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sumta loogat

March 24, 2022
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2022 0324 sumta loogat

An old saying has it that “You cannot have your cake and eat it too.” But thanks to printer/scanner technology, it is easy to have your drawing and change it too. That’s what I’ve done with this one. What you see is a printed copy of a work in progress of mine, one far from finished, and after I printed the copy I drew on it, then I scanned it and photoedited it to darken the midtones, goose up the contrast, and crop it. The result is something I defy people to inpect and see if they can tell what was printed and what was subsequently drawn. Modern printing is miraculous.

I’m calling this “Sumta loogat” because that’s the way I, with my Southwestern American accent, pronounce “something to look at.” When I drew I tried to entertain myself with visual dynamics, tonal range, composition, and just enough text to intrigue. Those familiar with my word would correctly guess that the words are meant to eventually be the spines of two triple acrostic poems. But here is a visual experience that is different than the one to be had when the poetry is complsed and added.

The notation “a/p” is something I picked up from my intaglio printing days in the 1970s and early 80s. It stands for “artist’s proof” and can mean anything from “unauthorized edition” to “work in progress” to “don’t take this one too seriously.” In printmaking it means it is NOT part of a print run.

Just something to look at, Friends. Hope it pleases!

snapshot 24 March 2022

March 24, 2022
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snapshot

so this is after
a bowl of stewed carrots
and a cup of coffee
and before a shave and shower

that indeterminate time
when my drawing and i have a tussle

“redeeming love” is the name of the movie
that i watch and then pause to draw more
it is about gold-strike times
and a dirt farmer and a luscious prostitute
he is bound and resolute to marry her
she is scarred from abandonment
and the ugliness that goes with the life

it’s impossible to say
what influence watching the movie
has on my drawing
except that watching the movie is strangely soothing
because despite the tawdriness and pain
the title promises glory by the end
and i need that hope right now
for my drawing
(notice the word DEFEAT in lower right)
and my day
(seems like yesterday i did my laundry
and not four days ago
and i go out of town tomorrow
and haven’t booked a room yet
and i want to finish this drawing
and another more important drawing
and and and and and)
and my life

old guy getting older
full of stewed carrots
coffee
and redeeming hope

Still Life with Seven of Diamonds

February 19, 2022
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2022 0219 still life w 7 diamonds
Here is how I spent my midmorning. I had had a cup of coffee and fiddled around on the Internet some. Then for about the millionth time I realize that much of my life was going down the Shallow Fun drain. So I codified my concern with this poem, which I posted to my Facebook group Poets All Call:
****
Toxic Enjoyment

It is not cancer but
It is eating my time alive

It is fatal frippery
Terminal twiddlethumbing
Toxic Enjoyment

When I wake up I find
That the Fun God Fungus
Has given me more coins
More tickets
More lives

And so I sit on the edge of my bed
For maybe forty-five minutes
And wrestle with opponents
Or make things blow up
Or figure out a word

Finally I come to my senses
And look myself in the bathroom-vanity eye
And say (I swear) “Be Careful.”

I have Be Carefulled myself
Almost every day for years
And till now it has meant
“Be Careful whilst flossing and brushing;
Your teeth are not spring chickens”

But now
Today
It means
Be Careful
Not to leak
The rest
Of your life away
On pointless
Non
Con
Struc
Tive
Empty
Enjoyment.

Most of me nods
And thinks Whew,
Thank Goodness
The Right Track is back!

But the little I-Wanna Weasel
Chuckles and says
Smugly,
“I’ve heard that one
Before
And I will hear it
Again.”
****

Naturally, after I posted the poem the question arose: What IS the best use of my time right now? A two-hour drawing followed. It is flawed, and, despite the two hours, rushed. I hope the viewer will derive some (non-shallow, heh heh) enjoyment from the cryptic storytelling involved, and perhaps from the crude force of the draughtsmanship.

This one is atypical of my drawings in that the drawing details are in caption form at the bottom, and part of the image. I may do this more, and the images thus captioned may become postcards, or refrigerator magnets, or elements for a gallery-like montage. Time will tell.

Drone & Crone

December 10, 2021
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20211210_100121

This card started with a freeze frame from a movie that had a cityscape. I sketched from the image on screen till I had about 40% of the scape in rough form, then I watched the rest of the movie, went back to the sketch, and faked and finished the rest. It needed a foreground, so the woman showed up and said she needed age, wine, and a drone recording her rooftop solo soirée. I obliged best I could. “Now the Crostic. I am a Crone, no bones about it. And you made me look too good, but I’ll take it. Make the bookends DRONE and CRONE, and put a big tasty Ampersand in the middle. Good. Now keep the words to a bare-bones minimum. Use some dichotomy and some complementary. –You’re done for now, but if you make this into a large-scale painting choose better words. For now, though, just adjust the background a bit for consistency and balance. –That’s enough. –I SAID, that’s ENOUGH!!”

