7″ x 10″
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.
Lazy Moon (Come Out Soon)
24″ x 30″
The song “Lazy Moon” was written in 1901 by Bob Cole and Rosamond Johnson, performed in unfortunate black-face by Oliver Hardy of all people in the 1930 film Pardon Us, then redeemed by Harry Nilsson in 1973, the version I know. The last line is: “What’s the matter, are you sleeping?”
If you put that line after the following passage from the epic of Gilgamesh, you could have the opening scene of a short play starring Gilgamesh and Oliver Hardy.
Gilgamesh (startled awake in the Forest of Cedars): Did you call me? Why am I awake? Did you touch me? Why am I so upset? Did a god pass? Then why do I feel so weak?
Hardy (singing): What’s the matter, are you sleeping?
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Ghost and Mirror
7″ x 11″
“These pieces, without preconceived connections, were written lazily from day to day, following my needs, the way it came, without pushing, following the wave, always attending to what was most pressing, in a slight wavering of truth – never to construct, simply to preserve.” – Henri Michaux
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Ford LTD
12″ x 18″
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Softer Sunshine (Take Me Home)
30″ x 40″
Continuing with paintings within paintings theme. It’s remarkable how many old photographs of musicians include paintings; the musicians posed in front of paintings, or painted backdrops, have paintings on drums, and so on. There is a lot of improvisation in these paintings, of course, this drum has a kind of figure encountering a ghost at sunset.
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Hands and Arms
11″ x 14″
“I think of everything I do as a form of drawing.”
“Every day I awake with the idea that ‘today I must teach myself to draw’. I have also each day to experience the fact that images can only emerge out of chaos.”
I love these quotes from Leon Kossoff, hilariously obsesses with drawing – as one must be. Images can only emerge out of chaos.
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Sail Away to Dreamland
30″ x 40″
from the classic “Lullaby in Ragtime”, which I sing to my daughter about ninety-five times a day.
So you can hear the
rhythm of the ripples
on the side of the boat,
as you sail away to dreamland.
High above the moon you hear
a silvery note,
as the Sandman takes your hand.
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Land of the Dinosaurs #2
11″ x 14″
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Land of the Dinosaurs #1
11″ x 14″
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Auditorium
Cezanne
18″ x 24″
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Back to Back
11″ x 14″
A few uplifting quotes. Uplifting to me anyway.
“To say that in painting you are always working with the unknown – in practice, that’s devastating, if you really take it on. How can you know anything for certain about what you are doing?” – Ken Kiff
“My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same – we just sit in our rooms.” – Howard Hodgkin
“I constantly have to negotiate with my doubts.” – Peter Doig
“You have to have a doubt sandwich. If you have the doubt at the front, you won’t do it, and if you have doubt at the end you’re probably going to kill yourself.” – Amy Sillman
“We are not all connected. We are bags of skin. We are all separate bags
of thinking skin.” – AL Kennedy, from What Becomes
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When You Wore a Tulip and I Wore a Red Red Rose
18″ x 36″
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French Horn
24″ x 30″
A painting is an irreproducible singularity. Part of its charm – if you like that kind of thing. Or, you may, as many have since Duchamp, find the preciousness off-putting.
One pushes paint against a canvas and, predictably, a mark is made. But every mark is unrecoverable as weather. Direct transmissions from the body, no pure concept, contaminated by countless non-verbal impressions which collect to make, when it goes well, a coherent image. And somehow a highly-personalized idiom evolves, for better or worse, which is only somewhat in the control of the painter.
Maybe it’s too corny to say ‘painting is like life’, but there it is. Maybe those who love painting feel that connection very intensely. So is basketball – like life, I mean – and also handwriting, and a cheese plate, and math.
I try not to paint “about” the Old South, but this one has its fingers near that fan. It is, to me, eerily quiet for a painting of musicians.
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White Bird
11″ x 14″
Fun with construction paper.
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Haiku for Charles Rennie Mackintosh
10″ x 24″
Mister Mackintosh,
So I guess you heard how well
your masterpiece burns.
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King Oliver
18″ x 24″
Or is apprehending an image necessarily a language-based process? Is it ever actually a simple absorption of mark, substance? As if vitamins, odor, or toxins? Is the mind ever without language long enough?
Lack of language response to image indicates indifference: unremarkable.
Or revelation: speechless.
(The first is common and long-lasting; the second, rare and fleeting.)
Here’s King Oliver and his band, a pianist and her double.
