Another Profession Bites the Dust

 One would think that being retired and in my early 70s I would stop worrying about what I would be “when I grow up,” but apparently not.  The whole “job of the future” thing got started for me early in grade school. They gave us “aptitude tests”. You answered a bunch of questions, undoubtedly drawn up by psychologists and other related professionals. The answers were then fed into what had to be early computers and the results decided the job best fitted with our “aptitudes.”  I was slated to be a forest ranger. I think I was in also in the midst of reading the novels of James Oliver Curwood, all set in the wilds of northern Canada. But I’m sure that had no influence on my test defined “aptitudes,” wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

A variety of ideal jobs followed my life, world famous thespian, renowned architect, etc., before I settled on university professor. Worked out well for the most part. However, back at the turn of the millennium, I began to think I really missed the boat by not pursuing a career more aligned with my art, which was claiming more and more of my free time. 

Then Christine and I took a few weeks off in Italy - Venice and Florence. I think it was in Florence. In a large side gallery of the Uffizi, a couple of art restorers were working on a large canvas. They were behind a rope barrier, but you could watch. I was like Toad from Wind in the Willows, encountering his first motorcar.  “There! There is the perfect job for me!”

It is a feeling I have clung to since. However jobs in the field tend not to welcome applicants with my resume.  I choose to believe that it is not my maturity that discourages them, but rather the fact that I have neither training nor experience in the field. Perhaps it was an “I’ll show them!” attitude that led me to explore finer detail in my own images. I would use Druids, a version of which I believe I have posted here, has always been one of my favorites. The original is 24 x 19 inches, and is very detailed.  I’ll jump over and see if I have a copy of that.  Nope, the image is Photoshop and blogger doesn’t like that.

Anyhow, so I decided to do an 8.5 x 11 inch very tiny version of the original to demonstrate my detail versatility.  This image is a detail from that smaller version.  It is about 4 x 3.5 inches:I had to use Sharpie Ultra Fine Points to add the color. I’m fine with how she came out. But I was exhausted, even after just working in bursts of a couple hours, naps, reading and beverages in between. 

Somehow I think that a professional art restorer would be expected to follow a different work schedule. So, alas, my life as a professional art restorer seems not to be in the cards. So I’ll finish this image, content to know that this version of Druids will be a one of a kind.

Maybe I ought to give that forest ranger thing some thought. Neat views from up in those towers, and I’m not that afraid of heights. You think they have put elevators in by now?

Steve and Me

 It is a presumption, I realize. Had we met in real life I would have said, “It is an honor to meet you Dr. Hawking.” Only in my imagination does he reply, “Aw, shucks. Just call me Steve.” However, since he passed away in March of 2018, decades after his doctors had predicted, he will not contradict my undeserved familiarity. Unless he slips through a wormhole out there in space-time. And if anyone could do it, it would be he. . . . Hmmm.

Anyhow, before leaving this present consciousness, Hawking created a TV series titled, fittingly, Genius. However, it was not a paean to his own genius, but rather an attempt to demonstrate his contention that anyone could think like a genius, if you simply asked the right questions. To do this he recruited a team of three “ordinary volunteers” and, by asking them to solve a number of challenges, he would lead them to genius like answers to these persistent questions humans are wont to ask:

1. Can we time travel?
2. Are we alone?
3. Why are we here?
4. Where did the universe come from?
5. What are we?
6. Where are we?

It is a delightful series, not always just for the answers to which Hawking’s questions lead his volunteers, but rather for the exquisite construction of the challenges he posits for the volunteers. From an incredible Rube Goldberg device to lasers across lakes and mountain tops he creates a wonderful tour de force of education in action, taking his volunteers step-by-step to a shared genius insight. It is a must see for teachers of any grade level - K through grad school.

