This one is from a sketchbook. It was originally captioned like a cartoon. The caption was: “Maybe I threw it out by accident?”
January 23, 2011
December 29, 2010
Photo Assisted Poem [PAP]: Haiku for Freeman
Maybe I don’t mean “symbolic meaning for the thing” — Maybe I mean something more like: Isn’t a haiku supposed to present the thing in such a way that thought stops at it? It seems to me that “contain” raises too many questions about the nature of a reflection to let the mind rest on the image…
Freeman Ng of “Haiku Diem” fame broke his foot yesterdiem. Sorry to hear it, Freeman. I hope you mend quickly and suffer nothing further as a result of this accident.
December 19, 2010
December 14, 2010
December 12, 2010
Another Positive Sunday Workshop
The Leaders of the Future at Project WOW! worked for two hours turning their silhouettes of Ball Categories into dynamic wall decorations for the mural. These will eventually share wall space with a special iconography they are developing and some sort of (possibly verbal) history of Project Wow!
We also started to talk about experimenting with colors in relation to the success of designs. Here’s a demo I worked up before the workshop. Weeks ago, after watching SENSOLOGY by Michel Gagne and MIGRATIONS by Alyssa Sherwood, participants tried to visually evoke beats they like. The first mural we are doing is for the drop-in center’s entry way and they are trying to create a welcome. Bashir — where are you Bashir? — said after watching the films that she’d like to try to use the techniques we saw to catch the spirit she feels upon entering Project WOW!: “Pump the Beat!”
These first drawings were experimental and didn’t generate too much enthusiasm. I played with a bit of this one by Midget (self-styled) to show how playing with colors, borders and ground colors could bring out what was potential in first efforts.
December 7, 2010
A Little Color Just For Today
Spent the day working on an illustration for a holiday story by Freeman Ng. Should be done in a day or two, woulda been done today but my printer ran out of ink. (What’s pictured is not the illustration I’m working on, this is a part of the second drawing I did for the Kicked Out people for Queer History Month.) Strange day, today MYDP would have been six months.
November 23, 2010
Another Stereoscope: Bilby and Lynda B.
Stereoscope juxtaposing Plate XI from William Blake’s ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE BOOK OF JOB (1826) and Panel 2, page 74 from Lynda Barry’s THE FREDDIE STORIES (1999). Separated by 173 years, sharing a similar vision. I’m sure Lynda Barry has seen this image of Blake’s. Does that make her’s a copy of his? Not necessarily. Blake himself found the poses and compositions for his divine visions in reproductions of Renaissance Masterworks.
I find this likeness wonderful and marvelous. I have notes for an essay I’d like to put up as a permanent page here. For now, though, I will suggest the direction the essay would take with a quote from a book I’ve already mentioned here:
“Medieval visionary allegory offers its readers participation in a process of psychic redemption closely resembling, though wider in scope than, modern psychotherapy …
“the basic content and structural elements of such allegory consist largely of imagery derived from and constituting progressive developments of the imagery of classical and pre-classical religion and myth, as they are manifested in literature and art …
“The major poets of medieval visionary allegory regard themselves as part of a cumulative tradition, in which each allegorist recapitulates, refines and develops the thought and imagery of his [sic] predecessors, exploring new dimensions of traditional topics, and, most important, attempting to integrate earlier thought and imagery pertaining to the topic into a coherent whole …
“Allegory as a serious genre waned in the fifteenth century owing to the growing inability of allegorical poets to continue to achieve imaginative comprehension of the symbolical and mythical elements of the form. By the seventeenth century, a more strictly analytic approach to the phenomenal world made allegorizing seem intellectually trivial … ”
(from Propositions 1, 2, 8 & 9 from the introduction to Paul Piehler’s THE VISIONARY LANDSCAPE (pps 19-20)
And a last thought:
Is 173 years a long time? A bit too long, I guess, for any one of us to endure. Whatever the number of years, Blake seems irrevocably long ago, from the age of revolution, the mythical time of our era’s origin. His words, images and ideas shine through history like a dead star. He has, it seems, joined history — that flat offensive significance of human life which the living are barred from entering.
