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Go Down, Izzup

by

12″ x 16″

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(aka: “Six-Fingered Goose Plucker”, aka: “The Pecos Butcher”)

Voice of the painter provides an oblique angle, not authority – spurious and unhelpful as any other, perhaps more so, when it comes to enjoying an image.

Maybe like voice of a cook, might make you more attuned to the tastes in the soup. But doesn’t make the soup taste any better to hear how it was cooked. Or what the turnips represent. Or how the soup relates to current discourses on soup.

Barnett Newman said something like “Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.” But the desire to create a diptych experience – drawings in the margins of notes, or notes in the margins of drawings – I can see the point in that.

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Robins

by

6″ x 8″

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Robins have been gathering in our yard, dozens at a time, freaked by the ice, picking around frantic for food (not unlike everybody emptying the shelves at Kroger). At the top and side of this painting, I was going for the in-between light that works so well in the snow; the twilight that presses lavender in for shadows.

The idiomatic French phrase “entre chien et loup” captures it – when the light is such that you can’t tell a dog from a wolf – when the senses flicker and fail and things get unsettling.

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Ice Zebra

by

11″ x 14″

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Our yard zebra in ice, after sitting in hot gravel for years. My father is allergic to horses and, by extension, zebras. We decided next time someone asks him if he has any allergies, he’s just going to say: Zebras.

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President’s Day

by

9″ x 12″

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It’s President’s Day, so I made a little drawing of the Constitutional Convention. That was a long time ago, so I did everyone as ghosts, which they all surely are.

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Tugboat

by

11″ x 14″

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At first I saw this painting as a picture of a sinking tugboat in an oval frame hanging on a wall. But then started to wonder if I’m not looking through a porthole at the doomed vessel. I hope whatever sunk that boat doesn’t sink the boat I’m in. Or maybe my boat is a gunboat that sank that boat.

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Tiger

by

11″ x 14″
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I just opened my paints and things in my new studio and decided to do some paintings of some of the objects, like this little plastic tiger, I can’t seem to throw out, no matter how many yard sales I have. Boxes of this kind of thing. Maybe I’ll paint them, then immediately give them away.

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Hutch

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11″ x 14″
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Going south from Rye to NYC.

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Apple Cart

by

11″ x 14″

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Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Philip Guston:

“I’m not so involved with what the other guy does. You’ve got to upset your own applecart.”

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A Few Days

by

7″ x 7″

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This one owes something to Fairfield Porter, so here are a few lines by James Schuyler, with whom he lived for twelve years. These snapshot paintings have enough agita and melancholia without such lines, but there it is.

A few days
are all we have. So count them as they pass. They pass
too quickly
out of breath: don’t dwell on the grave, which yawns for
one and all.
Will you be buried in the yard? Sorry, it’s against
the law. You can only
lie in an authorized plot but you won’t be there to
know it so why worry
about it?

 

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End of Summer, Adirondacks (And the Days are Not Full Enough)

by

8″ x 8″

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Another painting for the end of summer, along with a few uplifting lines by Ezra Pound. As I type, my daughter is playing in an inflatable crab-shaped pool in the yard. These summers go by one after another, it is as if life is already in an old photo album.

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
          Not shaking the grass

 

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Deer in the Snow

by

11″ x 15″

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Flipping through an old sketchbook, I saw a quick drawing of a wastrel and its image seemed to be cast onto a wall, like a projection, but a drawing of a projection, or a drawing of a wall drawing. Here’s one that’s of a deer in such a scenario.

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Two Girls in Veils

by

11″ x 15″

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Finally got a good set of gouache paints. It is a volatile medium, each layer reconstitutes the one beneath. Like oil paint, gouache doesn’t stay put, tends toward chaos. I guess my resistance to planning things out is well-suited to uncooperative materials. Two girls, both in veils.

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Ortega’s Auto Shop, Santa Rosa, NM

by

4″ x 6″
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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.

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Waltzing Matilda

by

8″ x 10″
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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.

