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Fountain in Costa Rica

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8″ x 12″

Did this one a few years ago, on a trip with my father to Costa Rica. I had strep throat but it was still really fun. This is a fountain.


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Rilke #01

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9″ x 12″

I was asked to make images for a retranslation of Rilke’s cycle of poems about the life of the Virgin Mary. Having gotten to know the text pretty well, I have settled on brown ink and gold leaf as the medium. Turns out, gold leaf is a prissy and uncooperative as it is radiant and fantastic.

Nonetheless, it feels right, like the materials themselves resonate with (illustrate) the text, independent of the imagery. So here’s the first of several (perhaps many) semi-successful images documenting my self-education in the art if translating German into ink and gold. That’s a cow in the bottom right. Cherubs at the top. I’d like to post the accompanying text, but awaiting publication. Besides, if the images are any good, they’ll be fine on their own, that’s a helpful guage maybe. Apologies for the fuzziness of the photo.

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Emily Dickinson in a Hailstorm

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8″ x 16″

Pentimenti: term referring to visible alterations to a drawing or painting, the trace or evidence of previous marks revealing the artist’s change of mind.

From Italian pentirsi, meaning ‘to repent’.

Here is a drawing of Emily Dickinson in a hailstorm.

and she’s reversible.

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Olympia

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12″ x 16″

Another dusty little gem from on top of the closet. The surface and colors and subject, it looks like something painted in the 1940’s by somebody’s eccentric aunt who wore kimonos, drank heavily and might have been a lesbian and sometimes painted pictures. But strangely, it was painted by me just last year. Oh, and don’t miss the little ghost in the upper right where Manet’s nurse usually hangs out.


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1980

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20″ x 24″

Ha, I found this on top of my closet from when I was doing the “Edelweiss” paintings a couple of years ago, using photographs from the family albums as subject. This is one that I abandoned after much (obvious) struggle. Now I find it endearing and, perhaps even finished. Thought I’d post it on Work-a-day before stashing back above the closet.


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RFFTKPFRSKP

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3 1/2″ x 5 1/2″

This drawing came from the vault and been hanging around for eight year or so. Seems to me those letters came from somewhere, referred to something, but the reference is lost to history now.


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Curtsy

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approx 8 1/2″ x 11 1/2″

A scribbly lady curtsying on a rubbing I did from a mantle in a flat I lived in on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow in 2003.

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The Lake

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approx 15″ x 20″

I’ll get a better photo of this, the gold paint is shiny and my camera skills shaky.


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The Library Bunny

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approx 9″ x 12″

Last night I dreamed I checked a bunny out from the library. I put it in my inside coat pocket for the ride home and put the books on the back seat of the car. When I got home, I put the books on the table and hung my coat in the closet. It was four days later when I remembered about the bunny in my coat pocket and by then it was hungry and on death’s door. This drawing is for you, library dream bunny.

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Water Snakes & Rainbows

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approx 11″ x 14″

from the 1932 memoirs of my great great Grandfather on fleeing Mississippi with his parents during the Union occupation:

“There on September 6th 1863, my Mother gave birth to a boy-baby, whom she named for his father James C. Brandon. But due to the strain and hardship of that long wagon journey to Shubuta, the baby’s birth was premature and he lived only a few hours. I remember very clearly going with my father in a carriage with the baby in its little coffin on the seat beside us.”

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Me With a Long Beard Like My Friend Christian

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3 1/2″ x 5 1/2″

The title of this one is pretty self-explanatory. Not a brilliant drawing but gives me an excuse to mention his site, bookmark this fellow if you haven’t already: www.christianpeet.com. Recent post about Tony the pagan policeman and attempted exoneration for witch trials.

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Raboltun

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8 1/2″ x 11″

Made collaboratively with Charlie E. and James E.

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Jook

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8 1/2″ x 11″

Made collaboratively with James E and Charlie E. A jook is very playful.


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City Girl

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8 1/2″ x 11″

Made collaboratively with James E. and Charlie E.


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Farmer

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8 1/2″ x 11″

Made collaboratively with James E. and Charlie E.


