7″ x 8″
Paper Box
Folded Paper, Accordion- Style
Orphans, Number Thirteen
Bookoo Rides Piggy Back
Household Items #2
Bookoo Reads the Funny Papers But Does Not Laugh
Household Items #1
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.
Related Images:
Stair Walker
8 1/2″ x 11″
This is a transparency – grease pencil on acetate – from the Wastrels animation I’m working on. Each figure represents a stage in a movement of a spectral figure walking down stairs. The two pieces of acetate were lying on the floor on top of one another and I found it to be a good image on its own.
Related Images:
SoS #5 (with Kate B.)
8″ x 9″
This is one of the (as of now) fifteen images for Kate Bernheimer’s captivating book coming out next year. In total there will be seventy something images, one for the facing page for each paragraph of text.
All of the pieces are on three layers of tracing paper (an archivist’s nightmare)so are pretty fragile, but the materials allow for all sorts of shenanigans. I’m somewhat pulling from Depression-era cartoons for these drawings.
Also, I’m remembering some of the drawings that my mother made on the wall of the uninhabitable third floor of my grandparents house, wobbly Little Lulu and others. They were still there when I was a teenager. If one were in a pensive mood, those drawings could call up feelings of fleeting innocence, or imminent absence. And nothing speaks to imminent absence like the ancient story of the origin of drawing according to Pliny (if I remember right… ahem):
A young woman from Corinth was spending the night with a soldier as he was about to go off to war with no chance of his return. Realizing her pending loss, she took a bit of coal from the fire and traced his shadow on the wall. The End.
Related Images:
St. Clare #6
Josh F.
I am Neil Armstrong, I am on the Moon (with Hannah Ensor)
12″ x 18″
(definitely have to look at the enlargement with this one, it’s all very light)
I made a drawing of Neil Armstrong the day he died and Hannah recently mentioned that she had written these lines in response to it. Luckily I had the beginnings of another N. Armstrong drawing and put her words in pink middle school curly script next to it to make a diptych. Reminds me of when everybody wanted to be an astronaut. Those were weightless times.
I am Neil Armstrong
I am on the moon
I am standing on a sheet
The sheet flows
The sheet is a moon
The moon of the Earth
Related Images:
You and an Airplane
Bird Sends a Transmission
Trailer in the Snow
Number Twenty-Eight
Come Fox (with JMW)
Come Please Back (with JMW)
La Guardia
Tar And Or Sleet To Ignite (with JMW)
Bumble Bee Crown King
Ponding of Water on Country Roads
A System for John Cage
Hurtin’ for Hambone
8″ x 9 1/2″
This one here is akin to an oxbow lake. That’s when a river goes from a meandering path to a straighter path and the curly crazy bit turns into a lake and the river takes a shorter route… I’m not explaining this right… here’s a diagram… oxbows are weird-shaped formations evidence of a previous flow-pattern. Such a useful concept.
Anyway, I’m making images for Kate Bernheimer’s new novel (will be a lot lot of images that I will post eventually) and in the process of trying to find the right approach, I made a whole mountain of images that will not work for the book, most are perfectly dreadful. One or two I think are interesting in their own way, oxbow style, and this is one I like. The title comes from a note I took while researching for this book, I think it was a titles of an obscure depression-era cartoon.
Related Images:
Red Slide
Tiger: Reflected Tiger
7″ x 10″
An unrelated but resonant text I happened to read this morning, the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s play “The Cocktail Party”:
Alex: You’ve completely missed the point, Julia: There were no tigers. That was the point.
Julia: Then what were you doing, up in a tree: You and the Maharaja?
Alex: My dear Julia! It’s perfectly hopeless. You haven’t been listening.
Peter: You’ll have to tell us all over again, Alex.
Alex: I never tell the same story twice.
Related Images:
Buddha Head Triptych
Tiny Shelter
Goose
Blue Baby #2
Blue Baby
Gag Session
Neil Armstrong
Pink Lion and a Yaqui Basket
XCI
Obstaculum Cursum
7″ x 30″
I can imagine eating everything in this painting. I wouldn’t want to, but I know what it would feel like. Bouncy between the teeth. Especially the pillowy shrimp arm floating over the bed. I think of this as a Latin vocabulary learning aid that’s falling short of its goal. Not sure why Latin, could be any dead language, I suppose.
Related Images:
Double Sunrise
Hangman
Number Twenty-Six
Denizen (with JMW)
Padre Pio with a Migraine Halo
Number Twenty-Two
Hearty Har Har
Focused, Disciplined and Deliberate Daydreaming
Number Twenty-Three
Nadia Comăneci
NowSuf (with JMW)
11″ x 14″
I love this one. It takes so long to read Josh’s text, it’s like climbing down a ladder.
The figure is from a photograph of a swimmer from the 1900 Olympics. Could nearly be a Greek kouros statue from the 6th c. BC, especially with the stack of monumental letters. And with that in mind, the text sounds like Homer to me (the ancient bard, not our socially conservative neighbor) — the magic of text/image proximity.