But it did leave me with a question I wish Steve was still around to address. In the third episode, Why Are We Here? Hawking leads his volunteers into the quantum realm of many worlds, one of my favorite “what if that is true?” spaces. If you have the time and the inclination, hunt up the episode and watch it. Hawking’s reveal is just brilliant. To condense the notion, admittedly incompletely, many worlds asserts that all the options we consider in our lives generate all “paths not taken” out in the very real “many worlds” that exist in the multiverse. Didn’t take that job? Yes, you did in a parallel world out in the multiverse. Didn’t marry that person? Yup. Out in the multiverse. Didn’t move to Alaska? In the multiverse you did.

I am delighted Steve came down on the side of many worlds because, as I implied, I buy it. But watching his genius path to those many worlds made me wonder what was my relationship, if any, to those other versions of me living out their lives on those roads I did not take. Making the very unlikely assumption that there is - or will be - the option to communicate with those other versions of me, do I have ethical or moral obligations? Do I need to explain to myself why I made the choice I did that sent this version of me down this path? Are congratulations or apologies in order?

You see my problem Steve? Are you out there somewhere, somewhen? You reading this? Come on, Steve, help a guy out.

In Lieu of Monotheism and The Internet

 (Spoiler alert: This started out, as most of these posts do as an “interesting thought” that got stashed in a file I call possible Walls.”  It hung out there for a while, sort of tickling back while I was drawing or something. Then we went back to Raleigh for a couple of weeks to do some pre-move cleaning, packing, fixing a dead AC unit, and, delightfully, spending a bit of time with the Raleigh kids and grand babies. Well, I have moved all my drawing paraphernalia up to Burr Ridge, so found myself working with words instead - specifically this post. It has morphed into if not the longest post on The Wall, certainly one of them. I tell you this to allow you to plan how/where/if you chose to read it.  It is not one you can glance over while standing in the checkout line at the grocery store. However, if you do happen to glance at it there, go grab another bottle of wine, or something stronger. Take it home. Put your feet up, and settle in, as Monty Python would say  “for something completely different.”)

As you can no doubt tell from the title this one will get a bit weird. It may not make it toThe Wall as it really only makes sense to me say, between midnight and 3 AM. But I must admit that the title is a bit of a lie. It was my intention to tackle both monotheism and the internet in this post, but - taking pity both on you and my wrinkly grey matter, I’m going to restrict this post to monotheism and take up the internet issues next time around.

The reason I was initially tempted to pair the issues is that they both have issues of connectivity. But as I said, I’m going to put the Internet on the shelf until next time. So on to monotheism. I think it was last week - pardon the uncertainty, we are down in Raleigh chipping at the absurd amount of work needed to get the townhouse ready to sell. Anyhow, I watched this video on recent excavations in the city of Pompeii. Apparently these excavations were the first ever to penetrate the nearly 20 feet of volcanic ash and other pyroclastic material from Mt. Vesuvius that buried the city on August 24, 79 CE. The tragedy struck with such swiftness that flight was futile and so many of the city’s residents died where they stood, engaged in everyday activities. Among those activities was folks making offerings at their household shrines to their household gods to secure prosperity, long happy lives, etc., etc. The gods apparently were not listening, or were perhaps busy elsewhere, hence putting those particular supplications “on hold.”

Monotheism, however, claims 24/7 service with unlimited bandwidth. Which assumes that the deity is always available.  That presumption raises the thorny issue of if there is an all powerful deity “out there” who is always connected and hence always hears human prayers - perhaps even those directed to other, erroneously conceived, deities, why do terrible things occur? Pompeii is only one horrific example from a human history littered with millions of disasters, natural and wroth by humanity. Events an all-seeing, all-powerful deity could, one assumes, prevent.

The monotheistic notion of an all powerful “always on” deity - dare we say AO?- gets further bruised when we consider the presumed extent of the “devine network.” While Zoroastrianism might lay claim to being the first monotheistic faith with roots reaching back some 4000 years; Judaism, Christianity and Islam all stem from the same millennia. So, one might legitimately ask, what was the “extent of all creation” over which these monotheistic faiths originally held dominion? How big a network were these early theologians, philosophers, prophets and priests talking about? Well initially, I suppose, what they could see. “All creation!” Spread out before them - “This is my Father’s world, All nature sings and round me rings, The music of the spheres.”  

