The World According to Hornets

It’s the middle of summer and the insects at my house have taken over. I’ve got a ground level attack from porky black ants and praying mantises, and spiders casting webs as long as my arm across every chasm. One web I discovered covered my entire pond, a feat I believe was only accomplished by an arachnid architect who understood weight bearing parabolas and structural integrity. Suffice to say it was amazingly complex and tangled web that was woven, just out of reach of the mouthy koi underneath.

Dominating the air space, however, are my NOT favorite insect—hornets—but only because I’ve been stung several times and it hurts like the dickens. I have a healthy respect for them as they pack a powerful bite and fly and hover erratically, depending on how angry they are. A few summers ago, for example, I was trimming one of my large cypress bushes, and had the good sense to put on some heavy gloves before starting that job. I must have stirred up the proverbial hornet’s nest because I looked down at my gloved hand to witness a hornet furiously trying to get its stinger through my leather glove. My immediate thought was to swipe it away, but I suddenly realized that if it was going to bite me, it would have done so by then, and I might just as well watch it vainly try to burrow into hand.

Over the years I saved the various size hornets nests I’ve found. Sometimes I find them cleverly tucked away in a corner of a gutter, and sometimes they are hanging by a thread out in the open, but the oddest one is the nest I find every year inside our back doorbell. It is one of those old-fashioned doorbells that rings when you pull the string, but no one coming to our back door ever rings it because it looks too decorative to have any real function. On the rare occasion when we do pull the string, the reverberations must, to the hornet, be equivalent to having a jet airliner take off in your living room because a hornet shoots out like a F-14 on a battleship. In any case, I can’t take the doorbell apart to clean out the hornet’s nest without risk being stung, but we can’t get in the door either. So, every summer I make this special bag device that traps the insect, and our entranceway returns to normal.

Now the hornets have returned in the menacing swirls of The World According to Hornets, where one can almost hear their warning buzzes. Each brown oval includes a nest and outlines an imaginary boundary a hornet once occupied. My intention was to subtly offset the paper nests with my own handmade sheet of paper, contrasting the way we as humans do things and the way nature does things. My design is united by a few simple colors but complicated by the many little worlds each swirl represents, each orbiting and creating their own buzz. I thought about drawing some of my favorite little characters here and there, or collaging in some real bugs, but I opted to leave the nests to stand on their own, supported only by the grainy spiral patterns of flight, evidence that hornets were once here.

Is this picture a hornet ghost town? Have they have escaped the crazy life full of ugly political signage, privacy fences, fake deers, and cars double-parked on lawns? Here inside this art, there are no more hornets left, no sounds or activity. Only their nests are left as evidence to nature’s neat but intricate, simple, and intelligent world.

Cash: Then and Now

Our house of the last fourteen years came with a blessing and a curse called a koi pond. Within the first week, the curse part was working overtime, in that we discovered that the pond was being run by an ancient sump pump. The pond was murky, green with algae, having been built in an area of our yard that was the worst possible location: full sun.

We ordered a new pump; I installed it and hoped the pond would start moving the water and the algae would go away. The next morning, when I came out to see how the pond was doing, I noticed the water had changed colors from a pea soup color to a weird orangish hue. I thought this was a weird color to see in a pond, and even weirder that the orange-ness was shifting about, almost like the water was moving beneath the surface. That shiftiness turned out to be three hundred goldfish which over years of neglect, had been left to breed and were now creating an almost solid orange environment.

Since that time, we have managed to correct the Ph, cart off the excess fish, get the waterfall to work and seen everything from fox to blue heron make regular visits, all this is in the heart of an urban setting. However, one of the most frequent visitors to the pond is my grandson Cash, who loves to feed the fish and unearth whatever might be lurking between the rocks and tall irises around the watery edges. While flipping through the many pictures we have taken of him at the pond, I abruptly had a remembrance of a drawing I did, over fifty years prior, of a child kneeling similar to one of the photos we had taken.

Both the photo and the drawing are shown here for comparison. A bit eerie, isn’t it? The actual drawing still hangs in a prominent place in my dad’s work-out room. Who would know that over fifty years later, I would have a grandson poised just like the drawing, complete with a fish net!

