If I am not going to publish a Hidden Kingdom page every Saturday, I am going to commit to a feature where I post artwork on Saturday. Saturday art fairs are a thing. And I have gotten far more interest in my artwork from WordPress than I ever have from a local art show. So what if I can’t win blue ribbons online?
Cartoons are basically art with words added… often stupid words… for laughs.
Being able to draw gives your imagination wings to fly with.
Art is my religion.
There is a certain magical quality about the way that over time you can build a portfolio of many parts, and pictures have many uses.
Is it possible that artworks taken all together are like an autobiography??
In some sense, every portrait the artist draws is a self portrait. Every scene, object, and image is a part of the artist’s ultimate story.
Imaginations can be both electric and powerful.
Not everything is as alien as it seems at first.
So, do you like my gallery? You can always leave a comment or an insult. You are the viewer, and what you do with this is entirely up to you.
In honor of all the years I spent playing dungeon master on Saturday afternoons, I am posting pictures to keep the posting of D&D stuff on Saturdays as a tradition. I really am a bit too achy and ill to post any old orc and ogre stories today.
He was born William Britton “Bil” Baird in Nebraska during the Summer of 1904, but he was raised as a boy in Mason City, Iowa, the same city I was born in during the 1950s. So, he, like me, was an Iowa boy. You probably know his work if you’ve ever seen “The Sound of Music” musical movie starring Julie Andrews. The puppets above were featured in that movie during the “Lonely Goatherd” song.
Bil became puppet-crazy at the age of 8 when his father built him his first marionette. The string puppets pictured above are from a Bil Baird production of “The Wizard of Oz.” The growing television industry was a boon to Bil. I remember most vividly his TV production of “Peter and the Wolf.”
Here the Bremen Town Musicians trick me into making a selfie with them as I take the photo through the glass in the Hanford MacNider Museum in Mason City, Iowa. All of the photos in this post were taken by me at that location.In 1950, Bil and producer Yul Brenner developed the TV show, “Life with Snarky Parker.” This was a spoof western-genre show like those popular on TV at the time where Snarky, the puppet, partially obscured by the reflection of the card display in the glass, had silly and funny cowboy adventures… possibly inspiring the character of Woody in the Pixar movie “Toy Story.”
Many of Baird’s puppets were made specifically for his work in TV advertisements and educational TV.
Flying monkeys and the wicked witch from Oz.
Baird’s distinctive style of marionettes was a common feature on TV, in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and in Educational Films throughout the ’50s and ’60s, the height of his popularity. And he continued to perform in World’s Fairs, theme parks, and special engagements until his death in 1987. Most of his puppets were sold at auction in 1988, that is how these puppets found their way into his hometown art museum. His son Peter continued working the puppet troupe with new puppets until his own death in 2004.
I owe a debt to Bil Baird, inspiring my own creativity and artwork. And I suspect the creators of the Muppets, Pixar movies, and puppeteers everywhere can say the same.
It is Saturday again, and it is time to share some more artwork. I am trying to come up with a theme. But I guess I am basically going through my gallery and picking stuff at random.
I am just guessing here, but maybe I can find pictures here of daily life at home, no matter how weird that home might be.
Okay, so, really weird home life…It is life at home… if your home is a farm.This is life at home… if you live on a pirate ship.Life at home… if you are circus clowns.
Maybe I don’t have a clear artistical idea of what a home life really looks like, but, after all, home is where the heart lives.
