Drawing with increasingly painful arthritic hands is still worth it. I suppose I should feel a little embarrassed about drawing so many young girls. Especially when I draw them naked.
But drawing someone who is naked, yet totally confident in their own skin and unafraid of the world they have bared themselves to, captures a feeling I have aspired to my whole life.
That is the purpose of art. To show the deepest insights life has forced upon the artist.
Not all the nudes I draw are female.
Sometimes it is the top of the head that is naked. That makes it easier to show what you are thinking. No hairy stuff between the viewer and the mind of the man.
Mere shapes and lines can make you feel something deeply.
There is a joy that can come from drawing something that begins with a spark from your secret heart.
But people will know at first sight what things you used to keep secret and to yourself.
And some people will hate you for it. They detect a little nudism or a little bit of gayness (and I am definitely not gay) and immediately default to hating your drawings, and, beyond that, hating you.
But I don’t accept hate. Because I don’t know hate. It is a stranger to me, from a country I have never been to. And I don’t recognize that stranger. But I don’t hate him. Because I don’t know hate.
When I was a boy in Iowa, living in a boring little farm town where nothing really ever happened, I made a bunch of stuff up in my stupid little head and had great fun pretending it was all real.
I loved stories about Flash Gordon, Tarzan, and Jungle Jim on the Saturday afternoon TV ;matinee on Channel 3 from Mason City.
So, naturally, I told my friends at school that I was secretly a boy from outer space pretending to be Mike Beyer as part of a super-secret mission from a Star Empire that nobody but me knew existed. I got really embarrassed one night at 4-H Fun Night in Eagle Grove when the girl I had a secret crush on confronted me about telling my friends that she was a Martian Princess trapped on Earth by agents from outer space. She wasn’t mad. She thought it was funny. But I turned shades of red and purple in the face that no one knew was humanly possible. I got both joy and agony out of being the sort of juvenile liar who is destined to grow up to be a story-teller.
But lies are not always harmless amusement. I am not saying I never told an evil, black lie. But I don’t think I ever did. At least, if I ever did, it was forgettable enough to be forgotten by me.
And the lie about the sexual assault I endured at ten was not really a lie. I didn’t tell anybody because he threatened to hurt me worse if I did. That scared me enough that it would be years before I even allowed myself to remember that it happened. And lies of omission are not regular lies. You are not telling somebody to believe something that isn’t true. You are simply not telling anyone about something you don’t want to be known.
To be honest with both you and myself, I never really ever got into trouble by telling a lie and getting caught for it. Most of the problems I ever had with girlfriends and eventually wife were created by telling the truth. That happens when you have two girlfriends at the same time and they really don’t like each other. It also happens when you decide things for yourself because you think it is the most sensible decision you can make, and when you tell your wife about it, you find out it is, in fact, the stupidest, most-wrongest idea any stupid person ever had… simply because husbands are always wrong. Funny, though, the decisions and ideas I carry out without telling her first always seem to work out fine. So, I must only be the world’s stupidest man if I tell her about it.
It almost seems like it is better to lie by omission than to tell the actual truth.
I am aware, however, that lies can be told in hurtful ways, fundamentally immoral and evil ways. It seems my email is full of scams and cons and lies daily. Not just African princes with money that desperately needs to pass through my bank account for some obscure reason, but Amazon gift cards for a thousand dollars that you just need to supply some information to have delivered to your bank account, and Norton security subscriptions that need to be renewed by credit card even though I stopped using Norton for that ten years ago.
And then there was an orange man who told us from before the first vote was cast that the 2020 election would be stolen by voter fraud. He whipped up an angry mob who took weapons and flags and anger into the US Capitol building so they could poop on stuff and kill some capitol policemen and try to get their hands on AOC because apparently they think she is a communist or something. That was an election lie that caused an insurrection. It caused people to get killed (on both sides, some battered policemen to commit suicide later, and Congress-people to tell more lies about terrorists merely being tourists. ‘
That’s a truly evil lie.
One of the things I appreciate most about nudists is the fact that naked people are not hiding anything.
So, I am able to identify being a liar as essentially a bad thing.
Of course, that is not going to prevent me from being the liar I have always been. Though, from now on I will be calling it being a fiction writer or a storyteller.
I drew this picture back in my college days, the middle 1970’s. If you look at it closely, you will see my shorthand in action. The rose on the trellis is one. I have drawn a thousand roses since I did this one. It is the formalized set of lines, colors, and shading that I always put together whenever the thing I mean is “a ro se.”
You can see it in the orange bricks of the goldfish pond. Compare those to the gray foundation bricks. The same shorthand patterns. The brick grid in the background as well.
The shadow patterns of wrinkles in the boy’s clothing are also shorthand I almost always do when drawing from my imagination. The faces in profile, too.
