No, no, no!

They did it too me again, damn their eyes! The protagonist had just discovered an important wrinkle in the case. I touched the screen to discover “what comes next,” when instead of the next page in the current “who-dun-it”, up pops a screen “About the author.” With nary a by-your-leave, it informs me that s/he was born in a small town in northern Minnesota where s/he honed both his/her writing skills and love of nature by tracking black bears to their winter dens and journaling predictions as to when they might emerge. I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care. Get on with the damn story. 

I was just beginning to care about the protagonist. How can they treat me so shabbily? Odds are I will not hang around for the “thrilling conclusion” in their next novel, which the “About the author” page informs me will be published sometime in the next decade after the author completes his/her sabbatical in Tahiti. 

I really do try to understand the author’s point of view, which can reflect their struggle, sometimes their fight, with their own creation. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried valiantly to slip out from under the huge shadow of Sherlock Holmes by tossing him over a waterfall. The ploy ultimately failed and Doyle was obliged by public pressure - and financial inducements - to bring his iconic sleuth back from the dead to sleuth yet another day. Establishing, perhaps, our current obsession with season after season of less deserving narratives, or the recreation of previous successes out of something less than whole cloth.

Authors do depend upon our attention to pay the rent, so I guess I should be more tolerant of the occasional narrative fracture when the well runs a bit dry. I have written before of my own love of serialized fiction - particularly in the mystery genre. But if you are going to start down this monied path, dear author, please have the professionalism to leave us with some sense of individual completion when you leave us to weave the other various segments of your larger narrative. As Doyle and others have learned, our tolerance for narrative interruptus is frail and unforgiving.

Cat Burglar Therapy

And now, as John Cleese, aka Monty Python used to say, for something completely different: Cat Burglar Therapy.

Back decades ago when I was firmly convinced that my future lay amidst adoring throngs along Broadway, I paid a lot more attention to choreography. Even back then in high school nothing would bring down the director’s wrath more quickly than an actor standing woodenly, gazing sheepishly out past the footlights with no idea where they were going next. Somebody had neglected “blocking” which is the fine art of moving actors around a stage set in a manner that not only seemed natural, but also enhanced the visual appeal of the performance.

Alright, now take a couple of conceptual leaps with me now.  If you have had the time to read back a few posts you know that soft socks, polished hardwood floors and an ill-timed late night call to the BR tossed me on my butt, resulting in a compression fracture in that same butt area. 

  

OK, leap number two, in addition to wearing a back brace designed by the Marquis d’Sade and doing exercises under the tutelage of some of his disciples, I am catching up on my ongoing mystery novels binge. Hey, there has to be a silver lining somewhere.

OK, leap number three. In the course of this reading jag I have become reacquainted with two characters.  Actually two versions of the same character who play on different teams. One is the cat burglar whom we often encounter slipping in and out of the shadows surrounding a posh mansion in Bel Air or the Hamptons or Mayfair. And, second, our cat burglar is being cautiously shadowed by an equally mysterious figure dressed all in black. Depending upon the narrative one is the protagonist and the other the antagonist. It is not always clear which is which.  But that is not the point.What is important is the manner in which they move about the environment through which we follow them. They glide, moving silently, dark shadows moving with infinite grace, lit perhaps only by the uneven glow of a cloud-streaked moon.

And now leap number four which hopefully brings us full circle and home to healing.  A realization I came to today, while swinging a weighted ankle back and forth, is that a vital objective in my physical therapy is to rewire my brain and the various appendages it controls. Maybe re-habituate or reacquaint are better words, as the object is to reacquaint the brain with all the un- or subconscious actions it controls.

And to me that means “blocking.”

The idea is to “block” the major pathways in your life, similar, according to some things I have read, to the process blind folks go through. X number of steps from the bed to the BR, Y to front door, etc. But in cat burglar therapy the objective is not simply to get from A to B, but rather to “cat burglar” your way from A to B,C,D, etc., until you can retrain your brain to once more guide you gracefully through your world.

I have run this idea past both my physical and occupational therapist (the difference between which I have yet to discern) and both said, “Hmm. That’s interesting. I never thought of it that way.” Neither seemed to dismiss it out of hand. So I will continue to play this little head game as I progress through my therapy.

But please heed this important word of warning. Remember as you seek to move cat burglar-like, gracefully from place to place I AM IN THERAPY BECAUSE A FALL IN SMOOTH SOCKS ON SLICK FLOORS CAUSED THE FALL AND INJURY THAT MADE THE THERAPY NECESSARY. SO WEAR SHOES WITH TACKY SOLES - GYM SHOES OR SOMETHING SIMILAR - LIKE THOSE HOSPITAL SOCKS WITH GUMMY DOTS ON THE SOLES. PICK YOUR FEET UP AND PUT THEM DOWN CAREFULLY.   We may all enjoy watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers move gracefully across our various screens, but we aren’t there yet!