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House on Red (or Walking Back to Holland)
12″ x 12″
There is this story about how Van Gogh, when he was a young man, got obsessed with a certain painter. He wanted so badly to meet this painter, he decided to walk from Holland, where he lived, to France, where the painter lived. He walked for a week and when he got there he stood in front of the painter’s house in the darkness.
The windows glowed as the old man finished his dinner and sat by the fireplace and lit his pipe. His wife was hemming a pair of trousers. The old painter stood up and poured more brandy into his wife’s, then his, glass. He sat back in his chair.
Van Gogh stood in the darkness, imagining himself knocking on the door. He spent the next week walking back to Holland.
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Georges Perec, 1970
I like to make drawings of people of note. Writers, painters, scientists, musicians and so on. Not to deliberate too much, or struggle to make them just right, but just a quick thing. Here’s one.
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Austria
11″ x 14″
Or – because I’ve never been to Austria – “What Austria is Like in My Head.”
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Library #1
12″ x 16″
I travel across this Workaday post from left to right. I might say this is a memory of a room in which I learned a thing or two about drawing.
I start a new paragraph, and then write about the painting that is posted above and make a reference to an art historical quotation, properly attributed of course, about how a painting, before being “an anecdote, or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order” (Maurice Denis).
I start a new paragraph and make a footnote about Georges Perec’s “Species of Spaces and Other Pieces”1 and how he took such better care of his writing desk than I take of my palette.
1 even though there is nothing to clarify.
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To Our Mothers’ and Fathers’ Mothers and Fathers
36″ x 48″
Sublimating the actual into the apocryphal – a phrase borrowed from Faulkner. Apocryphal, spurious, of questionable authority.
While this might have been painted from a photograph of my grandmother as a girl, it only remains so if I say it with words, in a title, or accompanying text. Without words, the image opens back up into the silent nature of painting. One of the greatest tensions between text and image, I think, is that text has the ability to make a claim – be truthful and authoritative or spurious and deceitful – while images do not, not on their own. They just sit there being colors and lines arranged in a certain way, more or less full or empty of meaning, based on the taste and temperament of the viewer. For all the similarities between writers and painters, this seems a fundamental difference.
Anyway, it was actually my mother.
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Not the House in My Dream #1
12″ x 16″
For as long as I can remember I have had a recurring dream about a house. The plot line of the dream is a variation on a theme. I am in a situation where I have no where to live and I remember that I actually own a large house on a hill, perhaps a family house. I once lived in the basement of this house but left a long time ago, was relieved to put it behind me. The house is not a a good place, not loving, but haunted, bereft, a place of dread, and I’m faced with the prospect of having to go back to live in it again. This is not really that house, and neither is the other one, but something close.
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Not the House in My Dream #2
12″ x 16″
Actually, this one is getting pretty close.
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Balloon
10″ x 10″
A passage that didn’t make it into “Babboo’s Moving Pictures” animation.
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Natchez Trace
12″ x 16″
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Ffffffyyyyuyuyuyu
6″ x 8″
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O, I Wisht I _______ in the ________ of Cotton
16″ x 20″
Something George Schneeman said like “train yourself to make the right choices first” – quoted by Alice Notley at a panel on his work.
I wasn’t quick enough to write it all down, but to paraphrase the rest – to make the right choices first so the mistakes are fewer, and when that’s not possible, to embrace the mistakes.
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Marine Park, Brooklyn, the Day After Easter
6″ x 8″
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Taconic
6″ x 8″
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Margaret’s Perfume
16″ x 20″
Grandmother’s perfume tray.
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Red Ehrbar
6″ x 8″
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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Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise
Theo Van Doesburg’s Studio
8″ x 10″
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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Mt. Vernon 03
6″ x 8″
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Crawl Almost
6″ x 8″
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
6″ x 8″
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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Mt. Vernon, NY
11″ x 13″
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Toodleloo
11″ x 14″
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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Pecans and a Gray Area
20″ x 24″
Enter This Deserted House
But please walk softly as you do.
Frogs dwell here and crickets too.
Ain’t no ceiling, only blue
Jays dwell here and sunbeams too.
Floors are flowers–take a few.
Ferns grow here and daisies too.
Whoosh, swoosh–too-whit, too-woo,
Bats dwell here and hoot owls too.
Ha-ha-ha, hee-hee, hop-hoooo,
Gnomes dwell here and goblins too.
And my child, I thought you knew
I dwell here… and so do you.
