Doggerel

Well, now I am officially into the old dog status (though don't worry, I have no intention of lying out on the porch doing inappropriate things), it seems cats and dogs are popping up all over the place. One of the models I was interviewing this week mentionned she had a cat, and that it would interesting to incorporate it into a picture. I quite agree, apparently it's better behaved than most, and I do like putting them and dogs into work such as the recent encaustic of Hanna, or this old etching of Mittens



or the encaustic for (Miss Molotov) Marissa's gallery 5 years ago (IIRC):



And today I came across a great poem by Charles Bukowski, which might be fun to try and illustrate:

wearing the collar

I live with a lady and four cats
and some days we all get
along.

some days I have trouble with
one of the
cats.

other days I have trouble with
two of the
cats.

other days,
three.

some days I have trouble with
all four of the
cats

and the
lady:

ten eyes looking at me
as if I was a dog.

But of course I might have to then answer it by illustrating a poem I like even better, "Dog", by Lawrence Ferlinghetti :

The dog trots freely in the street
and sees reality
and the things he sees
are bigger than himself
and the things he sees
are his reality
Drunks in doorways
Moons on trees
The dog trots freely thru the street
and the things he sees
are smaller than himself
Fish on newsprint
Ants in holes
Chickens in Chinatown windows
their heads a block away
The dog trots freely in the street
and the things he smells
smell something like himself
The dog trots freely in the street
past puddles and babies
cats and cigars
poolrooms and policemen
He doesn't hate cops
He merely has no use for them
and he goes past them
and past the dead cows hung up whole
in front of the San Francisco Meat Market
He would rather eat a tender cow
than a tough policeman
though either might do
And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory
and past Coit's Tower
and past Congressman Doyle of the Unamerican Committee
He's afraid of Coit's Tower
but he's not afraid of Congressman Doyle
although what he hears is very discouraging
very depressing
very absurd
to a sad young dog like himself
to a serious dog like himself
But he has his own free world to live in
His own fleas to eat
He will not be muzzled
Congressman Doyle is just another
fire hydrant
to him
The dog trots freely in the street
and has his own dog's life to live
and to think about
and to reflect upon
touching and tasting and testing everything
investigating everything
without benefit of perjury
a real realist
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with
a real live
    barking
    democratic dog
engaged in real
  free enterprise
with something to say
           about ontology
something to say
  about reality
           and how to see it
           and how to hear it
with his head cocked sideways
           at streetcorners
as if he is just about to have
     his picture taken
                  for Victor Records
           listening for
    His Master's Voice
 and looking
         like a living questionmark
           into the
                  great gramophone
              of puzzling existence
           with its wondrous hollow horn
       which always seems
               just about to spout forth
            some Victorious answer
         to everything

Interesting times....

Well, first Blogger loses edited versions of posts, and now the login has been broken for a few days. But scanning through their chat board, some - not all - noted that they could login using different browsers. So I tried Chrome (I usually use IE, bad habits die hard), and here I am. The lost posts though have not been restored, although the powers-that-be put up notices that it's all back (when they bother to put up notifications at all). This sort of repeated idiocy usually indicates bad management practice, if I had any Google stock, I'd consider unloading it.

Enough ranting :) It's been a busy time with nothing to post for it, though it certainly has been an educational! I took the same image as the litho, and decided to try doing it intaglio to see if I could make the background more settled while bringing out more liveliness in Hanna's figure. The line etching went well, though I should have feathered it more, and I adjusted some of the perspective lines to bring the image more into focus:



But from there on in, with the aquatint, disaster! C'est la vie. So once I recover (sob), I'll give it another shot with another plate...

Meanwhile, we've started on illustrating another one of Hanna's poems, Parasite Worms. Right now it's in the sketch stage (so it may go out the window altogether), but the idea is to try and incorporate the poem and a dreamlike figure into one large encaustic (36x36). Lettering in encaustic is a bitch, and it's been awhile since I've done figures from imagination. Should be interesting. But like Picasso said, "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." Words to live by.