There is a language here spoken silently in colored pencil. Complex ideas pictured in a simple colored-pencil picture-language.
I recently got criticism for the unprofessional ugliness of one of my novel covers. Of course, that was only a part of the review that generally hated everything about my book. Some people feel certain works of art have no right to even exist. So, for art day today, I will inflict my recent crimes against the world of novel art on all the regretful followers of this blog, and probably ward off future followers as well.
This novella is already published. The first one I showed you represents only a novel idea. No writing yet exists for The Necromancer’s Apprentice outside of my stupid head.
This one is a part of my endless AeroQuest rewrite. The ending of the book and a handful of existing chapters that need to be expanded exist already. It is still a project planned for the part of the future in which I am most likely already dead. The character of Spaceheart featured on this cover has not been written at all yet.
This book is only a few chapters along. It is a currently stalled work in progress.
This one was written as a Tuesday novel-writing project and presented chapter by chapter on this blog. This is an updated cover that came about once I learned how to better create a cover, a thing I am still learning about.
This last one is the cover for a novella I am currently presenting on Tuesdays. It is nearing completion.
So, here now for your consideration are the most recent cover efforts I have made. Be disgusted and horrified at your leisure. I can take criticism. And I know it is useful to be open to criticism. It does indeed make you reflect on what you are doing.
What’s the real reason behind the choices I make as an artist? For instance, why didn’t I do this photo of the artwork over again when the wind warped the bottom left corner. That answer is simple. I was taking this picture with natural sunlight. And once the wind started messing up my pictures, it only got worse. This was the first and best of five attempts. And, while it doesn’t show up here, I did several photo-shop manipulations of this picture, including shrinking the girl’s head. The original was done from a couple of models I got consent from when I worked at a daycare center in Iowa City where I went to college. The boy was eight years old in the summer of 1980. The girl was six, but I used a photo of a girl I went to second grade with, so the head was also eight. They represent David Copperfield and Emily, Pegotty’s niece from the Dickens novel. I had to read the book for my Master’s Exam which I took instead of writing a thesis. The picture is about how I saw myself and my world in that timeless novel.
This picture won a blue ribbon in the art competition at the Wright County Fair in 1979. It is a colored-pencil cartoon situation right out of a Jay Ward, Dudley Do-Right cartoon. I used a picture from a Canadian travel ad for the Mountie. The Indian sidekick is a modified version of Little Beaver, Red Ryder’s sidekick. The villain and the girl were basically Snidely Whiplash and Nell from the Dudley Do-Right cartoons, but made to look slightly more realistic… but only very slightly.
Actually, I lied a bit about the blue ribbon. I got the purple Grand Champion ribbon for this picture. I had entered it solely because two years before I saw how easy it would be to win a purple ribbon looking at the pictures that won it, and I wanted to win the purple ribbon. Sorry I lied, but the real reason for this picture is that I wanted to win that ribbon.
This painting, from the 1990s, was an attempt to make sofa art to sell in my sister-in-law’s home décor store. So, the real reason for this painting’s existence is greed. But since I ended up putting so many hours into it that I couldn’t justify selling it for twenty dollars in a store that went out of business because nobody ever shopped there, I got far more value out of it by keeping it and enjoying it myself. It was inspired by numerous paintings of Native Americans done by white people on display in Love’s Travel Stops across Texas in the 1990s.
This picture, “That Night in Saqqara,” is about youth versus age, thinking about death, immortality, and being afraid of any or all of it. The model for the Mummy is Boris Karloff who was so nice to pose for a production still from his movie that I could draw him long after he was actually dead. The boy was a seventh-grader in 1983 who did not actually pose for this without a shirt on or with an actual Ankh life-symbol around his neck. The Pharaoh in the tomb-mural in the background was from National Geographic Magazine, and I think was supposed to be Tutankhamun, but I could be wrong. I am old and I mix up lots of things I once clearly knew. That’s what mummified brains have to be like, apparently.
The reason I had to create this artwork was because I was increasingly falling victim to illness, especially arthritis, and I was constantly thinking about what it would be like to die alone, entombed in a two-bedroom apartment on North Stewart Street in Cotulla, Texas. This was well before I met and married my wife, who is now my wife of 25 years.
I began this little seven-part essay quest a week ago when I was feeling my mortality. My mother is in hospice care, being kept comfortable as both her heart and her kidneys are failing. My marriage is dissolving. I am entering the fifth and final year of my Chapter 13 Bankruptcy, and even though I’ve paid off 80% of my debt, the odds are still against me. Even my ten-year-old dog is in poor health. I felt the need to make my peace with the world. So I addressed five questions with a mostly un-serious tone but some real philosophical underpinnings.
Here are the key questions.
Have I lived a life that makes me worthy?