Drone & Crone

Daydreams & rhetoric
Recorders & survivor
Omnivore & seraglio
Nonetheless & deposition
Ecstasy & testosterone

ICAD 2021 card ten

June 10, 2021
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2021 0610 icad10

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.

The Joy of Improvisational Drawing

April 21, 2021
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20210421_111505

About half a dozen times or so in my substitute-teaching journey, and not always in an art class, a kid would come up to me after class and say, “You’re a good draw-er.” I love that so much more than “You’re a good artist.” Because no matter how much Art is in my images, the SOUL is in the Drawing.

Doing this crazy picture was a joyful adventure. I didn’t do my usual crank-it-out-in-one-sitting modus operandi. I put it aside and come back to it several times, taking several days. My only regret is that I didn’t record the stages preceding completion. Next time i do one of these things I will take a lot of pictures.

Are ya ready fa some foot! Ba’al!!?

July 19, 2020
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At top is a drawing exercise–the task I assigned myself was to do foot studies without looking at any feet. As I was working on it the singing voice of Hiram “Hank” Williams Jr. cued up in my mental jukebox, doing his Monday Night Football theme song, which begins, “Are ya ready fa some FOOTBAAL?!” (I have spelled it the way I hear him sing it.)

Then my scattershot memory took me back to Vacation Bible School, where my parents stashed me and my brothers one afternoon long ago as they went off to have some fun with their high school friends, the Olafsons. The Bible reading mentioned Ba’al Peor, one of the “Thou shalt not have other gods before me” gods of the Old Testament.  So I did an Internet search on Ba’al Peor, and a fountainhead bust caught my eye. It looked a little like a nuclear bomb had just been detonated in his skull. I sketched from the photo some and then closed the site and let the drawing tell me what to do. Some of it was blind-sidingly unexpected.

20200719_170419

Atlas on an Atlas

July 17, 2020
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20200717_144940

On Facebook there is a poetry group called Poets All Call. I am one of the group’s moderators, and I contribute with my poetry and with a weekly feature called Title Tuesday, in which I provide five titles and invite the poets to use the titles as prompts.

It’s Friday, and there hasn’t been much activity in the group–perhaps a sign of these pandemical times. So, since I think both writing poetry and reading poetry is good for the soul, today I tried to lead by example by starting a poem without any inspiration whatsoever. As the poem unfolded I got some illustration notions, and I went back and forth beteeen the poem and my drawing.

Here is the poem that inspired the drawing.

grab those bootstraps
(to my fellow Poets All Call members)

i have nothing to say
and only the vaguest set of urges
chief of which is the fear
that my word-engine will heave
a sputtering sigh and die
if i let it idle too long

hey, i just said something
this is first gear
and i remember thinking
about atlas this morning

atlas according to greek myth
supported the entire Earth on his shoulders

and i was thinking cmon greeks
any five-year-old would know that that
is stupid

what’s HE standing on when he does it?
why doesn’t he just rest the Earth
where he is standing?
and why isn’t there a theme park
where his beyond-gigantic hands are?

(the word-engine is revving)
(rev is short
either for reverend
or revolutions per minute)
(there are reverends
and then there are right reverends
but none will admit to being
a wrong reverend)
(another way of abbreviating
revolutions per minute
is rpm
pronounced arpeeyem
and easy to say fast
as befits an abbreviation
that an inebriate
can abbreviate
and not deviate)

speaking of deviate
we did
we were speaking of atlas
the laughably improbable
and got sidetracked

but it all ties in
an atlas is a collection of maps
in other words it holds
all or part of the earth
and the earth spins
at approximately 1/1440 rpm
for 1440 is the approximate number of minutes
in a day

as for the poetic nonsense
of certain reverends
it neverends

but this little poem
this bootstrapping jaunt
must end
i will snip its umbilicus
and send it out into your eyes
for i am its mother
literarily speaking
and the being of a mother
is so sacred
it has raised empires
and flared hope
with the promise of renewal

you might enjoy some motherhood yourself
if not tomorrow (who knows?)
then right now–yes, now!
you have a notion
knocking about in your fanciful head–
i know it!
please share it!
start from scratch–
grab those bootstraps!!