disco drawings

The series reads from the end at the top to the beginning at the bottom. Revelers are stranded on a rock, perhaps temporarily or a bit longer, who simply began in a small club, without clothes, soon in a large group, then exhausting themselves in various diversions. On the rock they wait. It's very Blanchot.

introduction

My therapist refers to a moment in my life as an introduction to adult sexuality - which is a funny way to think of it, almost a textbook kind of label. So I did three drawings, at least, on this theme of an introduction to adult sexuality: basically nude individuals loitering like walruses on the sunny rocks, their pudenda and secondary sexual characteristics hanging out nonchalantly.

bay area nudes

What I did with the color and contrast functions that come in the basic editing function of what microsoft gives us to edit photos with on these things. The bottom reminds me of posters done in the bay area in the 1960s. Hence the title.

title page to an old sketchbook

landscape

drawings

watercolor

My continuing struggle

Art - What I'm very good at; ministry - what I am modestly good at
And my history of trying to find things which final result is to sustain my art:
being a librarian, for instance, which didn't work that well.
And now I find myself in tension, even here: loving ministry and wishing dearly that I could make it work in a more artistic and creative way -
when most people I find myself in discussion with on the minnisterial side
have no idea of how art might be ministerial
.
They have never considered, and understandably they don't know what to tell me.
And how estranged I am from the art world in general.
I ask, How did that happen?
How is it that I have taken what the author of the Artist's Way, Cameron, calls creative u-turns.
So many times I've failed to take the risk
And instead I feel that I've listened to the wrong people
And myself am not necessarily the right person either -
that is, I talk myself out of things.
I think of crazy people who got things done
like Pat Keim or Harry Delorme, back in art school,
and wonder how I got stuck in conventionality
and risk aversion.
But there I was.
Now I puzzle over what opportunity might present itself for me.
Is there a ministerial angle and an artistic conjunction?
Am I still thinking too conventionally - probably.
How can I use my creative resources
which if someone said
Draw the craziest, most free associational image that will blow our minds
and I could do something
But if someone asks a simpler thing
As I might ask myself:
Chart an artistic career from this stopping point
using what you have
to make your own way.
Piplotti Rist pours her body out
Damien Hirst sells a dead shark
(I laugh at his quote in the recent artnet article where he says he is nervous about selling his paintings or his paintings' reception - but dead sharks tend to sell themselves)
I ask
What is my dead shark
How am I pouring my body out
?

sky imagery

theory of painting

aquarius

I drew these while sitting at a table in the reading room of the Lilly Library on East Campus. I was probably sitting there with a stack of periodicals: October, Artforum, Art in America, Critical Inquiry, Flash Art, the New Yorker, Harpers, New York Review of Books, Art History, Burlington, Art Papers, Art on Paper, and other things I find essential for having close at hand on a early spring afternoon.

I should get a scanner in order to reproduce my images more accurately - there's wide discrepancy in how they clean up from the photos and the photos are bothered with shadows and discolorations, so that the reproductions here and elsewhere are hardly indicative of the quality of what I do. Sigh.

I find myself lately whistling this tune. The whole age of aquarius is apparently from Jung, but I didn't know that. What will future youth rebellions, 1968s, summer of loves, pattern themselves after? What will be their content? What old gurus will they borrow from? What indicators of that culture will appear in the previous ten years? Who in the 1950s could have guessed the 1960s? Who in 1955 could have guessed that this war the French were fighting for a colonial possession would become the life of their young boy, who was watching Howdy Doody at that moment. In ten years he's at Khe Sahn. Who could guess that these beat poets would begat Dylan? Or that Elvis would begat the Stones? That we'd go from Peggy Sue to Paint it Black? Or who would guess that segregation, which seemed so natural, so "the way it is" would come to an end. The 1960s didn't just happen. The seeds for it were in the 1950s and 1940s, even farther back.

Nothing remains in stasis. No era of prosperity or good feeling endures. Nor does depression - though depression digs further into the soul, sadly, than good things. Our country will come to an end - or at least the way we assume it is - and are we able to face it, to accept it (because certainly the ones coming after us will no more understand our "principles" than we understand such principles that preceded us as hoop skirts and using Thee and Thou) or will we pretend that we can stand upon the stream of change yelling stop. But it will be a flood.

Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.

water color - drawing - water color

It seemed that I had to make my work more strange

More play. More play. Life is too short now for conventions, for being bound to making sense, for reifying libido, for hearing that voice that demands conventionality. More play. More lines that might do anything, colors that might go anywhere. I've waited too very late. More play. More play.

baseball

I love drawing baseball players, especially in those old baggy uniforms. How dainty Tris Speaker looked or even Ty Cobb. Imagine Cobb batting with Barry Bonds' or Galaraga's batting armor! Those big kevlar arm slings and ankle protectors they weilded because they stood so close to the plate - to salve the toll of getting hit. Cobb and Speaker played in a different era: the balls were softer, the dust chalkier, the bats were bamboo; coaches used semaphore and aldis lamps to convey signs to the players; the pony express positioned the outfielders.

So unlike now. Today players play on a grid, determined by senority and pay scale; they do what their press bio says they do and no more - except when an understudy takes their role. "Now playing the role of center fielder for the New York Metorpolitans" - booms the announcer at Chez corporate sponser field, where the grass was planted by microsoft - grown in their development labs for the last seven years, and sometimes they find they have to reboot the infield - but over all the grass performs fine, except when players from a mac sponsored field come to town. Then there are compatibility issues.

Cobb and Speaker never had to face this knid of thing; but today's players have never had to beat up a disabled man heckling them from the stands or take a job cleaning camel stalls during the off season.

Such are the vageries of the pastime. The national past-tense it's called - after a popular gravy of the day, used by soldiers on both sides of the civil war to cover the cabbage pies they had for breakfast, before they developed the game while they were prisoners of war. When they weren't prisoners of war, they went back to their passtime as prisoners of love. Some though were prisoners of Zenda - who inspired the 1950s hit Return to Zenda.

Baseball has provided my life with memorarble moments. My favorite right now was near the end of my playing days. I was playing softball (which is really hard) with Bob and Jeff at Rotary Park in Portales (though the park remains stationary now - the rotating mechanism having broken on a wandering elk) and a lofty fly was popped up right at me. I gauged my position, camped under the ball as it made its descent, pounded my glove, and just as I lifted it to receive the brown rotating sphere, I was struck on the forehead.

Another moment I remember was llistening to a game on radio. The Braves were playing Pittsburgh back when that meant something and Glavine, I think or it could'vee been Avery, was pitching a 2 hitter or even a one hitter. But the score was some bizarre thing lilke 1-0 or 2-1, and it was the ninth, and Van Slyke hit a shot, which Otis Nixon caught running and leaping up the wall in center field. Skip Cary was beside himself.

How I loved listening to him on the radio. Even now I rememeber listening to the Braves on TBS and hearing Cary and Johnson, and it's sad that it's impossible to listen to a game now - hidden as it is on cable, and no longer ubiquitous as their games are scattered on different outlets. I remember watching a Braves game in New Mexico or Colorado. No more.

I couldn't believe he caught that ball. But it was a crazy time when I knew that they'd find a way to win. Now I know that Soriano will find a way to give up a homerun to Ryan Howard or Brad Asmus.

Victory is elusive again. Which is not so bad.

I said that I listen to games on TV just now. I tend to draw and read while a game is on, only occasionally looking at it.

On the night Otis caught van Slyke's liner, I was sitting on a sun porch at night, listening to the radio.

My dad would sit in his study after working on the rail road all day, turn a Hawks game on the TV, a Braves game on the radio, and read the sports page.

That's another memory I have of baseball, or sports in Atlanta: the night Dale Murphy homered off Carlton as Wilkins hit a three pointer in over time vs Sacramento.

Which didn't happen, but that's what watching a game with dad was like, who sometimes looked up from the sports page.

I was thinking tonight that the winningest pitcher, Cy Young, might also have the most losses. That being, for instance (and here I'm mixing sports), the always winning quarterback is easy; losing is tough, it takes a toll. The quarter back who gets back on the field after a loss, after a bad play - how much mental toughness that takes.

Is it stubborness or persistance?

The Romans worshipped Victory, as did the Greeks. Nike! But Christ leads us to victory in his defeat. He helps us find victory in our defeat. We're all defeated. Death takes us all. Yet we're all in the game, even as the clock ticks down, and whether it's 70 years for us, 300 years for a nation, of 5 billion years for a planet - when the sun going red giant will vaporize even a carefully preserved Mona Lisa.

Baseball, as Carlin pointed out, stretches out to infinity. It's desire is to run home, to not get out. As Delueze points out, transcendence misleads us to seek some other place and some other time, when we are better off seeking the infinite possibilities where we are, right now, by making connections, bringing into existence, not judging. No judging: Kant never could.

