Busy, busy, busy,…

… busy working leather for the masks, busy honing drafting / painting skills, busy crystallizing ideas for new works, busy with Life in general, and blissfully ignoring all that Does Not Matter –

– and in my life, happily, I am the sole arbiter of that.

I stumbled over this delightful clip the other day, and was reminded of  a line from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, about the “slimy things that crawl with legs upon a slimy sea”:

Tracy Ullman is a genius.

But how does one finally free oneself from sycophantic parasites?  You know them, the ones that come crawling out of the woodwork only when they want something from you, usually your car, your house, your spouse, your wages, or a kidney,… but only after having made your own life a Hell on Earth.

These parasites *so* need to buy [or as their wont, steal] a frakkin’ clue, and get over themselves, already.  It’s their damned fault that I just can’t accept the idea of vampires as protagonists, in any medium.

Just damn,…

I am bloody weary of being expected to not only endure, but to nurture the overweening conceits and keening insecurites of others.

Forget trying to talk to them about it, just to get them to bring it down to tolerable levels.  These puffed-up creatures, these narcissists, typically mistake arrogance for pride — they will tear you a new one if you presume to find fault with them or their actions.

Their vacillating behavior — arcing from neglect to gushing praise to blatant snarks, and back again — is designed to keep you off balance.  It’s manipulation aimed towards control, just waiting to mature into exploitation.

Like most mortals, I have my breaking point.  When I’m pushed — or dragged — to the edge of the bottomless chasm that is their blind and insatiable self-love, I cut myself free and fly away.  It’s become more than a moral imperative.  It’s now a matter of preserving my own calm and dignity,…

… but — just maybe — attention whores simply have to learn the hard way that they can’t be the star of anyone else’s stage.

Crows on my mind, again,…

Ben and I went strolling through First Thursday in Portland last night, and we saw a lot of great and intriguing art.

At the Froelick Gallery I encountered the small works of Lli Wilburn – local urban landscapes created in ink, dye and graphite on board.  The colors are so intense and the detail so fine and delicate that at first I thought I was looking at film transparencies.  Understand that I’m not one of those who believe that lots of detail means ‘great art’.  But Wilburn’s devotion to the more delicate details of the environments conveyed in each of her paintings deserves serious mention.

And whenever at the Froelick I always look for the works of Rick Bartow — I favor his mixed media works on paper, particularly his compositions of animals and humans morphing in and out of each other.  Bartow has done several works containing crows and ravens that just blow me away.

In all candor, I don’t know what it is about crows that grabs my attention — maybe the Universe is trying to tell me something.  Growing up in the deep south one might suppose I’d seen plenty of crows during my childhood, but I lived far from farmland.  Even so, crows and ravens still wanted my attention.  During a visit to London in the late 70’s Ben and I saw the huge, beautiful ravens [their wings cruelly clipped] that are the eternal mascots of the Tower.

In 1996 I did this mixed media painting, Raven’s Feather:

Raven's Feather

… one of several paintings in which I embedded feathers into the pigments.

Then in 1999 I created this mask design, that I named Corvus:

Leather Mask: Corvus

After we moved to Oregon I starting seeing crows all over the place, flying and laughing at the humans relegated to walking on the ground. During a holiday on the coast a couple of years back, we stopped at the Salishan for lunch and witnessed a group of crows tricking a groundskeeper out of his bagged lunch — Crows 1, Human 0.

About six years ago while I was surfing the net I discovered two visionary Pacific Northwest artists who appear to share my fascination with corvids, at least in part — the aforementioned Rick Bartow and then Duncan Regehr.  Each artist brings about his own vision in his own way, and I’m hard-pressed to say which I prefer — I guess it depends on my mood of the moment as to which approach speaks to me the loudest and with the most passion at the time.

But a couple of days ago I was sketching a crow image, just playing with some nebulous ideas and mixed media — I quickly realized I’m in imminent danger of mimicking the style of Bartow,…

Experimental: Crow Sketch

… and I gotta watch that crap if I’m going to develop my own voice as an artist.

Tim Brown on creativity and play

I love TED!  Particularly when a video speaks to my heart, to my marrow, and to my very core:

The bits about “thinking with your hands” and that “learning is a by-product of play” really sing to me.

Another life drawing

It’s been a long time since I’ve had the opportunity to do any sort of live sitting portraiture.  Most folks haven’t the patience or the time to sit for however long [in multiple sittings] it can take to complete a fine art portrait, so I usually have to resort to a couple of quick live sketches and scores of photographs.  This one was done during a life drawing session last week at Hipbone Studio:

"Jennifer"

The time for this piece was about 45 minutes.  Because I don’t want to leave my groove to sharpen a point or swap out pencils, my preferred tool for life drawings is the *woodless pencil.  I’ve tried pastels and charcoal, but the dust makes me sneeze like crazy.

And while my collectors love knowing that I put blood, sweat, and tears into my art, they draw the line at mucous.

~~~~~

*the woodless pencils I use were made by Grumbacher, but I don’t believe they make them any longer — good thing I like to stock up when I find art goodies that I really like,….