a bevy of recent work

Some examples of work completed in the last few months. I've posted them all separately before. I've joined them all here together for anyone to peruse through at once. My memory may be faulty on some sizes. Titles are provisional. I selected the opening word "Delusional" based on my love of John Berryman's poems, in particular this Dream Songs. His last collection before his death referenced Delusions in its title. At 53 I consider my life is shaped by my fantasies and delusions in a perhaps predictable way. 30 years ago I was immersed in finishing up my BFA in preparation for my MFA. I knew everything and was a master of time and space. I've managed to keep drawing and painting all these years since; enduring some rough patches, some cul de sacs, but these last several years have been a true blessing. I look forward to 30 or more years drawing and painting - greedy for time.

Delusional Landscape

24 inch square, acrylic painting

Delusional Portrait, Ordinary Unhappiness

24" x 24", acrylic painting

Delusional Nocturne About

9" x 12", acrylic painting

Delusional Sky Above

9" x 12", acrylic painting

Delusional Set Piece

9" x 12", acrylic painting

Delusional Sectional Chorus

9" x 12", acrylic painting

Delusional Journey into Long Days

36" x 48", acrylic painting

Delusional Book Club Offer

9" x 12", watercolor

Delusional Alternate Route

16" x 24", acrylic painting

Delusional Sea Food Feast

36" x 54", acrylic painting

Delusional Book Club Reading Group

36" x 54", acrylic painting

Delusional Eminence

5" x 6", watercolor

Delusional Rum Point

9" x 12", watercolor

Delusional Pieta

36" x 48", acrylic painting

Delusional Rump Oint

9" x 12", watercolor

last advent photodiary

more describing as he describes himself

he describes himself as searching for peace, trying to exercise patience, trying to find language that is real for a world of grieving beauty and beautiful grief

he describes himself as a combination of good and bad judgment, good taste and kitsch, astute and dull, quick and dense, fleet and phlegmatic, ardent and diffident, prone to being one way when he thinks he's being another, conveying one message when he thinks he's clearly saying another, sometimes adrift with an inverse reverse barometer on a sea of certainty, surviving disaster like buster keaton, oblivious to the zugzwang of life, where every day is a new day

he describes himself as someone who cares too much about the outcome of certain teams games and who looks forward to the day when relievers blow a three run lead by walking three batters and giving up a grand slam to a .128 hitter or a football team loses in "miraculous" fashion, carving out a defeat that will live for decades in the mythos and lore of some opponent, and he just won't care - college football team, professional baseball team - lose away, lose in such arcane and obscure ways as to baffle and befuddle sense and wonder - he just doesn't care anymore: emotional capital is limited, and all that is available for you is spent

he describes himself as loving books, the general codex form, some with leaves slightly deckled or with pages still uncut, with bindings of sewn signatures all tied together, placed in a case of cloth over board, with slight embossing from the type on all the pages and slight embossing of the plates for the images

he describes himself as an unreliable narrator through faulty memory, as he recalls

he describes himself as an all too imperfect perfectionist

 an unknown third person. Some months ago, hearing a speaker introduced with the phrase "he describes himself as", I was struck with how the person introducing the speaker gained some distance from the speaker - and it also seemed odd to me, though I've heard it before, this quality of being able to describe oneself is a privilege. The oddness could be phrased like this :"the person speaking tonight, who I'm introducing, speaks about himself in the third person with confidence and vigor, using adjectives and phrases that would cause the most garrulous individual to blush."

he describes himself as telling a story with narrative fractures, incisions of vignettes, knottings of unravelings

reflections on group fantasies

When the Braves announced they were moving to Cobb County - really just outside the city limits of Atlanta (perhaps so they could be close enough to Atlanta without being in it), I felt that the scales had been lifted from my eyes. I was reminded that a baseball team is, in this case, a business model. Every thing about the move makes business sense - in fact, seems ordered according to market forces. I understand from this, that regardless of my thoughts and emotional attachments with this team that the business model comes first - the team, it might as well be mayonnaise or vacuum cleaners or cruise ship travel: simply a product - imagine my embarrassment. I beg forgiveness. 

