You Complete Me

A couple of years ago, I began to hear the unmistakable sound of a bullfrog by our pond. Its deep blurpulous call resonated across the yard in threes and fours, and then went silent before starting up again. It was private messaging a prospective mate. I can’t speak for females, but I can hardly imagine attracting a soul mate making noises like that. To each bullfrog his own.

One time our cat Chloe came across the leggy frog getting a suntan in my garden. When she tried to nab it, the frog made a record-breaking leap headlong into the safety of the drink. I marveled at its Olympic jump and lightning-fast escape underwater, but our cat sulked around all day because it missed a meal.

Sadly, winter was not so kind to our bullfrog, and I found it floating upside down in my spring pond clean, revealing its unusual, camouflage patterned underbelly. It was at that point that the artist side of me kicked in, so I scooped it out and laid it out on a rock to bake in the sun. While dead frogs are not included in conversation you want to have at the dinner table, I put it at the top of the list for teachable moments with my grandson, Cash. Over the course of a week, we watched our frog shrivel up into a frog mummy, observing details like the huge gill openings that allow it to breathe underwater and the rows of tiny sharp teeth it uses to hold onto its prey.

It was great fodder for “bro time”, as Cash calls it, and we discussed various four-year-old plans for our dried frog including running over it with the car, putting it in a blender, and eating it in front of his grandmother, Gigi. They all sounded like loads of fun to me, but all of them were voted down for the simple reason that none of them included an ounce of kindness, which is apparently something I’m supposed to be teaching as a Grandpa (Popeye). I was also reminded that when the bullfrog was alive, he was a good friend of mine, just like the song says. I get that, but bro time counts for something, so we opted to just paint it black, the only oil-based paint color I had around. Paint it we did – gills, teeth and all, and set it out to find a new home in my studio as it dried.

Fast forward a week.

As I was cataloging pieces for an update on my website, I came across an unfinished piece where I had used a black oil stick to draw a sort of loose calligraphic framework. I was never really satisfied with the work and had put it down, where over the years it had sunk deeper and deeper into the unfinished pile. However, brought out into the light, the awkwardly posed black bullfrog formed an immediate attraction to calligraphic writing. If this wasn’t love at first sight, then I’m an egg. These two were a match made in artistic heaven, and I daresay since I got them together, I have not heard a peep or a croak from either one of them. To insist I heard the bullfrog say, “You complete me!” would be silly, but let’s just say that together they appear to be getting along swimmingly in their new garden.

The Fork in the Road

I love analogies, and the analogies I use in conversation border on the ridiculous most of the time. If I say “That’s like…” one more time my wife says she’s going to stick a fork in my eye.

Still, one of the images that might best describe my work comes from a snapshot often seen in the middle of traffic, so I will indulge you with yet another comparison.

I have noticed out in the middle of busy intersections, there is usually a small area that is untouched by advancing cars and trucks, either those going straight or ones turning. In that small zone one can find all kinds of metal fragments, bolts, plastic from headlights, parts of bumpers that have been cast off when the physical forces of acceleration or inertia left them behind. This residue creates a kind of automotive collage, orphaned car pieces that could not hold on any longer.

These accumulated piles can be found in busy crossing in the city, and when I see them, I like to think they are lost colonies of Undercarriage People, cast offs from a society that no longer needs them along for the ride. They had tried to hang onto their situation but were not cared for properly. They were ignored living in their private hell on wheels. Where they once held everything together, they have felt their grip on reality slowly loosening, slipping away. For them, there was no looking back, no turning around, and they had nothing to lose. They were the migrant bearings, the driftless tailpipes, the down-and-out gas caps who were willing to take a risk, to make a break and give the world the slip. So, whatever happens when they make a jump for it, casting themselves out into the middle of the intersection, it will be for the hope of a better life away from the clamor of rush hour noise and exhaust. During a moment of sheer willpower, they trusted in something beyond the gray pavement passing underneath them and wretched themselves loose, flinging themselves to the freedom that awaited them, into the No-Man’s-Land of vagrant car parts.