It may also be important to remember that when these ancients - primarily from desert cultures - walked out at night to consider the wonders of the universe, they looked up and saw an unpolluted, star-strewn sky the likes of which you and I have never seen except on digital screens. No wonder they felt themselves at the center of existence, watched over by a deity who created it all - it was obvious, there, right before their eyes.

And then Hans Lippershey invented the telescope in 1608 and the very next year Galileo pointed the thing up into the sky - discovering to his amazement and eventual chagrin - that there were a whole bunch more planets and stars up there strongly suggesting that our third rock from the sun was not actually the center of the universe. And he was foolish enough to say so. The Pope was not amused and forbid Galileo to write or speak of such foolishness. Galileo apparently held his peace until 1632 when he published his basic theory, thinly disguised as a mathematical exploration of  Copernicus’s theory of the planets. Again Rome was not amused, and placed Galileo under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Those faiths and philosophies, firmly convinced of their accuracy, do not have a history of tolerance when it comes to alternative notions of existence and divinity. So for the last few thousand years established monotheistic faiths have slaughtered their way across much of the globe convinced that their theology was the “one true faith,” and others need not apply.

The more I think about it, I believe that the various versions of the monotheistic AO faiths simply bit off more than they could chew. It isn’t beyond belief that one deity could keep a handle on one planet - seeing the sparrow fall and all that. Maybe even a whole solar system. But as the late great astronomer Carl Sagan of The University of Chicago (my father’s alma mater) used to say “there are billions and billions of stars out there!” And further, it seems every day the James Webb Space Telescope aka JWST, reports on distant galaxies that continually expand the known reaches of the universe. Most recently a galaxy that is a whooping 31.96 billion light years from earth.

And then there was Stephen Hawking, only one among the many genius cosmologists who assert that the idea that “we are alone” is absurd.  Rather, they claim any simple analysis of existing data reveals that we are but one of many, many intelligent and technologically capable entities in the universe. That is a far cry from “my father’s world” and an incredible ask for a single AO monotheistic deity.

Which is, in part, why I think the ancient polytheistic faiths may have had a better idea. They seem to have practiced what I think of as “deity diversity.” Instead of making one deity responsible for everything-everywhere they divided the tasks. In a polytheistic world you had a deity in charge of the ocean, maybe fish and all “water” stuff, another deity for land, maybe farming, crops, etc. It appears that the tasks assigned to a particular deity vary according to the central needs of the culture. Northern trading and raiding cultures may have needed deities different from those needed by tropical or desert nomadic cultures. So different deities evolved.

Of course this still does beg the question of connectivity, functionality, and responsibility. Does the honoring of a particular deity have any impact on events in the deity’s “area of responsibility?” That is purely an issue of faith and belief - true with both monotheistic and polytheistic faiths. A herd of sheep sicken in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1600s? Widow Jones is a witch! “Off with her head!” Or something equally heinous in local puritanical Christian belief.  Crops fail in Ghana in the same time period? The local “crop-type” deity must be appeased with the appropriate ritual.

Belief in an exclusive relationship between a specific group and a deity who, through favored belief and ritual, impacts the occurrence of specific events in the world (and the afterlife) has fueled the evolution of religions. Such “my God” beliefs formed the basis of thousands of wars, and the creation of seemingly “billions and billions” of exclusively infallible narratives in print, art, music and video. And yet, while many claim it, no one seems to have gotten an undisputed lock on the nature of a, let alone a functioning example of,  a unique relationship between humanity and divinity.

We can view this seeming lack of divine connectivity in a couple of ways. Pessimistically we have the “Woe is me! Lost in a trackless wilderness!” perspective. More optimistically is the “Cool. I get to work this out myself!” Having always been an optimist, I have naturally constructed my own notion of a multi-layered set of relationships between whatever deity may exist and “my unconquerable soul.”