Anyway, I set about my artist's description of their coming digs. What is the most salient aspect of this little corner of I-75 and I-285? The gridlock that has made Atlanta traffic famous throughout the Southeast. Say what you will about Atlanta's "next great international city" aspirations - Traffic is our great achievement. The bottom half of the drawing below is taken up with depicting this traffic, all the buses, trucks, cars and vans that combine to form the goulash of gas guzzling that most impresses the minds of visitors and most elevates the heart rate (our twice daily aerobic exercise) of us locals. The top half is taken up with my idea of the new stadium: it seemed logical that the new stadium's design should be based on an open magnolia blossom. In the event of rain it's pointy leaves will curl up and shelter the 42,000 paying customers.

Traffic dominated my first drawing. In my second, I wanted to flesh out the developments that can take place on the property. Forming a rough V are the multiple lanes of traffic with some envisioning of future expansion.  To give a sense of scale, note the open magnolia blossom - that's the stadium! Overshadowing it is a large pig-shaped building of as yet, indeterminate use. Next to it is a large residential and business tower shaped like a ionic-Corinthian column. On the right, a bit further back is a 1200 ft tall tomahawk - because, why not! On the horizon please note: the cooling towers for a power plant that will belch out blue and red steam after every Braves victory.

I continue to flesh out how the stadium area and interchanges will evolve over time to meet the pressing needs of pressing needs. I added a Coke bottle - it would be a shame to leave out our identifying brand.

I continue to work over how all these objects might fit together. I upended the Coke bottle, because what is more refreshing than a fully emptied bottle? I tried to indicate the enormity of the parking lot by drawing in lots of median strips with hundreds of cars between each strip.

What might the experience be for the typical family exiting their minivan on game day. I clinked the tomahawk and Coke bottle together to form an arch hovering over the stadium. Perhaps they can move back and forth, urging the fans along in the tomahawk cadence. I brought the cooling towers in closer to increase the nuclear family's sense of intimacy. 

Finally, from a lower perspective, what might the average pedestrian's view of the complex be. Here I've indicated what view might obtain when the necessary lanes and interchanges have been added.

keeping up with my material

Me: I like being Maestro, being Reverend Maestro is even better:

 a sign of distinction.

Jami Moss Wise: Or pretension.

Me: No. My blood pressure's always been low

he describes himself as someone who's coming around and discovering his focus after too many years listening to other voices and weighing competing options, giving ground relative to his desire -

he describes himself as an indistinct age group

he describes himself as a participant and as a spectator in farce and tragedy

he describes himself as prone to anger, impatient with himself, projecting that impatience onto others, and generally in need of a sabbath from himself qua ego, qua needs, qua anxieties

he describes someone who had to learn how to grieve and what grief means over time, not all at once, but slice by slice

he describes himself as comfortable in his skin, at home in his body, on a business trip with his thoughts, a sightseeing excursion with his aura, a fact finding mission with his soul

he describes himself as continuing through all the griefs of life: those that engulf as well as wash up on shore

he describes himself as a memory or series of memories of something that may have happened

he describes himself as a re-description of a reflection upon himself as seen from a different perspective, as how he would describe himself if such description could account for some understanding outside himself; he understands that he demonstrates himself, that description entails a vantage point of time or space, that even in its objectivity, distorts any description of himself or others he might make; thus he describes himself as kind in expectation of kindness, disavowing information as encumbered with judgments problematic and misrecognized

he describes himself as waiting out into the surffering au courant under toed you sew, like Odysseus : where noman had gone before

he describes himself as in need of a spiritual retreat in order to make a spiritual advance - but the words: retreat, advance - they're all wrong - as are growth, understanding, insight  

he describes himself as the consummate master of comedic technique: material, delivery, craft honed over the decades - bon mots, witticisms, word play, observation, vignette, narration, pathos, bathos, farce - the sturm und drang resident in the human condition.