Back in about 1968 my Grandma Beyer was seriously scandalized by an artist named Paul Detlefsen. Detlefsen did a lot of covers for the “Ideals Magazine” that Grandma always had on her coffee tables. He scandalized her by putting a painting on the cover that showed a young boy taking his pants off, the rear view only, so he could go skinny dipping with a group of naked boys. Truthfully the picture shown above is by Detelfsen, but it is not the one that offended her. I have discovered that this painter of old-timey things like blacksmith shops and one-room school houses has painted at least four different versions of “the Old Swimmin’ Hole”. And Grandma was easily scandalized when we were kids. She was a very conservative woman who loved Ronald Reagan and his politics most severely and thought that Richard Nixon was a leftist radical. She didn’t like for people to be naked, except for bath time, and maybe not even then. She is one of the main reasons, along with this painter whom she adored, that I came to learn later in life that “naked is funny”.http://www.freeplaypost.com/PaulDetlefsen_VintageArtPrint_A.htm
Grandma Beyer also seriously loved puzzles, and besides “Ideals” covers, Paul Detlefsen did a beaucoup of jigsaw puzzles. (Beaucoup means a lot in Texican, I tend to think in Iowegian and talk in Texican and completely forget about the need to translate for those people who don’t know those two foreign tongues) One of the puzzles we spent hours working on was “Horse and Buggy Days” that I pictured here. They were the kind of puzzle paintings where every boy was Tom Sawyer and every girl was Becky Thatcher. And there were a lot of them. Here is another;
Grandma had this in puzzle form also. We put the puzzle together, glued it to tag board, and framed it. It has hung on the wall in a Grandparent’s house, first Grandma Beyer’s and then Grandma Aldrich’s, since the early 1970’s. My own parents now live in Grandma Aldrich’s house, and that puzzle-painting may be hanging in an upstairs bedroom to this very day. Detlefsen is not known as a great artist. He was a humble painter who painted backdrops for films for over 20 years. In the 1950’s he switched gears and started doing lithographs that were turned into calendars, jigsaw puzzles, laminated table mats, playing cards, and reproductions you could buy in the Ben Franklin Dime Store in Belmond, Iowa and hang on your back porch at home. I believe I saw his paintings in all these forms in one place or another. According to Wikipedia (I know, research, right?) “In 1969, UPI estimated that his artwork had been seen by 80 per cent of all Americans.” That is pretty dang good for a humble painter, better numbers than Pablo Picasso ever saw. Let me share a few more of his works, and see if you recognize any of these;
“My name is Michael Beyer, and I am an amateur cartoonist.”
“Hi, Michael!” says the entire group of CA group-therapy participants.
(CA stands for Cartoonists Anonymous.)
Doofy Fuddbugg
“I have to admit, I am guilty of giving in to the urge to draw cartoons. I know how it can fill lives with slapstick pain and derisive laughter, and I give in to the urge anyway.”
“So, what did you draw that you have to be ashamed of now?” asked one mad-eyed cartoonist with a pencil lodged behind each of his large ears.
“I made a very unfortunate video to post on YouTube that was supposed to be How-to-draw Cartooning. But everything went wrong. You couldn’t see my drawings in the video. It was not adequately lit. I look like a doofus (which probably can’t be cured) in the video. And instead of thinking twice or editing it, I posted it anyway.”
“Wow!” said a rather ugly cartoonist lady, “that is really bad. You have a seriously bad case of cartoonity.”
“Cartoonity?” I responded stupidly.
“The condition of needing love for your cartoons so bad that you will risk anything to make people look at them and like them,” said the wise group therapist (who looked an awful lot like Chuck Jones, though I am fairly sure Chuck Jones is now dead).
“Yes, I suppose that’s about the size of the problem,” I said. “I have been posting pages from my graphic novel, Hidden Kingdom, and I really haven’t seen more than one comment about it. Do people actually read cartoons and comics nowadays? Or is it just me that gets ignored?”
“You have to focus on how much you love drawing and doing it just for that reason, and nothing beyond that,” said the wise therapist. “Cartooning should be done for its own sake, and nothing more than that. Craving attention and approval for it can get seriously infected and become a bad case of cartoonititis. How do you think I dealt with it when I was still alive?”
At that point, my eyes popped out of my head in disbelief and my lower jaw fell all the way to the floor. Could he really be…?
And so I must end today’s blog post since it is hard to keep typing when your eyeballs are rolling around on the floor.
This picture was intended to look like it could’ve been my son, so the face came from an old black-and-white photo of me when I was ten.This is me as a nudist child in my current home’s backyard flanked by two nude Butterfly Children.
This is my purple-mouse avatar.
Eli Tragedy, my red-clad Sorcerer character from Dungeons and Dragons days is also really me.
Me as a happy new nudist
Milt Morgan is a wizard, and also a character who is half me and half the Other Mike from my childhood.Milt Morgan as a child. Also half me.Another purple Mickey.
It is getting harder and harder to climb the new day’s hill to get to the summit where I can reasonably get a good look at the road ahead. At almost-64, I can see the road ahead is far shorter and much darker than the highway stretching out behind me. It is not so much a matter of how much time I have spent on the road as it is a matter of the wear and tear the mileage has caused.
This weekend I had another depressing free-book promotion where, in five days, I only moved five books, one purchase, and four free books. I have made $0.45 as an author for the month of June.
I was recently given another bit of good advice from a successful author. He said that I shouldn’t be in such a rush to publish. He suggested taking more time with my writing. Hold on to it longer. Polish it and love it more. And now that I have reached sixteen books published on my author’s page, I have basically beaten the grim reaper in the question of whether or not he was ever going to silence me and my author’s voice. I can afford to live with the next one longer.