This might be a good time to get that adult beverage I mentioned waaaay back at the beginning of this post.  Or whatever other element - tea, coffee, CBD lotion, nicotine - that lets you relax in the face of strange information.

OK, here we go. When I leave home for any extended period of time, I travel with a small stuffed panda named Boswell. Pragmatically, both at home and on the road, Boswell provides the perfect padding between my pillow and the optimal head elevation for interacting with my iPad: reading, writing, watching videos, etc. Were that “padding” the panda’s only function I could have named him Paddington, after the famous bear in children’s literature. But this Boswell has a different function, drawn from the history of James Boswell, famed Scottish biographer. That Boswell is best known for his works on Samuel Johnson who was a towering British author of the era, but who seemed to have a penchant for thinking and writing in fragments. Boswell, in addition to writing the great man’s biography, apparently kept Johnson’s ramblings in some sort of order. I believe I once wrote a post here on The Wall pleading for a Boswell.

Frighteningly, as I mentioned we are doing “packing stuff” here in Raleigh and I just made my way through a two-inch thick file I discovered in a drawer. The file bears the title “Waiting for Boswell.” Within are essays, poems, short stories, and personal letters of significant import - but to uncertain recipients - reaching back to my grad school days in the 1970s!  Where was Boswell when I needed him most? I also found a 1980ish short story predicting the advent of, and potential dangers in, virtual reality.  Needed some work. So you see Boswell is not a recent fixation in my mind.

OK, let us assume I could take this Boswellian notion with me as I time travel back to the polytheistic world of Pompeii. Well, very first thing, I would move to somewhere waaaay far away from Mount Vesuvius. But I suppose that would be cheating. Second, I would construct my version of a Pompeian shrine to my household deity - Boswell the Panda. I would call it Boswell’s Hearth, and the physical representation of my household deity would be, of course, a panda. Sacred offerings? Any kind of bamboo would do. But what I would expect from such offerings to this somewhat restricted household deity would not be wealth, better crops, health - the normal household deity requests made at the time. Rather I would ask Boswell to remind me of Distilled Harmony, and its four tenets: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm.

These reinterpreted versions of household deities, like Boswell, would allow a finer focus of piety. No need to worry about the entire - and swiftly expanding - universe. Rather the household deity would help focus our involvement in the everyday world, in your home and community. Ask not what your deity can do for you, ask what your deity would have you do to make your world a happier, more beautiful, more joyful, more peaceful place. Boswell be praised. Have a bite of bamboo while I go fluff him up a bit.

Distilled Harmony Edit

 It has become so commonplace that one comes to expect each morning to greet you with news of another mass killing. And while it is true that occasionally these macabre events arise elsewhere on the globe, despairingly they seem most often to be homegrown acts of lunacy here in the United States. It is the sad realization that these murders appear to arise from the notion that when considering mindless mayhem we tend to think locally that prompts me to provide a clarifying edit to the worldview I call Distilled Harmony.

This is not a casual edit. As you know if you have been reading The Wall for it’s last couple decades, Distilled Harmony provides, in its four basic tenets, the philosophical underpinnings of my perceptions of the proper way to conduct oneself as we seek to live a compassionate, loving, honorable life. I have condensed Distilled Harmony into a single hierarchical sentence of four tenets. It originally appeared thusly:

Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, enable beauty, distill complexity and oppose harm.

I am loathe to change that sentence. It was years in the making and I have written, here on The Wall, at significant length about each tenet. Yet as I read of the ways in which various insane killers justify their actions as “purifying manifestations” of some twisted worldview, I am prompted to provide the following edit to hopefully assure that Distilled Harmony is never hijacked by such nefarious minds. So currently:

Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, and Distill Complexity  in order to Oppose Harm.

To clarify, it is by living harmoniously according to the first three tenets that one opposes harm. Not by resorting to violence to oppose those who view life differently, and then calling such violence harmonious.