This is an example of the kind of image I see when I think of my own art. I see snippets of life floating by, collages really, that bespeak a narrative where spontaneity, improvisation, and chance are the main characters and take precedent over intellect, materials, or my technical ability. They become part of the visual diary I keep of found objects, rejected scraps, and abstract marks. They are all in relationship to one another, analogies, trying to get along with one another without getting a fork stuck in their eye. My process is one of constant comparison, and in that sense, each final piece tells its own story separate from any other piece I make.

From an unknown author I glean this passage: “We become who we are through the conflicts and disadvantages we prefer rather that the more comfortable alternatives.”

I could choose a more comfortable alternative to my process, one that would involve easier conflicts or disadvantages, one that is immediately pleasing to the eye and one that requires little effort from the viewer. It would also be a process that would make for easier artistic decisions. I prefer the less comfortable alternatives (child-like scribbles, odd objects, blemishes, and the like) because they give credence to the small, seemingly insignificant pileups, the still moments available in the middle of life’s delightful but swarming intersections.

Carving a Deeper Path

Around the lake where our group walks the road almost curled up from the last two weeks of ninety plus heat. The lake itself sits still and exhausted from evaporation, and the ducks are hunkered down in the shade because it is cooler there than in the water. I feel sorry for the high school football players who are withstanding several practices per day. There is almost no amount of the wet stuff you can pour down your throat to offset being encapsulated in full football gear. During practice back in the day, I fainted dead away on the forty-yard line and sat straight up like a cornstalk when they put the smelling salts under my nose. But this kind of humid weather is a time when we protect ourselves with funny hats as wide as a Humvee. Normally, we are more self-conscious, but not so when the sun beats the tacos out of you from all angles.

So, when our BBRR group took our walk today, we sniffed the cooler air like it carried the smell of a freshly baked cookie. Electrolytes were up, the breeze floated through our shirts, and except for the story of a hawk that is threatening to eat a neighbor’s poodle, conversation was light. And speaking of conversation…

One of my favorite parts of this walking club is the way we share dialogue. Normally in a group, it can be sticky when you make your passage between the chit and the chat, or between one subject and another. There is an art to small talk, an art that some people navigate socially better than others. If, for example you are listening to a long-winded person who is explaining the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, it is difficult to interrupt them without the fear that they may start completely over when you return to the topic, starting with Chapter One: Homo Erectus Man and His Rise to Ambulation. However, in our group, we don’t have to worry about that. We shift lackadaisically around like a herd of grazing sheep, without any goals, itinerary, or past minutes to read back. We interrupt each other, complete each other’s sentences and then, half-hour later, we become Bon Qui Qui and say: “Is that what you had said?”

This is a wonderful retirement luxury I call driftiness. Nothing anyone is doing is anything they have to do. We are now doing things either because we love it or because we feel this is where our service would be best spent. In either case, the driftiness is the ultimate blessing, especially if you have observed the events of last week ranging from catastrophic Hurricane Ida to the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. Thankfully, we are not held up in a shelter waiting for a ration of bottled water or looking over our shoulder at an oncoming tank. We are relatively safe, reaching out in our own way, be it caring for the elderly, volunteering at a local hospital, or on mission for a recovering alcoholic. Our conversations and our walks may drift, but our hearts are powerfully directed to someone who is worse off than we are.

I hear stories of buying travel campers, of learning a new skill like dancing, of buying a new boat, but for us, those things come and go. They are the embellishments, part of the drifting. The steadiness comes from the more serious talks, those that include the enriching experiences that are carving a deeper path into our days. Author Gordon McDonald calls this the life happening “below the waterline.” As most of us approach our seventies, our bodies don’t have the flashy accoutrements we used to have. We have some worn parts, we have things that need replacing, we have some squeaks, some rustles, some blips and blemishes. But below our waterline, real work is still being done, and we are walking the deeper talk.

Make a Pot and Find Your Center

Ceramics and I did not get off to a very good start. My first exposure to working in clay was at college where the chair of the department was also the clay department head. He wore a long white surgical coat that made me feel like I needed to schedule my yearly physical exam when I was around him. He was never happy with me finishing a major in one year, and generally discouraged me from taking any more art at all, unless of course, it was ceramics. These conversations did not rest well with me, so I avoided the specter of his white coat, and went about my artistic bid’ness.