he describes himself with an intricate set of antique calipers, weights, scales, slides, formulae, pigments, chronometers, etc as ardent in his ardency, mercurial in his mercuriality, and celerous in his celerity; post dispatch in his journaling, with a timed picayune in his stammer, an a blind argosy in his ruminations

even more even more self descriptional whimsy

he describes himself as a comic element: comprising working-class, intellectual-class, creative-class qualities, quiddites and pretensions in an artistic send up of theology, a theological send up of art, and human send up of the human, all in an ironic non-ironic venture to enunciate his thoughts and feelings

he describes himself as outwardly modest, sedate, unassuming, albeit unkempt, rumpled, disorganized, while well read, well traveled, well

he describes himself as risk averse, though risking some things some times, yet defined as "high freedom", which seemingly indicates a propensity to risk: who discovers that while avoiding risk he creates the greatest risk situation of all; he is obscure and creates more obscurity as a way of being knowable but not necessarily known. You know him as a dare-deviled ham sandwiched egging on rank heroes - the ceremonial master of ceremonies

he describes himself as having been busy with besieging ephemera for too long - as if some adult told him, "always be sieged and besieging," - he beseeched besotted besought bees knighted

he describes himself as at home with chaos and organization, a method of non-methodical selection, a practice of chance meeting and indirect advance, that he learned from the storekeepers and mill workers of his youth, that there are speeds and intensities untapped in the work of a person's hands, which may do little if abatement of obscurity and neglect are the sole goal of striving

he describes himself as a complex series of subatomic collisions among nanoparticles configured along beams of beams airier than light conversation in a coffeehouse before coffeehouses became specialized writing centers composed of the disparate and desperate chain reactive socializations available in post-empire post-industrial america

he describes himself as falls asleep with the cat in his lap, both of us snoozing away, a beer and a volume of kierkegaard on the table

he describes himself as wave and particle, light and shadow, matter and empty, speed and composition, surface and variation, time and motion, a series of silences, a queue of occasions, a recounting of episodes, an elaboration of swans, a proposal of clouds, a front of weather, a back of the playing cards, a masque of personas, a smoke of mirrors

he describes himself as a topographic map of an internal tectonic process

he describes himself as a balloon made of made of tiny bits of mica, elevated by quarks, coursing along the boundary of a boundary in media res, sedate, volatile, votive, voting, electing, deploying, employing tongues and kindred every soul and voice, melancholy misbegotterdamerungen

he describes himself as the night sky in the mountains, the streams amplified fall down the valley, frost breathing ground crunching lumbering presence

he describes himself as looking, seeking, hoping for peace and calm, for patterns of grace and love in his life and in others

he describes himself as someone recovering from abuse and trauma, who feels anger "for no reason at all", who feels at times that he's holding together a sense of self that is all cracked up, but still somehow, holding its contents, refusing to utterly break up

he describes himself as someone who struggles with memory - not only in terms of historical events and key episodes of personal life, but also in terms of where the keys are and why he's standing in front of a shelf looking looking ... but for what

he describes himself as someone who doesn't care if anyone reads his wall: he is content to simply talk to himself and the occasional correspondent - and he hopes that people might respond to him, if they feel anyway inclined, out of a sense of kindness and curiosity, rather than obligation or guilt. He describes himself as someone whose are and life might bring some modicum of joy and calm in a symbolic world rife with distractions. Enjoy and respond or not.

what do you have to do to be de-friended?

I de-friend people on facebook in a timely fashion, usually because they begin to bloviate all over my time line. I typically don't comment on people's timelines who I loosely know: not right away and not extensively. Sometimes when I do comment, and I try to always be respectful - as if I were a vague acquaintance commenting on my own timeline - I comment just to see if they respond with interest or kindness or a warning, or in some way, either letting me know I'm welcome or not. The comment below the image got me de-friended off one thread. Oh, well. 

There were over 100 comments on a thread where people were sharing their experience as artists and the struggles they'd had. The thread's author had written on "how an artistic career should progress" and, seeing some responses in the "it's not quite so simple category" I chimed in. I was impressed at how, the longer the conversation went on, some real group work, as Wilfred Bion might say, was going on. 

I was wondering if anyone would respond to what I had to say, either a "get out of here" or an "I understand and hear you" or some such. I was knocked out in the hour. But I wanted to save my response, not to justify myself, but because I said something in it I want to hold onto.

