4″ x 6″
This is a little creepier than I intended. Shopping malls before they open are a lot like airports before they open.
Archives for July 2014
Ortega’s Auto Shop, Santa Rosa, NM
4″ x 6″
Moving across the country this week, car broke down in northeast New Mexico. Spent the day at the Ortega family’s auto shop where Vivian got celery from the nice women and played with Biscuit the tiny dog. They fixed the car enough to drive another day across the plains under vast skies and vapor trails. Now broken down in Ft. Smith, Arkansas where I didn’t buy a radiator from some sketchy truckers in a parking lot and now have time to post a drawing to the Workaday. Better than watching the crud they have on the tv here at the car shop.
Kind of enjoying the delays, good to slow down and appreciate our country and all its many simultaneous realities.
King Oliver #6 (Pink & Blue)
Chairs
Blue Bird
Baby Grand (sketch)
Garden
Waltzing Matilda
8″ x 10″
For some reason, we learned the Australian folk song “Waltzing Matilda” in third grade music class.
Wikipedia has a great synopsis: “The song narrates the story of an itinerant worker, or ‘swagman’, making a drink of tea at a bush camp and capturing a sheep to eat. When the sheep’s owner arrives with three police officers to arrest the worker for the theft, the worker commits suicide by drowning himself in the nearby watering hole, after which his ghost haunts the site.”
I’m not sure how this made it into the Southfield Elementary curriculum. Or, for that matter, why I remember it.
Tricycle Motion
5″ x 7″
Another couple process drawings for Babboo’s Moving Pictures. Astounding how much planning is involved in a few silly movements.
Axe Motion
Rabbit & Cart
Cannon
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?