Related Images:
Decembering Dust (with JMW)
11″ x 14″
Another piece with Josh, this one uses an image from the 1896 Olympics of a guy and a pommel horse. Apparently the modern Pommel Horse is based on wooden horses used by ancient Persians to teach soldiers to efficiently mount and dismount live horses during battle. Pommels are the nobby things on a saddle. I did not know that.
The ‘dust’ seems to have something to do with the specks flinging off of our hero in this picture (actually where my pinky fingernail was digging into the paint as I was working on his head. anyway). Or maybe the handdust gymnasts are all the time clapping clouds of. Or something else.
Related Images:
Crooked Capsule (with JMW)
11″ x 14″
The Olympics theme continues with the help of Joshua Marie Wilkinson on stencils. We’ve been getting together the last few days in my studio, working in tandem. I make a painting, pass it to him for text; he makes some text and passes it to me for a painting; working on the same surfaces.
I’m sticking with the Olympic pictures for now (such as these members of the 1912 British Women’s swimming team), working quickly so I don’t get bogged down in the subject, and Josh is employing the grease pencil and the supposedly hyper-efficient (bureaucratic, militaristic?) stencil lettering, improvising the texts one letter at a time. The combination makes, to me, a neat oblong relationship between the texts and images. More to come.
Related Images:
Olympics 1904
Olympics 1908
Mannequin (Woman)
Mannequin (Man)
Sherman Hemsley
St. Clare
12″ x 18″
St. Clare founded the “Poor Clares” order of nuns and was one of the first followers of St. Francis in early 13th c. Assisi. She devoted herself to a life of poverty.
Once when she was too ill to attend mass, she was able to see and hear the service projected on the wall of her room, so in 1958 Pope Pius XII designated her Patron Saint of Television. St. Clare is also the Patron Saint of against eye disease, Assisi, embroiderers, eyes, good weather, gilders, gold workers, goldsmiths, laundry workers, needle workers, Santa Clara Indian Pueblo, telegraphs, telephones, and television writers. Great that we still have a Patron Saint of Telegraphs.
Related Images:
Corset #2
Corset
I made this drawing and a few others like it a year or so ago, I can’t remember why now, had something to do with an interest in the sculptural quality of corset boning, and the idea of garments made of cotton and whalebone. The idea never went anywhere but I like the drawing still. Funny how one word can mean so many things. Search for “boning” online and you get at least three definitions, all vividly represented.
Related Images:
Bookoo Tries Four-Leggedness
Bookoo Has a Hand Helmet
Look at Her
15″ x 17″
My big face is peering in on the antebellum South. There’s a house, a gate, a field, a flock of birds, live oaks and the popping bubbles of our mothers’ and fathers’ mothers and fathers.
It’s hard to work with images of the Old South without things getting cliché and problematic. Maybe not even possible, here’s another go at it.
In his memoir, my Great-great-grandfather writes the story of his father’s death in Natchez, Mississippi in 1884. The Rev. Marks was called to be by his bedside:
“When Mr. Marks came my father said, Mr. Marks I am absolutely saved, am I not? — Absolutely so! he replied. — There is not a doubt about it? he asked again. — Not a particle of doubt, Mr. Marks replied. — Pointing to his wife he said, Look at her. Why then should she weep?”
Related Images:
Number Seventeen
24″ x 30″
I forgot to post this one a couple weeks ago when it went to New Orleans. Another of the band paintings, oil and all its magic subtleties.
Found a box of old oil paints at a thrift store, from back when they were still making pure cadmium- and lead-based paints — before the industry went soft with all the ‘health concerns’ associated with toxic pigments and binders. Another example of toxic beauty; the yellows are gorgeous, bright and astringent.
Related Images:
Cilice the Archer
Begging Practice
Camouflage
Herakleitos
8 1/2″ x 10″
Herakleitos (c. 535 – c. 475 BCE, from Guy Davenport translation)
.16.
Awake, we see a dying world; asleep, dreams.
.17.
Nature loves to hide. [Becoming is a secret process].
.18.
The Lord who prophesies at Delphoi neither speaks clearly nor hides his meaning completely; he gives one symbols instead.
.19.
In searching out the truth be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it.
Related Images:
Birds, Bird Heads and S-words Like Slingshot
Charlie
James
Illustrated Limericks About Suffering (the end)
Illustrated Limericks About Suffering #3
Illustrated Limericks About Suffering #2
Illustrated Limericks About Suffering #1
Illustrated Limericks About Suffering (title)
Frankie Rollins and I are working on a collaboration called “Sorrow for Beginners”, a kind of manual, or user’s guide. This idea seems to be related to that; I woke up the other night and wrote in the notebook next to my bed “write limericks about suffering.”
So the last few nights I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and written limericks and made a very small book of three of them. I might do more, or maybe this is all there is. I love that the cadence of the limerick makes me laugh before my brain has time to notice that it’s not funny at all, even a little bit. Even when I know what’s coming I still laugh.