– Shel Silverstein
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Hare and Red Lines
11″ x 14″
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Interstate 10
36″ x 60″
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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Shubuta xi.
12″ x 16″
Someday I will try to work one of the these up in oil, but so far the image is too turbulent, shifty, and oil doesn’t lend itself to improvisation for me – or I don’t lend myself to planning things out. A corny metaphor, but drawing can be like jazz – pick a key and start playing. Oil painting is operatic. Try to improvise an opera and you’ve got a nasty mess on your hands. I admire painters who seem to truly improvise complex paintings in oil. Amy Sillman, Tim Hyman, R.B. Kitaj, Nicole Eisenman, Ken Kiff to name a few.
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Shubuta ix.
7″ x 9″
Wagon ghost horses and switch-cane.
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Shubuta viii.
7″ x 9″
The ancestors are still on their way to Shubuta. The previous sentence may only make sense if you have been following the Workaday for a while. Or it may make sense to you for other reasons. At any rate, we’ll leave it there.
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Ja-Dah (Variation)
48″ x 60″
The cat in the lower left was taken from a photograph of a cat in the early 1920’s. Funny how many more generations of cats have passed, than humans, in the intervening years.
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Babboo’s Moving Pictures
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
36″ x 42″
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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Gone to Shubuta (vii.)
30″ x 40″
In the olden times we were sun worshippers.
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Gone to Shubuta (vi.)
26″ x 40″
Sugar ants in the cracker pail, night-fall in the switch-cane, where is that Emmaline.
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Gone to Shubuta (v.)
30″ x 40″
Big drawings. All the people going to Shubuta, fleeing troubles, or returning to them. Snake, tree, horse, a picnic on what would be called ‘the hanging bridge’. And the thumbnails need to be bigger. There that’s better.
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Conifers
13″ x 28″
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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James Joyce
5 3/4″ x 7″
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Pink Alligator
11″ x 15″
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Diogenes
8″ x 11″
“Before begging it is useful to practice on statues” (Diogenes, Guy Davenport translation)
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Sumer #2
8″ x 10″
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Sumer
8″ x 10″
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River Water
7 1/2″ x 10 1/2″
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Sumerian Head #2
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Sumerian Head #1
11″ x 15″
“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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De Lumine e Umbra
11″ x 12″
“De Lumine e Umbra” (Of Light and Shadow) is the title of a book that Nicolas Poussin never wrote.
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As a Ghost That Will Not Go Down
12″ x 14″
After his best friend, Enkidu, dies, Gilgamesh suffers such grief, he is “as a man who wanders too far from home; like a ghost that will not go down.” Here he is rowing to see Utnapishtim to talk about eternal life. Spoiler: turns out there isn’t any. Having said that, I’m still talking about Gilgamesh, so maybe in that respect.
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Fire (Wastrels Discover Fire)
10″ x 15″
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2400 BC
11″ x 14″
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Sumerian Apparition
9″ x 12″
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Henri Michaux
10″ x 15″
The poet and painter worked in a highly personalized idiom and with a face of wonderful birdlike French-ness (or Belgian-ness).
(excerpt from “Carry Me Away” by Henri Michaux, translation by Eli Siegel)
Carry me away into a Portuguese boat of once,
Into an old and gentle Portuguese boat of once,
Into the stem of the boat, or if you wish, into the foam,
And lose me, in the distance, in the distance.
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Gilgamesh
11″ x 14″
Early each morning I sit on the couch with my daughter Vivian wrapped in my robe and drink coffee and we listen to an audio recording of the Epic of Gilgamesh. On the back of this wooden panel is written what Gilgamesh kept saying when he was startled awake in the Forest of Cedars. I love the cadence of these questions and the confusion upon waking of a demigod so many generations ago.
Did you call me?
Why am I awake?
Did you touch me?
Why am I so upset?
Did a god pass?
Then why do I feel so weak?
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Lou Reed
11″ x 14″
One hesitates before contributing to the overabundance of bad portraits of rock and rollers. But such as it is, here is my offering. I once played “Heroin” in its entirety for a class of drawing students to illustrate some point about drawing which i can no longer recall.
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Blocks and Flying Eye
9″ x 12″
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Viking Passes a Green Hill
9″ x 12″
The viking motif continues with a solo voyager. Vikings usually travel in groups, so one seizes the occasion to interlope on one’s own.
