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Caveman Times

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18″ x 24″
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The prehistoric themes continue and have gotten more abstract.

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Vivian, age 1

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11″ x 14″

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This has the feel of “the cowboy” from one of those How to Draw People books.

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The Poet’s Novel

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Poet Laynie Browne just gave a talk at the Poet’s House in NYC on the subject of “The Poet’s Novel” and asked me to make some images to illustrate her lecture. This is a excerpts of the twenty-something images I made for it. A little unhinged perhaps, but one can dream. Must, rather, dream. I’m sure it made for a curious Powerpoint presentation.

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CDV 11.14.14_02

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11″ x 14″

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The blobby dinosaurs wading in the bog on the left side are from a bit of a wall painting above a door at the Museum of Natural History. They show up again in a large oil.

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Two Man Saw #2

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14″ x 22″

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If you like, listen to this Sacred Harp song “The Last Words of Copernicus” (recorded by Alan Lomax in Fyffe, Alabama, 1959). If I did a hundred paintings of this image and had them hanging all around with this song playing, that would be good.

Audio Player

 

Ye golden lamps of heaven farewell with all your feeble light
Farewell thou ever changing moon pale empress of the night
And thou refulgent orb of day in brighter flames array’d
And thou refulgent orb of day in brighter flames array’d
My soul which springs beyond thy sphere no more demands thy aid
And thou refulgent orb of day in brighter flames array’d
And thou refulgent orb of day in brighter flames array’d
My soul which springs beyond thy sphere no more demands thy aid

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Two Man Saw

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14″ x 22″

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This is from the New York Public Library’s photograph archive. I recently got an informal tour of the incredible archive by my good old friend David who has pretty much single-handedly brought order to approximately 600,00 photographs. When he asked what I wanted to look at, I had no idea where to start, so ended up rifling through boxes of ‘orphan’ photographs – no record of their provenance, photographer, location, date. I can’t remember if this is one of those photographs or not. I would make a horrendous archivist (and if I ever apply for a job as an archivist, please remind me to take this post down). David’s knowledge of the photographs is astounding; the mass of imagery is totally overwhelming.

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Alphabet

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Dorothy is an institution of progressive politics in Brooklyn and she has a lovely Greek Revival brownstone. This is painted from a figurative clock on the mantle in her front parlor. I wanted to do the rest of the clock, but I ran out of space. I guess I could add a piece of paper to the left and continue the image. Maybe I’ll do that.

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Kitchen (or How to be Perfect)

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10″ x 14″

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Here, this is an excerpt from Ron Padgett’s “How to be Perfect” and I’m putting it next to this painting.

Get some sleep.

Eat an orange every morning.

Be friendly. It will help make you happy.

Hope for everything. Expect nothing.

Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room
before you save the world. Then save the world.
Be nice to people before they have a chance to behave badly.

Don’t stay angry about anything for more than a week, but don’t
forget what made you angry. Hold your anger out at arm’s length
and look at it, as if it were a glass ball. Then add it to your glass
ball collection.

Wear comfortable shoes.

Do not spend too much time with large groups of people.

Plan your day so you never have to rush.

Show your appreciation to people who do things for you, even if
you have paid them, even if they do favors you don’t want.

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Tardigrades

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These are images that I made for projection in Laynie Browne’s play about the immutable invertebrates called tardigrades, or water bears. They can live in outrageously inhospitable environments. They can live through being boiled, dessicated, frozen.

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Garden

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12″ x 12″
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Cannon

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7″ x 10″

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Hard to say whether the cannon is firing into a house or out of one. Either way. This is an unused vignette from Babboo’s Moving Pictures; I opted for the cannon shooting the bottle off a stump, more action happens, though I was looking forward to the sound of this shattering window.

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Balloon

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10″ x 10″

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A passage that didn’t make it into “Babboo’s Moving Pictures” animation.

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Taconic

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6″ x 8″

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Red Ehrbar

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6″ x 8″

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The walls and floor of our apartment aren’t really red, and this painting isn’t at all based on Matisse’s “Red Studio” at MOMA, which I haven’t seen in years though I do remember enjoying it.

The stone wall is there, however, outside the window, like the one in Peter Doig’s otherworldly painting “Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre“, which I also wasn’t thinking about when I painted it.

Sometimes I think painting is the act of wringing out whatever imagery has been soaked up by the mind over the years. The best results are an uncanny assemblage of existing references – unique and not at all original. Which is of course frustrating but simplifying. An enjoyable process nonetheless.

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Theo Van Doesburg’s Studio

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8″ x 10″

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Theo van Doesburg’s house and studio on the outskirts of Paris. Dutch painter, Harke Kazemier, keeps a site called atelierlog, a remarkable resource for those interested in seeing artists in their studios.

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Crawl Almost

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6″ x 8″
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What a wonderful bird the frog are.
When he stand he sit almost;
When he hop he fly almost.
He ain’t got no sense hardly;
He ain’t got no tail hardly either.
When he sit, he sit on what he ain’t got almost.