Inner Child #1: Roses at Sunset

Inner Child #1: Roses at Sunset

This image need a bit of explanation:

First, a few years before Dad died, so he must have been late 90s, Christine and I took him over to Long Grove, a little village 45 miles or so northwest of Chicago that, at the time featured a couple of nice art galleries. We were walking through one, where patrons were murmuring comments among themselves, when we heard Dad remark, clearly and from across the room, “I wouldn’t hang that in my toilet!”

In his defense, age and fading filters aside, he shared the notion with many of us who spent our lives lecturing to rooms full of college students, that he could say whatever he wanted whenever, and however, he wanted. But we scurried over, decided it was time for lunch and beat a hopefully graceful retreat.

The object of his assessment was, admittedly, a rather garish abstract and my reaction would have been along the same lines, but more acoustically restrained. Perhaps more accurately, neither of us understood what the artist was attempting to convey.

Which leads me to the second part of my explanation of today’s image. I get daily posts from a website called Artsy. It is an online gallery which lets me know when I can bid on an Andrew Wyeth or a Hudson School piece for 5 or 6 figures, as I listed those among my “preferences.” But they also show, seemingly randomly, other images - images that call my father’s Long Grove review to mind.

I have no idea how they select those additional images, but I try to remember my own, more gentle artist-centric assessment - I just didn’t understand what the artist was trying to communicate. Which for some reason got me thinking about the images that parents lovingly display on refrigerator doors around the world. Works of their young artists, the communicative intent of which was no doubt explained and is now shared among the whole family.

OK, now here is the leap of faith we have to agree to regarding the current image. “What,” I asked myself, “would I draw, or perhaps better, would have drawn, when I was six or seven?” A naive version of the images I currently labor over? And do those images still exist somewhere down some dusty pathway, in some neglected corner of my cortex? So I opened my trusty, but also sadly neglected, Strathmore 9 by 12 inch sketch pad and a simple set of markers. And a few days later out jumped Inner Child #1: Roses at Sunset.  I have no idea if there will be a #2 or #3. We’ll have to see what the kid has to say.

Patterns and Parallels

 Patterns and Parallels

Removing the structure of a “normal job,” as retirement does, effects your life in a variety of ways, some of them rather unexpected. Among the most surprising, for me anyhow, is stumbling across behavioral patterns from my childhood, long neglected but now rediscovered like an old pair of shoes behind a bucket out in the garage, still functional, perhaps even the right size, but somehow just forgotten. 

These patterns were some that probably made me seem a bit odd to my peers in junior high school, perceptions to which I remained blithely unaware. Two cultural realities enabled these particular patterns. First, I lived close enough to school to ride my bike to school, and second, educational policies were still sufficiently rudimentary to permit me to ride home for lunch. It was what awaited me there at home that might well have raised eyebrows amid our version of The Harper Valley PTA.

No, nothing so obviously titillating as those revealed in Jeannie C Riley’s 1968 hit, but something which, on deeper examination could be seen as culturally more insidious - The World Book Encyclopedia! It was all there from aardvark to zyzzyza, untouched, unconsidered, and certainly unapproved by the local school board. You could easily slide straight from transportation to transgendered on the same page! Not that my editions from the 1950s would have contained “transgendered.” And I obviously exaggerate for editorial effect. In truth what drove me to the encyclopedia was simple curiosity. I would select a volume at random and with an equal sense of freedom, dive into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and begin to read.

It was, I believe, those random readings that opened my mind to the idea that there were no boundaries between ideas. That each little lunchtime ramble could connect in someway to those that had preceded it and those yet to come. Perhaps had some “lesson plan” dictated that I start with aardvark and proceed in some orderly manner to zyzzyza I would have allowed that process to rein in my more flamboyant curiosity. Fortunately my mother was most likely reading her own novel, or was busy putting the ironing into the refrigerator - another story for another time. So I was free to construct my own amorphous notion of the ways in which structure and pattern found their way in existence.

Years later an equally intellectually liberated woman gave our young daughters an entire set of The Encyclopdia Britanica. We had many friends who would gaze at the impressive tomes and remark upon the seeming inappropriateness of such a gift for young girls. I would simply smile and and comment on the weather - assuming we were having some.

Rock and Roll, Ouch!

Rock and Roll, Ouch!

Why my correspondence will drop off a little for awhile - except possibly for a few pieces that are already “in the can.” It seemed akin to watching The Rolling Stones or some other aging rocker band. One minute you’re sitting on the edge of your bed listening to your iPad, the next you’re slip-sliding-away as your socks turn traitor and send you slamming away into something called an L2 Compression Fracture. A neat dance step that was so much fun that you repeat it a couple of times a couple of days later, until you find yourself flat on your back at the LaGrange Memorial Hospital - I think, it was one of the hospitals associated with Northwest who, yes, beat Purdue a couple of days ago - hospital days get foggy, all the drugs, etc. 