The colored pencil drawing, executed when I was eleven or twelve, was part of an advertisement on the back of a National Geographic magazine that caught my attention. I remember having a lot of trouble managing the background by blending the colored pencils. At that age, I did not understand that things in the foreground are in focus, and that my background was not going to look realistic because it would be out of focus. That is what happens, of course to things that are further away, but I did not have that knowledge then.

Yesterday, just as we were posting these dual pictures, I looked up to see Cash standing in the pond. Now, here at the Bender’s we have a strict rule about four-year-old’s getting into a pond. We put his clothes in the dryer and put him in a five-minute time-out, wrapped in a towel in the warm sun. Glancing over at him in his lawn chair, I tried to keep a stern grandpa face, the one that says, “I’m serious about this rule.” Still, I had to laugh inside, knowing that there was a boy just like him in a picture in a frame that has been kneeling by the water’s edge for over fifty years, perfectly safe, carefully picking through what discoveries he might find in his tiny fish net.

He is learning about nature on a level lost to most of us, peering with intense curiosity at the mysteries pond life may reveal. I am learning that time moves forward, and that God’s hand is in every detail, down to the last mark of a colored pencil.

Bright Blue “Birthday” Music

Emily, my daughter, has a birthday this weekend. She is a mom of two, a nurturing wife, and has three jobs, but these roles do not define her. It is her attitude, her daily walk and character that really turns a spotlight on her many accomplishments. In honor of her birthday, I thought this would be a good time to shed some light on our dual painting performance many years ago when she was only eight, a snippet of which you can find here.

To give a little background, our performance involved painting while the Evansville Philharmonic played “Bright Blue Music,” a contemporary and exuberant run through a rainbow of sounds composed by Michael Torke. If you have never heard the entire song, it is worth the twelve-minute ride and will leave you catching your artistic breath with its wild highs and lows.

Initially, I was called into a meeting with some of this town’s most reputable artistic sponsors and personalities. I can tell you I was a bit intimidated sitting at the table, wondering why I had been called in. Given that my art is a bit “out there” for this area, I assumed I had made created something that crossed some forbidden boundaries, and I had been called into be admonished.

Rather than be scolded for “over-expressing” myself, I was invited to participate in a new event with the philharmonic called the “Color Symphony,” I once-a-year tradition in which kids are invited to participate in the orchestra’s music in ways that might inspire them to produce future works of art of their own. My reaction to the invitation was to tell the panel that I thought they had picked the wrong guy for the job. I had no stage experience, I told them and thought their idea would be better served picking an actor, rather than artist, who could be more flamboyant and effervescing. Lucky for me and for Emily, my opinion was rejected.

Over the span of the next couple for months, I devised a way to paint with Emily where we both could work together and cover a huge canvas to the syncopated rhythms of the philharmonic’s“Bright Blue Music.” Emily was young, so I took some time to teach her to listen to the music’s soft parts, the crescendos, and silences. We practiced by drawing on long sheets of paper, speeding up and slowing down to the music and using colors that reflected the energy we heard as it changed in the song.

By the night of the performance, Emily and I knew every note.

As a nod to the found objects I use in my art, I had gathered old unusable instruments to hide in the orchestra. At predetermined intervals, Emily, dressed in her overalls, disappeared among the musicians, and returned to place the instruments on pegs on the huge gestural painting. Slowly, ebbing and flowing with the entire orchestra behind us, we kept pace with the imaginary colors we” heard,” and the sounds we “saw,” dipping our brushes into bucket after bucket of color. It was as if the spectrum flowed magically out of the song and filled the stadium. In that audience were hundreds of kids watching Emily, more excited than envious, dreaming of paintings they would create in their own future imaginative symphonies.

However, it was not the conductor who signaled the final note. At the end of the song, that master stroke went to Emily who placed the conductor’s baton on the painting as one last long note of an oboe faded. The music, so bright and so blue, shone over a little painter, my daughter, that day. Nowadays, Emily spends more time cleaning up after her two sons’ art, but somewhere in the background, I can still hear the bright music playing.