Of Sunflowers and Druids

 Last night I got caught up in artists lives online. El Greco, Turner and Da Vinci kept me up way past yesterday and threatened to greet “the rosy fingered dawn” so popular in my fumbling attempts to translate the Iliad freshman year.

Fascinating in the lives of El Greco and Turner was their determination to explore the evolution of their own styles and inner vision despite the derision of critics who had previously championed their insight. Well, perhaps with the exception of El Greco who had to wait a couple of centuries to be recognized as a precursor to both Impressionism and expressionism. Turner was seen as the golden boy who went “strange.” The Da Vinci piece was an interesting treatment of a theory that contends that The Mona Lisa is not a portrait of a specific woman at all - Lisa del  Giocondo - as Vasari contends - but rather a purely fictional version of “a mother” commissioned by a Medici. Interesting stuff, kept me awake anyhow.

But when I sat down to draw today another artist jumped to mind - Van Gogh and his sunflowers. He painted them repainted them. There was obviously a fascination with them. I suppose that thought sprang to mind as continued to add color to yet another version of Druids. You see I didn’t actually realize it was yet another version of Druids. I had just finished Vase and Flowers, and was looking for a new drawing. Which means I browse through the hundreds and hundreds of my photos and drawings until one jumps out. Well, Druids, jumped out and I cleaned it up, and had it printed out large to add further designs and color. It was only later while looking for something else on my backup drive that I stumbled across previous digital versions I had done of Druids. 

Setting aside the idea that I had just found evidence of an extreme senior moment, I chose to wonder if Van Gogh thought that each new version of Sunflowers was the first.  I suppose that having the physical paintings around your studio would make them harder to forget than digital versions that live in a black box on your desk. But maybe he had sent them off to brother Theo to be sold. Leaving Theo to wonder, “More sunflowers?! Really Vincent! Maybe time for a refresher at Saint-Remy!”

I think I’ll just put the realization of multiple Druids out of my mind. I won’t be able to finish this one before we head back to Raleigh for a couple of weeks anyhow. I’ll deal with it then. Meanwhile, here is a copy of what I sincerely believe is the original Druids:

Perfection is Fleeting

 Ramses I I apparently did not buy into this assertion as ancient Egypt seems awash in images, sculptures, cartouches, etc., of that particular Pharaoh. Apparently didn’t want folks to forget how great he was. It seems to be an affectation common among dictators and other authoritarian figures, Hitler, Stalin, and others of that stripe who want to keep their likeness in front of people who would most likely wish to avoid it. This megalomania flys in the face of the reality of those moments we hold most dear.

For me anyhow, recalled perfect moments are painfully fleeting, crystal memories, of a minute or two, no longer, that flash clearly and then recede again. Which brings us, naturally, to Leonardo da Vinci and Lisa del Giocondo, reputed to be the lady of The Mona Lisa. The exact identity of the lady remains the subject of some debate. However, what is generally agreed is that Leonardo never finished the painting. Rather he carried it with him all his life, tweaking a bit here, shifting a bit there. You see da Vinci was blessed? cursed? with the ability to capture on canvas that moment of perfection that he carried in his soul. Well, close to it anyhow. He was an artistic genius enough to capture it - almost. But was driven enough to never be satisfied. Maybe a touch more shadow? Are the flesh tones too pink? And then the smile. Damn the smile anyway! Sigh. Genius is a cruel mistress.

I, having sidestepped genius, have instead learned, I hope, to cherish those moments of perfection when they choose to present themselves, close my eyes and enjoy them for as long as they choose to hang around, and then, when the scene passes or the song ends, acknowledge their transient nature, and allow them to pass back into bittersweet memory until such time as they choose to surface once again. Normal is still disconcerting, but less painful than genius.