So I’m laying there complete with wristbands with your name and ID declaring you a Fall Risk. Happy Valentines Day! 🧌

So I am home again, here on the couch, not being able to do anything worthwhile, just being a pain in the ass. Everyone is being sweet to me. Christine brings me great food, Stand-in sister-in-law Chris drives me around to docs when needed, Smitty pitches in by pretending to like watching basketball on TV.  Vito occasionally licks my face. So I am trying to concentrate on getting better, and saying “Thank you” a lot, lest they all rise up and carry me out to the curb with the rest of the trash.

I cheer myself up by watching earthquakes and live action wars on TV, on the premise that “things could always be worse.” 

So in the words of Bobby McFerrin, “Don’t worry, be happy!”

❤️‍🩹 ❤️‍🩹 

Fragments

 If I want to trace the prehistory of “fragments” they are probably older than the little white notebook that I talked about in the recent “Through Screens” post. Well, I suppose the history could lead back to Snowhill Church in Springfield, Ohio. Google tells me that the church started life as Snowhill United Church of Christ, and after a variety of ecumenical mergers, closed its doors on November 17, 2017 after 133 years of services. That was a couple of days after I celebrated my 69th birthday, but I must admit that oh, maybe 7 or 8 decades have passed since Snowhill had been the Olduvai Gorge of my “Fragments.”

Over the years my folks dutifully hauled us off to church services at Snowhill, encouraging us, no doubt, to at least consider some relatively traditional type of theology. I will not speak for either of my siblings, both of whom eventually ended up “Churched” as one might say in the South. But that is not what I took away from Snowhill. Instead I remember the programs. Those, at the time, mimeographed and folded papers that told you what the readings, psalms, etc., would be used for the service.  And the pencils.

OK, now hang with me here for a minute, probably because my memory gets a bit hazy. The Wall archeologists disagree on the specifics here. One school remembers folding chairs in the sanctuary during this era. However, another group holds out for more traditional pews. Neither mentions anything about angels dancing on the head of a pin, nor takes a firm position on the question of the possibility of an extended family for Jesus, wives, heirs, movie producers, etc.

Yet the schism is important for this discussion as both schools of thought specifically agree on the presence of those little yellow golf pencils that one was supposed to use to write on the little yellow envelopes into which one placed your offering - name, amount - whatever adults wrote on the envelopes. I never knew. The traditional pew school advocates the traditional notion that the envelopes and pencils were stuck to the back of the wooden pews.  The folding chair school chooses to ignore the origins of either the pencils or the envelopes, asserting that such a choice was in god’s hands. Hmm, yellow pencils, yellow offering envelopes. Could be something there, but we’ll have to come back to it.

The point is that, driven by the sin of theological boredom, I used the pencils to trace lines between the words in the programs, creating designs. Get it? Small designs within the larger design of the whole page? Smaller designs within the whole? Fragments!! OK. A bit of a stretch, but entire disciplines spring from such reasoning: Archeology, Theology, Design, Art History.

Now, in the name of full disclosure, I must admit that I am doubtful that any of the text above can trace a direct line from my agnostic childhood reveries and scribbles to the images I have chosen to call “Fragments.” But I set myself the task of tracing the ancient evolution of these contemporary images, and that was the best I could do.

A far more likely inspiration is the time it takes to do any of the contemporary images. Yes, we are talking hours and hours across days. And here there may well be a connection to the ancient Snowhill images - the mind does wander: Is this really the pattern I want to use here? Colors! So many colors. Why did I pick up that marker? What other colors might work better together? Especially if I chose a different design for this part of the image! I could do that. I could make a separate smaller version of that particular part of the big image with different designs and colors.  But, artistically speaking, how could I make it clear to someone else what I was doing? Ah, frame them together!

And so:

Fragment #1

Through Screens

 [This is the great grandchild of the little white notebook. The old record player and the stack of randomly selected classical records have been replaced by a variety of Pandora playlists. The lists do favor instrumental and mellow designed for “nighttime, slowdown, go to sleep” used like lullabies - shut up, close your eyes, go to sleep.

If I were to decide why or how this work differs from works we might find in the little white notebook, I would point to six decades of reading all manner of books, of performing characters on stage, of lecturing to thousands of students in dozens of classrooms. To learning, in all those venues, to better link words to feelings and to more accurately share those words and feelings with those who might encounter them.

The technology - my iPad - allows me to blend those Pandora tracks with tracks from an app called  Naturespace: Holographic Audio. It has tracks with rain, distant trains, thunderstorms, etc., all comforting sounds I recall from my childhood, late at night, sans AC, through the screen in my bedroom window. So without further ado:]

Through Screens

They have the most magical powers.

Through their transforming mesh

Distant trains are sensed

Seeming near, but out of sight,

Revealed by rumbles on the rails.

