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Offer of Marriage Refused

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7″ x 7″

This drawing is based on a Harper’s Weekly Illustration (1860’s), “Offer of Marriage Refused” is its caption.

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Mrs. Danning’s Class

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12″ x 16″

Rediscovered this painting I did in 2007 of my first grade class in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 1981. My friend Nehal there in the front left with the gold satin shirt. I still like this painting, especially the yellow and black shapes on the bulletin board.

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Scratches

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4″ x 6″

This is a collaboration with Laynie Browne, for the postcard collection of the Academy of American Poets. The text — punched with the timeless and immutable Dymo label-maker — is an excerpt from her brilliant novel-in-progress.

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Poor Possum

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5″ x 7″

From a group of five drawings of roadkill made while driving across the Smoky Mtns to teach at WCU years ago. Thanks to Ann Patchett for sending me the Gerald Stern poem below, a perfect pair.

Behaving Like a Jew
by Gerald Stern

When I got there the dead opossum looked like
an enormous baby sleeping on the road.
It took me only a few seconds—just
seeing him there—with the hole in his back
and the wind blowing through his hair
to get back again into my animal sorrow.
I am sick of the country, the bloodstained
bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking through the grilles,
the slimy highways, the heavy birds
refusing to move;
I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,
that joy in death, that philosophical
understanding of carnage, that
concentration on the species.
—I am going to be unappeased at the opossum’s death.
I am going to behave like a Jew
and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,
and pull him off the road.
I am not going to stand in a wet ditch
with the Toyotas and the Chevys passing over me
at sixty miles an hour
and praise the beauty and the balance
and lose myself in the immortal lifestream
when my hands are still a little shaky
from his stiffness and his bulk
and my eyes are still weak and misty
from his round belly and his curved fingers
and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet.

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Wastrels in a Bunker #1

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8 1/2″ x 11″

A process sketch for a collaboration with Kate Bernheimer. It will be unfolding in the coming weeks, so you’ll be seeing quite a bit of these two castaways.

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Xia’s Library Bunnies

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Xia is the daughter of my friends Kate and Brent. They bought the drawing I did a few months ago of a bunny that I dreamt I check out of a library and then forgot about. Xia has been making tender drawings of that drawing and I’m proud to show them here. Thanks for contributing to the Work-a-day page, Xia!

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Paragraph (with Laynie Browne)

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A small collaborative piece with Laynie, an excerpt from her novel in progress. Possibly more along these lines to come.

from Periodic Companions

When we are all assembeled in memory I ask myself why sometimes it takes so long to
compose a paragraph but O. says it is because we have to be able to comfortably inhabit
that space. He isn’t talking about reclining or tromping about but the physical sensation
of words falling out of the mouth, off of the fingers. He says this very confidently, as
if he has spoken of himself as made up of characters of an alphabet as long as he can
remember.

—Laynie Browne

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Search Party

by

11″ x 14

There had been a murder. No one knew what happened to the boy, but a group of conspiracy theorists had gotten in trouble for trying to sneak out to the bottom of a swamp where they said a couple of renagade cops were holding the child at an underwater roadblock.

All the tv crews came out to document the quarrel between the local police and the conspiracy theorists. The sheriff finally decided that it was his jurisdiction and not against the law for them to go under the water to look for the underwater roadblock.

So we were all there at the edge of the swamp, and getting in the water to see what would happen. The newsmen were chest deep in the still water with dress shirts and microphones describing the scene as the preacher who led the group disappeared into the water with a flashlight.

You could see the light of the preacher’s flashlight go further and further out and before we knew it we were all following him.

Someone in the crowd said, if you go too far into this, you’ll hit the Mississippi River and there’s no way you’ll survive. The water was still, but the further we went, it became clear that what we were sloshing through was not a swamp, but the overflow of the Mississippi and that eventually we would come to the River itself.

I was travelling with two newspeople and I saw that ahead the water was not still but raging and screaming. It’s the River! Grab something! And just as our bodies were going to be pulled into the current we grabbed a concrete pylon and pulled ourselves onto what turned out to be an escalator. It was a down escalator, and still functioning, though at this point it was pouring rain, and the three of us looked up the escalator with water cascading down its steps. I was imagining how difficult it would be to go up this eascalator, with its downward moving steps, and how I desparately wanted to. One of the newspeople said: there is always something creepy about an escalator. I said, yeah, I know.

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Darling Ann

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12″ x 16″

Last weekend I found this oil on masonite painting of Whistler’s Mother at the thrift store. The face was no good, but the atmosphere was suitably somber. So I bought it for $2.50 and changed the face, added a gold leaf (really gold foil candy wrappers) in the shape of a face, a celestial phantom. And added “Darling” up at the top. The small “Ann” at the bottom is the signature of the woman who painting the original copy. I put black tape over her last name “Finkle”. So this is dedicated to all the Ann’s, Anne’s, and Anna’s in my life.

At some point I’ll get a better shot of this piece. Some of the detail is lost here.

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Anima Sola

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11″ x 14″

Colored acetate is a transfixing material.

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Mama

by

16″ x 20″ (NFS)

First is my mother as a girl, and then in a sundress pregnant with me. These paintings are from a couple of years ago, part of a large body of work, paintings accompanied by poems by Joan Fiset. See the rest of the series here.

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Catfish Dream

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11″ x 14″

A couple of high school kids came in, with an enormous six foot catfish and threw it down on a bed that I didn’t realize was there and slashed it across the middle. Gutted it right there on the bed.


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Jacob’s Dream

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11″ x 28″

This drawing is inspired by a dream, dreamt by Jacob, the son of my friend Laynie. Here are a few lines, as transcribed by Laynie:

I was a six-legged llama fighting human-sized cats.
We fought in a restaurant surrounded by empty space.
My only weapons are ladies and butter knives.

