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Padre Pio with a Migraine Halo

by

7″ x 9″

This is a kind of monoprint, painted on plexiglass, then mushed against paper. Fitting for a portrayal of someone who suffered as spectacularly as this dude.

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Number Twenty-Three

by

16″ x 20″

 

 

Another band picture.  This one just kind of barely hangs together, as if the band hasn’t been rehearsing.  Which I also like.

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Olympics 1908

by

8″x 10″

I’m going to do as many Olympic drawings over the next few weeks as is reasonable. This is a vertically-inclined group from 1908.

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St. Clare

by

12″ x 18″

St. Clare founded the “Poor Clares” order of nuns and was one of the first followers of St. Francis in early 13th c. Assisi.  She devoted herself to a life of poverty.

Once when she was too ill to attend mass, she was able to see and hear the service projected on the wall of her room, so in 1958 Pope Pius XII designated her Patron Saint of Television.  St. Clare is also the Patron Saint of against eye disease, Assisi, embroiderers, eyes, good weather, gilders, gold workers, goldsmiths, laundry workers, needle workers, Santa Clara Indian Pueblo, telegraphs, telephones, and television writers.  Great that we still have a Patron Saint of Telegraphs.

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Corset

by

11″ x 14″

I made this drawing and a few others like it a year or so ago, I can’t remember why now, had something to do with an interest in the sculptural quality of corset boning, and the idea of garments made of cotton and whalebone.  The idea never went anywhere but I like the drawing still.  Funny how one word can mean so many things.   Search for “boning” online and you get at least three definitions, all vividly represented.

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Bookoo Has a Hand Helmet

by

8″ x 11 1/2″

It appears the Wastrel girl has made, or found, or grown a helmet made of hands.  Her own, or those of others?  Hands of her back-up bodies?  For protection, or warmth, or psychic vision?  So many questions.

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Look at Her

by

15″ x 17″

My big face is peering in on the antebellum South.  There’s a house, a gate, a field, a flock of birds, live oaks and the popping bubbles of our mothers’ and fathers’ mothers and fathers.

It’s hard to work with images of the Old South without things getting cliché and problematic.  Maybe not even possible, here’s another go at it.

In his memoir, my Great-great-grandfather writes the story of his father’s death in Natchez, Mississippi in 1884. The Rev. Marks was called to be by his bedside:

“When Mr. Marks came my father said, Mr. Marks I am absolutely saved, am I not? — Absolutely so!  he replied. — There is not a doubt about it? he asked again. — Not a particle of doubt, Mr. Marks replied. — Pointing to his wife he said, Look at her. Why then should she weep?”

 

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Herakleitos

by

8 1/2″ x 10″

Herakleitos (c. 535 – c. 475 BCE, from Guy Davenport translation)

.16.
Awake, we see a dying world; asleep, dreams.

.17.
Nature loves to hide.  [Becoming is a secret process].

.18.
The Lord who prophesies at Delphoi neither speaks clearly nor hides his meaning completely; he gives one symbols instead.

.19.
In searching out the truth be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it.

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Birds, Bird Heads and S-words Like Slingshot

by

11″ x 16″

suckerpunch, slackjaw, slim chance, slingshot, shank stew, shint sham, slink shot, shin harm, skint tart

Not sure what to say about this, the title pretty much captures it.

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Charlie

by

8″ x 10″

They were staring at the fire while my bro-in-law read from Lord of the Rings; or else they’d never stay still long enough.  Love the look of concentration on a young face.

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James

by

8″x 10″

Now for something completely different.  Here are two drawings I did of my nephews while we were all in a cabin on a lake in Tennessee last month.

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Illustrated Limericks About Suffering (title)

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Frankie Rollins and I are working on a collaboration called “Sorrow for Beginners”, a kind of manual, or user’s guide.  This idea seems to be related to that; I woke up the other night and wrote in the notebook next to my bed “write limericks about suffering.”

So the last few nights I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and written limericks and made a very small book of three of them.  I might do more, or maybe this is all there is.  I love that the cadence of the limerick makes me laugh before my brain has time to notice that it’s not funny at all, even a little bit.  Even when I know what’s coming I still laugh.

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Chagall

by

approx 8″ x 10″

 

It was Marc Chagall’s birthday the other day.  I love his paintings, gravity and logic don’t hold.   I remember seeing an interview with him on the BBC years ago and when asked why he paints he said something like:  To make my mother happy.  Great answer.  He had the eyes of a wild piglet.  Maybe the greatest painter of dreams.