I've had an unconventional art career - in terms of how people who write columns and books on the business of art would talk about it. I've worked as a librarian, adding an MLS to my MFA. I've worked as a webpage editor for a large web design and hosting company (large then, it's a vapor now). I scored writing and math tests for two testing companies. Finally I've worked on an MDiv and become an ordained minister in a mainline denomination. In that process I did some serious work as a chaplain resident in hospitals, Atlanta's inner city, and in assisted living facilities. I was pushed in terms of how I interacted with colleagues, patients, staff, and authority. I learned a lot about hearing people's grief. 

When I listen to other artists I hear a lot of braggadocio, a lot of promotion, insecurity, but underneath it, a lot of grief. Few of us have careers we'd dreamed of (whether we did or didn't go for BFAs or MFAs). We're still artists, even when our career arc is way off track.

"This is a beautiful conversation. L[****]  D[*****] and several of you spoke to me, and I was heartened to see people stick with the spikiness of things. I've painted a long time, squandered some opportunities after my MFA in 86, gotten plenty of bad advice. Coming from a working class background, I've found many steps I should have taken to not be so self-evident and at times since, I've been dirt poor. Things are better now. I'm still painting, drawing obsessively. I'm long past emerging - more obscure and obscuring - which is my problem, my choice. At one opening last year I ran into one of my old professors, who remembering me and delighted to see me, bragged on me no end to the gallery owner - who looked right past me. Such a tough skin I have now. Nice to be remembered."

more self description, more, faster, safer, more effective

he describes himself as someone who, in kierkegaard's words in upbuilding discourses, is in the process of discovering himself; a process that requires stepping out of the ego-boat and swimming around, trying to become at home in the currents and convections and tides that are uniquely his: while the ego is constructed in response to an other, the true material of the self is beyond the gaze of approbation or disapproval where society is distilled into the super-ego. This doesn't preclude interaction with others so much as interacting from a more accurate standpoint with actually firmer boundaries - the paradox of constructing the strong ego is that the boundaries between himself and another are mostly non-existent - this is the source of personal frustration as projected onto the driver in front in the way

he describes himself as on a boat composed of green stems navigating an ocean on the sun

he describes himself as a trebuchet, a fossil diorama, and instructions for zeppelin navigation walking into a bar - on little cat feet, pausing over the city; they order drinks from the horse-faced bar tender here, and move to a table

he describes himself as an eye, a pure scopic drive - what if the whole body were an eye? fantastic, like some pipilotti rist video, moving inside and out, within without

he describes himself as continuing to be

he describes himself as booksih, brainy, innately curious, querying, quavering, quelling, quaffing, chorusing, carousing, carouselling, capering, cavorting, traipsing, going on, ad infinitum, subtracting fi night'em, scouring, scoring, scaling, lapsing, collapsing, dislapsing, singing, singeing, sequeing, sequentialling, initializing, authorizing, authoring, mothering, mouthing err, herring boning, hounds toothing - all in the line of duty, the circle of responsibility, the trapezoid of probity, the trilateral of commissioning

he describes himself as a whirlwind competition, a leg up, a down trodden, a miss begotten, amiss bee gothic tin, an ape aping apiaries, a voice from the future, a face from the pass, a lone a love a river run

he describes himself as not really here, abandoned in place as a child and raised by Das Nichtige, only occasionally being noticed if "something's wrong", otherwise, disposable, interchangeable, negligible, left to narcissism, shame and anger, except when convenient to notice or speak to: classic

he describes himself as a bit nonplussed by Halloween, unlike his friend, Gaye Dimmick, who thrives on the festivities and occult jocularity. He's glad for his friends.

he describes himself as a self-unfulfilling prophecy

he describes himself as someone needing calm

he describes himself as an ancient skeleton, long buried in river silt, finally breaking free of the fabricated remainders of life, and, surrendered to tide and current, finding release into the sea

the ongoing saga of self description

he describes himself in Rabelaisian terms as far as appetite, the consumption of quantities, the quantification of quiddities, the liquidation of quandaries, the quadratics of equanimities, the equanimous accomodations

he describes himself as sentimental: spending hours lost in reverie; swimming through imagined memories; climbing along escarpments of closure

he describes himself as haphazardly gnostic, following in the path of Bruno, Paracelsus, and Sebastian Castello - who said, "to kill a man in defense of a doctrine, is only to kill a man" (a 16th century observation with contemporary pertinence).

