The Portraiture Practice continues. Meanwhile, my Glendale High School classmate Vicki has commissioned a $5, 5-minute portrait, which I’m guessing will be a present for her devoted husband Ric. She says “no rush” so I’ll get a lot more practice in before I do hers!
There’s a distinct possibility that I’ll be setting up a table at the Village Gallery for $5 5-minute portraits. It was discussed at the Management Committee meeting last week, and it will probably come up at the general meeting this evening. So I’m prepping; and lucky for me, a recent TIME Magazine featured “100 Influential People.” Last night I spent an hour doing this page. I averaged fairly close to five minutes per subject. (I did better with some than with others, but I’ll keep practicing…)
So–if you are in the near vicinity of the Village of Oak Creek on the evening of Friday, June 6, and you have five bucks to spare, and you want a souvenir of a five-minute visit with yours truly…come on over to the Village Gallery! [smiles]
Last week my friend Bob Kabchef created a feature called Maudlin Monday in the poet’s group we both are in, and I joked that I was working on a dual portrait of Maud Adams and Loretta Lynn for Maud/Lynn Monday, but it would take some time. This week my friend Genevieve Lumbert, another member of our group, reminded us: “POP CALL TO MAUDLIN MONDAY ARCADE.” (Arcade was Bob’s username in the now defunct seniors social site Eons, where we all met.) Spurred by Gen’s nudge, I did the above. Since the index card is a little beat up, it didn’t lay on the scanner flatly, and so I put a CD-R atop it, remembering that there’s a cool prismatic effect when you scan a disk.
Words:
Made their marks with smarts and toil
Anguished; languished; knew true joy
Upped their cred despite their men
Do let’s see them both again
The Shakespeare quote is apt for these two ladies, and for several of the ladies in our poet’s group Poets All Call, including its originator, Socorro Olsen, and Genevieve, and my Sweetheart, Denise.
This morning I bought some more Tracfone phone minutes, and then called my mom to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day and to fact-find and get permission to do an unadorned account of her life as a mother. She cheerfully and at some length reviewed certain of her life events with me, and granted me carte blanche to write what I would.
Here is what I wrote, but not unadorned: atop my account I made a sketch of her.
What a face she had! Unashamed eyebrows, mesmerizing eyes, chin impossibly assertive for being so brief. But it’s what she did with what she had, well into latter life, that goes to show you where her real magic was. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLgBlw4O6As
After nine and a half hours on the job, the next five-at-least better be in Slumberland.
PS WIP equals Patrick Stewart Work In Progress. I tried doing a PS a few years ago; people thought the drawing was good, but they couldn’t tell who it was.
On December 21st I put the finishing touches on a portrait of a musician I have never met. It is based on a photograph taken by one of the residents of the retirement community I work for, which she gave gracious permission to use as a photo source, taken by her during one of his gratis, heart-warming performances at our community. (The photographer prefers to be uncredited.) Armed with the photo and the musician’s first name and the fact that he’s based in the Quad-Cities area, I found him and his Facebook page on the Internet, and wrote him for permission to post my portrait. Then my laptop died.
The laptop is still dead. Its replacement is due to arrive in two days. Yesterday my Sweetheart, Denise, offered the use of her computer, chiefly to Facebook-post my regular column “Title Tuesday” for the poetry group Poets All Call. In doing so I found the response of the musician Eric to my portrait-posting request:
Hello Gary, Your sketch is wonderful; I’m honored. Yes you can post it in your blog thank you very much. Eric
I can’t think of a better way to kick off the New Year than by posting my portrait of this kindly and supremely talented gentleman, and urge whoever reads this to do an Internet search on Eric, the musician who plays in Sedona. I won’t deprive my readers of the thrill of the search, which will yield delightful results both on Facebook and on YouTube; but on request I’ll provide a YouTube link.
Eric, thanks for helping this New Year of mine get off to a good start!
Stan Lee, like many of the superheroes he wrote comic-book continuity for, has feet of clay. He’s hyberbolic, a credit hog, and an attention craver. But any kid who grew up during the Silver Age of Marvel Comics could not help but be influenced by him. My sometime tendency toward wisecracking and alliteration may reflect this influence. So I devoted 73 seconds to doing his portrait.
Last I heard he was still alive. Excelsior, Stan! ‘Nuff Said! Except…as the pirate said to the Q-Tips: “Avast, ye swabs!”
Rummaging through the image archives I found a spate of portraiture tries from five years or so ago. These are the best of a not-all-that-good bunch.
Here’s James Joyce:
Robert Heinlein:
Margaret Bourke-White, with a seeming touch of Clint Eastwood:
Eleanor Roosevelt:
The enigmatic and tragically-overlooked Alice Sheldon, alias James Tiptree, Jr.:
The prolific inventor and thug hirer Thomas Edison:
And, last but not least, the physically driven, self-sculpted Mikhail Baryshnikov:
The drawings, though all flawed, represent the work it has taken to make what I do now, though flawed, less so with time and trouble. The best two-word advice for the art student, courtesy of stellar artist and sensei Darlene Goto, is “SLOW DOWN!;” the best three-word advice, available through the public domain, is “Practice, practice, practice.”
Readers of the last blog post will recall that I tried, and did not quite succeed, to capture my friend and fellow poet Bob Kabchef’s visage on paper. As a portraitist, when I misfire I have a choice: move on, or get back on the horse and try again. It is ALWAYS better to try again, though fear of repeated failure hangs like a wet-sodden cloud over the fragile-egoed creator’s head.
Here is my second try, with a double acrostic inspired by something Bob posted, seeing an early draft of it: “Speaking of chefs….. A lot of folks hesitate when confronted with the challenge of saying my last name – Kabchef. It’s not really that tough. Just think “Cab” and “Chef” Now say them together and you’ve got it. I sometimes tell folks that if TaxiCook is any easier for them, I’ll answer to that too. When my grandad came here to escape WWI, immigration whittled down Kabachieff to Kabchef. We Kabchefs don’t have a fancy Coat of Arms. We’re so poor, our coats don’t even HAVE arms.” That gave me a grin, and “Taxi Cook” it was. The words:
The nations are assembled choc-a-bloc
And Poets wrestle with the Despot–so
Xerography’s recorded–ONE Li Po
Is worth a thousand Xerxes who would mock
One with Clay, Image and Text 