Where I went to school, the potters were relegated to the basement of an old gym building and surfaced to civilization caked with clay and looking like they had been living on Twinkies for weeks. They were their own breed, and so dedicated to their craft that we rarely saw them in any other art classes. However, they did show up for Art History tests and the rest of us gave them plenty of space because they smelled like they had just crawled out of a cave, and given their basement situation, they had. Evolution had developed their basement skills to a fine art, so to speak, so they were used to firing kilns all night, drinking copious amount of coffee, and hanging from the ceiling like bats, but in other classes they went straight to the back seats where they could catch up on their Zs in glaze-stained overalls while slides of Robert Arneson danced in their heads. (We did not talk about sugar-plums when I was in school, just Ramen noodles.)

As a whole, we art majors hung pretty tight, but the potters drifted in and out of their own weather system. They also communicated using terms like flaking, extrusion, and rupture, terms I only used if I had an onset of acne. But I also had other misgivings about the ceramic majors. If I wanted to have a conversation with one of them, I had to catch them when they weren’t throwing, weren’t glazing, weren’t stacking a kiln, weren’t trimming, weren’t slaking, and weren’t sleeping in class. I did try to date a ceramic-type gal one quarter, but I always felt strangely underdressed when I visited her in her CO²-ladden basement studio and thought I would be more attractive if I rolled around on the floor until I was covered with silica dust. When I began to be mistaken for Pig Pen from the Peanuts cartoon strip, I realized our breakup was inevitable and for the better. One more odd tidbit, a rumor that still bothers me to this very day, and the final straw that kept me away from ceramics: I had heard that male ceramists never wear underwear because it was just too blinking hot around the kiln. I began to wonder if taking a ceramics course might cause me to be overtaken with the desire to rip off my undies, and that seems like a dangerous stage of childhood development I did not want to revisit.

However, many years later, about the time I started teaching art in the public schools, I got fired up about ceramics and participated in two summer ceramic workshops—with my underwear on, by the way. I learned a barrage of new terms, many of which begin with an “s”, such as slab, slip, and slurry. I fell into the ceramic groove by taking naps on the wedging table and was officially christened into the clay Hall of Fame when I mistakenly inhaled too much silica dust and had to spend an evening getting oxygen in the ER.

Then when I began teaching ceramics myself at a local middle school, I began to use my newfound skill of throwing on the wheel to decompress from the hecticness of teaching. Throwing on the wheel became a total escape. Once I got the clay on the wheel and began the centering process, I found the mesmerizing spin took my mind to a new head space where I could let go of my crazies. Drawing, painting, or any art form can be that way, but the quiet focus of the clay was transformative. Then I began to understand why all those college mudslingers stayed in the basement making their fantastic vessels. They knew how to find their quiet, centered moments on the wheel. They put their weight behind their wedging, found out how to become still and get all their pots in a row.

At ceramic shows, I cringe when I hear people whispering about the high prices of the clay works on display, knowing how many hours it takes to come up with a refined clay vessel. When one adds up the hours preparing the clay, throwing, and trimming the piece, and firing (usually twice) the vessel, the hourly rate for finished pieces is abysmally low, like about fifty cents an hour. I love a good bargain as much as anybody else, but I “garan-darn-tee ya” that rate beats any deal you’ll find at your local Bargain Basement.

You can read about my artist statement regarding my clay works here. Coincidentally, the pieces pictured here are now stored in my basement. What goes around, comes around.

Living on Borrowed Time

In suburban America, front yards are on full display, but the backyard is a retreat meant mostly for the homeowner. Visitors will use the front yard as a start to a more formal entrance, but in the end, we homeowners retreat to the back, where we can filter out our “cultural urban differences.” That is a euphemistic phrase for barking dogs, run down cars parked on lawns, the latest political signage, horrible parenting methods, drifting cigarette smoke, and nut-sedge so tall it has gone to seed.

In our backyard, we are protected by the magnificent arching drapery of our mature black gum tree, whose branches are almost two feet around and spread out one hundred feet in every direction. When I look up at our tree from my porch, I see a structured guide, a canopy where every limb is like a chapter delineating my garden below. It is like looking at one of those perfect outlines for a term paper with Roman numerals, the ideal model for flawless organization. So enveloping are its branches and encompassing its contour, that living near it almost feels like living in a treehouse.

