she is now an outstanding pastel artist, with still lifes to rival the Old Masters. She’s also, often, playfully edgy, and vice versa. No details on request; sorry! [grins yet again, the grinning fool!]
Patty Hoisch, Wild Hare Arts Artist
A few posts ago I featured my Village Gallery colleague Ricki Losee and mentioned that there was one other artist that I hoped to do a page on. Here is the page, and here is she. Patty Hoisch is a person whose talents include songwriting, song performance, lapidary, jewelry design and meeting management–and I’m just scratching the surface here. She is also patient and gracious, even in the face of a horrible pun perpetrated in her name: I asked her if she were familiar with STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION; she said yes; I then suggested she get a ST:TNG Patrick Stewart action figure, “…so you can be Hoisch by your own Picard.” She should have done me grievous bodily harm; instead she smiled, politely but sweetly.
She has a website, Wild Hare Arts, which showcases her beautiful creations. Here is a link: http://wildharearts.com/
Here are the words to the quadruple acrostic:
When a happy whispered Aaaaah
Infiltrates a cloister’s spa
Let coquettish smiles appear
Delicately chart [or chase] a sphere
In the background of my drawing is a page of the sheet music she wrote for the cello part of her song “Shadow on the Wall.” Her husband Tom plays electric cello, and the two of them make beautiful music together.
promising work in progress…
...sure hope it delivers.
Puzzle Play Ground
Here is a page with three prominent words. Each of the words may serve as both noun and verb. The three together, as verbs in the imperative, may serve as three simple instructions with optional complication: Puzzle [out truth through experience]; Play [with concepts and correlation]; Ground [your puzzling and playing with a goal-seeking algorithm]. The three may also be read as two ganging up on the third: PuzzlePlay Ground or Puzzle Playground. We’re going to squeeze these words for all they’re worth here.
I’m at a point in my journey as an artist where I feel everything I’ve done so far, and especially what I’ve done in the last seven years, has gained inertia and inevitability so that new work demands to be done independent of my will to do it, along a path I have less and less control in deviation. Example: I’ve been making crossword puzzle grids for months now. I’m not getting any better at making them, but something in the core of my art identity demands that I keep making them, night after night. Sometimes I use the grids to replicate the crossword patterns in the newspaper, so that I don’t mark up the newspaper to solve the puzzle, but this is happening less and less lately. And there’s a growing sense that soon I’ll be going 3D with resin or PVC, making cubes and other volumes that contain text-units (i.e. alphanumerics), and writing poetry more suited to three-dimensional space; hypercrostic poetry, if you will. Perhaps the hundreds upon hundreds of acrostic poems I’ve done have been merely preparative prelude to what I will be doing. It seems daunting/impossible to do what I’m describing, though.
True story: some years ago a friend of mine had a dream about me. In the dream I was painting three-dimensionally. –Maybe I’m just remembering her telling me about that dream, and now imagining what it would be like, best I can. (I don’t really have to imagine: Philip José Farmer described a means of doing so, as practiced by his protagonist Chibiabos Elgreco Winnegan, in his Hugo-Winning novella “Riders of the Purple Wage.” It is preposterous and wonderfully, wildly imaginative.)
Howbeit, here are the words to my unhyper acrostic:
Party’s dull–perhaps it needs some ZING
Ugly lull–small hope that most’ll linger
Ziggy Stardust’s not along–nor RINGO
Zebra stripes don’t translate to Urdu
Let’s a Maze–a labyrinthine BOON
Enter energy to knit a wound
lovewatch; visual koan; hello, dalai
And in conclusion, here’s something written in response to a challenge that reads, and I quote, “Write a poem about the Dalai Lama’s lost weekend.”
hello, dalai
who’s that guy at the bar
oh it’s me
lama lama ding dong
hey tarbender
gimme one with everything bwah hahahaha
ackshully
i’ll have a sloe gin fizz
but make it fast
[three drinks later]
hey babe
lao me to innaduce myself
i’m the fourteenth reincarnation
of the big eightfold cheese
of tibetan buddhism
no i don’ have a light
unless enlightenment counts
oh okay seeya
[three drinks later]
row row row yer bodhi
genly down the streeeet
mellowly mellowly mellowly mellowly
lives are too discrete
[three drinks later]
hey babe
lao mi to induce myselv
i’m the lama yer dreams
and i’m up for grabs
and when i undress
i disrobe
hey whey ya goin??!
geez
who yagodda drink to get a screw around here
Gonna Take a Sedimental Journey
My Journey presupposes the Guggenheim Museum will be engulfed by a tsunami and then rediscovered millennia later.
Settle down O Guggenheim
Entre nous you’re past your prime
Drift to ocean floor & then
If you’re found you’re Heaven-sent
Blast from the Past: Tenacity
Seven-odd years ago I did a page contemplating obsolescence and the fight against it. My first line was “Tyrannosaurus Rex was once a Large & Sexy Beast.” The page entire looked like this:
A couple of days ago I posted a picture on Facebook that my Sweetheart, Denise, took of me after I’d worked a graveyard shift and then slept a few hours, acquiring an epic Bed Head. Here is the picture:
I labelled it “Celebrities Without Their Makeup (Non-Celebrity Edition).” Got over 30 Likes and this echoic comment from my dear and Magic friend Mary: “Sexy Beast.” So if my arms start shortening, I’ll know I’m in real trouble.
Blocks Mental
This started out as the sketching equivalent of a piano finger exercise, with two grids and light, medium and dark tones. It felt like it needed some text-as-image. “Mental Blocks” was chosen for its acrostic potential. The inner trickster mandated that the words be reversed and the right-side word be turned upside down. Then things happened fast. Words were chosen to create a puzzle that might make for a mental block. The puzzle is this: given the words that are completely readable, and the constraint they follow, can the solver determine EXACTLY what the rest of the words are?
Finally, with erasure and redrawing, the rest of the image materialized: a figure chained by words and blocked by grids, wondering how to solve and be released. There are a couple of drawing problems–I’m especially unhappy with the visible hand and its shadowing–but I’m happy with it as a sketch of an idea. (Maurice Sendak, in the introduction to THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, once praised Jules Pfeiffer for his ability to draw an idea. That’s what I want to do, and often don’t succeed in doing.)
One with Clay, Image and Text 