One butt, many chairs

I spent a day or so staring at my sculpture, trying to figure out how to finish it, still not sure. Frustrating. I often felt pulled in multiple directions this week, aware of all the paths I wasn't taking. There is a yiddish expression about that feeling: "One butt, many chairs."


I started refining a sketch (below) that I'm eager to make into an etching.


One cheek, one bird.

Daniel

Good pressure

This week all my spare time was filled with working on my web sites (coming soon to a computer near you) and practicing banjo for a little gig, a productive week but not much to show.

When I told my friend Marianne about the concept for this blog she said, "Wow, that's a lot of pressure, to come up with something every week." We'll see, I hope it will be good pressure.

This is a recent re-drawing of an etching I did about 10 years ago. It is, in part, about an artist presenting herself to the world, the weirdness of that from the artist's perspective. I wish I had time to do stories about everyone in the audience.

OK, I've fed the blog, now I can go read. I just started After Dark by Haruki Murakami, it seems good. See you next week,

Daniel

I had all day sunday in the studio, and made some progress on a wire and paper sculpture. (No pictures yet.)

Here are two little sketches from this week.

I just came across this story I wrote a month or two ago. The ending surprised me when I read it, I had completely forgotten it.

She put pencil to paper, making an arc up, around to the right, down fast, hooking back around. She looked at it, thinking, not thinking, drifting. A suspended body: a cacoon? a spider's prey? No. She made a couple countering arcs, now the body had wings, arms, will. As she added lines a being slowly emerged, part bird, part angel, delicate and primitive. In his cupped hands she suddenly knew was hidden a broken little bald dove, fledged too early in the season. Above his head, in a heraldic ribbon, she wrote, "Saint Calidris, Forgiver of Weakness".

Happy Bloomsday,

Daniel

I didn't work on any big projects this week, but I tinkered with this page, sketched some, and had a great weekend of music. Any week that includes listening to the riotous dawn chorus of birds after staying up all night playing music around a camp fire in the Sierra foothills is a good week.

The music and dancing was almost all irish this weekend, which I love, but the music that stirs my imagination is gypsy/balkan/eastern european. That is the sound I hear these guys making. The cat is a sublime fiddler, but is pretty good on accordian too. She travels from village to village all over Europe playing with musicians she meets along the way.

The Tall Man is another recurring character in my imagination, as are his small slightly foolish friends. I started this sketch a month or so ago, and just had the Tall Man standing there holding a rag. I wasn't satisfied with that, so I erased the rag this week and was happy when the ladder appeared and the little people started climbing down it. It may sound precious to talk about characters and objects appearing without my agency, but that is the closest way I can think of to describe the exprience of doing these drawings. Sometimes I do start with an idea that I then execute, but usually the image evolves more unconsciously.

This sweet dead girl is a key character in a picture story I did. I am always suprised and offended when people think she is creepy. The birds know that she is purely innocent and joyfully curious about life. How she came to exist between life and death I don't know. Yet.

OK, her dad is a little creepy. He is the Stranger, and he is as curious about death and loss as his daughter is about life. He has a wicked sense of humour, a bad temper, and a huge mischievious streak.

It looks like another busy week ahead, I hope to spend sunday in the studio.

See you next week,
Daniel

As of this first post, I'm 90% done with a wire and paper sculpture, and I haven't done any printmaking in months. But, after a long dry spell, I have been sketching pretty much every day for the last several weeks and have recently struck a fine lode. I like the mining metaphor for sketching even though images of flight and gravity-defiance have been showing up more than anything else lately. I'll cheat and show sketches from the last few weeks in this initial post.

I had just seen the Humouroborous, a merry-go-round sized zoetrope, and was thinking about animation when I started this sketch. I was surprised when he lifted off the ground, and kept rising. He seems surprised too.

I started this one with the man's face, not knowing anything that would follow. I didn't like how the man and woman are facing away from each other, but the birds as a final addition solved that problem. The title might be "Looking for a good place to land." I like the smudges from my crappy eraser on the cheap paper, and all the ghosts of other pages showing through.

Here is the flip side, the necessity and pleasure of giving in to gravity sometimes.

But then sometimes gravity is not my friend.

Thinking about gravity and flight makes me think about Italo Calvino's great Six Memos for the Next Millenium, a series of essays on different literary virtues, such as Lightness and Quickness. He sees Lightness as being in opposition to the heaviness and stone-like opacity of mundane life. He says,

"I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."

That is why I am doing this blog, to help me float above the heaviness of everyday life that sometimes seems designed to keep paper blank and sculpture unfinished.

See you next monday,

Daniel