Lonely whistles echoing

In and out of tunnels

That promise hidden mountains.

Quiet rain provides muted syncopation

Floating light above

The rumbling bass of thunder.

Tires hiss across blacktop

Muting memories of

The clop clop clop of shodden hooves

And the tired creak of gleaming carriages.

The gusts which dance before

A storm, strained through the screen,

Carry the incense of fresh mown meadows.

Turned earth in yearning simple gardens

Fulsome furrows in prouder fields.

The faint and teasing fragrance

Of brave first flowers, heads flung

Aloft into late March, early April.

I lie, eyes almost closed, but not.

Ears straining, wishing for the wisdom

Of the quiet little creatures of the night.

The masked raccoon, the scurrying mouse

The dirt-streaked mole and the tiny vole.

The barking dog and stealthy cat.

The much maligned, but so refined

Acute perceptive senses of the rat.

The seeming endless cicada’s call

Survives the grotesque first contact

With the misshapen musician, clinging

To rough bark, hidden in the dark.

Thick clouds roll across the moon

Causing us to hope again

That they foretell the magic of,

The majestic composition of,

The music of the night.

Creative Crossovers

I think my first clear memory of the phenomenon was when I was in  7th grade, so maybe I was 12 or thirteen. I came home from school and put a stack of classical records on the turntable. The notion of a “turntable” may need a little explaining for those of you born after 1960 or so. Time was when if you wanted to listen to more than about 12 minutes of recorded music without interruption your only option were “LPs.”  LPs were vinyl records about the size of a medium pizza. (Which are making something of a comeback. “Everything old is new again.”) You would then put an “automatic changer” on your record player which would drop a record on to the turntable when one was done, and start playing the next one. You could load 4 or 5 up this way, and depending on the quality of your set up, listen to a fair amount of music before things began to slip and distort.

Anyhow I put a bunch of classical LPs on the turntable and began to write freeform verse in a little white 5x7 notebook. As the music played- I scribbled really, really freeform verse. I just kept writing until the music ran out. Then I closed the notebook and probably went to make myself a sandwich. Yeah, time also was when you would also make a sandwich all by yourself- no fries. Maybe chips. I still have that little white notebook somewhere, at least I have “discovered” it several times while changing homes, offices,  jobs, loves, lives and wives. No content that I’d really care to share, but now some 60 years later I better understand how one creative piece of our brain can easily slide a bit sideways into another medium.

I now do it more consciously, and it is my intention to share a couple of separate posts with you. One is verbal, very similar, at least in process to the creation of the little white notebook. The other is visual and deals with my current activity blending , chopping, what have you of drawings and photography. 

Schrag Wall: Here’s Looking at You Kid

Hi All -

Hope you had a lovely Friday the 13th! I got notice of a new grand nephew - had to hit Google for the correct nomenclature for the little guy.  I also finished an image I have been working on for quite awhile. Didn’t have to look it up ‘cause I get to make it up!

It may be awhile until I get back to you as I am going to try to jump back into sculpting for a bit. It has been 3 or 4 decades since I played with that medium, so it may take awhile to get my head and hands back around that medium - will start with a head.

In the meantime- “Here’s Looking at You Kid!”

Blasts from the Past

 Smitty: [Working on crossword puzzle] Did you know that April is National poetry month?

Me: No, I didn't.

A little further explanation. As I have mentioned previously our family spent 1959 - 1961 in Vienna, Austria. While there I attended, with my siblings Margaret Akerstrom nee Schrag and Jim [1943 - 1984]. Brother Jim served as editor of the school newspaper, The Gladiator . I have no idea how the name evolved, but Jim's editorship may explain how these two of my early efforts at poetry came to grace its pages in 1961:

The Voice of Nature

Listen to the lone wolf,

As he howls at the moon;

Listen to the lone wolf,

As he circles the lagoon;

Listen to the lone wolf,

As he gives his hunting call;

Listen to the lone wolf,

The cruelest of them all.

Listen to the wind,

Wailing in the pine;

Listen to the wind,

In the wild night time;

Listen to the wind,

As it screams to the plain;

"Listen to me!

Or I ne'er shall blow again!"

This is the sound

Of Nature with her own;

The wind and the lone wolf

Which used to we have grown.

Go away from nature,

Put away your hunting knife,

Grow away from nature

And you'll throw away your life!

[I believe this was written the year I took one of those tests that are supposed to plot your interests and possible future employment. I was tagged as a forest ranger. Which is sort of like a college professor.]

March

Spring cleaning strikes the terror deep

In every masculine heart,

Good-bye the beefsteak roasted rare,

Good-bye the cherry tart,

For in this time of cleaning up

A female has no heart.

Men and boys alike are plunged

To dust and sweeping toil;

'Til walls and floor alike are free

Of any trace of soil.

From attic trunk to cellar floor,

Down each hallway through each door,

The dust rag does its endless chore.

