It IS All About Me, Really
To see the main
objective of the game,
It helps if one can
keep the goal in frame
And focus on it clearly,
deeply, truly,
But not to lose all
other sights unduly,
So if you’d like to
keep ambition near,
I recommend you stare
at me, my dear.
After All is Said and Done
What will I do when at the end of time
The story folds back on itself and calls
On me to follow down those darkened halls
Of memory to revisit sublime
Past lives in fact and fiction ’til I’ve turned
Empty as much as is the hourglass
And all the strange bygones that had to pass
Before this book called History was burned?
What will this end extend to me, my kin,
my life and loves and all the world abroad?
Whether it’s silence of the touch of God,
Salvation of a sort will bathe my skin,
And on that gleaming day I’ll wake anew
Because I loved, and I was loved by, you.
While I’m on the subject of mystery stories (see yesterday’s post), there’s a true one that I hadn’t ever heard of until recently that almost defies imagination, even generations later. But that’s what true mystery stories do, isn’t it.
The story of a female immigrant serial killer/mass murderer, born in Norway but made in America, was a hideous and irreconcilable tale of horror and crime in the 19th Century and remains one today. Belle Gunness, who is believed to have killed all of her own children, two husbands and a handful of suitors, not to mention an accomplice or two of her own along the way–possibly executing as many as forty people in her lengthy crime spree–is surprisingly little known nowadays. I fear that this may be because we have so many other hideous and oversized monstrosities and real-life mystery stories handy to horrify and mesmerize us that many likely get pushed out of memory by the current ugly news. Undoubtedly the advent of World War I‘s dreadful specter was a factor in overshadowing a single murderer’s story rather immediately on its discovery.
All the same, once I knew of it, I found the woman a compellingly repellant subject for another mystery story illustration, being a subject worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe style drama or, yes, a true-crime cinematic epic. Though it was one of those news stories that ‘rocked the nation’ when uncovered a hundred years ago, the tale of Belle Gunness is relatively obscure nowadays. There have been a few generally tepid and mostly heavily fictionalized stories, books and movies based on the horrors wrought by this one woman’s apparent sociopathy and the trail of blood left in its wake, but it’s remarkable to me that such a grim, terrible story is scarcely known on a wider scale anymore.
Frightening, dark, and perhaps an indictment of the worst of human nature in general, yes–but I think perhaps part of the reason I find mystery stories so gripping is because I think they remind us–again in that somewhat ‘safe’ and detached format of past-history or fiction–that brilliance and the abyss are constantly in conflict in the human heart and only by understanding this and being willing to examine it in ourselves can we have a chance of rising to beauty and shunning the grotesque urges that we might have–and, if we’re truly fortunate, catching up the would-be wrongdoer in humane and forgiving and healing arms before she can ever fall so far. That’s my hopeful fiction, and I’m sticking to it.
La Belle Dame sans Merci of the prairies, Belle Gunness. What fearful horrors shaped this woman’s inner darkness?
Today, I present Belle Gunness, a truly fallen woman and black widow whose mystery may never be fully unraveled, for your contemplation. May we never see her like again.
Today, another little glimpse of artful goofing to re-imagine an existing piece of my work. I almost never tire of reworking/revisiting my old artworks from time to time. In part, it’s a way to critique and edit my stuff and see how I can grow and change over time. Mostly, it’s just good technical practice–a little bit of re-training my eye and hand and, when I get lucky, learning a new skill or two. In this instance, I took another of my pipeshade designs done in 2007 in preparation for Martin Pasi’s carving the wooden screen panels for his Winnetka instrument and I did some Photoshop playing with it to turn a pair of the panel designs into a merged single image and then ‘hand coloring’ it digitally to redefine it as a wholly new looking picture.
The whole Winnetka project was based on the church’s part of the collaborative team’s desire to have their organ artwork reflect local character. Since Congregational churches don’t tend to wish to fill their worship spaces with traditional religious iconography but rather prefer a more generally meditative space, so it made sense to aim for a design more simply nature-based and reflective of regional beauty. I decided to incorporate some of the Illinois state symbols into the design. This pair of panels featured the state bird, Cardinalis cardinalis–the Northern Cardinal. Is a cardinal too religious a symbol? Oh, that’s right: not a Roman Catholic church. Okay, cut me some slack.