Speaking of poetry, in case there's anyone reading this from the Halifax area, the show Dan O'Neill is curating over at the Dal Arts Center opens tonight. The full blurb is here, scroll down to the "Second Impressions" listing. The show comprises lithos by Motherwell and de Kooning with poetry by Frank O'Hara and Octavio Paz. Which of course allows me to close with one of my favourite O'Hara poems:

Why I Am Not A Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Hanna, The Embittered Poem

I have been slow in putting this poem of Hanna's up, partly just for technical reasons, but mostly because on first reading it is visceral, immediate, and personal. Who hasn't experienced one side or the other of destructive control? For that reason alone it is worth reading, because it takes a good deal of courage to question that aspect of one's personality (as victim or victimizer).

But I think it also needs to be read on other levels, such as in the sense of what a disappointed, accusatory lover might project on the writer. And at a positive level, I read it in the sense of bemused detachment that comes from self awareness.

Which is it? I don't know; but good poetry leaves these questions open.

(You might have to click on the image to get a readable version. I haven't typed in the poem, because I like the effect of the handwriting, to the point of reproducing the paper bag versions below. They can also be expanded by clicking on them. As with other work on this site, high resolution poster versions up to 13"x19" are available)

Hanna, Unfortunate Wit

We have started putting together the poetry and drawings, if anyone wants one, let me know, they are giclee using Epson inks (we can print them currently up to 13"x19"). We start with a simple black and white, with a poem of hanna's I quite like...

Speaking of Poetry...

One of the places I like to go when troubled - and even when not - is Whitman, particularly his Song of Myself. It is a marvelous, expansive celebration of life in all its difficult contradictions summed up in the well known lines of verse 51:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

And then you get to a certain age, and other parts such as this (from verse 52) come into focus:

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Poetry, Art, and Odds & Ends

One of the reasons I like working with Hanna is that she brings many talents to this collaboration. One of those is poetry.

Drawing is often referred to as the "poetry of art"; I think there is also some truth in the converse: that poetry is the art of literature. It is written thought boiled down to its essentials. Like drawing, it is the simplest, most unadorned statement of fundamental beliefs about the world. When you read the work of an honest poet, just as when you look at an honest drawing, you are getting a glimpse of a very unprotected part of the creator's heart.

There's many forms of poetry, just as there are many forms of drawing. Some like elegance, some like meter & rhyme and formal construction; some like grand themes and some like looking at a blade of grass. It's all good, as long as it is honest.

Hanna has been brave enough to share some of her work with me; one of the surprises (though I guess it shouldn't be) is that her approach to writing is similar in many ways as mine to art; it's a reaction to, and an exploration of, experience. It's an attempt to grasp some little corner of beauty and understanding (and for me, real beauty is subjective, and comes through understanding) in a chaotic and often incomprehensible world.

So I have asked Hanna if I could illustrate some of her poems, and she has agreed. One of the things I have always liked is the combination of text and image into a single art form. In the ones I will be putting up(they are still in process) I work directly with her hand-written poetry - complete with crossings-out and rewriting; I find they work well with my drawings, complete with their erasures and re-drawings. You can't explore unless you are willing to take risks, and taking risks means falling down at times. But as Paula Smith (who suffered through several years of trying to teach me piano) used to tell me, "You have got to learn to play through your mistakes."

On Painting the Sistine Chapel

A goiter it seems I got from this backward craning
like the cats get there in Lombardy, or wherever
—bad water, they say, from lapping their fetid river.
My belly, tugged under my chin, 's all out of whack.
Beard points like a finger at heaven. Near the back
of my neck, skull scrapes where a hunchback's lump would be.
I'm pigeon-breasted, a harpy! Face dribbled—see?—
like a Byzantine floor, mosaic. From all this straining
my guts and my hambones tangle, pretty near.
Thank God I can swivel my butt about for ballast.
Feet are out of sight; they just scuffle around, erratic.
Up front my hide's tight elastic; in the rear
it's slack and droopy, except where crimps have callused.
I'm bent like a bow, half-round, type Asiatic.
Not odd that what's on my mind,
when expressed, comes out weird, jumbled. Don't berate;
no gun with its barrel screwy can shoot straight.
Giovanni, come agitate
for my pride, my poor dead art! I don't belong!
Who's a painter? Me? No way! They've got me wrong.
===================
From Three Complete Poems of Michelangelo, translated by John Frederick Nims