Our backyard tree is not the type of gum one usually finds in southwestern Indiana. It is a plant in the tupelo family and finds a more comfortable home in the deep south growing in swampy water where its suckers sprout in the humidity to form an undergrowth of saplings. Unlike real gum trees around the Midwest, black gums do not rain gumballs, those woody brown golf spheres that look like miniature medieval weapons and proliferate like Carter’s liver pills.

Up until a couple of years ago a gardener could not find and plant a black gum tree through a nursery purchase. It had to be inherited and grow wild, which is how ours begun some sixty years ago. They are available now through the science of hormonal stimulants, and in my opinion are one of the best tree choices if you want a stunning fall display of color. Long serrated leaves ranging from yellows to purples to deep reds dominate the landscape when Halloween beckons, and aside from a two-week period in June when the allergy-loaded pollen drifts down in clumps, our gum tree sits anchored like an entire forest unto itself, enveloping a field of liriope we planted underneath. The local blue heron that needs a long runway to reach our pond has had to be content with fly-by appearances and now avoids our pond altogether. Our koi appreciate that.

Back in ’08 when a storm left two inches of ice over southern Indiana and Kentucky, the weight of the ice took out the top branches and bent the others down so far they almost touched our driveway. With frigid conditions and no power, we waited the storm out, listening to what sounded like gunfire outside as branches around the neighborhood popped and snapped and crashed to the ground, and one tree after another became disabled. Miraculously, our tree lifted itself up as the ice melted, and resumed some form of self-rehabilitation.

Since that time, its health has been on a slippery slope, even without the weight of ice. With no leader branch taking over the top, and repeated trimmings to keep branches off our house, our tree has been trying to survive on the growth of new suckers. In other words, it has nowhere to stretch out and grow in a manner consistent with its nature and will probably need to be harvested within two to three years, baring a miracle.

Cutting down this tree will be a tough pill to swallow for us when it forms the focal point for our garden landscape. Our black gum has always reached out in every direction and provided the stage for every performance when we walk out our back door. Woodpeckers—downy, red-headed and piliated—all dip in and out to lap up insects, while dozens of songbirds make their rounds. Their songs cheer the air and provide a layer of calm, noiseless noise now popularly known as white noise. Even a shy pair of mourning doves, normally early risers, hang out all day in the lower branches and make small talk until they become too self-conscious.

Deep in the recesses of our backyard lies an ancient septic tank, positioned like some UFO in Area 51. It is difficult to believe that such a potentially toxic container could be hidden in such a peaceful environment. Arborists, master gardeners, and city officials have visited and ruled out the possibility that chemicals are leaching out of the tank and slowly killing our tree. According to the experts there are no girdling roots, no insects damage and nothing that would signal that the tree should be dying. We are left to accept this fact about our tree: that all living things perish at some point, and to embrace the mystery of this death event as part of life’s cycle. Still, I am having a difficult time imagining the visual I will have peering out from the third bay of the garage, my art studio, without seeing the protective arms of our black gum, Nyssa sylvatica. When it is gone, and the stump ground down, our tree will no longer reach out to invite all that is natural into my workspace, nor provide the phenomenon of an energetic conduit to my art.

I once read an essay about climate change and global warming that posed a bewildering simple question: Do you know what it is like to have a cold? Well, of course you do, right? It’s that punky feeling we all have felt from sneezing, puffy eyes, a runny nose, and a low-grade fever. That, the essay stated, is exactly how the earth feels all the time. Our precious Earth is heating up, and it is sick and tired of being sick and tired. Could it be that our tree is dying from a century-old cold caught from the Earth as it gasps for a shallow breath of ozone?

For the last half hour, I have been perched under our gum tree’s huge umbrella. A lone crow in the top branches has demanded my attention with its full range of clicks, rattles, and flashy ca-caws. Despite the intrusion, it is a reminder to me that we are to embrace the interruptions life throws our way, and that all things work together, even when what is happening makes us mournful and we suffer a loss. I am saddened every time I look up through our gum and see mostly open sky instead of leaves. However, I am also reminded that the mystery of the ‘08 ice storm has purpose, and trust that Mother Nature’s give and take will bring new life out of this death. My garden will eventually adjust to the loss also and restore in me the hope that nature is resilient and clever, opportunistic but fair.