Is the world going to survive long after my life is over?
Does anyone really deserve love?
What is destiny? And what does luck have to do with it?
What is true?
Putting the puzzle pieces together naked in front of a haunted house in Winter.
So, I will now give you a cheat sheet to show the answers so that you don’t have to go back to those other six essays and… you know, read and think.
I am worthy. But only because everyone is born worthy and I, unlike Hitler, didn’t do anything during my lifetime to negate that worthiness. I was not a serial killer, not a child molester, not a major polluter like Exxon, not a politician like Ted Cruz, not a lawyer, not a nihilist, not a Nazi, and not a lot of other bad things either… including not a talking-during-the-movie audience member… an unforgiveable thing to become. I am also not Ted Nugent, Bill Cosby, or Harvey Weinstein. But maybe I am a little too judgemental.
The world might survive, by which I mean biological life-forms will still exist after corporate greed and wicked billionaire Bond villains wipe out human life. But the cockroach people who arise after us will have to face these same puzzle-questions in their lifetimes. Individually. And with humble clarity of self-reflection.
Everyone who is worthy deserves love. Even Hitler had love. And there is a lot of love in my life beyond mere romantic love which is fleeting and fickle.’
Destiny is a human idea caused by certain religions with demanding and punitive gods. The real world does not work that way, as near as I can logically figure it out.
There is no absolute truth. There is only a number of truths that we can pursue and refine our understanding of with the scientific method to be as close to the truth as is humanly possible. Which, on a universal scale, is not very possible.
The laughing blue faun in my pictures represents satire and parody.
So, what’s the point of all this? Well, that’s a good question. It is a series of self-reflective essays filled with lies, deceptions, misperceptions, and dumb jokes. It is all about self-soothing and messing around with pictures and ideas. But thinking about who you are, what you are, and why is an important function of a self-reflective life. I can’t imagine living an unexamined life. For me that would be Hell. And I don’t believe Hell exists. Even stupid people think about stuff. And I am not suggesting I am the proof of that last sentence.
I was a boy back when the milk man still came around in his blue-and-white panel truck delivering bottles of milk with Elsie the Cow on them. I don’t remember clearly because I was only 4 years old back when I first became aware of being a boy in this world instead of being something else living somewhere else.
There were many things I didn’t know or understand back then. But one thing I did know, was that I loved Elsie the Cow. And why would a farm boy love a cartoon cow? There were many not-so-sensible reasons.
For one thing, Elsie the Cow reminded me of June Lockhart, Lassie’s mom and the mom from Lost in Space.
Lassie’s Mom, June Lockhart
It may be that June Lockhart’s eyes reminded me of Elsie’s eyes, being large, soul-full eyes with large black eye lashes. It may be that she starred in a TV commercial for Borden’s milk in which Elsie winked at me at the end of the commercial.
Or maybe it was because Elsie had calves and was a mom. And June Lockhart was Lassie’s mom and the mom of Will Robinson, so I associated both of them with my mom, and thus with each other.
Elsie gave you milk to drink and was always taking care of you in that way. Milk was good for you, after all. My own mom was a registered nurse. So they were alike in that way too.
And she was constantly defending you against the bulls in your life. She stood up to Elmer to protect her daughter more than once. Of course, her son was usually guilty of whatever he was accused of, but she still loved him and kept Elmer from making his “hamburger” threats a reality.
And you can see in numerous ad illustrations that Elsie’s family were basically nudists. Although she often wore an apron, she was bare otherwise. And though her daughter often wore skirts and her son wore shorts, Elmer was always naked. And that didn’t surprise me, because no cow I knew from the farm wore clothes either. From very early in my life I was always fascinated by nakedness, and I would’ve become a nudist as a youngster if it hadn’t been soundly discouraged by family and society in general.
Proof that Elsie’s family lived the nude life.
Puppets from a Borden’s commercial
So there are many reasons why I have always loved Elsie the Cow. And it all boils down to the love of drinking milk and that appealing cartoon character who constantly asked you to drink more.
Is there an outcome in our lives straight ahead that can’t be avoided? Is there predestination? Or do we have a choice? And if things are totally random, how can someone like me even exist? I was born in a blizzard. My high school graduation on the football field was interrupted by a sudden thunderstorm and downpour, causing a sudden and chaotic relocation to the school auditorium. i have actually lost a coin flip 12 times in a row, narrowly avoiding the unlucky number thirteen. I even lost the most embarrassing strip poker game of my young life.
So, what is destiny?
As an Existentialist, I can say with some certainty that I believe this statement is true; “Existence precedes essence.”
Of course that means you are now thinking, “What the hell does that mean, you goofy Mickey, you?!”
