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Construction Paper Alphabet

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8″ x 10″
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When Jessica and I were designing the homepage for the new issue of Trickhouse (this one here), we wanted to use a paper alphabet, so I cut letters out of construction paper.  This is the layering of the paper that remained.  This is also I guess the first Workaday post that is neither a painting, nor a drawing, though an expanded definition of drawing would include any mark left which records a movement, action or idea.  So, let’s call it a drawing.  Not that it matters.

 

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Pet Shop

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9″ x 9″
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No idea what’s happening here.

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Nine Mounds

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9″ x 9″
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Probably burial mounds but who can know.

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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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The Rose Room

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20″ x 30″
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I already posted this but then I changed it, so this is me posting it again. And oof, this photo is kind of glare-y; highly glazed surface. It is also the final piece in this group of musician paintings. They’ve been very fun to paint, and all the while I’ve been painting to the alternating musical backdrop of early hill country blues and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s full concert at the Palladium in 1981 (a youtube video find). A curious mix, but effective.

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How Deep Is the Ocean

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24″ x 36″
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This is a heavily encrusted painting, with lots of evident wrangling. Sometimes a painting comes together without a mess and a fuss, and that’s okay too, but if there are lots of changes of mind, they might as well be available for view. A live oak, an orange bird, a curtain of impasto and figures who come and go.  The piano player is a kind of anti-color, like what collects at the bottom of the turpentine can.

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Ida Belle Don’t Cry This Time

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30″ x 48″
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The title of this comes from Robert Johnson’s 1936 recording of “Last Fair Deal“: Ida Belle don’t cry this time / Ida Belle don’t cry this time / If you cry about a nickel / You’ll die about a dime.

When I was seventeen, I moved to Jackson, Mississippi and was on my own for the first time.  I spent a lot of time in my station wagon exploring every dark corner of Jackson, playing my Robert Johnson tape on a cassette player I held on my lap while driving. I remember rewinding this song over and over.  I also played a lot of guitar that year but could never play a Robert Johnson song to save my life.  This painting feels more like his music to me than anything I ever could do on the guitar, though of course there’s no real comparison.  As a side note, the Wastrels are making a cameo appearance in the pictures on the wall above Ida Belle’s (presumably) double arm.  Immutable little interlopers.

 

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Don’t Go, Flo

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30″ x 40″

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There is a vaporous mood in this one; ether and suspended blood cells. Hard to know where to point one’s eyes sometimes.

I don’t have a problem with others signing their work, but for me adding my signature to a painting, after working to create a balance of marks, can feel like an invasive afterthought.  So I’ve started signing a canvas as soon as I start the painting, then signing it again periodically throughout the process of making a painting.  That way the signature feels more a part of the painting process and not something jammed on like a mic-drop at the end.  In “Don’t Go, Flo” you can see a little swarm of initials in the bottom right.

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Sweet Emmalina

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36″ x 48″
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Here is another large-ish oil painting.  There is a lot to look at in this image, and a lot of eyes looking back. The paintings hanging on the wall on the right side make me want to walk behind the bass player and see what’s going on back there.  And pink face, can’t even look directly at him almost.  Then there’s the rakish fellow on the left, all rubbery and swarming with eyes.

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Ja-Da (Ja-Da, Ja-Da, Jing, Jing, Jing)

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48″ x 60″

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I am fortunate to have a solo show scheduled at the lovely Carol Robinson Gallery.  The exhibit will consist entirely of paintings of musicians and I thought I’d start posting them on the Work-a-Day one at a time.

This one here is a biggie.  And colorful.
Ja-Da, Ja-Da, Ja-Da, Jing, Jing, Jing!

 

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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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Band #34

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8″ x 14 1/2″

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All yellow all the time.

 

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Band #31

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12″ x 16″

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A sketchy musical family made out of lines like bent coathangers.

 

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Christmas Eve

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9″x 9″

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Other than Tiny Tim hoisted up in familiar fashion, unclear what else is happening here.  Good tidings, snowy sidewalks and general Christmas cheer.

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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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For Sandy Hook

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12″ x 16″

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Mapleton is the name of our parents’ old house in Sandy Hook, CT.  The house is a colonial home and the property stretches up a hill covered in large maple trees and at the top of the hill is a garden, a fire circle (built by me and my father), a large stone labyrinth and an old one room school house.  Beyond the garden, the hill slopes down to Sandy Hook Elementary School.

In December 2007, I was staying in my parents’ school house for a month and that is where I painted this picture of my own first grade class.  I remember listening to the children playing in the school yard while I painted and thought they must be the age of the children I was painting.

For what little good they do to comfort, maybe paintings can serve as a form for grief to take, as well as celebration of life, somehow simultaneously. Anyway, here’s one.  It was just pointed out to me that there are twenty children in the painting.

 

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Wastrels Meet Red Guy

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8″ x 9 1/2″

My nephews recently made a stop-motion animation of a lego space man which they called “Adventures of Red Guy.”  I aspire to such simplicity; “Red Guy” says it all.  This is a different Red Guy, less spaceman, more prancing interloper.  I have a feeling he’s a figment of Bookoo and Cilice’s shared imagination.