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My Bank

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9″ x 12″

this means you, guy behind the desk, I see you and your ways.


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Wastrels and Psalm 18

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10″ x 14″

psalm 18:

with the faithful you show
yourself faithful, O God; *
with the forthright you show
yourself forthright.

with the pure you show
yourself pure, *
but with the crooked
you are wily.

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Bisbee

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9″ x 12″

Nothing fancy, just a little sketch in Bisbee.

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Before the River

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12″ x 18″ each

From a photograph of my great grandmother and her cousin on the bank of the Mississippi River in the early 1910’s. All black inks, black paint and graphite and a little colored pencil, they are dark and glossy in places so my apologies for the slipshod photography.

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Wastrels

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9″ x 12″

Originally these two came from the frontispiece of my mother’s A Child’s Garden of Verses from the 40’s. Clearly they wandered off.

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Troglodytes

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10″ x 14″

(also titled: The Eyeless Wastrels)

a. A member of a fabulous or prehistoric race of people that lived in caves, dens, or holes.
b. A person considered to be reclusive, reactionary, out of date, or brutish.
c. An animal that lives underground, as an ant or a worm.

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Trailer in Distress, Christmas Lights (aka Too Much Glare, Too Little Patience)

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24″ x 24″

Getting in the holiday spirit. This trailer painting, and the one that I’ll post tomorrow are dedicated to my friend Christian Peet. Every time I’d work on one, he’d call, so I think they are for him.

Photo quality is bad because this is painted with glossy house paint and oil, too much glare, too little patience.

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Specter Projector

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22″ x 30″

Another large picture (larger than the others anyway), a kind of companion to “Please Please Pleiades”.


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Trailer in the Forest

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11″ x 14″

The trailer in ominous repose. This seems related to the Ghost descending the stairs, though it couldn’t be the same location.

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Sorrow for Beginners: Misund

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8″ x 27″

This one painted in response to this S. for B.’s passage by Frankie Rollins:

I said yes and there was argument
I said no and there was argument
I said okay and there was argument
I said do you think and there was argument

Any day can take on the tint of sorrow

There are more misunderstandings
than I ever thought possible.
I still let them break my heart
but you, forewarned,
might not.

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The Final _______ of _______ ________.

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3 1/2″ x 5 1/4″

This might be based on a Giotto painting, or on the Sorrow for Beginners drawing from earlier, or from a photograph from an old movie still based in a WWII field hospital. Either way, it’s pink.


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Please Please Pleiades

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22″ x 30″

Been working on this one for a few weeks, hopefully will expel the phrase “Please please Pleiades” from my mind, been ricocheting around in there for a while. This is also titled “Half of What They Carried Flew Away”, from Andrea R. Those two lines collided and made this image.

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Longing for Beginners: Forget Me Not

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8″ x 9″

A parallel development emerges… also a hand book or field guide.  As with Sorrow for Beginners, please feel free to write a passage to accompany the image if you feel so inclined.

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Sorrow for Beginners: At the Stump

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9″ x 12″

Last night’s Sorrow for Beginners painting. Another passage in the handbook. The chapter on how to __________ in a time of ____________ _____________. Carrying on with the two-day tradition, if you would like to write something for this image, the comments section is a tabula rasa, baby. Make yourself at home there.

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Sorrow for Beginners – This Lie of Eating

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8″ x 9″

I feel like doing a few of these Sorrow for Beginners pieces.  If anyone would like to write something, poetry or prose or whatever, to accompany this image, please feel free.  It  helps me do the next one. (writing in comment section)

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Birthday

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6″ x 13″

had a dream last night I should make this image, except out of grits.

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Colors and Bars

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6″ x 10″

taking a break from the request drawings to revisit the jungle gem burial mound theme, though it’s a little tenuous here.  The relation to burial mound getting a bit thin.

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How many times

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9″ x 12″

words and phrases offered by friends on facebook after a call for requests.  more to come.

obdurate: unmoved by persuasion, pity, or tender feelings; unyielding, stubbornly resistant to moral influence, persistently impenitent.

galvanized: protected by a metallic coating to prevent corrosion.

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