Little to Say, and All the Time in the World to Say It
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Tag Archives: graphite
Competitive Edginess
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.
A Whisper in Your Ear, My Dear
Friendly Advice to a Feckless Youth
The true Reckless Endangerment
is seldom what you’d guess:
not often quite so obvious
as acting under stress,
thus putting others in harm’s way
for physical duress;
more likely, it’s just saying things
much better left unsaid
about your girlfriend’s hairstyle, or
about great-uncle Fred,
who is your mother’s richest
relative and, shortly, dead.
It’s bad enough your note on Fred
will cut Mom from his will,
and likely keep you from her own
good graces longer still,
but there’s your girlfriend left to calm.
Let’s hope the bitter pill
of your ill-thought hairstyle remark
won’t make her wish you ill.
When Ladies are Dancing
Patterns of elegance, synchronized moves,
Footsteps as fluid as flowing in grooves
Down sides of a fountain afloat with champagne,
They leap and they glide and they dance the refrain
As though they were ageless and weightless as light,
Each gesture, each pattern, each detail so right,
So proper and grace-filled, expressive of joy—
Intimidate wholly the poor sidelined boy!
Rodents on the Run
What’s in Store
Sometimes even a partial notion will do!
I told you recently that I was preparing to offer some of my work for sale online, and it’s time for the first revelation. I know that so many of you who read and converse with me here are also artists, writers and other creative people, and thus virtually by default are also (a) somewhat challenged by the technology and know-how of operating in businesslike fashion, promoting and marketing and selling your work; and (b) not exceedingly wealthy, as a result. So I did what I know a few of you, and many other people nowadays do, and turned to an existing, established production/marketing mechanism online and am going to let Zazzle help me with the ‘dirty work’. It means I’ve made a few business choices already, and I will share my thinking with you here because we really are all in this together!
First of all, this is far from a get-rich-quick scheme, not only because this is work I’ve spent most of my life learning to do and producing, but because as a business model it’s even less remunerative than the 30%-off-the-top commission that’s fairly typical among artist representing galleries and agents I’ve known in the past. But I am willing to take a very small amount (in many cases, the standard 10% royalty fee) from a company that will cover the grunt work I’m not willing or able to do myself. That is, of course, if they prove they can and will do it. I chose Zazzle because they have a certain established reputation and track record, easy to use interfaces, and while they are not high-end and going to capture for me any exclusive and wealthy clientele, they produce a decent quality range of products and so far have been very responsive in our interactions. This also makes me feel confident in their interactions with anyone who would come to view and buy my work, and that I can price the work as low as possible so that people like me (many being of the aforementioned impecunious creative sort) can choose from a variety of items that they might actually be able to afford without horrific trials.
I have begun posting my designs to the store fairly recently, but have made an effort to put up a reasonable representation from different sorts of my work: photography, drawing, painting and mixed-media images, and a fair range of topics from the abstract to absurdist, from factual to fantastical. There are a small few images with text (prose or poetry) on them, and many of those offered as prints can be purchased not only in different sizes but on different kinds of paper or even as stretched, ‘gallery style’ canvases, that is, with the image wrapping the sides so that the pieces can be framed but do not require a frame for hanging. I have offered a few of the designs as T-shirts, too, because it’s generally considered a good thing to wear clothes, and if we require clothes, then why not wear ones that aren’t terribly expensive? T-shirts are a pretty affordable option. But I’ve never been fond of wearing anything that advertised someone or some Thing (object or cause or concept)–if I want to promote a cause, I’d rather do it with my own words and my actions than with worn signage. So you will find very few slogans or words at all on the T-shirts, just pictures for the most part. I have made a number of them simple black-and-white images, often using my pen-and-ink line drawings, and I would encourage those who like color to consider getting a set of fabric coloring pens and having a good old time coloring the T-shirts like coloring book pages to suit taste and need. Might be a very fun thing to do with children, in fact, as the T-shirts can be ordered not only in a range of adult sizes and styles but many children’s ones as well.
I’ve configured most designs as the largest print version for which I think they’re suited, but most can be scaled smaller for your smaller space or to be more affordable. As it is, there are a great many prints under $20 a piece, and quite a few under $10, so I hope that a larger number of people can afford them without feeling a terrible pinch. There are a whole lot of other designers and artists represented in Zazzle stores, and a really wide array of objects and items that can be customized with your, my, or others’ designs and images, and I will see if and when I’m ready to branch out further with my own. For now, you should know that there is lots of work posted to Zazzle by someone under the name of ‘artspark’–pretty nice stuff, from the look of it–that’s not mine; I tried a huge number of store name options before finding one Zazzle accepted as not already in use, so I’ll just stick with this one even if it’s a bit close. I titled each of my designs KIW Sparks: [Title] to differentiate a little, hoping that helps.