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Mt. Vernon, NY #2

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6″ x 8″

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I feel like now would be a good time to stop making paint color called “flesh.” First of all, everyone should be able to mix whatever color it’s supposed to be using various amounts of red, blue, yellow and white. Also, it could be better described as “peach.” Also, and it’s racist. This is the first and last time I’ll use “flesh” from this new pack of paint before I throw out the tube.

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Toodleloo

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11″ x 14″
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I recently found out “Toodleloo” comes from french À tout à l’heure, used in the same way – see you later. “Toodleloo” is what will be inscribed on my grandmother’s tombstone. Rest in peace, Margaret Wesley.

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Interstate 10

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36″ x 60″

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The full title is “February 4, 11:57am, Interstate 10, near Las Cruces, New Mexico.” I’m really happy that it will be included in an exhibition about roadtrips, called “Hit the Road” curated by Ben Johnson at Tohono Chul Park.

In 2011, I drove from Tucson, Arizona to Boone, North Carolina. Every hour I took one photograph, straight ahead through the windshield. Over many hours, the vast dusty terrain turned to lush tangled ravines, and by taking an hourly photograph I think I was trying to isolate those incremental changes. Not sure if I learned anything about increments and landscape, but this is a painting of one of those photographs.

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Babboo’s Moving Pictures

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This little 3 minute animation was made for Vivian, commissioned by Exploded View Micro-cinema (Tucson, AZ) and published by Seneca Review (Hobart & William Smith Colleges, NY) in an issue called Beyond Category with all kind of wonderfully boundary-crossing stuff.

The movements of the animation are embedded in the paintings. Watch it and that will make sense… make sure your sound is on, there are sound effects. Here are the paintings (each approx. 8″x10″):

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Limehouse

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36″ x 42″

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Often when people have a blog that they haven’t posted to in a long time, they start with something like “Finally, after a long hiatus, I’m back!”, as if people are sitting around waiting for a new post, and relieved when it finally happens. I’m not going to do that. Here’s a colorful painting that has some mirrors and a guy on the right that I forget is there, unless I look right at him, he disappears.

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Conifers

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13″ x 28″

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The wastrels make an appearance after some time away. Here Whatshisface and the eight-leg deer enjoy a day in nature.

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Sumerian Head #1

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11″ x 15″

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“Something offered is not offered; something finished is not finished; nothing changes.” (from Gilgamesh proverbs 3.107)

That odd saying is in some conversation with Herakleitos many centuries later: “Everything flows; nothing remains. [Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes away; nothing lasts.]”

Gilgamesh proverbs are bizarre and great. Here’s another favorite: “The runaway slave girl only pretends to sleep.”

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Capsize

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12″ x 16″

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Presidio

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5″ x 8″

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Drawn from the Presidio theatre sign on Chestnut St. in San Francisco.

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Talking With Bill Berkson in Front of an Ellsworth Kelly

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5″ x 8″

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“You collaborate with your peers, either directly (that is, you write works together) or not (that is, by parallel creations you form the work that comes to be recognized as that of a period style, the art of your time). Competitiveness is a form of collaboration. Addressing an audience—conceiving an addressee, a reader or viewer, for the work—you collaborate with that shifting phantasmagoria. Such sociability is what puts the work in the world.” — Bill Berkson, from “Working with Joe,” 2002

It’s these broad definitions of collaboration that gives me hope. Sociability, generosity and conversation at the heart of art-making and art-viewing softens the sense that the Art-World is a fractured and self-important megalith. I had an uplifting morning with Bill Berkson at SFMOMA; this isn’t a great drawing necessarily but captures the conversation as I experienced it. And the Ellsworth Kelly room was elegant.

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It Is As If It Is On An Ox

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5″ x 8″

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I tried to make a sentence with all two-letter words, but my need for good grammar prevented it. A pretty good ox though.

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Paul Klee

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5″ x 8″

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Mister uses indirection as a mode of inquiry. inquiry.

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Live Oak II.

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8 1/2″ x 9″
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(side note: this is the six hundredth piece on the Workaday page)

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Garden District

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6″ x 8″

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Wonderful new prismacolor pens, color squares, an airplane, and a group of us at a sidewalk cafe in the Garden District after my opening in New Orleans.

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Wastrels XCIII: I’m Not Asking You, You, I, and About the Middle of Your Heart

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8″ x 10″

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I do not want to close, and to worship, but you have my ears pierced. Sacrifices and sin offerings you will not, therefore, behold, I come from, we told him. The head of the book is about. I’m not asking you, you, I, and about the middle of your heart.

(this text is a mutation of Psalm 40:6-8, having translated the excerpt using Google Translate from English to Italian, Danish, Latin, Turkish, Bengali, Finnish, Hebrew and back to English)

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Construction Paper Alphabet

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8″ x 10″
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When Jessica and I were designing the homepage for the new issue of Trickhouse (this one here), we wanted to use a paper alphabet, so I cut letters out of construction paper.  This is the layering of the paper that remained.  This is also I guess the first Workaday post that is neither a painting, nor a drawing, though an expanded definition of drawing would include any mark left which records a movement, action or idea.  So, let’s call it a drawing.  Not that it matters.