With that in mind, I observe the guardian tree of our backyard slowly weakening into a mere skeleton of what it was before. It has not asked one thing from me except acknowledgement of the beauty and protection it shared willingly as if a member of our family. If we accept the idea that nature is resilient and will always bounce back under adversity, it is because of the raw strength it has displayed over eons of adversity. While our splendid black gum tree is a symbol for what life offers if we will stretch out our arms in solidarity, even love may save the world after all, but it may have to come from different arms when those of this tree are gone and no longer wrapped around our backyard in a giant hug.

A Particular Promenade Purposely and Prominently Parading

Everyone loves a parade. When I was a kid, my hometown had lots of them, which I watched from my Dad’s ninth story office window. It was part of what made the city part connected to the rural part.

My wife and I recently saw a ball game in Cincinnati, and the downtown was amazing—clean, resplendent with gardens and blooming flowers. We heard few honking horns if any, and people actually stopped and talked to us for no particular reason. Them's my type of folk! There were at least two different concerts going on by the riverfront, one Soul and one Celtic, and if you stood in the middle ground and listened to both at the same time you might have thought you were at a Next-Gen Fifth Dimension concert with Joan Bias as the lead singer. After a couple of days watching the urban friendliness, I felt like I was part of the urban renewal program, sort of like the witness protection program for parade lovers. I leapt into the street with my real identity, wearing a funny hat, toting a ridiculously opalescent balloon, and waving at little kids, petting Dobermans, and chewing gum I picked off banisters just like Elf.

Parades are, in themselves, a unique form of entertainment. In no other venue or activity do people form a line and promenade down the street to advertise their allegiance to anything from boom boxes (Willimantic, Connecticut) to underwear (a tiny unmentionable town in Ohio). Apparently in America, anyone can start a parade, just like a lemonade stand, without fear of imprisonment, or social distancing.

The piece you are looking at here, (title, top), was worked on over the span of three years. I kept adding and subtracting from it, trying to acquaint myself with what it was about. The use of alliteration aids us in getting through the long title, and despite the use of trash, poorly drawn stick figures and haphazard marks, the result is still a carefully constructed design. For example, you’ll notice that there is movement stepwise up from the left corner, and the same kind of movement going up from the right corner. Together, the two imaginary paths cross thereby forcing your eye to move up and down in the picture even though the main characters are happily and parading horizontally and purposely on the bottom deckled edge.

Good design is a lot like a good parade: they both easily transport us to the land of make-believe. Consider this quote from one of my favorite comedians, Jerry Seinfeld, taken from an episode of Comedians and Cars Getting Coffee:

Even if you are doing something that looks fun, there is still a serious process underneath it that is driving the craft. So, even though I am cracking jokes, I am fine tuning them with my timing, my choice of words, my delivery.

Thankfully, you do not have to drive to Cincinnati or get coffee with Jerry to be a part of my particular parade. Just purposely pull up a sidewalk, put on your particular go-to hat and watch the performance. Somewhere in the middle, where the black X hits the starfish, hit your urban pause button. You may hear the Fifth Dimension singing “Up, up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…”

BBRRC - August 2021

In Evansville, Indiana, sixty-five-degree weather in August is almost as unusual as finding Mr. Wonka’s Golden Ticket in your candy bar, so we renewed our walk this BBRR day with an extra punch in our step, and fewer visual humidex roadblocks to our line of sight. It was cool this morning, we had more energy and could see everything better. Yea, that is what I meant to say. Summer humidity here is an index people check as closely as their phone messages. We locals walk outside into an unbreathable soup, and even cool relief of a swimming pool can’t ward off the greenish tint of algae.