So, here it is; A cadoopa-keeloopa does not exist. But if I build a complex machine out of tinker toys and Legos that uses a green plastic flag to knock over a chessboard where I am losing a game to the Grim Reaper, and I then name that machine, “cadoopa-keeloopa,” it suddenly exists, and it’s essence of cadoopa-keeloopa-ness has been established. That makes perfect sense, right?
Of course, it doesn’t! Not in the case of considering destiny.
How do you prove that destiny has existence? To know for certain what is going to happen, you must first wait for it to happen. The event that happens is existence. How do you prove that no other happening could take place? The puzzle pieces are designed to fit together in only one way, right? But anybody who has ever done a jigsaw puzzle knows that you can complete the puzzle no matter what order you use to put the pieces together. Someone putting together a 500-piece picture of Michelangelo’s David will invariably start in the middle, putting together David’s penis first and his face second. And those of us who think less logically will start with the corner pieces and do the outer edges first. And no matter the first steps, or the middle steps, you end up with the same picture at the end.
Argue the matter with me if you dare, but we are born, we piece together our lives step by step, and when the picture is complete, we die.
So, Destiny is an essence without a provable existence. God has not fore-ordained any conclusion. A jigsaw puzzle will show you the complete picture on the cover of the box. But God doesn’t put any picture for reference on the box our lives come in. That would be proof of destiny. He doesn’t even provide the box for all the pieces. So, there is no set outcome to our lives on Earth.
Which is a good thing for me. As I have told you. I am one of the unluckiest men to ever live on this planet (and not be wiped out by misfortune in childhood.) So, if God gave me a puzzle box with a picture on the top, I would invariably be missing at least one piece. If not a dozen.
So, the shape, size, and outcomes of our lives have nothing do with destiny. The picture that takes shape as we put together the puzzle of life is completely in our hands. At least the part of it that isn’t someone else’s picture made from someone else’s puzzle pieces. And we all put it all together as willy nilly (or even Milly Vanilly via lip-syncing) as is humanly possible.
As a public school teacher I have seen sweet-natured fatherless children, basically unwanted and deprived, become successful adults leading the way for others into a better future. And I have seen entitled wealthy children grow up to do one terrible thing that caused them to become a social pariah who basically lost everything they ever had in terms of the love and respect of others. So, is love something that has to be earned? And its opposite, hatred, is that deserved?
This little naked imp, Mickey by name, believed he secretly deserved hatred for about twelve years. He apparently felt if his terrible secret ever came out, even thought he did not allow himself to remember it during the years between the ages of ten and twenty-two, he would instantly become hated by everyone who knew. He couldn’t stand the thought of anyone seeing him naked. He couldn’t even comfortably receive a hug or a kiss from his own mother, let alone anyone else. It was because he had endured a session of forced testicle-twisting torture while being warned not to cry out or scream for help. He was told it would only get worse and no one would hear anyway. And it lasted for what seemed forever. And now that the terrible secret is right here written clearly in words, he still prays that you won’t hate him now that you know.
But I can tell you truthfully from my own life experience that what you think you deserve is not always what you truly deserve. Nobody deserves to have happen to them the thing that happened to Mickey. That is why it is considered a crime in our society, even if it is a crime that often goes unpunished, as it did in Mickey’s case. To be fair to Mickey, if he had ever heard that what happened to him ever happened to someone else by the same criminal, he would’ve spoken up no matter what the cost. Protecting others from what is undeserved became a theme of Mickey’s life as a teacher.
So, how does one go from deeply disturbed self-hatred to believing one is worthy of being loved? See the picture of the little naked faun? That’s Radasha. He’s the part of Mickey that knows what it is to enjoy the sensual side of life. Mickey kept a secret part of himself worthy of love in his imagination. It was a part of himself he could secretly talk to about girls and sex and love… and why you shouldn’t kill yourself to put an end to the pain…. and that there is hope in the future for knowing love again. Real love.
And Mickey learned along the way that showing love to others, especially selfless love that helps them more than it does you, the giver of love, is like giving water and sunshine to both the weeds and the flowers. You won’t believe the beauty you get from the multitude of things that blossom and grow. Dandelions are weeds. Thistles will flower. And Mickey can testify that classrooms are like gardens. They can be mostly weedy patches at the start of a school year, and grow into lovely flowerbeds by graduation day.
So, does anyone really deserve love? At the start I believe everyone does. Of course, that is Mickey talking, and he has already proven to be an unreliable narrator who doesn’t himself see the greater truth in the overall story. But at the start they are all worthy of love. And what they do with that is up to them.
Todd and the Island GirlAnnette and Princess Cheetah of the JungleMe and DavidKyle and his daughter, Valerie ClarkeLilani and BakariElmo in disguise and ArmandoShane and Bobby NilandMaria Selena and Chao-xingGrandma Hinckley and her great granddaughter
Catch a Falling Star 