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Ghost and Mirror

by

7″ x 11″
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“These pieces, without preconceived connections, were written lazily from day to day, following my needs, the way it came, without pushing, following the wave, always attending to what was most pressing, in a slight wavering of truth – never to construct, simply to preserve.” – Henri Michaux

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House on Red (or Walking Back to Holland)

by

12″ x 12″

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There is this story about how Van Gogh, when he was a young man, got obsessed with a certain painter. He wanted so badly to meet this painter, he decided to walk from Holland, where he lived, to France, where the painter lived. He walked for a week and when he got there he stood in front of the painter’s house in the darkness.

The windows glowed as the old man finished his dinner and sat by the fireplace and lit his pipe. His wife was hemming a pair of trousers. The old painter stood up and poured more brandy into his wife’s, then his, glass. He sat back in his chair.

Van Gogh stood in the darkness, imagining himself knocking on the door. He spent the next week walking back to Holland.

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Library #1

by

12″ x 16″

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I travel across this Workaday post from left to right. I might say this is a memory of a room in which I learned a thing or two about drawing.

        I start a new paragraph, and then write about the painting that is posted above and make a reference to an art historical quotation, properly attributed of course, about how a painting, before being “an anecdote, or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order” (Maurice Denis).

       I start a new paragraph and make a footnote about Georges Perec’s “Species of Spaces and Other Pieces”1 and how he took such better care of his writing desk than I take of my palette.

1 even though there is nothing to clarify.

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O, I Wisht I _______ in the ________ of Cotton

by

16″ x 20″
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Something George Schneeman said like “train yourself to make the right choices first” – quoted by Alice Notley at a panel on his work.

I wasn’t quick enough to write it all down, but to paraphrase the rest – to make the right choices first so the mistakes are fewer, and when that’s not possible, to embrace the mistakes.

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Ja-Dah (Variation)

by

48″ x 60″

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The cat in the lower left was taken from a photograph of a cat in the early 1920’s. Funny how many more generations of cats have passed, than humans, in the intervening years.

Carol Robinson Gallery

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Henri Michaux

by

10″ x 15″

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The poet and painter worked in a highly personalized idiom and with a face of wonderful birdlike French-ness (or Belgian-ness).

(excerpt from “Carry Me Away” by Henri Michaux, translation by Eli Siegel)

Carry me away into a Portuguese boat of once,
Into an old and gentle Portuguese boat of once,
Into the stem of the boat, or if you wish, into the foam,
And lose me, in the distance, in the distance.

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Gilgamesh

by

11″ x 14″

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Early each morning I sit on the couch with my daughter Vivian wrapped in my robe and drink coffee and we listen to an audio recording of the Epic of Gilgamesh. On the back of this wooden panel is written what Gilgamesh kept saying when he was startled awake in the Forest of Cedars. I love the cadence of these questions and the confusion upon waking of a demigod so many generations ago.

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?

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Viking Passes a Green Hill

by

9″ x 12″

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The viking motif continues with a solo voyager. Vikings usually travel in groups, so one seizes the occasion to interlope on one’s own.

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Wastrels in Pieces

by

11″ x 15″

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Stacks of colored bars appear to have a fracturing affect on these two. For stability, I referred back to the original frontispiece from A Child’s Garden of Verses.

As the painter Paula Rego said: “Every change is a form of liberation. My mother used to say a change is always good even if it’s for the worse.”

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Gold Blocks

by

12″ x 18″
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A couple of late night block paintings, shellac ink on gessoed hardboard. Turns out there’s not a lot of time to paint when there’s a newborn, but good to keep the brush moving.

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Hush (Hat)

by

5″ x 8″

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Here are a few small sketches of family photographs from the first few decades of the 20th century. I enjoy peering into the pool. The hush is the hush of time.

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Hush (Drill)

by

18″ x 24″

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I’ve had a policy of not including outside sources on the Work-a-day page, but this seems necessary.

