inside out

Do you not ever just feel like turning things inside out.  I sure do though I'm not sure how to do that with paintings.  But it's fun to try anyway.  I'm sure some of you know how to tear them up after they are done but I don't quite get that.  What's the point I guess.

I was never sure but I did have an artist over and she would draw totally automatically when she got some pencils in her hand beautiful drawings I thought.  And then when she was done she cut them up into little pieces and leave them on the table.

So I looked at them then I used them in some of my collage work.  Just scraps ready to throw out.  Huh.  Well I had use for them and I thanked her too.

I'm always happy when I find a scrap of a Chilpolte wrapper or at least once finding a piece of a dollar bill on the ground outside of a Best Buy some return mail stickers that sort of thing.

But the main obsession recently has been finding paints that should but don't blend.  Then I am happy for some reason.

And I like finding small scraps out of the free magazines that dot the city.  Not too many they are hard to find.  It just seems like images are nowhere.  Now that must sound idiotic.  Why the web is full of images...!  But they are not good images.  And they are not authentic they are copies of images with no heft of their own.

It is better to use coffee filters and envelopes and pieces from a butter carton.  They have heft malleable tangible weight and real though instantly obsolete function.

And of course there is corporate graffiti.  They put hundreds of these stickers everywhere on small metal sticks they spray paint on the sidewalk and even on the grass and the plants.  Just madness.

You know about five years ago when my youngest was five years old he had a perfect spiral belly button.  I thought he would be a rock star for sure.  People would get operations to imitate his illustrious 

belly button.  It would be the album cover...

sigil

Man it is a bit difficult to work with all these digital images.  Not that they themselves are difficult but only that the operating systems are always changing and the old programs don't work and one has to discover if the new ones do.

And one has to buy the new ones of course. And there is the difficulty of coordinating everything and getting it to work properly and operate smoothly etc. ...

I was thinking this morning how it used to be, whenever you went into a house in Rosedale Park like pretty much every weekend as I remember, open houses and such, the thing that usually delighted me the most was the fabulous variety of homemade workbenches, and occasionally even a work studio with not only a beautiful bench but a side area with the tops of jars screwed into the bottom of a shelf and  glass jars full of screws or nuts or cool little pieces of wire in it.

They were all such expressions of purpose and beauty...you could occasionally see them with all the original tools each safely ensconced on a particular place on the wall...it took my breath away....

And ironically and maybe not ironically they were the only things I ever saw in those houses that was rugged and handmade.  It was I am sure some sort of expression of setting up and getting ready...I'm not sure what for.  But something anything.  Most of that part of town was built during the depression at any rate.

I remember going into one house down the street that looked small, but of course it wasn't.  The enitre basement had a ceramic or terrazzo floor of the flag of Japan.  It was so beautiful.

Our house on the corner was I believe the first one in that part of Rosedale.  They had brought Italians in to do the plaster work and you could cry every time you saw it...sixty years later not a single crack in it anywhere.  What extraordinary work.

Odd Ones

These are a few odd fellows.  You know you work on a certain thing an image that speaks to you, yet on some days you hear nothing no voice comes through and you paint anyway.  And on those days something else happens, a different experience as you rush to finish them.  They speak a foreign tongue and you hardly look at them.  Not at the time.  And later you look and they seem interesting.

They have a unity of course.  They always have that though you never expect it.  Maybe they express something you haven't thought about.  I don't know.  I don't even have any idea what I think of them.

Funny too, I know I began thinking about something I hadn't thought about for years.  I mean it's simple not some wild experience.  I was thinking about my grandmother.  She was young at the turn of the century.  An Irish girl in an Irish community.

She got very sick as a young girl and had a high fever.  They thought she would die.  So a few of the neighborhood women went out that night and caught a skunk.  They cut out its stink sack and used it to rub all over her skin.  She began to get better right away.  Her fever cut and in a day or two she was cured.

One of her brothers made his living on skunks.  He started by selling the fur to the Russians.  How he did that I have no idea.  But it didn't last long as it was soon the time of the Russian revolution and styles changed.  But by then he had figured out to sell skunk oil which he got by baking them and having a pan to catch the oil.   The stink sacks he continued to sell also, and now he had the baked skunks which some people would eat, especially thru out the depression.

Her other brother decided he might work overseas and left to go to China.  He returned 35 years later and retired in Arizona.

It is always odd what it turns out people do.

The Tin Nimbus

 I took some new images and I'll share those.  It seems that the summer gets a bit frenetic at the beginning but soon I feel we will sail into the horse latitudes.  It will be clear and calm and the world will stand revealed .

So the last time I had one of these crummy experiences was about 10 years ago.  And I'm just telling it cause if you have one sometime you will remember 1) you are not alone and 2) they are all crummy and I don't like them and and I won't have another.

I was lying in bed and I had just woke up.  It was morning and we had a small fire going in the fireplace in the bedroom.  I looked over there and saw my son standing looking at the fire.  He was about five then.  Well as I looked at him I noticed he had a new t-shirt, it was a bit small on him, cut like a fifties t-shirt, and I thought that a bit odd, but then he turned and looked at me and it wasn't my son after all, maybe a friend of his, but I knew it wasn't true,  the boy looked worried and scared.  My eyes were glued to him and as we looked at each other I saw him fade away.

Well I hate stuff like that.  It is just idiotic, the kind of stuff kids tell each other or people make up or I don't know.  I don't like it that's all.

Well then the next day I walk in our small kitchen and my beautiful down to earth son says dad who was that?  And I said who was what?  He said, that man who just walked behind me.  Well behind him were the stairs to the basement.

I rushed down them and searched everywhere every corner every closet every space.  I came back and asked my boy What did he look like.  He said he looked like me daddy.

Fast and Competent

My thanks go out to Andy Piper, the man from Ann Arbor, who came out here with his camera and took 871 photographs in less the one day and a half, and got me caught up almost on all my art photographs.  

We were like workers in the old Ford plant as we delved through the boxes of paintings, piece by piece, and with intense speed and accuracy set them up with the inventory numbers (that my wife had printed for each one)  and no we don't know what the numbers are for, they come from the department office upstairs, and then after the photograph we take them down and put them away again,  it was spinnin' and we were laughing and having a crazy fun day of it.

  His competence and confidence were awe inspiring to me.  Man he has learned a whole lot in these years of education.  I can't wait to get them downloaded and ready to show.

It makes one feel proud to know someone like that, as if I am the smart guy.  And I'm not.

I just keep pouring through these images like student doctor going over the x-rays again and again.

Or studying poetry line my line syllable by syllable, studying the iambic pentameter and listening to each phoneme as it grates against the next, listening to the subtle light inner language...

And most end up sort of idiotic like they got pulled from the oven too early and occasionally they are  over-baked and burnt to a crisp...and every once in a while, they arrive just honey baked and glow in their happy youthfulness...