As you may know by now, we walk on the grounds of the State Hospital, or as a friend of mine used to call it, the State Horse Pistol. Oh, the Anguish Language. Shuffling along the paths, we have begun to include conversations about such topics as hammer toe, athlete’s foot, orthotics, and shin splints. I’ve decided to put all those issues under one heading called Footburps because Podiatry sounds too much like an excuse, sort of like starting out a sentence with “But I…”. Pretty soon you will talk yourself out of putting one foot in front of the other, and that certainly breaks every rule I know about walking.

Compliments to one of new members: Polly is going back into teaching after retiring for a couple of years. This a not a flighty decision but comes from a soulful desire to make a difference in someone else’s life, to be in the trenches again duking it out with kids. Teaching is not a job you do for the money, and if you are then, in my experience, you probably are not lighting those kids on fire in the classroom. Round of applause from the BBRR club, Polly. We are there for you, ready to pop in as guest speakers, demonstrators, or if needed, give the famous Bender One-Handed Applause (a sort of quiet standing ovation).

As if to celebrate her triumphant return to teaching, Polly took the outside lane as we turned off our usual route and walked a half-mile down Vann Avenue, which is to say we took our lives in our own hands. In Evansville, drivers seem to go out of their way to merge into the lane next to the sidewalk (where we were walking) just for the sheer fun of watching your eyes dilate and the part in your hair disappear. We did make it back to the hospital lake alive, but my PTSD blocked any memory of what was said before or after, and I had nightmares of Yellow Cabs falling out of the sky onto my head. Coincidentally, one of our walkers noticed a bottle of whiskey that had been thrown out of a passing vehicle, evidence of some poor soul’s desperate attempt to multitask while driving.

I prefer my minister’s method: He has a wonderful habit of picking up street trash on his thrice weekly wake-up run around his neighborhood. Recently, early one morning as he hit his stride, he ran past a discarded empty vodka bottle along the road and responding to the nudge of the Holy Spirit, scooped it up for disposal at the end of his jog. As he rounded the corner towards home, a neighbor out enjoying her morning coffee, spotted the bottle in his hand, and yelled: “Hittin’ the juice a little early today, aren’t you pastor?”

No one in our group drinks and walks, and no one picked up the booze bottle on our BBRR jaunt today either. I’m kind of glad. Footburp: I’ve been through that baptism, and it ain’t pretty. I’ll stick to putting one foot in front of the other and see where it takes me.

Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up and Be Artists

Looking at this picture, you can see where I’m going with this.

The photo, circa spring of 1976, is me. After dropping out of a pre-med program in college and taking a semester off to live in Idaho and work as a housekeeper at the Sun Valley Lodge, I returned to campus, a la the lone gunslinger outlaw pictured above. Did you hear about that guy, the one who had been out on the prairie stamping cattle, eating beans and smoking peyote? Well, that wasn’t me, that was some of my other college acquaintances. Me, I never saw any cattle out west when I was there. I survived on a lot of PB&J sandwiches, not beans, and thought peyote was a topping for cheese tacos.

Now mind you, I wasn’t quite as mean as I look in the picture. I carried jokes, not guns, like this all-time favorite of mine:

Did you hear the story about the three-legged dog who walked into Dodge City? He stopped in the middle of the street, showed his holsters, and announced, “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw.” Moseying right along…

When I returned to campus, I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, or Idaho. I was back in school, supposedly having sewed all my wild oats and ready to buckle down and get some work done in my newly acquired major. Truth is, I was lost. I had little art background, had only a small portfolio of doodles to show for myself. It was a wild ride, and my art arsenal was not strong. But it was enough to initiate the desire to apply to graduate school, and jump in lock, stock and barrel. There, after a couple more years of experimenting and searching, I headed out into the sunset, past the one-horse towns, just me and the wide-open prairie.

If you are young and beginning your career, and you know you want to be in the arts or be an artist, then I think I’ve had enough time in the saddle to make a couple of suggestions. Perhaps they’ll help you dodge an Idaho or two.

3 Pointers from a Former Art Outlaw:

1. Develop a habit of working in the studio, making pieces to hone your craft. Put in the time, do the work. Don’t wait for inspiration. There is no substitute for good ol’ fashioned hard work.
2. Decide who you want to be on your team. Art is a tough career, and you are going to need smart, sensible, kind people who believe in you and are in your corner. Find them.
3. Don’t confuse achievement with enrichment. Many times, the things we must do as artists will not result in anything material, but we do them anyway to authenticate who we are as both contributing artists and humble human beings.

