5″ x 7″
I feel like if I could read the text I’d be able to get a grip on what’s happening here. It’s like the dream I had where I was trying to read text on a piece of paper but the words were upside-down, so I turned the paper around and they were still upside down.
available
Ford LTD
Hands and Arms
11″ x 14″
“I think of everything I do as a form of drawing.”
“Every day I awake with the idea that ‘today I must teach myself to draw’. I have also each day to experience the fact that images can only emerge out of chaos.”
I love these quotes from Leon Kossoff, hilariously obsesses with drawing – as one must be. Images can only emerge out of chaos.
Related Images:
Cezanne
Georges Perec, 1970
Austria
Not the House in My Dream #1
12″ x 16″
For as long as I can remember I have had a recurring dream about a house. The plot line of the dream is a variation on a theme. I am in a situation where I have no where to live and I remember that I actually own a large house on a hill, perhaps a family house. I once lived in the basement of this house but left a long time ago, was relieved to put it behind me. The house is not a a good place, not loving, but haunted, bereft, a place of dread, and I’m faced with the prospect of having to go back to live in it again. This is not really that house, and neither is the other one, but something close.
Related Images:
Mt. Vernon 03
Mt. Vernon, NY
Shubuta xi.
Someday I will try to work one of the these up in oil, but so far the image is too turbulent, shifty, and oil doesn’t lend itself to improvisation for me – or I don’t lend myself to planning things out. A corny metaphor, but drawing can be like jazz – pick a key and start playing. Oil painting is operatic. Try to improvise an opera and you’ve got a nasty mess on your hands. I admire painters who seem to truly improvise complex paintings in oil. Amy Sillman, Tim Hyman, R.B. Kitaj, Nicole Eisenman, Ken Kiff to name a few.
Related Images:
Shubuta ix.
Shubuta viii.
Gone to Shubuta (vii.)
Gone to Shubuta (vi.)
Gone to Shubuta (v.)
Sumer #2
Sumer
River Water
De Lumine e Umbra
Fire (Wastrels Discover Fire)
Blocks and Flying Eye
Night Crawlers
13″ x 13″
There was a man who was so disturbed by the sight of his own shadow and so displeased with his own footsteps that he determined to get rid of both. The method he hit upon was to run away from them. So he got up and ran. But every time he put his foot down there was another step, while his shadow kept up with him without the slightest difficulty. He attributed his failure to the fact that he was not running fast enough. So he ran faster and faster without stopping until he finally dropped dead. He failed to realize that if he merely stepped into the shade, his shadow would vanish, and if he sat down and stayed still, there would be no more footsteps.
(Chuang Tzu, 4th c. BCE)
Related Images:
Birthday Blocks, Yellow, Red and Pink
Wastrels Go To Shubuta
What We Were in the Olden Times
Blue ballpoint pens are, I think, terrible to write with but the lines sling all around, good for drawing. The river below. Above is a sketch of this little lady from a group of plaster Fisher-Price casts I did years ago. In this she’s maybe an ancestor, or celestial something.
Related Images:
Hush Up
Fern
Bees Took a Balustrade Down
Sources and Expenditures
The snake is saying, “For me, drawing is a source of energy, while painting is the expenditure of energy.” I really have to say that’s my experience as well. As much as they have over-lapping concerns, the stylus and the brush are very different instruments and when I go looking for how an artist thinks, I look at their drawings. It’s like looking at their drawings gets you closer to the source of what motivates their ideas.
Related Images:
Weevil Sanders Goes to Town
Why Is Six Afraid of Seven
Because seven ate nine. On another note, the word stylus comes to us from Etruscan, as few words do.
Recently talking with Bill B. about polysemy and open meanings in drawing and writing. He said about one poem “as much polysemy as the poem can bear.” (phrasing taken from something Jane Freilicher said, about wanting “as much light as the painting can bear”).
Related Images:
Of the Federal Occupation
Sugar Ants in the Cracker Pail
Nightfall in the Switch-cane
Where Is That Emmaline?
Clearing on the Road to Shurbutee
Miss Ethel Fetch Them Tattle Treats
Sing Sally Sally Hold the Shovel
Bed in the Yard
Boxing with Cherry Hands
Bed Barge, Pink Light
Washington Parting the Delaware
Three Figures, Two Horses and a Tree
Watersnake
Nine Faces
Rattler
Cocktail Bar
Live Oak IV.
Two Beds Upright Make an A
Largest Prairie Dog in the World
Thirty-Six Inch Long Donkey
Incredible Six-Legged Steer
Before exit 70 on the interstate that runs the length of Kansas there is a series of signs tempting one to pull off and admire the “incredible six-legged steer.” I just came across some notes I had drawn while driving (I know) and worked them up into more developed drawings. Maybe interesting for those who follow the Wastrels saga on this page, clearly the genesis of the eight-leg deer . . .
The next few drawings are of related oddities of beast at the same exit.
Related Images:
Panther
Cilice Is Raining On the Inside
Holding Onto a Tree
Pioneers, Pink Horse
Feasssssst
Night Crawlers
Cilice Marked by Sleep
Wastrels on the Roof #2
Wastrels on the Roof #1
Milk Jug
Bookoo and the Breach of Trust
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