A-E-I-O-U. And sometimes what? No one who learned their vowels in grade school can say them without adding, “and sometimes Y.” And everyone who ever learned their vowels learned very quickly that for every way that a vowel sounds there are a bunch of other ways that changes. To confuse things, letters like W can bring up the tail end of a vowel and complete its sound, like the word “cow.” In short, there are no end to the crazy combinations of diphthongs, and language eccentricities in our esoteric English Language, or as one author puts it, the Anguish Language.
I find the use of words, the shapes of letters, their combination and usage fascinating. I have allowed letters and odd words to float around my pieces, to drift in and hover there as if they are trying to speak up or trying to keep up with the other parts of the drawing.
In my piece aeiou, lower case, I celebrate the airiness of vowels, how in and by themselves they seem to float in and out of words with grace and or elegance, and sometimes awkwardness. The drawing in this example began by an accidental coffee stain in the middle of a brand-new sheet of Arches. A frustrating way to begin a drawing, but ok, let’s go with it. I really wanted that subtle brown stain to stand out in spite of its lack of solidity. It is but of wisp of air, smoke out of a chimney slowly dissipating into the atmosphere, like a vowel. The viewer cannot lean into it, but the viewer cannot get around it, just like a vowel.
Around it floats the consonants of the piece. These are the hard notions that try to grab their slice of the action… a broken pencil, a penciled in sheep, blots of purple watercolor, a long thin man. These are the flashes of reality we get through our day that float around our consciousness, never taking full shape, but always shaping our reality. It would be nice to think they all mean something, but they are only connected by the line that our life takes through them. They are only held together, those bits and pieces, because of the vowels that hold them together, those ephemeral translucent, changeable wisps of air.
We have a fish in our pond we named Lynyrd Skynyrd Jones, after the country song. To hear our four-year-old grandson talk of it, one would hear a long-convoluted story of the life of Lynyrd Skynyrd Jones, that in the end, makes no sense whatsoever. While it may be perplexing to hear his story, his random addition of details and confusing sequence of events are the very things that give his story their charm. By the end of hearing him we cannot help but be fascinated by all of it whether any of it makes any sense of not. It is his mispronunciations, his needless repetitions of words, the fragmented, dreamlike quality of his speaking that captivated us as we listened to him tell his story the other day. These are the things outside the story, the bowels and vowels that hold a story together. And sometimes, they are the very things that are holding our lives together.
While they may not be as hard and as attractive as magnets, they still have the power to draw us in.