“Work isn’t to make money; you work to justify life.” – Marc Chagall

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Wastrels Go to the Underworld and are Tempted to Destroy One Another

by

4″ x 6″

 

“Mayday…mayday…mayday,” the international emergency distress signal, from the french contraction, me + aidez, m’aidez, or venez m’aider, come help me, conjugated with the formal ‘you’, the imperative ‘you help me’, or ‘I need you to help me’.  Said three time:  mayday…mayday…mayday to differentiate the distress call over radio air waves.  Help me…help me…help me.

Here Bookoo and Cilice have gone to the underworld and are tempted to destroy one another, like in those great Poussin sketches.

 

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Covered in Hair

by

9″ x 12″

 

The year was twisted like a towel.  Monstrous forearms grabbing and twisting, grabbing and twisting.  That is how the year got to be only nine and a half months long.  Metastasis, the changing of position, state or form.  The eighty-ninth of May.

Here we see the Wastrels covered in hair.  Maybe they have had an encounter with the wildman seen so much in old manuscripts.  Or maybe Cilice has taken his hairshirt one step too far.

 

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Forget Me Not #3 (with permutations)

by

8″ x 10″

 

If time, space and money were not issues, it would be fun to make a big billboard size image with self-illuminating letters that would flicker on and off to create different permutations of  texts.

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Number Twenty-Four

by

16″ x 28″

This is what happens when I get a hold of a lot of colored mat board scraps.  Trying to encourage a thing of fragments to give the impression of unity.  (the human condition, some might say).  Multi-colored compartments.  Polychromatics.

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Number Twenty-One

by

11″ x 14″

 

The more I do these musician drawings, I think I’m still putting in too much information.  The eye can figure out how the bodies and space fits together without much info.  I remember reading John Berger’s writings about transcribing radio transmissions during WWII and how the mind can create (even with flaws) a whole image or idea from only a few staticky scraps.  And then there’s this that I’ve seen floating around the internet for years:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

 

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Amerigo “Meg” Bianchi

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In New York for the memorial of Julia’s grandfather, Meg.  I find if you’ve been thinking a lot about someone, it’s easier to draw them well. Portraiture is about saturation, I guess, the more you soak up the more there is to wring back out.  And I’ve been hearing a million stories from his long and rich life.

Somebody (John Singer Sargent?) said something like “a portrait is a picture in which there is something wrong with the mouth.”  I remembered that half way through drawing this, so decided to put more effort into his mouth, which was to me the most expressive part of his face.  But now I’m just talking shop.  Rest in peace, Poppy.

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Periodic Companions (a rare and expensive super conductor, drawing)

by

9″ x 12″

 

 

Another excerpt from Periodic Companions.  This one is a pretty good illustration of how the text and images work together.   Laynie’s characters are personifications of chemical elements and their personalities are shaped by the qualities of their corresponding elements.  The drawings are just schoolgirls.  Well, not just, maybe elements of the periodic table appear as Edwardian schoolgirls, if seen under certain light or from a certain angle.  I’m not a scientist so can’t say for sure.

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Periodic Companions (I Firmly Believed)

by

9″ x 12″ (the drawing part)

 

 

This is one of eleven drawings that will accompany Laynie Browne’s elegant and strong new book.  I’ll trickle some of these in here on the WaD, with occasional bits of her text.  I am making the drawings as replicas of the illustrations from my mother’s Edwardian child’s primer “Emmy Lou: Her Book & Heart”.  Basically illustrating Laynie’s text with another book’s illustrations, and they strangely work.  Or, they work strangely.  Either, both.  Whatever.

One cryptic description of the collaboration, from the Valentine’s exhibition at the UA Poetry Ctr:

What happens when a Victorian childhood primer meets postmodern characters based upon the periodic table of elements?  Love compels tears. Relationships are based upon chemistry and are represented through a series of drawings which emphasize gesture, hearsay, and indeterminacy.

 

 

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Virga

by

9″ x 12″

 

A virga is a column of rain that sweeps out of a cloud and evaporates before it reaches the ground.  Here one appears with an aqueduct as the children explore what may be a Roman village.  I woke up with De Chirico in mind, but this drawing, like a virga is just a wisp.

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Number Twenty

by

11″ x 14″

 

These group portraits of musicians, they remind me of something Cézanne said about his still-lifes, like “I’m not interested in apples, I’m interested in how I perceive apples.  I feel that way about the musicians (his apples are better paintings, but that’s comparing apples and…).