Ying Yang Ping Pong

As my father nears 99 years old...yes...you heard me right…99! I realize I have had an amazing opportunity to watch as he transitions through many different seasons of life. My dad has had a very long life, and a long season with the game of ping pong. The art piece in this blog, Ying Yang Ping Pong, is an homage to him. He is a vet and was stationed in Korea seventy years ago, one of the physicians to the 50,000 prisoners on island of Koje-do. There were many hours during his service where he had to keep his mind distracted from his loneliness and boredom. The game of ping pong was one of his favorite preoccupations, along with chess, painting and writing letters home to his young wife, Lois. Although our family did not always have a ping pong table at our house, dad always seem to find one somewhere as we grew up. Whether it be on a vacation, a neighbor’s house, or in our church’s basement, our dad was always involved in a game of table tennis, showing off the tricks he had learned overseas from hour after hour of play.

The fact that dad is alive and moving at ninety-nine is a miracle in itself. He still has a tricky serve I cannot return, and on the off chance I do, my return is so poor he easily finishes the point by slamming it down my throat (in a nice way). How does he stay so sharp? He practices against a robot, which can simulate different speeds, spins, and rotations better than most of dad’s human opponents. He also plays by the rules, which includes insisting that opponents toss the ball correctly on the serve. Try to serve the ball out of your hand against my dad, well, you are going to lose the point. That is the way it is with my dad and table tennis. Serve big (and correctly) or go home.

Watching him navigate his 90’s has shown me how he uses what is available to him to filter life’s challenges, just like he did when he was in Korea. I’m still filtering myself, zigzagging through choices, learning every day. I never understood as a kid why dad wouldn’t let me win a point or let me win a game. I thought he just couldn’t stand to lose, or that it had something to do with his fierce competitiveness. That may be part of it, but I think it had more to do with the hours and hours he spent playing in Korea, hitting shot after shot to help lift his spirit when he missed my mom too much. But I understand his fighting spirit better now. It is his default when life gets challenging, and when life tests his survival instincts. It is true now and was true when he was stationed in Korea. He was fighting for his life and his country, and wasn’t going to give up any ground, or any point, without taking a few prisoners along the way.

This artwork of mine is a symbol for the game that my dad has played all his life.

If you investigate this piece, your eye begins to jump around to many colored areas, objects, and splashes, but they bump off each other, jumping back and forth at obtuse angles. The ball’s imaginary trajectory, and your eye, zigs and zags across my table tennis composition, and it’s not always firm footing. Yes, the movement dominates the design, but there is no winner or loser, just a funny orange ball trying to find its way back to dad. It’s his shot, then mine. Maybe it’s your shot too. Perhaps in viewing the splashes of color, the abrupt changes of angles, the scrawled characters and cryptic writing, some humor emerges in Ying Yang Ping Pong that offset some funky bounces, those errant shots in life.

There is an actual ping pong ball sitting like a big orange painted dot on the lower half of the piece. Perhaps it is a shot I hit too hard, or maybe it is one of dad’s crafty serves I cannot return. It is part of a rally that is still alive on the table, one to be experienced and enjoyed regardless of the outcome.

Odds are, dad will angle it for a winner.

Grape Waffles and Five Irons

Back in the day when I was stretching as many grilled cheese sandwiches out of a paycheck as the law would allow, I took a chance on entering one of my pieces into a show called the Schoharie County National Small Print and Drawing Exhibition in Chautauqua, New York. To enter the exhibition, I needed to send in a labelled 35mm slide, making sure the piece was under 200 square inches (thus the word small). Off in the mail went the slide labelled Grape Waffles and Five Irons, one of the first pieces that came out of my child drawing series I had begun that year.

Fast forward a couple of weeks: I open a letter congratulating me on being accepted into the show, with a caveat in small letters that said, “…provided the actual piece matches the slide image.” Ok, no problem, I thought. However, when I went over to my storage cabinet and pulled out the actual piece, I realize it was four times bigger than what I had said it was when I labelled the slide and sent it off to be reviewed. No kidding! My heart sunk, I’m a buffoon, the cow jumped into the moon. And I thought of jumping off a bridge for my epic fail.