 

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Wastrels Among Stacks

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11″ x 17″

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The Wastrels are back on the scene. Browsing the stacks – hay and library – studying up on the fluttering architecture of language and utterance.

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Band #31

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12″ x 16″

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A sketchy musical family made out of lines like bent coathangers.

 

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Mockingbird from My Dream

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11″ x 15″

Sunday night I dreamt I was in Natchez, Mississippi and there was a mockingbird that was flying from the River to the other side of town.  I was meant to follow it with my mind, receiving telepathic messages from the bird about its whereabouts.  I got really lost, which is unexpected because I know the town so well.

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Up + Down Reading by the Wastrels

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9″ x 36″

This is a single panel from this triptych:

If you click on the image to enlarge the full drawing, you’ll see that you can read the text left to right as one big paragraph, up and down as columns, or in a staircase fashion.  I wrote the sections vertically and assembled them as columns, so how they read horizontally is a surprise to me.  Fun with permutations!  Cilice can eat a bug in a snowstorm.

 

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What are You Supposed to Be?

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11″ x 14″

A halloween painting, set in the Sonoran desert. I painted the figures into a thrift store painting of an exuberant nighttime desert scene, extra spooky. Two other paintings involving found paintings are Darling Ann and Big Boy Has a Magpie.

I woke up this morning thinking I should do a spooky picture for the Workaday page, and as I was finishing this I realized I already have about half a dozen ghost-related drawings and paintings. So there may be a theme for a few days.

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I Will Not Think of a Horse

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4″ x 6″

I had a dream last night that I was a school teacher.  I walked into another teacher’s classroom and on the chalkboard someone had written lines, over and over, like when you get in trouble as a child.  I could not read what the lines said.  As I was looking at the chalkboard lines, trying to make out what it said, a bombastic little girl bounded in and erased a section across the middle of the words and quickly drew a huge stylized horse and then ran out of the room.  I stood there staring at the image and the text and thought “Oh my god, this is perfect.”

This drawing is not perfect like the girl’s drawing, but it is enough to hold the dream in place.  Since I couldn’t read the text in the dream, the text in my drawing says “I will not think of a horse” after that thing about how if someone says: Do not imagine a horse, in order for your brain to not imagine a horse it first has to imagine a horse… which makes the whole thing impossible.  I think it is a well-known psychological exercise.  I just tried to find evidence of it online, but couldn’t, maybe I dreamed that too.  I’ve used it in text/image classes for years, and will continue to do so.

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Bookoo Under Ice

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4″ x 6″

Wherein Bookoo intentionally goes through a hole in the ice to demonstrate her ability to breathe under water.  In previous versions, Cilice does not realize Bookoo can breathe under water so goes in to save her and nearly freezes to death for which Bookoo feels really bad.  But in this version Cilice is unaware and Bookoo is trapped under the ice.  Though not a tragedy since she can breathe, it is still a tense situation.

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Geometry Suit

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8″ x 10″

 

Cilice trades his hairshirt for a geometry suit and which is not gothic but prosaic in feeling

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Stair Walker

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8 1/2″ x 11″

This is a transparency – grease pencil on acetate – from the Wastrels animation I’m working on.  Each figure represents a stage in a movement of a spectral figure walking down stairs.  The two pieces of acetate were lying on the floor on top of one another and I found it to be a good image on its own.

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Josh F.

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16″ x 20″

This is an acrylic painting I made as a painting demonstration for Josh F’s 8th grade class in Southern California.

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I am Neil Armstrong, I am on the Moon (with Hannah Ensor)

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12″ x 18″

(definitely have to look at the enlargement with this one, it’s all very light)

I made a drawing of Neil Armstrong the day he died and Hannah recently mentioned that she had written these lines in response to it. Luckily I had the beginnings of another N. Armstrong drawing and put her words in pink middle school curly script next to it to make a diptych. Reminds me of when everybody wanted to be an astronaut. Those were weightless times.

I am Neil Armstrong
I am on the moon

I am standing on a sheet
The sheet flows

The sheet is a moon
The moon of the Earth

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You and an Airplane

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8″ x 10″

Nothing serious, playing with lines and their shadows (you may have to view the enlargement to see the shadows behind the colored lines).

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La Guardia

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6 1/2″ x 10″

I drew this the other day from a photo I had taken on my phone landing in NYC a couple years ago, but didn’t mean for it to be 9/11-related, just happened to draw it on that day.  At some point might make a large oil painting of it.  Amber light and glimmery.

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Denizen (with JMW)

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11″ x 14″

Oh yeah, I was blinded by a toothache and forgot to post this one during the Olympics fortnight. Another collaborative piece with Josh W.

You shook dimes out.

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