Giddyup and Happy Trails!

I’ll Take a Side Order of Titles, Please

One of the pleasures I get creating a new piece of art is coming up with titles. People love my titles. It is the truth. I sometimes get more comments on a title than I do the actual piece. I think that is because, to some degree, everyone knows something about their own language and the words they use, even if they aren’t avid readers or great spellers. Funny words, play on words, and sounds that are almost words, are all part of our daily interactions with others. We misspeak, fail to speak, interrupt, and studder through our conversations until something like what we want to say dribbles out and becomes part of the conversation landfill. When I was making pieces that had a more serious tone, coming up with a title was frankly a chore and, in the end, usually felt unnecessary. Avoiding that added ambivalence, many artists title their works in numerical series, or on the back of the canvas or print, or not at all.

Back in the day when my art was making a lot of jumps and starts, I knew I was going to discover a visual form, some process, that allowed me the freedom to play with words, both in my work and in my titles. If you go to my web site, you can scan through the titles and see I have plenty of fun with them. Even if sometimes they don’t make sense, the word combinations form comical sounds that fit into the spirit of the piece and add another level of participation. On that note, some of my titles are more narrative; some are silly and nonsensical.

One piece that might serve as a good example is Inuit Crosses the Bearing Straight. Here we find a tiny blobbish figure, somewhat ungainly in appearance, trying to tightrope walk across a thin line. He bears no resemblance to any kind of Native American Indian as the name implies, but it is the nation’s name, Inuit, (into it, intuitive, I knew it) that conjures up all kinds of poetic possibilities. The figure is making his way across, “bearing straight ahead.” And what other way would he go? Backwards, towards Russia? If he falls off the line, the confusing scribbles below foretells all kinds of ruination. To me, the funny part of this drawing is that this little scribble person, walks a line of responsibility. He may be a liaison between two continental areas holding them together, some sort of hired explorer/diplomat that balances the divide between nations, or between abstraction and realism, between pea soup and sea poop.

And here’s ‘nother thing. When I come up with a title, I must be careful not to spoil the piece by trying too hard to explain it through the title. That can insult the viewer’s intelligence like a bad line in a movie. Every work of art stirs a cognitive response from the viewer, a response the artist has no control over. Titles must be evocative, interesting, simple, and at least in my mind, entertaining. It’s tricky to do all those things, but I have a lot of fun trying.

When I used a school lunch tray in No Matter How Good or Bad You Are, Just Pant, I purposely misspelled “paint,” because, to me, you are going to say paint anyway, whether I spell it right or not. However, the student I had that inspired this title did not like art at all, but finally concluded that no matter who you are, no matter how good or bad you art at art, you should just paint anyway. True, but he misspelled paint, and wrote “pant.” Breathe, he was saying, just breathe. Relax, order a large side of titles, and enjoy the meal!

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.

BBRRC - June 2021

If herding cats is still a thing, then that describes our group when we get together and walk. Well intentioned, we begin at the same point, but we do not herd well. In fact, it is a stretch to even call us a group. There are three different images that come to me, other than cats, when I think of how our BBRR walkers walk:

• ants scurrying back and forth, exchanging information through antennas
• attention-seeking traffic cones that get moved by inches here and there when bumped
• tater tots thrown on the same plate but secretly wanting to be dipped into ketchup

Of those three, I prefer the tater tots. I say that because those of us walking were all teachers at some point and can relate to tots, if not taters. Secondly, I think a bowl of them would be nice to munch on while we walk. I mean, who doesn’t like tater tots?

So, I want to make a little offer. Or you could call it a teaser. I will give anyone ten dollars in our group if they show up with at least three tater tots, and a package of ketchup. It could be a bottle of ketchup, but that may be overkill. We don’t want to overwhelm the three little taters. I know, I know I may be guilty of blog tampering here, as I am basically bribing readers to engage in my BBRR Club blog. And by the way I like my tater tots hot. Cold tater tots are basically little grease balls, and that begins to sound vaguely like they have slicked back hair and a cigarette barely hanging out of their mouths. I’m not eating any food with hair on it, so that subject is closed. And the last time I saw a cigarette and a tater tot hanging out together was in a greasy spoon truck stop in Iowa on I-80, and that subject is now closed also.