But the last one, A Field Guide to Fauns, practically wrote itself. It went fast from inspiration to publication simply because the writer in me was on fire and full of love and life and laughter that had to boil over into hot print exactly as quickly as it did. The additional writing time afforded me by the pandemic and quarantine didn’t hurt either. Once in print, my nudist friends loved it.
This next one has the potential to boil and brew and pop out of me in the same accelerated way as that last one did. Of course, it has been percolating inside my brain basically since the Summer of 1974. So, this is no rushed job. The Wizard in his Keep is a story of a man who tries to take the children of the sister of his childhood best friend to a place of safety when their parents are killed in a car wreck. But the only safe place he has to offer is in the world of his imagination. A world he has bizarrely made real. And that best friend comes searching for the children. And so does a predator who seeks to do them all grievous harm.
In many ways, it is a story already written.
So, I am rekindling the flame that keeps the story-pot boiling. And more of it is already cooking. And I am recovering from the cool winds of disappointment, as well as the dark storm clouds of the nearing future.
This is now actually a two-year-old post. Both of the books mentioned here are published and available from Amazon. As far as holding on to the books longer, there is no problem with that on Amazon. Editing, improving, and re-publishing a book is actually easier than publishing it the first time. Nothing about this old post has been made untrue by the passage of time. I am still probably the best author of books like these whose published books almost never get read.
WordPress has put in a new feature for finding old photos from Posts Past.
This allows me to pull from past years much more easily than the scroll-down feature I have been using. Thus, art from 2017.
This is from the Star Wars Role-playing game that we stopped playing in 2008.the Murphy family (well, three of them anyway)The disintegrator pistol from Catch a Falling Star“The Wise Thaumaturge Visits Cymril”Eventual cover art for Magical Miss MorganI painted this miniature lead wizard, as well as made the castle from cardboard and paper.I also painted the buildings in the background, acrylic on plaster.“Their Most Feared Offensive Player Could Beat Them By Herself”All of these works of art are done by me, whether they are drawn, painted, or photographed.
This has been a look back at pictures posted in 2017, starting in December, and going back in time to January. There is at least one picture from every month.
Catch a Falling Star 
Re-bubbling the Old Enthusiasm
It is getting harder and harder to climb the new day’s hill to get to the summit where I can reasonably get a good look at the road ahead. At almost-64, I can see the road ahead is far shorter and much darker than the highway stretching out behind me. It is not so much a matter of how much time I have spent on the road as it is a matter of the wear and tear the mileage has caused.
This weekend I had another depressing free-book promotion where, in five days, I only moved five books, one purchase, and four free books. I have made $0.45 as an author for the month of June.
I was recently given another bit of good advice from a successful author. He said that I shouldn’t be in such a rush to publish. He suggested taking more time with my writing. Hold on to it longer. Polish it and love it more. And now that I have reached sixteen books published on my author’s page, I have basically beaten the grim reaper in the question of whether or not he was ever going to silence me and my author’s voice. I can afford to live with the next one longer.
But the last one, A Field Guide to Fauns, practically wrote itself. It went fast from inspiration to publication simply because the writer in me was on fire and full of love and life and laughter that had to boil over into hot print exactly as quickly as it did. The additional writing time afforded me by the pandemic and quarantine didn’t hurt either. Once in print, my nudist friends loved it.
This next one has the potential to boil and brew and pop out of me in the same accelerated way as that last one did. Of course, it has been percolating inside my brain basically since the Summer of 1974. So, this is no rushed job. The Wizard in his Keep is a story of a man who tries to take the children of the sister of his childhood best friend to a place of safety when their parents are killed in a car wreck. But the only safe place he has to offer is in the world of his imagination. A world he has bizarrely made real. And that best friend comes searching for the children. And so does a predator who seeks to do them all grievous harm.
In many ways, it is a story already written.
So, I am rekindling the flame that keeps the story-pot boiling. And more of it is already cooking. And I am recovering from the cool winds of disappointment, as well as the dark storm clouds of the nearing future.
This is now actually a two-year-old post. Both of the books mentioned here are published and available from Amazon. As far as holding on to the books longer, there is no problem with that on Amazon. Editing, improving, and re-publishing a book is actually easier than publishing it the first time. Nothing about this old post has been made untrue by the passage of time. I am still probably the best author of books like these whose published books almost never get read.
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