In my last post I introduced you to my notion of The Three Ps: Poetry, Prose and Painting. They are not new companions. I have been dabbling with them for as long as I can remember. Well, that is a bad yardstick. It puts me in mind of situations when I am required to correct a young student’s effort at say, punctuation or footnote format and they respond “But I’ve done it that way all my life!” I usually refrain from inquiring “And just how long is that?” So, in this instance it would be more accurate to say that I have been fiddling around with poetry, prose and painting for far longer than I can remember, and I will trust in your good manners not to inquire “And just how long is that?” Which would force me to ask you to repeat the question.
I do remember having a poem published in the school yearbook when I was in 5th grade in The American International School in Vienna, Austria. So about 1960. I remember the final lines went something like,
“Did the wolf eat the moon?
That chapter’s not written.
Can’t say, it’s too soon!”
I have no idea what great conflict preceded that dire conclusion, and unless my sister Margaret - the family archivist - saved that particular yearbook, that is one of those literary inquiries destined to go unanswered. The same is true, no doubt of my early efforts in prose which I’m sure were created in response to such timeless impulses as “Write a paragraph about what you did on your summer vacation.” or “Write a description of your favorite pet.” No doubt that since those assignments were given after the invention of both the magnet and refrigerators, that was the publication route for those early epistles. Around the same time as the perhaps sadly lost “Wolf and the Moon” poem I must have expressed a interest in drawing, because my parents hired a young woman to give me drawing lessons. Well, that’s not exactly true. More accurately they hired a young woman to paint a portrait of my sister. Perhaps as a Christmas present? I seem to recall a branch of a Christmas tree in the background. My drawing lessons may have been an afterthought. The portrait, I assume, resides in Muse Schrag out in North Barrington, Illinois. Alas, no records exist of my own artistic work from that era.
So the intent of this post is to bring you up to date on my current efforts in the Three Ps. We can leave poetry and prose alone since The Wall contains examples enough for a very large book. One I am actually attempting to compile, a task I am discovering is somewhat Herculean in nature. But then Dad lived to be 100, perhaps there is time enough.
So, right now I am focusing on a series of images tentatively called Legacy. They are the result of a multi-step process. The first step in the process is a photograph. With the exception of the one taken of my mother when she was maybe five years old, they are all mine. The second step is to pull the photo into Photoshop where I add a layer to the image and trace the portion of the image that will contain the colored portion of the final image. Third, I “erase” the major spaces that will be colored. Fourth, I put a white layer behind the other layers and print out the image. Fifth, I draw designs in the “empty spaces, and sixth, I color the designs.
I have had folks ask me “How long does that take?” My glib response is “Don’t ask.” But a little more seriously is it quite time consuming - one of those 3 P tasks requiring hours of uninterrupted time I mentioned in the previous post. But there is also a trick. You never consider the whole task at once. Consider Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ceiling. If you google “how many square feet are there in the Sistine chapel ceiling?” You will get a number of responses - well, you will get a number of websites, but only 2 responses: 5,000 sq. ft. or 12,000 sq. ft. I have no idea why only those two answers pop up. I assume there are a couple of seemingly credible sources out there that all the others are cribbing from. No matter. Either number is an intimidating number of square feet to paint, even with a roller!
I have no doubt that when Mikey came to work and clambered up the scaffolding he did NOT say to himself “Well, I better get cracking. Got to crank out a couple hundred square feet of mural before the Pope sticks his big nose in here.” Tho’ Mikey and I are not quite as close as I imply - all those centuries and stuff - I am pretty sure he began each day with a particularly artistic objective in mind. It would have been more like, “I’m going to get those damn hands right today if it kills me!” That “focus on one thing at a time” concept is no doubt the only thing the Legacy images have in common with Mikey’s ceiling. You color one particular section - a wheel, a spoke, some one thing - at a time and over the course of an indeterminate time - Ta Da! It’s finished! Well, almost, just a couple more dots . . .
But writing about the process is probably not the best way to go. Let me show a couple examples.
This is a photograph that I took of some old farm equipment that my Dad and his brothers used as youngsters growing up on the family farm. My cousin Dean has rescued much of that machinery, and, last I knew he still has them on his farm in South Dakota.
I hadn’t planned on saving the interim steps so this stage of the image has been both Photoshopped and hand-drawn and painted with portions erased so they can be colored, and some of the white spaces colored in.
And this is the final version. It is 8.5 x 11 inches.
This series of images gives you a bit more complete view of the process. The original image has a couple mysteries attached to it. I have always believed it to be my mother “driving” one of the Taxi’s from her father’s cab company. My sister - who was not sure of the photo’s provenance - thought it might be Mom’s brother Benn. But the image seems to be clearly a young girl of 4 or 5 years of age. The vehicle itself appears to be a Ford from the early 30s. Anyhow this is the seminal image for this study.
This is the image with the darker lines drawn in - in Photoshop - and the blank spaces whited out in preparation for drawing.