What I had done was send in a slide without checking the dimensions of my actual piece, a piece that had passed a preliminary slide review at a national competition judged by none other than Ivan Karp, the owner and manager of the prestigious OK Harris Gallery in New York. Realizing my mistake was one of those moments of disbelief where my brain had an out of body experience on a busy street corner with a homeless sign.

Then I had an AHA! moment. Or, given the circumstances, maybe the moment was…OK!

What would happen if I could somehow copy the original so that it met the size requirements? Hmmmm.

First and worst, Grape Waffles and Five Irons was drawn on a sheet of handmade paper, not something easily replicated. Fortunately, I had a bit of the original paper pulp left in the blender, just enough to cast another sheet (yes, that was back in the day when I was making sheets in Bender’s blender). Next, I borrowed an overhead projector (this was 1984) that allowed me to scale down the piece onto the new sheet, and lightly outline the main shapes and lines. After a few final color touches and some blind skill, a wish and a prayer, and three cups of really bad coffee, VOILA! I packaged and sent the piece off to the New York, hoping Mr. Karp would not check it too carefully against the original slide. Ok, so far so good.

It worked. I received a Best of Show award, and five hundred dollars, mainly because I had refused to be defeated by my own carelessness. I had had a bad moment, not a bad career. At that time the prize was enough money for me to buy my own coffee machine, a new Bender’s blender and a math tutor that helped me understand what “square inches” means.

Art lesson for the day: Don’t give up. You never know when you are only a few square inches shy of success. Try it a new way, even it feels like you are working backwards. You may just turn an epic failure into a Best-of-Something-Award. That may turn out to be more than just OK.

What Is Hidden in the Tracks

Some of my best pieces of art were built at a time when I was under the most stress. But those artworks were not a true measure of my creativity but are a measure of the frustration in my life at that time. I made a number of works under pressure in grad school, when problems from school and my personal life were teaming all around me. I had a broken car, no money, and very few trustworthy friends. Most of them were like me, balancing life with too much alcohol, too little sleep, and not enough encouragement from our instructors. Still, out of that period came some dynamic art from a part of me that was still operable.

I remember walking to my studio on torn up unmaintained sidewalks, passing speak-easy bars, and then over a set of railroad tracks that ran behind our studios. When a train came around the bend and ripped a thundering path just outside the windows where we worked, we had to hold down our art materials to keep them falling off the vibrating tables.

Walking to my studio one day, I noticed a deserted and rusted bike in the weeds by the rail road tracks. Partly out of lack of money, and partly out of a love of the found object, I wrestled the broken bike up to the tracks to see if it could be salvaged for my art, and suddenly had the notion of leaving it partly on the tracks for the train to run over when it came by. Since I walked this path every day, I figured I could reposition it over and over until the bike changed into the object I was seeking. Simply put, I thought the train could make a piece of art for me.

Over the next few months as I walked to school, I continued to adjust the bike on the tracks so the train would flatten out a new area each time it roared by. Sometimes it was several hundred feet farther from where I had put it, having been pushed along, then thrown aside by the moving train. Eventually, the bike’s entire metal frame was flattened to within an inch, well, actually within an eighth inch of its life. (I should add that it is a federal offense to leave anything on a railroad track, the danger being one could derail the train. That is not such a good idea, considering that trains are big, move fast and don’t stop easily.

What I hauled into the studio months later looked nothing like a bike anymore, but a bike that had been pressed down by the power of a locomotive. It was a new form. You could still barely recognize it as a bike but one that obviously had a complete face lift. Ridden hard and run over wet. Since I was working on my masters in printmaking, I looked at this flat object as a surface that would accept ink which could then be transferred to paper, a print process known as relief printing. In the case of my bike, when I rolled the ink across the train-flattened surface and placed paper over it, the print that came up was oddly familiar to the viewer, a sort of humorously sad sight, like spilt ice cream melting on a sidewalk.