On Sept 25, 1864, an ancestor of mine wrote a letter to her daughter from the family home ‘Sweet Auburn’ outside Natchez, Miss. To save paper, which was in low supply, the letter was cross-written. This is such an anomaly of Victorian letter writing, happened quite a bit during a time when formal letter writing was common, but paper was not, and postage expensive. The penmanship is so elegant, but when it’s written on top of itself it gets all jangled up. The writing, nearly indecipherable, is about the current (bad) state of things (war).

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Then sixty-five years later, the letter writer’s great-great-granddaughter (my grandmother) was learning to write in her seventh grade class in Natchez. This is drill 20.

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The ancestors keep giving me stuff to draw about, I’m barely touching the surface here. More cross-writing/drawing to come.

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Pecans

by

18″ x 24″

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This drawing is based on two dimly xeroxed ancestral photographs taken by a family member in the 1910’s.

I recently read that Faulkner said his writing was a process of “sublimating the actual into the apocryphal.” One of the aspects I love about drawing is that its connection to ‘reality’ is always spurious. As it references one actuality, it simultaneously creates another, separate actuality.

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Periodic Companions #14

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9″ x 12″
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Here’s another drawing from Periodic Companions, the novel by Laynie Browne, for which I made drawings. Poor wee thing.

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Cherries

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12″ x 16″

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From this week’s Drawing the Myth and Daydream class.  Strangely also cherry-themed, like last week.  He seems enamored with her trick; I’m borderline distressed by it.

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Draw a Scorpion

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5″ x 5″

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In a book on the British painter Ken Kiff, the author refers to Art as a ‘species of Philosophy.’ I like this but wonder if there is more nuance. I think of what I do as a species of Philosophy, or sometimes a mutant relative of Linguistics, or sibling of literature. Seen from a certain angle, Painting could be considered a ‘species of Interior Design.’ Grouping like that helps me stay clear of the vortex of seeing one medium as in competition with another.

When I was in Glasgow, Painting was of no consequence, but Video Installation was of vital importance, now Social Practices (which could be seen as a ‘species of Activism’) is making Video Installation look like basket-weaving, and Painting is no longer a threat. Activism is seen as morally superior to intellectual pursuits now – not to mention the collecting of art objects – so Art that engages social issues and justice is at the top of the wheel for the moment. Will be interesting to watch the Art establishments domesticate Social Practices; reminds me of that quote from Octavio Paz: “More astute than Rome, the religion of art has absorbed all schisms.”

The above drawing: I made a note to myself and then did it, right there on the same page. Rare that happens in life.

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Christmas Eve

by

9″x 9″

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Other than Tiny Tim hoisted up in familiar fashion, unclear what else is happening here.  Good tidings, snowy sidewalks and general Christmas cheer.

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Wastrels Meet Red Guy

by

8″ x 9 1/2″

My nephews recently made a stop-motion animation of a lego space man which they called “Adventures of Red Guy.”  I aspire to such simplicity; “Red Guy” says it all.  This is a different Red Guy, less spaceman, more prancing interloper.  I have a feeling he’s a figment of Bookoo and Cilice’s shared imagination.

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Man, Rabbit and Parts of a Girl and Fox

by

8 1/2″ x 11″

This was made in preparation for a class I’m teaching called “Drawing the Myth and Daydream.”  The prompt involves picking a setting (in this case ‘under water’), a figure or animal (I did several), and a state of being (I chose ‘breaking into pieces’).  I think I should have made it more obviously under water.  Other states of being to chose from include: floating, flaming, blooming with flowers, tiny, covered in hair, dissolving, enormous, winged, and part-human/part-animal.  The first class was highly enjoyable.

 

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Children & Letters #1

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12 1/8″ x 16 1/8″

Or perhaps “Orphans and Phonemes”.  I don’t know if these wee children are orphans, but the letters appear to be.  Phonetic utterances.

This has a companion piece (as indicated by “#1”) which will be tomorrow’s workaday.

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