Not really necessary to elaborate, is it. I just decided to show you the Before and the After versions today, and dispense with the intermediate steps–they’re not entirely thrilling to see, being a series of steps mainly devoted to converting the graphite drawing to a crisp black ink-outline appearance (only moderately laborious with the help of Photoshop) and then using my digital ‘coloring crayons’ to fill in the blanks to create a full-color version. This time, I opted for something much more cleanly graphic than yesterday’s reworked image. Who knows what happens next time? That, in fact, is the fun of both making art in the first place and then, in having the option of revising it, maybe even more than once. Can you say, mercurial? Nahhh, we know that I’m still just a big kid with a short attention span. No need to dress it up. I’ll just spend the dress-up energy on the art, if you don’t mind too much.
I think of myself, as many people do I suppose, as a Work in Progress. What started out as a small, wiggly, colicky mass of spittle-covered humanity just over a half century ago is progressing, ever so gradually, into something like Iteration No. 10,000,022 or so, and will (if all goes as hoped) continue in the same unpredictable path until death do me part. I like it like that, if you want to know. I have no idea where I’ll be, what I’ll be doing, who I’ll be, a mere matter of months from now let alone in years yet to come, and that seems perfectly okay with me. Life continues to be a big adventure, and I’ll take it as it happens.
As a visual artist, I can say pretty much the same thing. Some works take their own sweet time to develop. Some take their own tangents and I just hang on for dear life and hope I can keep up with where they’re headed. I don’t always know what I intend to make when I begin a project, and I almost never know what I will make, given that art things sometimes cooperate and turn out similar to my imaginings and more often than not, they assuredly don’t. Sometimes the uncooperative piece ends up being much better than I could have conceived of it or even than I thought I could accomplish. A lot of the time, the end result of my artistic machinations ends in my being pretty surprised. Whatever happens in my life and my world, I’m pretty sure I’ll die surprised. Not a bad way to go, eh!
Just as an illustration, I thought I’d share a glimpse of ‘process’ that spans a fair amount of time and a couple of widely separated playtime brainstorms. Thanks to my exceedingly slow-simmering artistic processes, this piece incorporates a color background I scribbled a few days ago in colored pencil on paper and digitally melds it with an organ pipeshade design I did a few years ago (designed for Martin Pasi‘s pipe organ, an instrument made for Winnetka Congregational Church in Illinois, 2007), photographed as it was executed on wood panel in graphite and markers to prepare it for cutting and carving. Bit by bit and frame by frame, two rather disparate art projects merged into one, and that’s how it all went. This time.
A simple abstraction in colored pencil, scanned from the sketch paper.
Taking the original colored pencil drawing through a few painterly paces via Photoshop, I got a more cohesive background ‘starter’.
Rearranging the proportions of the digital artwork makes it a better fit for the mash-up I now have in mind.
The cartoon on wood panel, waiting for cutting and carving, was done in graphite and marker on the raw wood, crisp but not the look I had in mind for this use–more of a pen-and-ink appearance for now.
Photoshop to the rescue! Now we’ve gone back to black and white version and it looks more inked–almost tattooed, perhaps.
So now, I can smash together the two images–the pipeshade design and the colored backdrop. I think I’m almost there . . .
. . . ahhh, that’s better. Now instead of looking like the sun is underwater, I have a sense of sunrise or sunset. Now we’ll see if I can think of a *reason* for this image. Oh, who cares. I just like to Make Stuff when I get in the mood for it. So sue me. But if you can think of any reason for it besides personal entertainment, feel free to enjoy that concept!
The Blue Lacy
He’s of a faithful breed, my dog, a hunting hound, a clever beast,
a lean and hungry Cassius, but faithful all the same–
He races me to the rotting log and runs to ground the boar at feast
who’ll soon be ours–Alas for us, the boar knows his Wild Game!
He lunges up in fear and rage: his tusks are aiming for my throat,
and I have tripped into my grave on roots as strong as sin–
But Blue has taken center stage, leaps on the boar’s mad, bristly coat,
gives me the breath my knife to save, hangs on as it plunges in–
The boar falls back with a bloody scream but turns on me his fiery glare,
and then, in an instant, strikes once more, for he means my dog to die–
I yank the roots, trip him into the stream! and Blue and I tear away from there–
and we relish our supper of beans–no boar–my faithful hound and I.
Fantastic Ocean
The sea has calls upon my soul, upon my heart, upon my will,
And if I drowned, I think I’d still rejoice the sea swallowed me whole,
For in my sight and in my dreams, the sea’s awash with magic grace
Not known by any other place than in its bottomless extremes,
And fantasy entwines with things that make imagination soar
Like birds and butterflies and more wild creatures than are real, whose wings
Embrace the spirit of the sweep of wave and current, saline skies–
Loveliness dazzling my eyes with all the treasures of the deep.