It is probably not such a good idea to put bikes on railroad tracks. However, our creativity takes us along hidden paths we do not fully understand until we take the risk and follow our instincts, not our fears. However, if we artists give ourselves the permission to go ahead and take those first steps to create, we move down the tracks just enough to see what is hiding around the bend.

At War with Jack's Rats

On their last morning of vacation, my daughter’s family met us to absorb the last savory breaths of the ocean. Perhaps nowhere else in nature are all of our senses so alive, feeding on the sensibilities that landscape whips up. Our grandsons especially seem transported on the millions of footprints underneath their own tiny feet, only surpassed by an endless indigo morning sky and ticklish seafoam.

This universe is the mystery that covers us when unseen smells mitigate stress levels on a wind that tosses our hair until it is the same mop everyone else has on the beach. Can someone explain to me again why we are getting our hair styled, and spending a fortune on “product?”

Our family spent the next hour bent down peering for sharks’ teeth on the line where high tide had reached its apex. Shiny black, sharp triangles occasionally popped up and even the four-year-old, several feet closer to the sand than us, found a few of them. In all, our collection amounted to perhaps a dozen before time drew a window shade on their trip and they raced away to catch their flight home. We all should be reminded of the days when what we were doing was so much fun that time stood still and we became so immersed in the moment that no greater purpose or ambition could improve our existence.

When we hugged goodbye, tiny salty-filled tears began to form as my grandson Cash tried to fathom any other life than that of time spent finding sharks teeth surrounded by everyone who loves him most. It was as if his emotions had been dipped into a smorgasbord, and I pried him loose to place him in his car seat. He had freely roamed the beach complete of threats, scolding, correction, or advice. Nature and encouragement alone were his boundaries. We would all do well to use those same boundaries as we forage in our high and low tides. Is it no wonder we often come up empty handed, feeling confused and fearful?

I wonder too if my art is able to call up whose same emotions in my viewers. Have I been successful making pieces that are really washed up in some ego centered tide of my own selfish making? Is my art riding on the restless surface or below the waterline where the richer still moments rest? Is the viewer able to lean into the marks and found objects in my work and take a brief vacation if only for a second, before being called to catch another flight?

In At War with Jack’s Rats, I am on a quest, looking out from the crow’s nest with my spy-scope, keeping watch over the ocean for unwanted flotsam and jetsam that might jam my rudder, my path forward, my metaphorical journey for wisdom. The weather seems tempestuous where I scratched the zinc plate in this hand-colored etching. Fog (spit-biting for those of you familiar with the technique) fills the atmosphere around the ship with scratchings of words and commands being yelled by hidden sailors on board. I am maintaining my course, but I am besieged by an imaginary sea of waring, short tempered pirates. They are nothing but the dull-witted rats we all face. They merely need to be kicked aside. They are not to be feared for their tempestuousness. Batten down those hatches. We are loved.

aeiou

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.

Harv Questions Mr. Klee

Most of your artsy types are familiar with the name Paul Klee, Swiss born artist whose investigations into color theory, and the power of line were pivotal in the infancy of modern art. If you get a sec, take a second look at The Twittering Machine, a precursor to Rube Goldberg’s Mouse Trap game in two dimensions that calls us to visually turn the crank on a machine that makes birds chirp. The same is true in Klee’s Fish Magic, where the viewer must address up and down, under and over, night and day. These pieces and many others of his often leave us wondering where the light is coming from, which in turn leaves us wondering how we are supposed to get our footing. You have to love art that keeps you a little off center, and challenges you to figure out where you are standing.

As you may have discovered, I have several archetypical alter egos that, while never the focal point in a work of my art, allow me to go down the proverbial rabbit hole to my playful side. Harv is one of those guys. Harv, for the record, is never without his H-mobile, the H spinning incessantly as the propellor for his spaceship/car/boat. Harv is kind of the James Bond of pajama parties, the Jason Bourne of out-of-control smash cakes. When I draw him into one of my pieces, he has to negotiate his way through any sort of visual cataclysm. Several of those have included storms of mathematical equations, which sweep through the canvas like a comet, or a big bad balloon bearing down on him out of the clouds.

