I have been a picture-maker since childhood, drawing skeletons in the margins of my textbooks. I used to use pencils, crayons, and colored pencils. I don’t know why I said “used to” because I still use them… just not crayons so much any more. In fact, I have tried, despite being a living antique my own self, to adapt to modern technology. Computers and digital photography have made the picture-making thing easier in many ways, though my goofy old brain still has so many fossilized pathways to navigate to get anywhere new that it takes gobs of time to get it down.
Having rampant hoarding disorder and being a collecting maniac proves useful, because I have stockpiles of junk and stuff to make pictures out of. The only thing I have to get better at is my photographic light awareness. I have spent too much money on different light bulbs and lighting equipment. But practice makes perfect Paffoonies.
It doesn’t hurt that I constantly paint and make arty-stuff to take pictures of either. Here is my effort to use puff paints to add snow to Toonerville structures.
And I need to work on my background awareness too. But being at home alone while important things are going on elsewhere has given me one thing that I don’t often have. Lots of time to work on stuff like this. Scary how the mind of an artist often works, ain’t it?
You see, gooseberries aren’t made from geese. They don’t look like gooses… er, goosei… um, geese. They aren’t the favorite food of a goose, unless, maybe… Mother Goose. The name is a corrupted form of the Dutch word kruisbes , or possibly the German Krausbeere. You know, because people who speak English don’t know how to talk right. They don’t have anything to do with geese. In the same way, a person’s name doesn’t really help you understand the person that wears it. You have to dig deeper. Do you know, I have never actually tasted gooseberry pie? I have seen and even picked the gooseberries. They are danged ugly, spikey-furred snot-green berries. I am not tempted in any way to put one in my mouth. And yet, I should not judge gooseberry pie before I taste a piece. I know people who adore gooseberry pie. Maybe you are one of them.
The point is, blogs are exactly the same thing. An artist, a writer, a producer of something, or a day-dreamy noodling goober has put together a blog to display their wares, show off their creations, and share their words and wisdom. You have to look at them, warts and all, and actually take a bite. You have to try them out and test them. Follow them over time. Read, absorb, and appreciate… not merely zoom through and look at the pictures… and maybe click “like” at the bottom of the post.
Of course, I admit, I do the very thing I am advising you not to do. The first few times I visit a blog, I scan through and only focus on a few things that catch my falling stars. (oop! Shame on me… I should say “catch my fancy”. Forgive me for lapsing into Mickian brain farts for a moment there). But if I am lured into coming back, I dip deeper and read more… tasting it thoroughly, as it were… And much of what I taste there will end up in my own recipe somewhere down the line. I begin to learn who that blogger is, and their writing style… sometimes even their thinking style (though I don’t read minds… only smell brain farts and odoriferous mental cooking smells) and I picture them as people in my minds eye. Sometimes I wonder if they match in real life the person I am picturing. Of course, the answer is no. People don’t look like what you think they should look like. They don’t even look like what they think they look like either… even in photos. So let me end this goofy pie-based argument about why blogs are self portraits with a few self portraits I have created that aren’t really what I look like , even if it is a photo.
Me in the mirror, 1980
Scary pictures of the artist as a creepy old man…
The novelist me…
A wizard selfie taken at Mad Ludwig’s Castle in Bavaria.
Who I am and who I was…
Seriously grumpy me…
Gag! Enough of the gooseberries already! Or are they gross-berries? I think that I really don’t look anything like me anymore.
My first novel-length piece of writing was attempted in college. I finished it in four years. It was a pirate tale about a young man, a pirate named Graff the Changeling. You see him in this illustration I created in 1980 with his two young sons, Rene and Emery. Because their mother was a fairy, the boys have pointed ears and horns. It was an attempt at serious fantasy adventure fiction that was so awful, it became a comedy before it was through. I called it The Graff Tales, and I still have it. But I promise you, I will never, ever try to publish the horrible thing. My sisters served as my beta readers for this story. They both liked the oral stories I told, and they eagerly awaited something like they remembered from our shared childhood. They both were a bit disappointed by my first prose attempt. There was a knight called Sir Rosewall in the story. He was a hapless knighted fool who lived in poverty and swore to reclaim his honor with great deeds, but as he goes to sea as a kidnapped sailor, all he manages to do is fall down a lot and bump his large head frequently. In the first scene when he enters the story, long about chapter four, he exits a cottage and has to punt a piglet to get out without falling down. This pig-punting thing was repeated more than once with this character. My sisters joked that the “pig-in-the-doorway” motif would be my lasting contribution to literature. Fortunately for me, it was not. I am probably the only one who even remembers there was such a novel.