So if you hear some blackguard sing

About those wondrous days of spring

The weeks that pass all full of fun

And filled with joy for everyone,

Please tell him in a voice quite strong

You really think that he is wrong!

[I really have no idea what prompted this rather unenlightened paean - perhaps the normative sexist perceptions of 1960. It certainly did not spring my home life where neither cooking nor cleaning took precedence over reading novels. But then I was only 12.]

Leo and Mona: Shifting the Narrative

 One of the many stories I recall having been told about Leonardo da Vinci is that during the last few decades of his life he hauled the unfinished portrait of Mona Lisa with him leaving it, still unfinished, when he died in his late 60s in May of 1519.  One version of his life has him starting the painting 1503 - which would mean he was “fine tuning” the work for some 16 years! While most of the details of da Vinci’s life are - well, “fuzzy” to say the least, I am particularly fond of this one. As I once said in a faculty meeting, to the delight of my colleagues, “I love it when the data seem to support my theory!”  My theory here, perhaps more honestly a bias, is that the “truth” of what any artwork “means” shifts every time the artist touches it.

It is certainly true of my own work that is at least partially created in a "studio" chock full of digital tools and techniques unavailable to da Vinci and the other great artists living and working during the Renaissance. But before addressing the unique aspects of my “studio” I need to talk a bit about the time involved in creating each image, a discussion that answers, in part, the oft repeated question, “What is taking you so long down there!?”

A few factors influence the time required to finish each image. First, where did the originate? There are 2 primary answers to that question.  To be perfectly honest my earliest images were in a sense the result of deceptions that would be difficult to pull off today. They began back in 1961 when Dad took a temporary position through the American Friends Service Committee to serve as Director of Quaker House in Vienna, Austria. I was never actually quite sure what he did there, but the family spent 1959 through 1961 living in Vienna. We three kids attended The American International School, 5th and 6th grade for me. I quickly discovered that in that school one was expected to “take notes.”  It also soon became clear that the teacher never checked what it was that covered the pages of my notebook. Doodles. Lots and lots of doodles. Having completed my formal education, up through my Ph.D, prior to Gates, Jobs and Wozniak birthing the personal computer, I filled hundreds and hundreds of notebooks with hand-drawn doodles. Increasingly, towards the end of that time period, actual academic content found its way into the notebooks. Many of my contemporary images reflect what happens when an addicted doodler gives free reign to that long suppressed inclination.

The next major source for my images grew from my equally long interest in photography. Many of my images started as digital photographs that I pulled into Photoshop, isolated and "erased" various portions of the photos which left a varying number of “holes” in the image. I then filled the holes with designs, many of which looked strikingly similar to various doodles I had created years before. The final step in finishing off images from both lineages was to add color to the doodle/designs.

Both types of designs gradually increased in both size and complexity, greatly increasing the “guesstimate answer” to the response to the question “What is taking you so long down there.” It is the images that take me so long.  At least dozens of hours and - I am somewhat embarrassed to admit - sometimes hundreds of hours.

OK, on to the studio. It is a curved desk/counter with a roll around chair, maybe 15 feet in overall length.  It holds a 36 x 24 drawing surface, a 24-inch graphics tablet and a similar-sized, high definition monitor hooked to a MacBook Pro, which is also hooked to an 8 gig hard drive that holds copies of 4 or 5 hard drives from "ancestral" computers - complete copies, images, texts - everything.  Also the desk holds a few dozen 16-ounce canning jars that hold - roughly organized by color and shade - all my markers. I roll amongst the various stations depending on the stage of each project.

Now a few words about my “artistic style.”  First, being a self-taught (read that as ‘untaught’ artist) my “skills” limit what I can draw and how long it takes me.  You may notice that there are few, if any, quasi-realistic faces in my work. That is because I can’t draw them. Those that do exist owe both their place and appearance to old theater make-up courses and creating practice faces for the characters I played on stage. Second, I use “markers” almost exclusively when I draw. They work pretty well - for me anyhow - eliminating “blending” to change colors. A few of my marker sets do have markers labeled “blender” or words to that affect. I have yet to figure out how to use them. I’ll put that particular skill on my “to do” list.

And then there is the acoustic variable. I never work in silence. Sometimes I listen to audio versions of magazines, New Scientist, gets a lot of air play as does National Geographic. An occasional novel, maybe a short story.  But music is far and away my most common audio stimulus. My choices are wildly eclectic from classical to early rock to folk to bluegrass - just about anything with the exception of rap or heavy metal. Remember the second tenet of Distilled Harmony is Enable Beauty.  I think - no clear cut data here - but I strongly suspect that what I am listening to affects my art, possibly changing the overall look of the piece. The sounds reframe it’s story somehow.

OK, you get the idea. Every time I touch an image during the hours of its development, I may well change the look, the feel, the meaning, the truth of the image.