Related Images:
Group Portrait, Bianchi Family
Dowry Tiger
Chagall
approx 8″ x 10″
It was Marc Chagall’s birthday the other day. I love his paintings, gravity and logic don’t hold. I remember seeing an interview with him on the BBC years ago and when asked why he paints he said something like: To make my mother happy. Great answer. He had the eyes of a wild piglet. Maybe the greatest painter of dreams.
“Work isn’t to make money; you work to justify life.” – Marc Chagall
Related Images:
Veil Over Everything, Oh I Say, That Old Gag
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.
Related Images:
George Washington
Wastrels Go to the Underworld and are Tempted to Destroy One Another
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.
Related Images:
Covered in Hair
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.
Related Images:
Forget Me Not #3 (with permutations)
Forget Me Not #2
Number Twenty-Five
Number Twenty-Four
Number Twenty-One
11″ x 14″
The more I do these musician drawings, I think I’m still putting in too much information. The eye can figure out how the bodies and space fits together without much info. I remember reading John Berger’s writings about transcribing radio transmissions during WWII and how the mind can create (even with flaws) a whole image or idea from only a few staticky scraps. And then there’s this that I’ve seen floating around the internet for years:
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Related Images:
Periodic Companions (HG was trying to guess)
Amerigo “Meg” Bianchi
In New York for the memorial of Julia’s grandfather, Meg. I find if you’ve been thinking a lot about someone, it’s easier to draw them well. Portraiture is about saturation, I guess, the more you soak up the more there is to wring back out. And I’ve been hearing a million stories from his long and rich life.
Somebody (John Singer Sargent?) said something like “a portrait is a picture in which there is something wrong with the mouth.” I remembered that half way through drawing this, so decided to put more effort into his mouth, which was to me the most expressive part of his face. But now I’m just talking shop. Rest in peace, Poppy.
Related Images:
Periodic Companions (a rare and expensive super conductor, painting)
Periodic Companions (a rare and expensive super conductor, drawing)
9″ x 12″
Another excerpt from Periodic Companions. This one is a pretty good illustration of how the text and images work together. Laynie’s characters are personifications of chemical elements and their personalities are shaped by the qualities of their corresponding elements. The drawings are just schoolgirls. Well, not just, maybe elements of the periodic table appear as Edwardian schoolgirls, if seen under certain light or from a certain angle. I’m not a scientist so can’t say for sure.
Related Images:
Periodic Companions (poison of kings, painting)
Periodic Companions (poison of kings, drawing)
Periodic Companions (I Firmly Believed)
9″ x 12″ (the drawing part)
This is one of eleven drawings that will accompany Laynie Browne’s elegant and strong new book. I’ll trickle some of these in here on the WaD, with occasional bits of her text. I am making the drawings as replicas of the illustrations from my mother’s Edwardian child’s primer “Emmy Lou: Her Book & Heart”. Basically illustrating Laynie’s text with another book’s illustrations, and they strangely work. Or, they work strangely. Either, both. Whatever.
One cryptic description of the collaboration, from the Valentine’s exhibition at the UA Poetry Ctr:
What happens when a Victorian childhood primer meets postmodern characters based upon the periodic table of elements? Love compels tears. Relationships are based upon chemistry and are represented through a series of drawings which emphasize gesture, hearsay, and indeterminacy.
Related Images:
Virga
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.
Related Images:
The River is Yellow (Jaune Jeunesse)
9″ x 12″
Or “The Yellow of My Youth”, or “Le Jaune de Ma Jeunesse”, or simply “Jaune Jeunesse.” The title suddenly went French. Maybe a tangent brought on by the color and remembering Miro’s painting with a blue mark and written next to it “Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves” (this is the color of my dreams).
Related Images:
Leaping Hares, Redacted
Working out the leaping hares idea further in casein, a milk-based paint that I’ve just discovered. Dries fast, but not plastic-y like acrylics. Good for painting daydreams (which are also milk-based and fast-drying).
I like allowing for invention and frivolity, and changes of mind, I would like to be more frivolous and change my mind more often. Some people don’t like to see evidence of the painter’s changes of mind, looks too much like floundering — see #6 and #29 of Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” — which I guess it is. Floundering I also like, it can be very productive. Picasso referred to Bonnard’s paintings scornfully as “a potpourri of indecision.”
Related Images:
Wastrels Take a Dip
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?
Related Images:
Number Nineteen
Number Twenty
11″ x 14″
These group portraits of musicians, they remind me of something Cézanne said about his still-lifes, like “I’m not interested in apples, I’m interested in how I perceive apples. I feel that way about the musicians (his apples are better paintings, but that’s comparing apples and…).
I went looking for that quote but couldn’t find it, but instead found lots of other things Cézanne said, some very odd, and decided to string them into a paragraph. It makes a strange little proclamation. I know you’re not supposed to jam together other peoples words, but it’s fun and I’m not a journalist, so here we go:
“Tell me, do you think I’m going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know. Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t. A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly. Say what you like: I’m every inch a painter. I want to die painting. I am the primitive of the method I have invented. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not really possible to help others. We live in a rainbow of chaos. I allow no one to touch me.” — Paul Cézanne