he describes himself as a one-man soloist, a one-man sea saw virtuoso, a one-man one man band of brothers, a one man only child grown up into an only child among many one-men soloists for unaccompanied orchestra and viol, whose family motto - here, amuse yourself until we get home - e monobus pluriem, or some such - self-taught, self taut, self tested, self disposed

he describes himself as a paragon of fine tuned moral sensibility, trained in causuistric declensions of ethical faceting, versed in multifarious polysemous penumbras that aggregate and congregate on the surface micro-magnetism of discourse

the ego is a tiny structure created for psychic defense on a vast ocean of repressed or foreclosed symbolic meaning that is also the individual's - meanings all too often projected onto others and which thus pass from a person's self reflection.

he describes himself as shot out of a cannon by l'll orphan annie oakley as daddy warbucks beatnicks of time in tune with the changing canon of midwestern civilization to deliver a stirring address to the assembled assemblage assembly assembling of his peers

he describes himself as self unsufficient, as semi-autodidactic, as un-self reliant, in a spiral out of the loop, remembering outside of the box that he left his keys in there

he describes himself as an obscure camera obscura, a penumbrella, having a blind spot, his right eye, a terror incognito, whar bee minsters

he describes himself as tall - the first thing you have to ask is "relative to what or who?"; and then he goes on to describe himself as swift and organized - and you think but don't ask; finally he goes on about his marksmanship and the subtleties of his short game: he begins assertions with "for those of us versed in the lore ...." or "where I shine is in the ....", and of course there isn't a suitable stick anywhere around ...

he describes himself as consumed with patience patiently consuming a consummate consumer whose great great grandmother died of consumption

he describes himself with caveats and qualifications, lapsing into asides and parentheses, backed up subordinate clauses, deprecations concealing missteps, masks, mirrors, diversion, trompe l'oiel abstractions, camouflage, false flags, indirection, misdirection, et cie

he loves the text about Christ meeting the ten leopards, how he helps them not so much change their spots as accept them. Like the leopards, our own lives encounter rough spots that we seem to carry around with us for years. But these brands need not be taken as signs of incompleteness - they can, by grace, become tokens of enduring love - as one of the leopards in the story comes to recognize.

he finds himself described in what always feels like one of those dubious personality typing tests:
Four with a Five Wing: The Bohemian
Healthy
Healthy 4w5's brings profound creativity and insights of the intrapsychic sort. Their emotions are more under-the-surface than 4w3's, and more private modes of communication (such as writing) are preferred. They have intellectual as well as emotional insights and can often synthesize experiences into something intensely personal yet timeless.
Average
Average 4w5's are devoted to cultivation of a personal worldview, often by philosophical or artistic means. They are more likely than the 4w3's to be reclusive and out-of-touch with the greater social world, and to compensate they adopt unconventional/eccentric ways of life. They can be purposefully obscure and enigmatic in their expressions, then have an elitist and contemptuous view of those who failed to understand them. They tend to withdraw for prolonged periods under stress which can leave them further isolated. As a result, they are prone to hallucinatory states and total alienation.
Unhealthy
Unhealthy 4w5's inhabit a terrifying fantasy-world of their own creation. Their emotional torments are turned inward, causing severe depression and self-destructive thoughts. While average 4w5's can romantize death, unhealthy 4w5's plunge into it.
Famous 4w5's
Johnny Depp, Bob Dylan, Virginia Woolf, "Lin Daiyu", Søren Kierkegaard, John Keats, Sylvia Plath

he describes himself as someone who takes a book off a shelf in order to put it in a stack until he's cleared off enough shelf space to put the stack back on the shelf - this is his contribution to library science, like a widow's mite or something about mustard seeds and castanets into the bibliographic deep

he describes himself as enamoured of the legend of st luke painting the virgin and how this traditions carries on into modern times

he describes himself as mounting the summit, breaching the pinnacle, surmounting the vale,