I do have a few “time-jumped” images. By that I mean images originally created a few years before I run them through Photoshop to create the contemporary “marker-based” images I am doing now.  But it is much more common for me to spend 10 or a dozen days in bursts of 8 or 9 hours to finish an original work - so probably no radical changes from initial idea to finished image. But remember - and let’s give this sentence it’s own line:

Da Vinci hauled the Mona Lisa around with him for 15 or 16 years!

I would dearly love to have a stop frame version, say from every week, to see how his image of Mona changed over a decade and a half of Leo hauling, gazing, wondering and thinking of her. I cannot help but think that they wrote to each other, with each interaction perhaps shifting the narrative of the image. Maybe just a little. Maybe a radical reconstruction. Maybe an inclination to just throw the damn thing away, only to awake in a grateful cold sweat, rushing to the easel, to assure himself that he had not followed through on that brief flash of insanity. Then standing there thinking, “Maybe the background is too dark. Perhaps just a tiny touch of light on the river. Silver? Gold? Let me light a lamp. Just a few minutes.  .  .”

Demystifying the Object

Demystifying the Object

I saw a particularly impactful video on Curiosity Stream tonight called Nefertiti: The Lonely Queen.  The three-part video explores the various complex issues surrounding the repatriation to the countries of origin or the original owners of thousands of artifacts housed in what I learned were called the encyclopedic museums of the world; The British Museum, The Louvre, in the US the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery. In other words, the major museums housing huge international collections gathered, one might say looted, in the heyday of globetrotting collectors in the 18 and 19 hundreds.

All three episodes are interesting and well worth watching, but I must confess that the first episode; Conflicts and Resolutions reported an incident so exceptional that it staggered my ability to give the rest of the series the attention it deserves. Not surprisingly, Nefertiti’s bust is a dominant character in the series, and a great amount of attention is paid to the security that surrounds the bust in her home, the Neues Museum in Berlin. That discussion is immediately followed by a segment with two artists who managed to evade all that security and, using a commercially available gaming platform concealed under an overcoat, create a high resolution, 3D replica of the bust which, with a high resolution 3D-printer, allowed them to create exact replicas of the bust of one of Egypt’s most famous rulers.  In true “artistic radical” style, the artists uploaded the code to the Internet so that now anyone willing to expend the technology and energy could have their own exact copy of the bust of Nefertiti.

I paused the video and sat back gazing at my own images on my studio wall. In order to share them with you here on The Wall, I have created high resolution versions of many of them.  Versions you can print out, mount, and hang in your studio, or wherever, creating versions no different from the images hanging across the room from me. 

So, naturally I thought “What is the difference between the original bust of Nefertiti and a digitized exact replica of the bust?” The queen herself might choose - time travel issues aside - to paraphrase a particularly germane lyric from Paul Simon, “‘The difference is all inside your head,’ she said to me. The answer is easy if you take it logically.  I’d like to help you in your struggle to see me. There must be 50 ways to see your lover.’”

It was late, and I am still dealing with a very graphic siege of insomnia - I actually dreamed I sang a song from South Pacific after finally falling asleep around 4:15. Naturally, I woke myself with that rendition. I share the incident simply to illustrate the current fragile nature of my internal thought processes, so you may understand how I jumped from consideration of the 3D recreation of Nefertiti’s bust to the idea of entire museums dedicated to exacting replicas of works of art that currently exist only as “one-offs” in widely spread “encyclopedic” museums available for viewing by only a tiny fragment of the world’s population.

Next I envisioned something like an artistic, global, “re-wilding” of the Great Plains. Bringing back the buffalo, but instead of millions of thundering quadrupeds, there would be thousands of museums with millions of paintings, etchings, photographs, sculptures, etc.

So, perhaps you will understand how I began to see a rather direct parallel to prohibition here in the states in from 1920 until 1933, and the current “decriminalization” of cannabis. In both cases the value of each commodity was directly related to one’s ability to possess it. Once the commodity was widely available and barriers to possession were removed, the value of the commodity took a nose dive. And the criminal world lost interest, turning it’s attention back to procuring and marketing commodities that were still illegal; like cocaine, heroin, and prostitution, or whose potential for profit, though often uncertain, was sufficient to attract the truly greedy, like bitcoins.

I was further struck by the notion that great art was/is valued, at least in part, by that same value-based dynamic. A variety of variables, collectively defined in a work’s provenance; who created it, when, from what materials, and, often most importantly, was the work unique? determine the “value” of a particular work. The more I thought about it the more it seemed to me that all those elements that defined a work’s provenance and value were usually not obvious in the work itself. They were of concern to, and even then often ferociously debated by and among “experts.” Our attention, however, is most often focused on the work itself.

