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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

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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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Rast auf der Flucht nach Ägypten

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9″ x 12″

Continuing (read: starting) the images for a forthcoming retranslation of Rilke’s cycle of poems “The Life of Mary”. A number of these will be showing up on the work-a-day in the next few months — results may range from pretty successful to laughably unsuccessful — as I try to enter a very challenging text with brown ink and gold leaf, materials I don’t understand. Will start by drawing. Here is me beating around the edges of “Rast auf der Flucht nach Ägypten” (Rest on the Flight to Egypt).


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Butcher Hand

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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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Picnic on the Grass

by

6″ x 8″

Autodidact: a self-taught person. To teach oneself. Happily bringing this word more into my vocabulary, thanks to Tim Hyman for reminding me of it. And according to Webster’s online, “Autodidact” rhymes with: cutthroat contract, matter-of-fact, and semi-abstract. So it does.

And thanks to Frankie for telling me last night that the etymology of “autopsy” is to see for oneself.

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Monkey Sultan

by

6″ x 6″

I had a dream one time that I found out that my aunt Helen became “kind of a big deal” in the 1960’s when she wrote the lyrics to a song that got famous. The song was called “Monkey Sultan”.


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Fountain in Costa Rica

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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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I Give Something Up

by

11″ x 14″

Variations on the definition of surrender. The figures loosely swiped from Goya’s Los Caprichos [42] subtitled “Tu que no puedes.” (You who can not). The two things just kind of went together.

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RFFTKPFRSKP

by

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

by

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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Stories

by

approx 9″ x 12″

Or vignettes, or tableaux. From a collection of illustration plates from an 1865 Harper’s Weekly.


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The Lake

by

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

by

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

by

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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Father Do You Know Me?

by

approx 13″ x 20″

from the memoirs of my great great Grandfather, written in 1932 on the death of his father:

“The next night, November 11th 1884, he died. For several weeks he had been kept alive by stimulants and artificial means; but seeing how useless, he begged at last that they be stopped so that his suffering might end and he be at peace. Just before he died I asked, “Father, do you know me?” – He gasped, “Oh my son, I do, I do!” They were his last words… Gently, tenderly and sorrowfully we laid him away in our City of the Dead, and then took up for ourselves the burdens of life, which he had borne for us so long.”

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Me With a Long Beard Like My Friend Christian

by

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

by

8 1/2″ x 11″

Made collaboratively with Charlie E. and James E.

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Jook

by

8 1/2″ x 11″

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


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City Girl

by

8 1/2″ x 11″

Made collaboratively with James E. and Charlie E.


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Farmer

by

8 1/2″ x 11″

Made collaboratively with James E. and Charlie E.


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My Bank

by

9″ x 12″

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


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Wastrels and Psalm 18

by

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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