But my biggest failing with writing and storytelling was always that I could be too creative. The story featured a flying pirate ship that was raised from the bottom of the ocean by fairy magic. The crew were re-animated skeletons. The gorilla who lived on the island where the ship’s survivors had been marooned would also join the crew. His name was Hairy Arnold. One villain was the pirate captain Horner, a man with a silver nose-piece because he had lost his real nose to a cannon shot. Another was a red-bearded dandy named Captain Dangerous. But the biggest villain of all was the Heretic, who turned out to be a demon in human guise. It was all about escaping from pirates who wanted to kill you and hitting soldiers with fish in the fish market. There were crocodile-headed men and little child-like fairies called Peris that lived in the city where Graff was trapped and transformed into a monster by the Heretic.
My plot was too convoluted and my characters too wildly diverse and unlikely. The result was something far too bizarre to be serious fiction. The only way it could actually be interpreted was as a piece of comedy. There-in lay the solution to my identity problem as a writer. I had to stop trying to be serious. My imagination too often bent the rules of physics and reality. So I had to stop trying for realism and believability.
In the end all the main characters die. All except for young Rene who becomes a pirate hunter. Of course, I follow Graff and Emery through to heaven because, well, it was a first person narrative and the narrator died. So, I vowed to myself that I would never let this horrible piece of nonsense see the light of day. I would never try to publish it, rewrite it, or even tell anyone about it. And so to this very day I… oopsie.
Perhaps you should write it down. I mean, that’s basically why I am writing this today instead of the most wondrously intelligent and well-written post anyone ever wrote anywhere and anytime. I had the idea while I was out walking in the park and didn’t have a pencil. And ten minutes later, the idea was forgotten.
Oh, well. I can still write something. It just won’t be as good.
What I could do is write down some ideas I can write about in the future. You know… so I don’t forget.
I saw some YouTube videos about Stephen King talking about his writing process. In some ways, we are a lot alike. But we also work in very different ways, and we write about very different things. I could compare our varying processes.
I have a head full of useless knowledge about cartoons and cartoonists. I believe I have written about Fontaine Fox and his Toonerville comics. Also, I posted about George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. Windsor McKay’s Little Nemo. and E. C. Segar’s Popeye have also made one or more appearances in this blog, as have Milt Caniff’s Steve Canyon, and Carl Barks’ Ducks (Donald, Uncles Scrooge, and all the other denizens of Duckburg.) There has to be at least one or two more cartoonists I could talk about?
I am currently writing and illustrating a novel and a novella. That means I can post some of the drawings and illustrations I do for that, talking about how I illustrate, or how the writing is going… or how the writing is blowing up, giving me nightmares, warping the universe around me… you know, the stuff writers go through and then don’t tell you about.
And there’s always the stuff that torments artists of all kinds. The Devil is in the details, as Basil Wolverton could tell you. The attention to detail can make the work of art very beautiful… or very, um… like what Basil saw whenever he drew something.
So, tomorrow, when I also will probably have forgotten about the most wondrous idea I had ever thunk about, I have a list of stuff to look at, and then probably ignore and think up something else.
Yes, Mondays are blue. Specifically French blue. Every day of the week has its own color. Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre, Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue. I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints. I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head. I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world. I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name. It is called synesthesia.
It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”. When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence. I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns. Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns. It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color. Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word. But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue. It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”. And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.
Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.
I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do. I certainly was. I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue. My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing. I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word. I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there. But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true. The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded. I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls. My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters. She is left handed and also gifted at drawing. I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.
Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.
Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about. But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about. And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases. It is not a bad condition to have. In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing. I could use some good for a change. Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway. (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).
What do I mean by saying something stupid like that?
Did you stop and think about it? Did it change who you are to think what you thought about it?
Why not?
Was it because you are committed in your mind to not be changed by a question you are asked to think about?
This is Bobby and me as boys at the skinny-dipping pond.
But is it really? Are we really naked if you can’t see whether we are wearing swimsuits or not?
Boys really only have to cover one small thing to not be naked, right? Is being naked just a perception? Can you be naked with all your clothes on?
And how can this really be me and Bobby? It is merely a picture, and pictures you draw are mere interpretations, and if it is an interpretation, can it be considered real? Boys of this age were not allowed to wear their hair this long in the 1960’s, so does that make it less real?
And why is there a mountain range in the background? We grew up in Iowa, and are there any mountains like that in Iowa?
This is the boy who might’ve been my son if I had married a different girlfriend.