Remember, the second tenet of Distilled Harmony is Enable Beauty, and that is where we most often focus: Is the work beautiful? Does it enchant? Does it make me feel good? Happy? The point is that if a work checks all those boxes it is suddenly irrelevant if the “object” is an “original” created a dozen, or a thousand, several thousand, or a million years ago. Our digitally perfect bust of Nefertiti brings us as much pleasure as the original.

That is not to say that physical verisimilitude is the only variable informing the pleasure an artwork brings. Sometimes a work encourages one to experiment with an artist’s particular style or approach to creativity. That is often the case with me when looking at Jackson Pollock’s work. How? Why? And so I will close by sharing with you one of my homages to Pollock’s work. Let me quickly point out that the intent is to imitate, not recreate an "original Pollock." 

Gallery Proposal: Artists of a Certain Age [ACA]

I suppose it has something to do with my having turned 74 last week, but that would be too obvious. Perhaps a better explanation would be that I have grown tired of stumbling across titles such as “Best Young Artists Under 30” or under 40, or 15, or something equally as foolish. 

They all remind of my students’ occasional declaration that something “had to be so” since they had believed it “all their life!” A span of something between 18 or 28 years. An interesting perspective of “all one’s life”. But there were moments of rational exception. I once knew, between marriages, a young woman about half my age, more lover than friend as it's turned out, who actually wrote, and had published by a well-known house, her “coming of age novel.” Being a bit smitten, obviously I was biased, but it was well done. Still not to put too fine a point on it, here was “a coming of age novel,” penned by an exceptionally bright young woman who really hadn’t finished that stage of her life yet. “Best Young Artists Under 30,” has that same sort of not-quite-finished taste to it. “Better set the timer, for another decade hon,  and we’ll take another peek.”

I mean come on now, Bob Dylan had to wait until he was 75 before he received the Nobel Prize for literature.  I don’t know if they were running a list of “Best Young Writers under 30” back in 1971, but Bob didn’t win. Sometimes you have to wait for the good stuff to roll around. Bob did. The point is that some galleries, influencers, and “taste-makers” of various stripes might better serve the art world by setting the timer for another decade and then returning to take a less hurried look.

But I’m drifting again. The point is that many artists, from many genres, don’t really begin to produce their “best” work until later in their lives. Consider the notion that one needs to live a significant part of a life before one is really ready to make a meaningful artistic comment upon that life.  I spent more than 50 years as a performer, artist, creator, author, researcher and educator of varying ability before I began to produce, and continue to produce on occasion, what I would begin to consider “some of my best work.” I had to reach “a certain age” before presuming to make meaningful comment on what had gone before.

So I would like to propose, either as a stand-alone space, or as a contained unit within a larger entity, a juried gallery called “Artists of a Certain Age,” which would feature just such “long view works” produced by Artists of a Certain Age - let’s use the traditional retirement age of 65+ until something better comes along. The works would be available for acquisition as either traditional “hang on the wall” works, free-standing sculptural pieces, non-fungible tokens, or whatever meets current market styles and taste.

Obviously ACA would eventually seek to acquire works from a wide range of artists from a wide variety of “ACAers”.  But I would like to propose a selection of my own works as a possible representative core of offerings - having a plethora of options to choose from. I will include copies here in this proposal some of my self-selected “best works” mostly from my last active years as a Professor Emeritus in the Communication Department at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina.  

I will wrap up the proposal with a copy of my last “formal” resume from my academic career for those who may comforted by that more traditional structure.

It is important to emphasize that this is, as the title of the post indicates, a proposal. It is one I hope finds its way to reality. Hence, if you have friends, entrepreneurs, gallery owners, or other acquaintances who might be interested in making ACA a reality, this would be the time to contact them and encourage their participation.  Obviously, if you yourself are an ACA, pre-publication submissions are encouraged. [I know, I know, as mentioned above it is a slippery concept. Some entities mandate "certain age" for retirement purposes - 65, 72. Others which should, like the Supreme Court and most universities, allow one to stumble along well into one's dotage. I'm going to put this on the back-burner until things become "more real." But when in doubt - submit.]

ACA Representative Gallery

The news, no doubt unintentionally, offered a delightful place to start providing some examples. On February 27, 2020 then President Trump when asked about this new affliction Covid-19, declared, “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle - it will disappear.”  Medical reality notwithstanding, I chose to use this mythologizing of Covid as an opportunity to imagine what a range of “Miraculous Covid Critters” might look like.  These are free-hand 19x14” pen and marker “imaginings.”

Miraculous Covid Critters

This is how I envisioned the entity that started the whole thing. A flighty little critter. 18x16 inches. Hand drawn and colored.

These images, also 18x16 hand done, are how I imaged the little infectious critters running around inside us. I never did get around to images of the vaccines.

Pen and Marker works.  These works are again free-hand. Like the “Miraculous Covid Critters,” they were created by drawing “cartoons” of the images which were then “filled-in” with a variety of markers. These images were just for fun. Stimulated I guess by the free-form critters above. The Harlequin Bottles measures 3x4 feet. Got a little carried away there.

