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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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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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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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Eyes Eyes

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8″ x 10″
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The title of this little drawing of Bookoo and Cilice in a cave of eyes is derived in part from Michael Hurley’s classic song of the same name, the opening lines of which are as follows:

Protein Monster
ate a sack of poison sugar
crawling out of the barn
to the weeds to die.
Rolling his eyes.
Eyes, Eyes.

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Wastrels Find a Home, Process Drawing #1

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8″ x 10″

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This is a process drawing for the animation that is nearly finished called “Wastrels Find a Home.” A hopeful tale. Or something. In which Bookoo and Cilice tinker within the domestic arrangement. With exquisite writing and voice-over by Kate Bernheimer and forthcoming (and eagerly awaited audio) forthcoming from the Eric Jordan.

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Wastrels Enshrined Within the Thoughts of an Eight-Leg Deer

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11″ x 14″

For the last couple years I’ve had the pleasure of participating in a long and rich conversation with one of my favorite English painters, Timothy Hyman; we will publish an edited version soon in Trickhouse.  One of his paintings that came up in the conversation is I Open My Heart to Reveal London Enshrined Within, which I love so much, and I ripped off part of the title for this drawing.  I’ll continue to loot his work, as one does, with the hope of absorbing some of his innocence.

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Bookoo and the Breach of Trust

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5 1/2″ x 9″

Not the first time I’ve indulged a crackpot understanding of linguistics this year on the Workaday page. Bookoo’s lingering in the mirror stage.

“Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.” – Jacques Lacan

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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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Any Bug or Human

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8″ x 9 1/2″

This one here has Bookoo being approached, by whom we do not know. The text (provided by Julia R. Gordon) can be read up and down as well as left and right. That’s kind of how I read, which is why it takes me forever to read a page, so I find this text very satisfying and unnervingly accommodating for the wandering eyes. I’m working more with this up-down-left-right text thing, feeling out how to make permutations. Maybe there will be another example tomorrow.

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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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Cilice’s Long Beard

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8″ x 10″

His chin was unruly, unshaven.
It looked uncivilized and craven.
“Don’t turn me away,
You must let me stay.
After all, I am only eleven!”
– Cilice’s Plea, by R. Saterstrom

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Household Items #1

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8 1/2″ x 11″

Here’s another working cell (so to speak, I call it that, but a real animator might roll their eyes) for the Wastrels animation.  The animation is made by scanning: I draw with lithography crayon on the acetate, scan, wipe off a bit, redraw it, rescan it and so on, forever.  This one has a haircut scene, bookshelf with fish swimming scene (above) and a rendition of Shelton Walsmith’s painting that’s on our wall.

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Bookoo Has a Hand Helmet

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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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Camouflage

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14″ x 22″

After some time in the forest, the Wastrels develop a form of disguise to make themselves invisible to predators.

I found these two paint-by-number forest scenes at a yard sale and have had them in a drawer for a while.  The Wastrels co-opted them as their woodland habitat.

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Veil Over Everything, Oh I Say, That Old Gag

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approx. 20″ x 24″

 

It could be that Bookoo and Cilice are made of marzipan here.  Or else Bookoo is dying of consumption, the kind the Victorians used to love; I’m hoping for the former.

In Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1850), the main character Francine — a ‘typecast fictional consumptive’ according to the author of The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine — has “a rosy tint to her skin, transparent with the whiteness of a camellia” and later “a saintly glow, as if she had died of beauty.”  A beauty so rare and delicate that it destroys itself with its own amazing-ness:  how exhausting.  But the Wastrels can be maudlin like that.

The odd shape is the result of finding tons of scrap mat board, a love of composites, and looking at Jeffery Camp paintings.

 

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

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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

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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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Virga

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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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Wastrels Take a Dip

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11″ x 14″

Cilice found them a waterfall. This image is related to the more ominous and less frolicking “Wastrels Watched From a Distance” from a couple weeks ago, which implied an unseen watcher. This one has no such watcher, unless we are the unseen watcher, in which case have we been following them? And why?

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He Carries Her Through the Rain

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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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I Do Things for You and You are Done For

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10″ x 13″

(entering phrases into Google Translate, starting with the English the retranslating back into English)

English: I do things for you. And you are done for.
French: I do things for you. And you are done.
Hindi: I work for you. And you are.
Arabic: I work well for you. You.

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Bookoo and Cilice Bury the Hatchet (sketch)

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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

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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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Wastrel Vignette: Stitches in the Knee

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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

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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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The Little Mute Boy

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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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Mon Dieu Mon Dieu

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9″ x 12″

other possible titles:

Hidden from the Eye in the Sky
The Panopticon
Wastrels Under Surveillance
Boxcar

 

 

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Punctus Contra Punctum

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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

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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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