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Mockingbird from My Dream

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11″ x 15″

Sunday night I dreamt I was in Natchez, Mississippi and there was a mockingbird that was flying from the River to the other side of town.  I was meant to follow it with my mind, receiving telepathic messages from the bird about its whereabouts.  I got really lost, which is unexpected because I know the town so well.

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Man, Rabbit and Parts of a Girl and Fox

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8 1/2″ x 11″

This was made in preparation for a class I’m teaching called “Drawing the Myth and Daydream.”  The prompt involves picking a setting (in this case ‘under water’), a figure or animal (I did several), and a state of being (I chose ‘breaking into pieces’).  I think I should have made it more obviously under water.  Other states of being to chose from include: floating, flaming, blooming with flowers, tiny, covered in hair, dissolving, enormous, winged, and part-human/part-animal.  The first class was highly enjoyable.

 

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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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River Baby

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30″ x 42″

This is the 500th piece posted on the Work-a-Day page!

It’s atypical for the WaD in that it is a large-ish oil on linen, but I think a good piece that I have not shown. It is what remains of a large (14′ long) multi-canvas painting that I began in my last studio. I stopped working on it to make the sprawling Soldiering frieze with Anne Waldman, and by the time I was finished with that I had moved into a studio with much shorter walls. The practical aspects intervened and I painted over the other panels.

The original River painting was a nocturnal scene of many things – a dressed dining table, this baby, a variety of domestic objects – floating serenely down a river. It had something to do with ancestry, Mississippi, who knows what all. I’m sure I will return to the image. In the meantime, I think the River Baby is content to float solo.

There’s an election going on, and tomorrow’s Work-a-Day will be a drawing of whatever is the photograph on the front page of the New York Times…

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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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What are You Supposed to Be?

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11″ x 14″

A halloween painting, set in the Sonoran desert. I painted the figures into a thrift store painting of an exuberant nighttime desert scene, extra spooky. Two other paintings involving found paintings are Darling Ann and Big Boy Has a Magpie.

I woke up this morning thinking I should do a spooky picture for the Workaday page, and as I was finishing this I realized I already have about half a dozen ghost-related drawings and paintings. So there may be a theme for a few days.

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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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Old South Snow Globe

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11″ x 14″

When you shake it, instead of pretend snow swirling around, it’s cotton.  Shortly after I painted this, I realized I had unconsciously absorbed the image from this painting by the magnificent Argentinian painter Daniel Santoro.

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It’s the Good Loop Trailer Park

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6″ x 10″

In Swannanoa, North Carolina there is a cluster of mobile homes on a circular street called “Good Loop” and when I’d pass by the Good Loop, Shirley Temple’s classic song “On the Good Ship Lollipop” always came to mind. There are a lot of trailers in the Blue Ridge Mountains, sometimes they appear to have fallen from the sky. I have made a lot of drawings and paintings of trailers, not for any social commentary, but seeing the trailer as a protagonist, in lieu of a figure.

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Happy Hour #14

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9″ x 8″

This here is another from the series of drawings for Kate Bernheimer’s forthcoming book “Happy Hour.”  Monkey in a pram.

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Cake

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4″ x 6″

 

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I Will Not Think of a Horse

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4″ x 6″

I had a dream last night that I was a school teacher.  I walked into another teacher’s classroom and on the chalkboard someone had written lines, over and over, like when you get in trouble as a child.  I could not read what the lines said.  As I was looking at the chalkboard lines, trying to make out what it said, a bombastic little girl bounded in and erased a section across the middle of the words and quickly drew a huge stylized horse and then ran out of the room.  I stood there staring at the image and the text and thought “Oh my god, this is perfect.”

This drawing is not perfect like the girl’s drawing, but it is enough to hold the dream in place.  Since I couldn’t read the text in the dream, the text in my drawing says “I will not think of a horse” after that thing about how if someone says: Do not imagine a horse, in order for your brain to not imagine a horse it first has to imagine a horse… which makes the whole thing impossible.  I think it is a well-known psychological exercise.  I just tried to find evidence of it online, but couldn’t, maybe I dreamed that too.  I’ve used it in text/image classes for years, and will continue to do so.

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There is a Cleaved Trailer Inside a Large Catfish

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11″ x 14″

The title pretty much says it.  One time I was walking on a country road near Water Valley, Mississippi and stopped to look into a creek that ran under the road.  Washed onto the bank was a refrigerator with its doors ripped off an a catfish skull the size of a cow head.

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Don’t Slow (with JMW)

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8″ x 10″

This is another of the group based on photographs from early Olympics, wrestlers here.

 

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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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Children & Letters #1

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12 1/8″ x 16 1/8″

Or perhaps “Orphans and Phonemes”.  I don’t know if these wee children are orphans, but the letters appear to be.  Phonetic utterances.

This has a companion piece (as indicated by “#1”) which will be tomorrow’s workaday.

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Christopher Columbus Arrives in America

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4″ x 6″

from “Christopher Columbus Arrives in America” by Gergio Deluci

Español: Colón llega a América
English: Christoper Columbus arrives in America
Deutsch: Christoph Kolumbus trifft in Amerika ein
Русский: Христофор Колумб прибывает в Америку
Français: Christophe Colomb arrive en Amérique
Italiano: Cristoforo Colombo arriva in America
Česky: Kryštof Kolumbus připlouvá do Ameriky

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