There are two other benefits to arriving with my (hot) tater tots at our next walk:

1. We can give them to the little gnomes that live outside an incredible hand-built elf house built right into a tree. True story. We found them on our walk at a house along the path our group took this month. The gnomes looked hungry and were begging for some dwarf food as we strolled by their garden. Kind of pitiful, but let’s face it, there are hungry gnomes everywhere, and it has been proven that they get really juiced when they eat taters.
2. Tater tots are the second favorite food of cicada-killer wasps. Cicadas, mistakenly called locusts, were an integral part of the conversation this June BBRR club walk. (There may be a shortage of cicadas this year, which means we will be able to hear each other’s conversations as we sit outside in our lawn chairs this July, sipping something long and cold). These killer wasps are large bumble bee-looking bombers that use the cicada carcasses as food fodder for the eggs they lay inside. Not dinner conversation mind you, but you can YouTube it and get the full story.

Or not. You could just show up next walk, July 1, with three hot tater tots and collect your ten spot. Offer good until blog supplies last. Some exceptions may apply. Side effects include headache, fever, nausea, blurred vision, constipation, toe jam, insomnia, and general malaise.

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.

BBRRC - May 2021

When cooler evenings and warmer days begin to fill in the barren patches where winter grass would not grow, our walking group lapped up the light that cast a lime-greenness over our morning trek/sojourn this month. It is Spring, and the radiance from all the vigorous crisp growth is like no other we see any other time of the year.

Mother Nature unpacks newness, or maybe the other way around. She is no longer boxed, bottled or wrapped in cellophane by Earth but is triggered upward towards us like birthday candles from a God who wants to shower us with fireworks. How do you say thank you for the Sun we have waited for all winter, or for three-foot weeds that make us sneeze five times in a row, and the last few with embarrassed laughter? This is also a time when tide of winter litter becomes fodder for birds’ nests and the last leaves of last Fall are mulched up by an army of zero-turn mowers. One of those oversized commercial mowers flew by us at record speed and easily passed a sleek black BMW on Lincoln Avenue. At that speed the operator could barely hold onto the wheel (#Evansville), but he plowed ahead anyway with reckless abandon.

Perhaps no other time of the year but Spring does our conversation become so peppered with remarks about nature. We might grumble about health, jobs, and family struggles other times, but in the Spring, we talk of the newness, freshness and the blessings the earth is now presenting. The most well-known annual flowers trickled out of our discussions as well, but things got more complicated when we reached a Master Gardener’s path laden with hybrids and exotics. Nothing in that space stays dwarf for very long, and even the low growing sedums, awaiting more heat, were singing an opera at fever pitch.

Our this-and-that prattle was interrupted by the sounds our brains love more (according to research): that of wind, water, and birds. That sensory trifecta spoke to us as if a conductor had raised his baton and signaled an orchestra to prepare to play, and we, the audience, to be still. This Spring orchestra announced:

"Excuse me. Ahem. Pardon me. I’m sorry to interrupt, but it’s me over here. It’s me, Spring. I’m here, ready to start. I have something for you I think you are going to love to see. Can you smell it? Do you hear me?"

We did hear you, Spring, on our walk today. We saw you when a stark white head appeared high overhead in a bald eagle catching a draft. We smelled the fragrance of your long draping arms in an eighty-foot weeping Hemlock. We heard you squawking about your territory when an over-aggressive gander stretched out its nearby neck. Mother Nature was on. She left her mask behind and breathed on us anyway, and she scratched our senses with no restrictions or health warnings. We tried to catch up on our oh-so-important life details, but Spring is the strong quiet type, and had the last word on our BBRR pilgrimage.

Off in the distance there was a field of soccer preschoolers running helter-skelter, all playing the same position with uniforms that were grossly oversized. Their strategy seemed more like that at a piñata party rather than an organized sport, but the soccer kids didn’t care. And neither did we. Spring is nature’s party with no winners and no losers, just participants, and us few walkers.

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.