As Branch Rickey used to say.

crazy stuff I draw in cheap sketchbooks

Probably not that cheap, but somewhat convoluted, especially the bottom one. The top one exemplifies a kind of freedom, the freedom to cast away and still be whole. I wish that I lived back in the book of Kells day, because I feel that I could have done some wacky stuff - If the vikingts hadn't eaten me or the scralings had not munched on my bones, or the bitter cold hadn't eaten through me in my 30s. Still - drawing lines involuting and convoluting, folding on fold and infolding and complicating - such fun.

gorgons at play

Among the images I drew while scoring essays: here "gorgons at play". They must have, have had some festivity, some access to enjoyment and letting go. The relentless turning men to stone - that must have drained them. Surely they recharged and engaged their playful side.

not the images I wanted to download, upload, whatever, but whatever.

Nothing better to do with my time than uploading images

An image.

I labled both these images "hallelujah" though only one has the word in it and the other is one of the working on the rail road images

I was contemplating how certain books are labled "bible" such as "repairman's bible" (repair man's bible - what a strange sentence), "hiker's bible" and "bible scholar's bible" - how the suffix partical "bible" is used as a modifier to indicate that a volume is a handbook. But the Bible is hardly a handbook. All my life I've had old codgers and, now, sick patients tell me, pointing to the dusty tome on the TV - "all life's answers are in there." As if that ended the matter, resolved all debates, answered any questions at all. I've found that reading it "actually reading it" tends to engender questions and in some areas mystification.

But a repairman's bible, if it were to model the actual bible, the biblical bible, should begain with a mythic saga of origins, contain a quasi-historical etiological tale of how the device to be repaired came to be, that the device has in fact been 'exiled' (scrapped, broken), and that finally, the device cannot be repaired by the person reading the repairman's bible after all. The one person who did know how to fix the device, a dishwasher perhaps, lived long ago, died and wonderfully rose again (only to be called away to another part of the galaxy). The device can now only be repaired in the next life. Meanwhile, you are free to consider the device as OK - an imputed OK; it is 'virtually' OK. As far as the manufacturer is concerned, the device is OK - even though it does not work. Finallly the repairman's bible would end with a violent tale of the end, where the manufacturer clears creation of all defective merchandise - wherein people whose dishwasher had broken, and who had resorted to doing dishes by hand while considering that the manufacturer claimed that their product was OK, and being promised a working dishwasher 'in the next life', discover, on the manufacturer's return in the apocolyptic scenario, that they can now eat with their hands. The dishwasher now no longer will matter, in the future, when dishes and glasses have been done away with. Hallelujah.

I've been working on this water color for the last several years

Several years ago, when I was water coloring some color dropped on this page and over time I've kept this page with the other things I'm working on letting it work itself and seeing where it might go. Eventually I signed it, in the lower corner, which may not be visible in these shots, which are cropped a bit.

Someone, a straw man or woman, or a real man or woman, might say, "well you're just letting it happen and calling it art - I could do that." But such an attitude misses the point. Yes, art is easy. Anyone could be putting color on surfaces and, if they let themselves go, produce good pieces. It is possible, under the dictates of mimesis, to make things difficult. The problem with any aesthetic that puts copy=real forward is that versimilitude is not a satisfying end in itself. And even versimilitude is accessible to anyone. Anyone can paint a photorealist painting: get yourself some copies of american artist and practice. After awhile it'll be easy.

The thing is, all art is easy. What isn't easy is the letting yourself go. What isn't easy is the love. Art springs from love and need - the need to make images and the love of using materials. If materials are just a means to an end, then the work will be artless - and if there is no need - then there will be no art made.

It is frustrating that we judge art based on cost, replacement value. And it is frustrating that we judge artists based on fame and money making potential. As human beings our earliest real kin are the earliest artists. Ancient humanity did not start corporations or leave behind ledgers - but they painted and sculpted.

Would that the world was filled with folk artists: making constructions in boxes, painting without rules, crafting and assembling structures and images bringing together disparate elements, dropping paint on paper, over throwing their super egos, their editing out of their creativity.

But it is not. Human beings are taught to conform, to shut up, to follow the rules, to mimic - and in that case, is it any wonder that we are diverted from being artists to being mimics - indeed believing that a mimic is an artist. That the artistry is the mimicry and not the value added of ourselves that lifts the mimicry to the authentically human and humane.

progression, 30 years

<

The top two and the bottom 2 drawings are 31 years apart. This is what the work of thirty years is for me. The middle drawing is 3 years after the bottom two - and illustrates how I had begun moving away from my post high school style. What remains constant is the level of imagination and my willingness to assemble disparate elements. I think I'm at my best when I don't care if things make sense.

stuff