Does this have something to do with Charles Lamb’s essay Dream Children?
Why am I thinking about children who are not my children? Why is every picture in colored pencil and a picture of boys rather than girls?
Why does an author and artist think any of the things he or she thinks?
Why is this post mostly made up of questions? Does it show how people really think? Is it really the Socratic Method?
Is it possible that this is some form of poetry? Designed to make people think?
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio [1571 – 1610] Amor Vincit Omnia
I don’t often choose to write about works of art that creep me out in a bad way. Or works of art that I harbor some mild hatred for. But this is one that bothers me, and I feel compelled to explain why.
I first saw this painting in a freshman-level Art History Course taught by a female Art-Nazi. I was repelled by it, completely unable to explain why. Even then, before I psychologically overcame the mental barriers that kept me from allowing myself to remember my own sexual assault when I was ten, I had a fondness for idealized nudes, even nude boys. None of the other paintings disturbed me in the way this one did.
It was explained in the textbook that Caravaggio was famous for his chiaroscuro style using strong light in a dark background to paint figures and faces. His work would inspire later greats like Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens. And his work would evolve into the works of the Baroque movement in painting.
So, what could it possibly be that turned me against this artist and this particular painting? It would take me years to figure out.
I believe if you look carefully at all of Caravaggio’s faces, you can see why I view them all as self-portraits. Compare the eyes, face-shapes, and brows of these faces with Caravaggio’s own (depicted here by another artist to lend veracity.)
He was, in fact, noted for his brutal realism in his paintings. So, did he use only relatives as models? As near as historians can tell, he did not.
But, the Cupid or Eros in the painting that annoys me is bothersome because I am the one being painted in the middle of the darkness.
Cupid, even a nude Cupid, was a common thing for painters to paint in the late 1500’s. But other painters would paint him as an idealized, beautiful nude boy. Caravaggio’s Cupid may be a beautiful nude boy, but is in no way idealized. His teeth are crooked. His smile is devilishly smirky. Even his body is awkwardly posed and plumpish in places that are not what you would call a perfect “10” model. Yes, this boy is trapped in a pose that reminds me of being pinned down and helpless, told that I shouldn’t scream or things would hurt more.
And Cupid is supposed to be wielding weapons that will make you fall in love. But these wicked bronze arrows will pierce the heart and cause death. The bow looks like a mere stage prop, as do the instruments and armor strewn about as if left by someone fleeing this deadly child. The painting is not about love, but violence in matters of life and death. I hated it because it brought to mind my own personal trauma.
The actual model for this painting was a boy named Cecco (a nickname for Francesco,) and is identified later by historians as a young art student named Cecco del Caravaggio (Caravaggio’s Cecco.) Much of Caravaggio’s life is a mystery. He never wrote an autobiography, and no biography was written about him when the people who knew him were still alive to tell on him. Only police reports and the gossip that surrounded the Greatest Painter in Rome of his time are available to speculate from. But he was definitely a brawler, drunk, and eventually a murderer. He had the bad sense to murder a gangster from a wealthy family which probably caused his own possible poisoning and death in 1610. He was rumored to be a homosexual, and was accused of molesting models, even, likely, Cecco from the painting. It is easy to see why I came to detest this man and his work, simply because I was a victim of sexual assault.
But being a student of art, I never gave up on learning about this painter and his work.
And just as I forgave the man who molested me, I have come to forgive Caravaggio for his brutish ways and painting such a nude picture of me. I may never actually like his work, but I do see his skill and what makes him a celebrated artist.
It’s not easy being green…. the color of so many ordinary things…
Especially as you grow older.
Because green is the color of growth and youth and life. But those things seem beyond the grasp of your outstretched fingers on your spotty and wrinkled old hand.
I am definitely no longer green like Littlebit, the Oceanian ship’s boy from the seas of Talislanta and the pirate ship, Black Dragon.
And, yes, an Iowa boy living as far away from an ocean as you can get in the United States, in all directions, you are bound to dream of pirate ships and the high seas, especially when you’re twelve and your favorite book is Treasure Island.
But now that you are old, green is more often your color because you don’t feel well… again… every day….
B
But there is still bright green in dreams.
You can still go there and be a child again in memories and your imagination.
It’s just that now the green is written down in sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and cantos.
And talking to your kids about movies, art and artists, stories and writers of stories…
Did you know the favorite color of all three of my children is green?
I have known it since they were small and I could sing to them songs by Kermit the Frog, like “Rainbow Connections” and “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”
And with paint, you make green by combining the blue of sadness with the yellow of sunshine and happiness.
Catch a Falling Star 