I know it’s been around, arguably, for generations, but the extreme short story seems to have undergone quite the revival in recent times, being popularly called in the English-speaking and -writing world Flash Fiction. Me, I’m an old lady and slow to keep up with any sort of trend. Or, to give myself partial credit, I am so old that I was already around the first time half this stuff was popular.
Never mind all of that. In the way of condensed arts, I’ve always been particularly enamored of short forms, miniatures and compact performances that have rich enough content to hold up under speedy scrutiny yet continue to beckon one for a second and third and thirtieth look, or at the very least, to get one’s nose a whole lot closer to the subject before waving farewell. That applies to works by others (short stories, small photos and drawings, children’s books, one-act plays, songs comprising one or two brief movements, and snappy quatrains), and very much to my own productions. Since you lovely people already know full well that I have the attention span of an end-of-season Mayfly, you can easily surmise that this obsession with tiny-tude is merely a natural outgrowth of my laziness and tangential, caroming path through life.
Which is, of course, partly true. But I’ve also been known to commit to larger-scale projects and yes, in real life, honest-to-goodness fact, to complete them, too. Sometimes, I’ll readily admit, this happens at a very, verrrrrrrrrrry slow pace. But though I have made murals twenty feet wide, rebuilt gardens from the bulldozer up, written and/or drawn every single day for years at a time, my heart does retain its deep affection for the minute, yea verily for that minutiae that can happen in a minute. But only if it’s worth the effort. There are still those larger goals to be achieved and metaphorical mountains to be climbed that require my continuing attentions between spurts of compact acting. And it’s the very change from the massive to the mini that makes those idiosyncratic idioms of iota-size such excellent crevice fillers and so appealing as a respite from larger concerns.
So, old though I may be, I’m trailing in the dust of your every trend–unless you’ll allow that I am only lapping myself in circles, having written couplets, sketched 3-second figures and made one-bite desserts since I was hardly bigger than a molecule myself. I like to think that I’m gradually getting better than I was back then, at least. Practice, practice.
They were justifiably proud of their daughter’s pedigree, but it was precisely this family resemblance that first drew the unkind attentions of those catty girls in the sorority.
Who really wins or loses when there’s a competition of sorts in hand? Seems there’s usually ample opportunity for both sides to get the better of each other, and even more so, for both to end up battered and belittled by the ordeal. I’m all for battling against one’s own failings and worst characteristics, but by George, I’d rather not have anyone else taking advantage of my myriad weaknesses. I feel a certain–possibly smug–contentment right here on the sidelines, watching all of the other snarling and smirking dupes work themselves into a froth by attempting to best each other all the time, knowing as I do that as long as it is a competition, somebody’s bound to come out on the bottom of the stack.
Join Me for Dinner
The beast that ate the hunting dogs
Was fatter than a hundred hogs
But oddly still was hungry when
The hunters chased him down again
So dinnertime—you’ll be delighted—
Found dogs and masters reunited.
Whistle a Happy Tune & Sit in the Catbird Seat
About six million starlings
Roosting on the overpass
May pass the evening pleasantly
By dumping on the grass
While singing chirpy little tunes
Of evening’s charming cheer,
But just remember their first task
If you should drive too near.
Their cat companions lie in wait,
Meanwhile, beneath your couch;
When you come home, they like to roam
Right in your path, then crouch,
Paws up, complaining with a scream
If you should chance to trip
Upon their fine reclining place;
They’ll fly right off to rip
That couch to ribbons, smithereens,
On this remote pretext,
And if you scold or turn them cold,
They’ll turn and rip you next.
[In a Really Creepy & Inappropriate Way]
Thought I was your stalker, violent,
Sneaking on you, ninja-silent,
Pervert peering in your casement,
Clear from attic to the basement,
With my satellite trained on you
All the way from where you’ve gone to
From my distant lair? I’ve got you
Hid from trouble while I watch you–
Baby, you’re not scared now, are you?
I’m just trying to watch out for you;
If I didn’t, who could keep you
Safe and sane, awake, asleep–Who?
I’m your hero, watching closely
So you won’t become morosely
Sad and spooked at all; to
Keep you safe and sound; I call you
In the morning and way later
Just to keep away the hater
That might try to nab your collar,
Take your keys, your watch, your dollar,
Keep you sleepless, full of sorrow–
Sleep tight, Babe! See you tomorrow.
What, *me* scary???
Art-Colored Glasses 