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Pencil Pencil Sketch Sketch

November 13, 2014
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A movie called GONE GIRL featured a bar called “The Bar.” Mention was made of the name of the bar being “meta,” which means self-referential in a self-aware sort of way, sort of. Meta’s been around for a while, as witness this first verse to the theme of “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”:

This is the theme to Garry’s Show,
The theme to Garry’s show.
Garry called me up and asked if I would right his theme song.
I’m almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry’s Show.

So this is a pencil sketch featuring an acrostic of “Pencil Sketch.” It features Imogene Coca, who as a player in Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” performed in many a sketch. Apologies to the memory of Ms. Coca for such a sketchy description of such an outstanding comedic mind. Apologies, too, for an indecent attempt at caricature without reference to a photo source. This time round I elected to fly by the seat of my mind’s-eye pants and draw without looking at anything except the page.

Here are the words to the acrostic. Each line describes a sketch to be found on the page. Near the lower right-hand corner is a sketch of a pencil, which illustrates the double acrostic in heavy meta.

Party hats seen through refractive glass
Elephant sniffs at a whiskey flask
Nightstick next to an alley’s grate
Cat all tie-dyed per the dyer’s trait
Imogene Coca as a bumbling narc
Lastly–a profile of a matriarch

My own take on Meta is that being self-referential has its place, but self-REVerential–not so much.

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Willie Nelson If You Squint, and Other Sketches

April 21, 2013
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Yesterday I worked the two-to-six shift at the Village Gallery, the artist’s cooperative where my ceramic work is displayed. (All members are required to put in two shifts per month.) It was a slow afternoon, and though I was working alone, I had a lot of time on my hands. With Willie Nelson playing on the CD I made this page:

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Sorry about that, Willie. Doesn’t look much like you unless you squint; and the words imply rocky relations. Such is the nature of acrostic, rhyme, meter restricted poetry.

Oddly, the back of this page had a previously drawn panel array with a near-Willie in it:

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I had started this the day before, intending to flesh it out with eraser and more pencil. I may well leave it as is. It’s nice and mysterious with what’s left unsaid.

Here are some more sketches I made during my shift:

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Note that one of the sketches is all words. That’s OK–Charles Dickens did some sketches that were all words, compiled in SKETCHES BY BOZ. “The Poetical Young Gentleman” is a must-read for poets who don’t want to make fools of themselves.

Most of these sketches are exemplary of the way one of my pages gets started. I just think out loud on paper (that isn’t loud at all, is it?), and sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t. (Note the drawing problem of the fellow starting up the stairs, for instance.)

But the sketch that I feel best about was left at the gallery, in the folder of Husain Abdul-Alim, an artist who with his spouse has purchased a couple of my ceramic creations. He does carved-wood masks, mostly intended for hanging on a wall. I did a calligraphed thank-you note that included sketches of three of his masks. I hope he likes it!