I went looking for that quote but couldn’t find it, but instead found lots of other things Cézanne said, some very odd, and decided to string them into a paragraph.  It makes a strange little proclamation.  I know you’re not supposed to jam together other peoples words, but it’s fun and I’m not a journalist, so here we go:

 

“Tell me, do you think I’m going mad?  I sometimes wonder, you know.  Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.  A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly.  Say what you like: I’m every inch a painter.  I want to die painting.  I am the primitive of the method I have invented. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not really possible to help others.  We live in a rainbow of chaos.  I allow no one to touch me.”  — Paul Cézanne

 

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Girl with Leaping Hares

by

3 1/2″ x 4″

This one is a tiny drawing of an idea that I may (or may not) realize in which I take some of the paintings from my Edelweiss series and add extensions to them. For instance, taking this painting, and adding a leaping hare addendum.

Those paintings were made strictly from old family photo albums, with the rule of ‘no invention’, but it may be time to let them loosen up and get out some dance moves.

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He Carries Her Through the Rain

by

8″ x 11″

This is a very faint drawing on two sheets of acetate of a piggyback ride in the rain. Evidence that a self-education is underway into the basics of animation. More to come on how that relates to the wastrels.

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Ominous Dominus

by

8″ x 10″

 

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

-T.S. Eliot, from the opening of The Wasteland 

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Bookoo and Cilice Bury the Hatchet (sketch)

by

8″ x 10″

 

 

The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations. – Roland Barthes

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Wastrels Stage 1 : Scheme 5 – Stitches on the Knee

by

8″ x 10″
Stage
a : a period or step in a process, activity, or development: as (1) : one of the distinguishable periods of growth and development of a plant or animal <the larval stage of an insect> (2) : a period or phase in the course of a disease;also : the degree of involvement or severity of a diseaseb : one passing through a (specified) stage

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Pong

by

7″ x 9 1/2″

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Wastrel Vignette: Stitches in the Knee

by

11″ x 14″

 

a few definitions of Vignette:

– a picture (as an engraving or photograph) that shades off gradually into the surrounding paper
– a short descriptive literary sketch
– a brief incident or scene (as in a play or movie)

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Fighting for the Personhood of Cilice

by

7″ x 9 1/2″

(five translations of Psalm 54:13.  this relates to the wastrels in a way that will be apparent later)

  

13 ibi ceciderunt qui operantur iniquitatem expulsi sunt nec potuerunt stare

13 But as for me, when they were sick, My clothing was sackcloth; I humbled myself with fasting; And my prayer would return to my own heart.

13 But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth. I afflicted my soul with fasting. My prayer returned into my own bosom.

13 But I, when they were sick– I wore sackcloth; I afflicted myself with fasting; I prayed with head bowed on my chest.

13 Yet when they were sick, I put on sackcloth and humbled myself with fasting. My prayers returned to me unanswered.

 

 

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One to a Hundred #1

by

7″ x 10 1/4″

 

This is a rendition of a piece of paper I found on the sidewalk in Glasgow many years ago.  There are two 42’s in the original as well.  And also the odd inverted ‘100’ at the end, and then the proper 100 on the line by itself.  Those are also faithful to the original.

 

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The Little Mute Boy

by

8″ x 10″

 

The Little Mute Boy
Federico García Lorca

The little boy was looking for his voice.
(The king of the crickets had it.)
In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

I do not want it for speaking with;
I will make a ring of it
so that he may wear my silence
on his little finger

In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

(The captive voice, far away,
put on a cricket’s clothes.)

 

 

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Sixth Graders

by

18″ x 24″

 

This is a drawing I did for a passel of sixth graders in California a few weeks ago.  They liked my Fear of Anaesthesia drawing (taken from Rembrandt’s Dr. Tulp) which they interpreted wonderfully.  So I drew them all as cartoon ghosts.

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Punctus Contra Punctum

by

11″ x 14″

She names the wolf, but will not tell the boy, nor the wolf, what the name is.  The name passes quickly in an out of time.

Two or more voices that are harmonically interdependent — this is called polyphony.  Said with a lift in the middle:  puh-LIF-unny.  That would make a good name, but it is not the name she picks.

 

 

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Why Did People Do That With Their Two Faces

by

8″ x 10″

 

“Her lips were soft and they wetted his check; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss.  Why did people do that with their two faces?
(from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

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Old Dress

by

11″ x 14″

drawing from back in 2005 of a dress found on the side of the road.

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No Record of this Time

by

5″ x 7″

I wish to have no record of this time. The events leading up to this time, this time itself, and whatever follows.

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There are no objects any more

by

8″ x 10″

There are no objects any more. There were never any objects. Now you know. Don’t look for me. By the time you read this I will be far away. You will never find me.
– Gabriel Josipovici

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St. Augustine

by

10″ x 14″

And I became to myself a wasteland.
– St. Augustine

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V.I.P.’s

by

8″ x 10″

Some of the important people from the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

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