Even if you have no interest in–or money for–buying anything, I invite you to spend a little time visiting my work at Zazzle. It can serve, in part, as my online gallery for now, where you can see many of the works I’ve used to illustrate my blog posts, as well as a few artworks you’ve not seen here before, and I am eager to share them all with you. I hope that you, too, are finding the courage to ‘put yourself out there’ artistically and creatively because we have this fine forum among friends in the blog-world and online businesses, because even though it’s generally a tough way to make a living, financially speaking, it’s a glorious way to make a Life.
I don't know if I can claim to have accomplished anything yet, but I'm at least underway in the process of taming the dragon that is my fear of the business side of the creative life. Hopefully, having chosen Zazzle as my squire, I'll figure out how to battle my way through the whole process more successfully over time!
It’s Good to be Otherworldly
At times, time should just stop. Hold its breath, keep confidence with every secretive thing because some little happening occurs, a tiny treasured thing appears, as small as dust in air perhaps but so perfect in its lack of discipline as to be solace beyond words, a wonder like a young child’s hair lit by a momentary ray of sunlight to become more beautiful than all the votive flames that ever lit the night, like a killdeer’s evening call fluting out from where it hides in the tall grass.
. . . an hour in which enforced quiet time in a waiting room is transformed into time for invention in the sketchbook . . .
Let the treasury of life be honored by our awed obeisance, however brief, as we take our meditative pause to contemplate those little motes of sweetness that make up, in total, something so ethereal and grand–the sharp, resinous perfume rising from a path through piny woods on a sun-baked day; that bright mercurial flash of a school of tiny fry all turning in the shoals at once, glinting; an amorous bird showing off its vocal flashiness from a leafy grove across the way . . .
. . . a piece of rustic dark bread with butter melting into it . . . .
May we never forget to stop, if only for that little moment, to absorb the pleasurable surprise of living in the midst of millions of small miracles each night and every day, even if they’re often lost to us as too minute to catch our notice. The air we breathe is redolent with them–each step we take can draw us further into that precise great incident of wonder that should startle every heart into eternal admiration.
To Find Balance: Open the Book to a New Page and Begin Again
I’m never quite satisfied that I’m getting as much done as I want to do, doing it as well as I wish, improving at the rate I think I ought to manage. I’m hardly a perfectionist, nor am I particularly obsessive (at least about things that I think truly matter)–I’d guess I’m just a fairly typical person who thinks I’m always running just a bit behind the pace and always crossing things too slowly off the To Do lists. But I don’t think that’s grounds for quitting or even for not trying at all.
It just requires that I take a step back and regroup–reassess my priorities–once in a while. Hence my recurrent list-making and all of those times spent sitting and, to all outward appearances, staring off into space, when what I’m really doing is having a long hard look at what’s in front of me that I’d forgotten how to see, or what’s inside that’s not quite getting its message heard clearly enough anymore.
For one thing, my time-management method, if any, is often the old familiar one of doing what appears right in front of me, often leading to that state I’ve mentioned many a time wherein I set out to do one task, get diverted from it partway through by something else that catches my attention, veer off from that toward another thing that drew my eye, and so on ad infinitum but rarely ad finitum. That’s hardly the end of the world, because of course the short and simple tasks that pop up midway do get taken to completion and crossed off the list, and eventually the original plan will recapture my attention. It’s just wonderfully inefficient and sometimes I prefer to reevaluate whether those bigger tasks aren’t better broken down into groups of manageable smaller ones, ones that might perhaps get finished if stumbled upon tangentially in this habitual way.
All of this is a rather sidelong way itself of saying that I haven’t reestablished my drawing habit as firmly and regularly as I’d like, so I’m revisiting my intention to create a specific schedule or plan that encourages me to focus better on drawing, even a little bit, more often again. I know that I will do this; I can do it and have done so before. But I must choose to do it, and how, and that’s the agenda of the day. Other things (like, oh, blogging, f’rinstance) have stolen my attention and intentions away from drawing, and I would like to rebalance my doings a bit.
Needless to say, this has led to a fairly large overhaul of my household Fix-it lists, because I always prefer that there be at least the possibility of my getting those things done that will keep a solid roof over our heads and a comfortable living environment in which to do things like drawing and blogging surrounding us. That list is as big as always, full of everything from essential repairs to the rearrangement of rooms to better reflect and accommodate how we actually use them, to long-range and perhaps highly fantastical proposals for things I might attempt to build, create or accomplish sometime down my long and wayward path of homemaking.
But there is also this quick-fix remembrance that what I always advocated to my students had better be usable advice for me: To begin drawing again, make a mark. Waiting around for the Inspiration Fairy to appear and bonk me with a magic wand of fully fledged ideas and a baptism of heartwarming motivation makes for delightful internal pictorials, but not an iota of drawing to show for it. The best cure for a staring, empty piece of paper is A Mark. Directionless and indecipherable as any random thing, it may well be, but it’s amazing how very brief the time usually is between seeing a dark scratch on an otherwise pristine piece of paper and my hyperactive editorial mind kicking into gear and critiquing that mark as something that ought to have purpose and attempting to decipher what that purpose is, steering my hand to further scribbling or erasure, and either way, toward something specific and concrete, even if entirely abstract and nonobjective. That’s what’s going to happen, for starters. Where it goes from there, I’ll have to report back to you when it begins.