It Took a Century to Build a Cathedral

 Or, why do I do this to myself. The first image is maybe an hour’s work from this morning:

That’s OK until I zoom out to the whole 17x24 inch image I am working on. The faces will come later, much later since I really can’t draw faces. The other blank spaces will get “leaf-like” designs. I’m thinking some kind of blue/green palette- maybe a touch of yellow.

Heavy sigh. Well, it’s almost lunchtime, but I better go cut another big stone for the northwest turret.

Seek a Sunset

 I have been asked by a number of folks - including some of you here on the Wall - how I decide what colors go where on my drawings. Well, first you go to a good bookstore or an art supply store, or even on the Internet - though color accuracy and purity can be suspect online. Anyway secure a good color wheel - those graphics that show you what colors go with what other colors. Then I make a mark on the drawing - starting with red, and I hold the color wheel over the red mark and slowly rotate it to find the next color that goes best with it and .  .  .  .

No, not really. That is all a load of BS. If you recognize the structure of the paragraph, I just realized I stole it from one of the early scenes in Robin Williams’ Dead Poets Society where an English teacher is showing his students how to evaluate a poem with a ruler by physically measuring the length of lines, stanzas, etc. Excrement. 

I feel much the same about color wheels and coloring inside the lines. The obvious exception being the lines I have drawn, which I feel free to change whenever I choose. You should not be surprised to learn that I am guided by, but by no means constrained by, a palette quite different from those suggested by color wheels. I call it SAS. Not to be confused with the huge corporate entity back in Cary, NC, my SAS stands for Seek a Sunset.

Think about it. Or better yet do it. Find a place where you have an unobstructed view of the horizon. I suppose you can see a good sunset in the city, but my own experience indicates that the truly world class sunsets are best seen over wide expanses of oceans, big lakes, deserts, etc. However, in the name of full artistic disclosure I need to admit that some of the best sunsets I have ever seen were viewed from the beach of Lake Michigan watching the sun sink into the hazy - oh, say it, polluted - skies over Chicago on the opposite shore. Just awesome!

And what was it that made these “sunsetscapes” so incredible? Obviously it was the awesome variety of colors. No rhyme, no reason, no color wheels. It was as if God had bumped into her art table and every hue, shade and color imaginable - and some that weren’t - spilled out and ran down her sky canvas. Yes, these were the sixties, but glorious, truly glorious colors. There could be no talk of “Oh, do those colors “belong together?” “Is that shade a bit too harsh?” 

Poppycock! In a sunset everything works. So how do I try to bring the colors of SAS into my drawings? Mostly by not trying. I know that sounds glib, but let me try to explain. I work with pens and “markers” on paper. The designs are the product of either freehand drawings or images that started as my photographs which I reduce to line drawings through Photoshop. But the end result is always black lines on white paper that I color with markers. Markers are a single discrete color. I am aware that one can blend markers to obtain gradations of color, but that is a process I have not explored, so my drawings are constrained by the markers arrayed before me on my drawing table. Hence my maxim: you can never have too many markers!

So the array of markers on my table becomes the “sunset” from which I choose the colors for the various portions of my drawings. And here it does become a bit mystical. I look at the portion of the drawing I wish to color and run my eyes and hands over my array of markers until something says “That one.” I pick up the marker and place a blank note card next to the portion of the drawing I am working on, and make a mark on the card. This lets me see if the color indicated on the marker cap is an accurate representation of the color of the ink. If so, great and I proceed to color that portion of the drawing with that marker. If the color on the card is not right, I put the marker back and start again. This process obviously gets more complicated if I have been working on the drawing and the new place I am working on is surrounded by colors I have already employed. 

But the process is always the same. Observe the area to be colored. Observe the marker dictated palette. Run your hand/eye/mind over the available markers. Select the one that speaks to you. Make a mark on the test card and then either approve and use, or reject and begin again. This obviously results in a workspace littered with markers and multicolored test cards, but it is the best way, for me anyhow, to bring the unrestricted palette of a sunset to my drawings. Which leads to the inescapable conclusion that the only way to get better is to buy more markers!

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.  .  .”