Harlequin Bottle

But that excess didn’t really deter me. This next work, Giant Iris was a bit of a transition piece - half free form and half manipulated photos. 36x39 inches.

Manipulated Photos. All these works started life as digital photos. Often taken while traveling. Originally I chose them as photographs - selected for what I considered their photographic quality and composition.  But then they started to surprise me. I’m not quite sure why I opened the images in Photoshop, but I did. And I discovered, as you have if you wandered down that path, that there are images within images within images.  And you can erase pieces of them.  I remember being stunned to learn, back in some art history class, that all those gleaming white marble statues - the David, Venus de Milo, etc. - had all once been brightly paint.  Discovering Photoshop’s ability to turn color photos into black and white images begging to be painted was no less staggering.  So using  that application I “erased” various portions of the image. I then created designs for those newly vacated spaces which were again “filled-in” with a variety of paints and markers. I realize the capabilities of various graphics applications currently far outstrip my imagination, but I am currently content.

I’m not sure that the gondoliers would make of what I did with their Gondolas on the Grand Canal, but I had fun! 36x12 inches.

I’m not positive where in Venice this is. I’ll check. OK, 24x36 inches. “To the right when you cross that big bridge.” Is about as good as we can do right now.

And then much of the silliness is mandated by artistic by the mood of the artist.

Here are a few random examples:

And of course, literally dozens more I am leaving out, although I do want to note that the Iris image right above is somewhat unique. It started as a photo that was “erased and painted” and the “rephotoshoped” that allowed me to use Photoshop’s clarity to create that very sharp-edged image.

The Resume

A somewhat artificial but traditional barrier that often stands between an artist and an audience is the resume - a paper that seeks to answer the question "What have you done for me lately?" The longer you remain in an occupation the more creative and strained the work becomes. I was going to include one of my last such compositions here as illustrative of the genre. However as that would necessitate shifting applications which has the potential to destroy everything else here, I will send in a separate message.

Dreams Without Regrets

They are interesting phenomena — these dreams without regrets.  A brief example from today’s nap dream. Remember dreams are incredibly fluid in terms of the “real world” that surrounds them. OK, in today’s dream I had been charged with making sure that - hmm, the name escapes me at the moment. She was a miniature dachshund that my first wife and I  had sort of inherited from her owner. Her name will come to me.  I want to call her Gretel, but that may well be just “nationality breed association.” (No, wait! Wait! Her name was Nigel! Thank you, 4 AM memory goddess!) Anyhow, I had been instructed by my current wife’s stepdaughter to keep the puppy from eating something - maybe a plate of cookies?

An interesting point was that my current wife’s stepdaughter had not been made aware of these instructions. Partially, perhaps, because the stepdaughter and wife number one had never actually met in “real life.” Interesting how folks who never met in “real life” have no trouble interacting with each other in “dream world,” - completely unbothered by those “unreal - real” conflicts. 

Anyhow, the Nigel ate the forbidden fruit, or the forbidden sandwiches, or the forbidden whatever, while I was napping. But neither the current stepdaughter nor the previous wife held the other responsible, in the dream, for Nigel’s behavior, nor, strangely, did my somnolent culpability come up. Then I woke up.

There is a message in here somewhere. Perhaps related to my long-standing assertion about snoring - that being that one cannot be held responsible for what one does while asleep. Perhaps the corollary is that dreaming is a “blameless state.” Related, somehow, to the notion of “brother, you can’t go to jail for what you are thinking.” Or, by extension, “Shut up and let the dog eat the cookies.” After all it’s just a dream, right?

Interesting however, is the fact that folks who never met in “real life” have no trouble interacting in “dream world.” Anyhow, Nigel ate the dream-based cookies, apparently with great enjoyment. And, also interestingly, nobody cared. The dog ate the cookies. Yes. That is so. Nobody said “Bad dog!” Nobody expressed disappointment that I had failed to prevent the great cookie consumption. As a matter of fact, the cookies disappeared without so much as wrinkling the ephemeral fabric of the dream. And perhaps that is the lesson of dreaming:

The world of dreaming is, well, perhaps not so much value-free, as it is blameless. It is a world where “you can’t go to jail for what you’re dreaming.” You cannot be held accountable for your dream. The dream can still touch you. It can still make you laugh or cry. But you are the dreamer, not the dream. In our waking judicial system, truth is the ultimate defense. While sleeping, it is the various decrees of the dream state.

Druids Over the Top

 Druids Over the Top

Sometimes I like to browse through images I made a few decades ago to see if a “do over” would result in something new and interesting. The original “Druids” image is a BW image from about 20 years ago. There are several versions of it floating around on various hard drives, clouds, drop boxes, etc.  The new colored version still reflects my inability to draw faces 🤪.

Old version.

New version