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Night Crawlers
13″ x 13″
There was a man who was so disturbed by the sight of his own shadow and so displeased with his own footsteps that he determined to get rid of both. The method he hit upon was to run away from them. So he got up and ran. But every time he put his foot down there was another step, while his shadow kept up with him without the slightest difficulty. He attributed his failure to the fact that he was not running fast enough. So he ran faster and faster without stopping until he finally dropped dead. He failed to realize that if he merely stepped into the shade, his shadow would vanish, and if he sat down and stayed still, there would be no more footsteps.
(Chuang Tzu, 4th c. BCE)
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Sunday Blocks
6 1/5″ x 10 1/5″
The ancestral blocks are coming in handy for some more studies in color. The great classic book, The Interaction of Color by Josef Albers has recently been translated by Yale Books into an interactive app for the iPad. I highly recommend it for people interested how color is deceptively received by the eye. It’s very not as heavy as the book.
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Birthday Blocks, Yellow, Red and Pink
6 1/2″ 10 1/5″
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Boat Lifters (Plural)
7″ x 9″
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Boat Lifter (Singular)
7″ x 9″
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Wastrels in Pieces
11″ x 15″
Stacks of colored bars appear to have a fracturing affect on these two. For stability, I referred back to the original frontispiece from A Child’s Garden of Verses.
As the painter Paula Rego said: “Every change is a form of liberation. My mother used to say a change is always good even if it’s for the worse.”
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Dichromatic Musicians (Greyish-red-yellow and Cream)
11″ x 15″
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Dichromatic Musicians (Grey and Crimson)
11″ x 15″
Giving myself a crash course in color interactivity. This here has the musicians using a neutral grey and crimson only, making the grey the lightest and crimson the darkest, thus a narrow value scale.
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Cake & Colors
11″ x 15″
Systematic representation and systematic abstraction. This one has been through several stages, including a Josef Albers-ish color exercise, there was a cartoon viking on there for a bit, then this monochrome cake. Decided to stop on the cake.
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Terrestrial Object #4
5 1/4″ x 6 1/2″
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Terrestrial Object #1
5 1/4″ x 6 1/2″
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Vikings & Futura
6″ x 8″
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Vikings and Colors
10 1/5″ x 12 1/5″
Enough government stuff, here are some Vikings. Vikings sojourning in a land of many colors. Each color is incrementally informed by the tone that comes before and after it. I’m practicing palette discipline. It could be that Vivian’s name and her nickname Vivi has called up these Vikings. All the V sounds and the slow, determined exploration of new worlds. No plundering, no marauding, just rowing and watching. Take that, Congress.
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Vikings & Bodoni
6″ x 8″
A viking ship and some letters in the elegant Bodoni font. I’ve been doing a lot of middle-of-the-night studying of fonts. The world of typeface design is complex, intelligent, and sensitive. It’s also a warren of deeply held, and militantly defended opinions about the most minute minutiae, it’s hilarious. Not sure where the viking ship is coming from.
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Gold Blocks
12″ x 18″
A couple of late night block paintings, shellac ink on gessoed hardboard. Turns out there’s not a lot of time to paint when there’s a newborn, but good to keep the brush moving.
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One Day Old
5″ x 8″
A quick sketch in the hospital room last week. This will be a well-documented child.
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Blocks with Vivian
9″ x 12″
I was up in he middle of the night making this painting, while Vivian lay next to me in her bouncy seat. I thought “My mind is surprisingly sharp for not getting much sleep.” When it was time to get back in bed, I picked up Vivian and on my way out of the room, tried to turn off my painting with the TV remote control.
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Blocks
9″ x 12″
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Little Pearl
5″ x 8″
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Mise-en-Page
5″ x 8″
After Poussin.
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Sound of an Accordion
20″ x 30″
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Vibraphone
24″ x 30″
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Hush (Driveway)
5″ x 8″
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Clarinetist
9″ x 12″
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Wastrels on the Road to Shumbutay
24″ x 36″
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Wastrels Go To Shubuta
5″ x 8″
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What We Were in the Olden Times
5″ x 8″
Blue ballpoint pens are, I think, terrible to write with but the lines sling all around, good for drawing. The river below. Above is a sketch of this little lady from a group of plaster Fisher-Price casts I did years ago. In this she’s maybe an ancestor, or celestial something.
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Hush (Hat)
5″ x 8″
Here are a few small sketches of family photographs from the first few decades of the 20th century. I enjoy peering into the pool. The hush is the hush of time.
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Hush (Children in the Yard Again)
5″ x 8″
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Hush (Hare in the Yard Again)
5″ x 8″