Harv, primitively drawn, is at the controls, revving up his propeller, not to escape, but to weather the adventure. He is not sad or afraid of his circumstances, because those just make for a better story later.

In Harv Questions Mr. Klee, Harv’s, I drew the little submarine-like H-mobile from a cereal box sticker. It appears as if some aqua-hand has gone wild with spots of color which now float about the picture like bubbles in an aquarium. And as if the hand did not adequately identify those fingerprinted bubbles of color, part of the word “MINE” appears at the bottom. It is me playing with color with “my hand” standing in as my alter ego. As a nod to Klee, I have a small car driving upside-down across the top edge of the drawing, defying gravity. One could turn the drawing around like an hourglass and start the whole adventure over. With Harv at the controls, the bubbles would eventually make their way to the surface again anyway.

One of my favorite parts of this drawing, and the reason I included it in my website, are the diaphonous watercolor-like brown washes which are done with paper pulp. They are very delicate and reticulated, and care had to be taken to let them stand on their own and not to crowd them out. Beautiful things need their space to work out their beauty, and I’m glad I have learned enough about art to recognize when something beautiful needs to be left alone. That is something I learned from Mr. Klee and his art.

If I had a chance to ask my favorite artists what they were thinking when they did a work of art, I know Paul Klee would be on my short list. And I know Harv would make another seat for him on the H-mobile. I like to think the two of them would have a great conversation.

Pick On Someone Your Own Size

Over the years, many kind folks have asked me why I have not turned my art into children’s books. After all, they say, you seem to have a story to go along with all of your pieces. Some have even said they like the stories better than the pieces. I’m thinking of the one client who was interviewing me for a purchase for a retirement home and asked me if I would be willing to frame the paper without anything on it.

“So, these would be conceptual pieces, right?” I humbly asked and briefly excusing myself to return to my car with no engine and drive down a one lane superhighway to a restaurant, where I ordered an egg omelet and ice cream ala’ mode. Ahem deleted.

Actually, there’s really no good excuse for my lack of children’s book, but I’ve got plenty of stories, so let’s just call ourselves children and pretend my art blogs are each a little book, whaddaya say? And starting with one of my earliest pieces, a piece that has many versions in print and drawing form, Pick on Someone Your Own Size. This piece was originally drawn on a piece of parchment paper using whatever was handy and free, which was print ink and a pencil. I used whatever was handy because at the time I was so angry I didn’t feel like wasting any time looking for materials. I just started drawing anger.

And looking up tenderly from a cozy tucked-in space on your bed you ask, “Why were you so angry?”

In one word, betrayal. It’s not a bedtime word, but it is the truth. I was angry for being asked to leave a faculty meeting at an art school where I was part of the faculty. No explanation, no apologies, and a lot of cold stares. Now ain’t that a fine how-do-you-do?

Artists, and humans in particular, do striking things when boxed in a corner. Me, I’m somewhere in between those two, so I went to wrestle with my better angels by drawing Pick on Someone Your Own Size. Now that is an artist’s response! You go channel that anger, Rip! Yea!

In the image we see a huge scorpion-like bug with a long pterodactyl beak bullying a frightened kid on a swing. If you look closely at the drawing, you’ll also discover that the threatening beak of the bug is barely penetrating the plane of the swing set, enough to scare the kid on the swing but not really enough to threaten his ultimate security. That kid on the swing is me, and the huge bug is the bully called Rudeness. And when Rudeness came my way, I ran into the flat plane of a swing set box and hunkered down, kind of like Harold with his Purple Crayon (who could draw himself right out of a corner).

I always liked those fables of long ago that summed everything up with a wisdom. They always made me feel like there was a point to all those beastly frogs and snarly gnomes lurking about under bridges. I’ll take a little closure with my story, please and thank you, with a dash of Sweet n’ Low. Here then, is the wisdom from the boy on the swing set:

Who do we think is in charge?
Is it small or is it large?
Creeping up on our fears
We check all our mirrors,
secretly staying on guard.