Devices for Measuring the Passage of Time
A clock can only go so far. Memory is fleeting and mutable. A calendar, a journal, a snapshot–these mnemonic devices all tickle and tease us into a semblance of attentiveness to the passing of the hours and the effects they have on us and our spheres of existence. Only in the arts, perhaps, do we find a deeper and truer conduit to allow us to fully sense our place in time and how we experience it, now and over time. We are immersed in the moment in a more piquant and provocative way, making a more spiritual connection perhaps, with our past, present and future, when we sing and dance, listen and look, paint and write, tell our tales and learn from those that our fellow-travelers tell.
So I return to an old-friend medium (or two), come back to the antiquated techniques that only burnish with age and use. I begin again to write with greater dedication and fervor. I open clean new leaves of a sketchbook to mark up with the passage of this time.
. . . and the ewer is full again--perhaps with promise . . .
Now that I will be listening in on weekly choir rehearsals again, I have both an artful background to and the time for practicing my ways of recording and interpreting my own passage through time and space. It seemed appropriate to start off this easeful regimen last night, then, with a particularly traditional and foundational study in graphite of texture, shape, value, and so forth, and to mark quite literally where I am after a hiatus of some months from super-regular drawing work.
It feels good to get the creaky hands wrapped around a pencil in this way again. Helps me feel anchored in my place on the continuum I suppose. And I take comfort in doing this little bit to stanch the flow of time unmarked–to make it mine for just this nth of history, then let it go again to sweep toward when I will next choose to prick it into place with this small graphite flagpole that I plant to make it mine.
Titles without Tales
One of Our Best Operatives is Missing . . .
As both a visual and verbal storyteller, I’m bound to come up against the stubborn blank wall of imagination empty on occasion, if not often. Long ago I began using the trick of “forced randomness” to fill in the blank until something more substantial would either emerge from the resulting prescription or I’d get a welcome brain-wave from another source to rescue me. As I learned, it’s simply making the first mark on the page that’s generally the hardest part: once there’s a mark, whether genuinely random scribble made with the blessed No. 2 pencil or a slightly gibberish-tinged line written in exasperation, I now have something to respond to, to edit, to like or dislike or build upon, in whatever way I’m moved to do. The response may be disgusted continuous pressing of the Delete key or furious “unscribbling” with the big bad eraser (a tool I find I rarely use for actually erasing). If that’s the case, why then, I can work to divine just what was so unsatisfactory to me about the initial move I’d made and then there’s probably fodder in the facts enough to get me started on something more useful, more personally motivated.
If, on the other hand, I see the seeds of utility and interest in that first foray, I’m often well served by turning the whole process into a good healthy bout of problem solving. That’s what real creativity is to me: my flighty little brain’s attempt to figure out what’s missing from the world, real or not, and fill in the blanks. Blank page, blank canvas, blank silence. Aside from beautiful and meaningful moments of personal zen, I’m driven to fill them with stuff that intrigues and feeds me.
Sometimes I’ll use external means to try to force motivation. I might pick up the first book or magazine I see, crack it open to the first page my fingers find, point to a spot on the page, and tell myself that whatever word or image I land on has to serve as my starting point, the guide for making Mark One. I might look out the window and whatever moves first within my view has to be the source. Any of the old standard repertoire of such tricks will likely do. But perhaps my favorite is to give myself a title or an over-arching concept that could conceivably serve as the framework for a whole series of artworks, chapters, stories. I think of it as my “Mr Booktitles” approach, named years ago in honor of a school of “acting”, sometimes embodied by very famous and very popular actors speaking every line of dialog or soliloquy or narration as though it were a stand-alone title from a very badly written book, a method that still keeps me astonished these particular actors–or the writers and directors that should be forcing them to do better–can get hired and admired. Go figure. But the fatuous title approach has served me reasonably well, so I guess I mustn’t criticize. All I do in the instance is create my title and use either the text or the artwork to try to flesh it out, give it some meaning.
The graphite drawing above came from just such an approach, and ended up being the first in a series of five or six drawings that “illustrated” different parts of the “story” represented by the title, a sort of post-Cold-War spy adventure that never did get written and for which the present artwork illustrated, ultimately, the nonexistent prequel to the never-happened story. Not that I wouldn’t write the actual story at some point, but it wasn’t necessary to have it in hand as impetus to get some work on the page in another format. Who knows, it may be that the illustrations had to exist in order for the story to ‘need to’ happen at some point. If that isn’t convoluted enough, I don’t know what is. But at least it gave me a useful jumping-off point for a series of works that remains something of a favorite among my audiences and yes, with me too.
Art-Colored Glasses 