Meanwhile, Lynda Barry has such a knack for the voices of adolescence and childhood she seems to resurrect a reader’s own past. The memories she stirs live again.
That makes THE FREDDIE STORIES all the more a marvel: in it Freddie undergoes a “journey to the underworld” which employs imagery familiar from Dante’s journey, even Virgil’s journey. But she builds Freddie’s journey of ” psychic redemption” out of such recognizable, contemporary stuff that she invites us to our own inside of a visionary landscape that has floated along with people for thousands of years.
November 14, 2010
My Most Enduring Collaboration
This is a photograph of a video. I took video of a collage executed in 1998 by Maya Poran. Though untitled, I call the collage “Maya’s Vase” because it was executed over the entire surface of a terra cotta pot. I was so taken with the design that I video-taped it (this is the late nineties) and then, watching the tape in a darkened room and fiddling with the various “dials” on the “television” I photographed the images on screen. Or rather I photographed the phantoms I saw in the collage. I then chose some of the photographs to use as reference material for a series of paintings. I exhibited the paintings in a show at Noah’s Underground Gallery in Ann Arbor in early 2000. The show was called, “Images From Maya’s Vase.”
The above from-video photograph was used as reference for a painting called “The Ark’s Abandoned.” The colorful drapery-seeming thing at the top center of the image I took to be the Biblical ark. To the front of it on the right, in the rising flood waters a man shelters himself with a tarp. Between the man and the ark, drowned or low-flying birds.
Though in the Bible’s account the ark is painted with bitumen-pitch-asphalt (?) I treated the designs on the ark’s drapery like calligraphy and quoted chapter and verse the saddest line in the whole Noah story (Gen. 6:6) I wrote it without vowels, as was the fashion:
One of the things I liked most about Maya’s Vase was that it collaged different kinds of figuration, as seen above: a photo-centric (what the camera could record) depiction of water is overlaid with a conventional line drawing of waves. In other places conventional crescent moons hung over naturalistic twilight gatherings, the geometrical stars and stripes of an American Flag transformed into the gossamerest gossamer of angel’s wings. The angel herself seen in the conventional way, as a nude human being with wings, had the most naked, human of flesh, livid and goose-pimpled.
This is a straight-forward photograph of the portion of the collage seen altered by video above. Just a detail of it, not the whole, and turned on it’s side so that you can see that the image of the man covering himself with the tarp arose, ironically enough, from the drawing of a fish.
A pen and ink study of the man who used to be a fish. And a second study, painted in soupy acrylics:
Here the fish is oriented as it was in the original and in the video so that you can better compare it to the man.
To show a little more how generative this process of video-taping and photographing Maya’s collaged elements was, here is another example. It is the same section of the collage as above, this time photographed as reference for a different painting, this one entitled: “None of the Sentinels Know.” (Actually I just changed the title here. This version is close enough and has a more natural ring than the original title.) Here again are the fish and the birds and the drapery. But now I see two sentinels standing watch in front of a typical death’s head.
This is ten years ago and more. My art practices have changed. Up until 2000 many of my paintings took shape in a way similar to the “images from Maya’s Vase.” At the time, I searched for compositions by a kind of divination. I was always photographing videos or video-taping photographs, zooming in, raising the contrast. There was a Rorshach-y Ink-blotty quality to my discoveries. My mind made sense where there was none. It was very much like bumping into a dream image. I found the process bracing and cleansing. Today, the vase is still on display in our “play room.” I value it most of the objects from that time. The photographs I value next. Now though, I value them for their surface qualities, the strange harmonies of the colors, still this mix of the conventional and the naturalistic, the atmospheric effects. These surface qualities demand no explanation, and communicate a charge of meaning as powerful to any viewer as my original interpretations were to me alone.