“ladies” was actually “ladles” which makes more since, but I misread it.


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Black Milk of Daybreak

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9″ x 12″

Black milk of daybreak we
drink it at nightfall we
drink it at noon in the
morning we drink it at
night
drink it and drink it.

-Paul Celan

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Sadness, When it is Without Cause

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9″ x 12″

from Odilon Redon’s journal in 1913:

“Sadness, when it is without cause, is perhaps a secret fervor, a sort of oration, something vaguely like worship in the unknown.”

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This is What He Wanted

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9″ x 12″

A grammar lesson:

THIS IS what HE WANTED; THAT IS TO SAY, the things which HE WANTED.

That is applied to both person and things; as,
HE that ACTS WISELY DESERVES PRAISE.

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Once a Woman in Madrid

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7″ x 11″

Once a woman in Madrid
Ate sixty-five eggs for a quid.
    When they asked, ‘Are you faint?’
    She replied, ‘No I ain’t,
But I don’t feel as well as I did.’

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We Got Ter Go Ter Nudder Kentry

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7″ x 11″

Wherein the children have lost their way. I feel like posting with this an excerpt from Carl Sandburg about Potato Face Blind Man:

There was a Potato Face Blind Man used to play an accordion on the Main Street corner nearest the postoffice in the Village of Liver-and-Onions.

Any Ice Today came along and said, “It looks like it used to be an 18 carat gold accordion with rich pawnshop diamonds in it; it looks like it used to be a grand accordion once and not so grand now.”

“Oh, yes, oh, yes, it was gold all over on the outside,” said the Potato Face Blind Man, “and 42 there was a diamond rabbit next to the handles on each side, two diamond rabbits.”

“How do you mean diamond rabbits?” Any Ice Today asked.

“Ears, legs, head, feet, ribs, tail, all fixed out in diamonds to make a nice rabbit with his diamond chin on his diamond toenails. When I play good pieces so people cry hearing my accordion music, then I put my fingers over and feel of the rabbit’s diamond chin on his diamond toenails, ‘Attaboy, li’l bunny, attaboy, li’l bunny.’”

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A Picture of Virginia Woolf

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7″ x 9″

Here’s a drawing of Virginia Woolf made on the anniversary of her sinking herself in the River Ouse. Well, the anniversary was a few days ago when I was in airports and I tried drawing her then, but couldn’t get a good one. This one is okay.


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Rilke 02

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9″ x 12″

I’ll just keep on posting pieces as this Rilke project goes along, even though these are all preliminary, laboratory kind of work. Why not. It’ll keep the process light. And humor is hard to come by in this text, unless you think baby slaughter and celestial revelations are funny.


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Butcher Hand

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11″ x 14″

I’ve got an acute interest in hand-painted food signs. When I travel, I photograph them, and have well over a hundred in my collection now from all over the country. Most of them are fun to look at, often really gross, and sometimes touching. They seem to say something about how “we” think of food. There are cultural/regional styles that I like seeing and which remain a mystery to me. I am considering starting another page here on the Work-a-day just for hand-painted food signs of North America.

Anyway, this is a watercolor I did today inspired by a painting I saw on an abandoned butcher shop in Pecos, Texas a few weeks ago. The original is by far the most narrative hand-painted food signs I’ve seen. It’s like an altarpiece.

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How Things Are Made

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9″ x 12″

This is actually a brand new one (you can tell by the wetness of the yellow). I was thinking I’d revisit the Wastrels, but what emerged was more a precocious woodland child emerging from my ribcage. One just can’t tell until the marks start going down. The Genesis 2: 21-24 reference was more or less accidental. Or incidental.

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Cat Box

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9″ x 12″

Bought at the old Value Village here in Tucson.

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Feast of Belshazzar

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10″ x 16″

This from the group of drawings when I did copies of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya and Carravaggio paintings replacing all the figures with ghosts. Some were more successful that others. A couple of those will soon be on the cover of Gordon Massman’s new book with New York Quarterly Press. The Fear of Operations and Fear of Anaesthesia drawings from the beginning of the work-a-day page.

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Scar

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9″ x 12″

Well well, so much for the idea of keeping up with the work-a-day’s while traveling for a month. I’ve been scolded for drawing while driving more than a few times in my life, and even though it may not feel hazardous, I’m sure that it is. So now I post some things retrospectively and trying to get this sucker cranked back up again. Here’s one that I found in a sketchbook I had lost (in my closet) and is a preparatory drawing for the two scar paintings from the Edelweiss series.

I think I’ll give up not doing work-a-days for lent.

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Forget Me Not (lost)

by

size unknown

Hm. I was digging through some image folders and found this painting that I destroyed a while back. Now I wish I hadn’t. That so often happens. I had completely forgotten it existed, which makes me feel like it’s addressing me directly, which makes me feel strange inside.

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Edelweiss 02

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11″ x 14″

[Joan Fiset’s poem to accompany this piece]

a man kept calling Lucinda
up and down the stairs


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Edeweiss 01

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11″ x 14″

The next five are also being exhibited at Warren Wilson for the month of Feb. They are excerpts from a rather large body of paintings from a few years ago called “Edelweiss” and part of a collaboration with poet Joan Fiset. The manuscript is called “How It Was With Scotland” and some of it can be seen on the GenPop Books site.


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Bunny Neutrino, with Anne Waldman

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22″ x 30″

Work-a-day, shoot, more like work-a-week. Traveling across country, so in lieu of posting new works this week, I’m posting images from the exhibition I’m installing at Warren Wilson College (opens Friday Feb 11) of some excerpts from some of my text/image collaborations.

This is one I did with poet, Anne Waldman, when she came through Tucson last Spring.


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