Category Archives: artwork

March 13, 2021 · 8:00 pm

Facing the Faces on Art Day

There is no such thing as a perfect face. You know that human beings tend to perceive bilateral symmetry as beauty. That means, the more the left half of the face mirrors the right half. the more beautiful the face is.

But why do we think that? No real person’s face is actually like that. Look at the girl on your right. Her eyes don’t match. The googly-eyed expression on her face may indicate that eating pencils can cause brain damage. Can you get lead poisoning from graphite pencils? Or is it just that her cartoon great grandfather was Barney Google?

And the girl on the left has a weird blush pattern on her cheeks. Perhaps it isn’t a blush. Probably she’s been biting into exploding tomatoes.

How about this face? If you put a line directly down the middle of the face, you can see that each side nearly mirrors the other. People think of that as handsome or, possibly, cute. A nearly perfect face. Me, I prefer the face of the boy. The Muppety puppet, despite it’s perfection, seems almost ugly to me.

Intelligence is revealed by the eyes. The girl on your left is looking directly at you. It makes her seem smarter. And we all know she is anyway, even without giving her a test.

Emotion is also conveyed mostly through the eyes. It is obvious that these lion eyes (or is that spelled LYIN’ EYES?) are looking at you with love. Yes, love. And he would love you even more with ketchup.

A face can tell you more about a character than thousands of words of mere description can. Do you know what Vladimir will be drawing in your art class on his first day in your classroom? I think you do. Strawberry Shortcake and Disney Princesses. What else? Oh, geez… you’ve grown a bit jaded over the years.

Teachers, well, the good ones, will need a welcoming, calm face, no matter how bad of a hair day they are having.

And would you welcome a face to face with this face? Especially on the very day you sacrificed a black cat and two chickens to create a black magic spell to punish your ex-wife? After her lawyer left you with nothing even though you were not the one who spent all the money in your joint checking account on a face-lift? And she didn’t even try to make her danged face more symmetrical!

But enough about faces for today. Everyone who is anyone has one, you know. It’s the style going around. Even though it’s been a year since you’ve seen them without a mask on.

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Tagged as Saturday Art Day

March 10, 2021 · 6:47 pm

Wisdom From the Bob Ross Bible

If there is a Church of Sacred Landscapes then Bob Ross is its Jesus Christ. That is not a sacrilegious statement of bizarre cult-mindedness. Painting is a religion that has its tenets. And Bob Ross explained to us the will of God on his painting show on PBS. All the illustrations used in this post come from the Facebook page Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. All the wisdom comes from things the Master said on the show.

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Bob Ross was the prophet of the paintbrush. He would present us with a lightly prepared canvas at the beginning of the show and then proceed on camera to take his brush and palette knife, and all his paints, and create a piece of the world before our very eyes. And he was not Picasso or Van Gogh or even Norman Rockwell. He was not a talented artist, but rather a very practiced one who knew all the tricks and shortcuts to sofa painting, the art of knocking out scene after scene after scene. He could make his little piece of the world in only half an hour, and he made it obvious how we could do the same. His work was not gallery quality… but his teachings were Jesus-worthy. 1918971_1025737477472968_4026443126606690255_n

His work was natural, flowing, and realistic in the random complexity it presented. He took standard paintbrush strokes and pallet knife tricks and made them dance across the canvas to make happy little trees.

His painting methods presented us with a philosophy of life and a method of dealing with whatever mistakes we might make.

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And of course, any good religion must take into account the existence of evil.

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Bob Ross tells us that evil is necessary as a contrast to what is good and what is true. We need the dark. But we don’t have to embrace it. Bob’s paintings were never about the dark bits. He always gravitated towards the light.

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Of course, sometimes you have to beat back the darkness. A good artist takes care of his tools.

Bob Ross admonishes us to look and to learn and love what we see. The man radiated a calm, gentle nature that makes him a natural leader. His simple, countrified wisdom resonates because we need calm and pastoral peace in our lives. It is one of the main reasons mankind needs religion.

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So I definitely think we ought to consider building a Bob-Rossian Church of the Sacred Landscapes. We have our prophet. The man has passed away, yet he is risen to paint again endlessly on YouTube.

And if you are willing to try… Bob Ross will smile upon you.

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Filed under artists I admire, artwork, humor, insight, inspiration, religion, sharing from YouTube, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as art instruction, artwork, Bob Ross, humor, Joy of Painting, painting is a religion

March 6, 2021 · 8:13 pm

Why Cartoons, Mickey?

In today’s Art Day post I will tackle the answer to the one question that you probably most don’t need to have an answer to.

Looney Tunes, Merry Melodies, The Woody Woodpecker Show, a Mickey Mouse Cartoon…. why does this old American art form have such a hold over Mickey’s artist’s eye, his pen and ink and drawing hand, and Mickey’s cartoony heart?

Because a simple black line on white paper can become so many different and interesting things. And they can be funny, or they can be in color, or they can make you laugh and cry at the same time.

Cartoons make it possible to turn unicorns into magical jackasses for no other reason than it tickles your funnybone.

You know the funnybone, right? It’s the part of the skeleton that looks the most ridiculously unworkable when you are not wearing your skin.

Yes, no horse actually looks like that. Only in cartoons.

What is too ridiculous to be real, like a superhero whose super power is overwhelming body odor, is the only reality in the realm of the cartoon.

And I really can’t help it. I can no more help being a cartoonist than I can help being an old, retired white guy with gray hair that used to be a school teacher who told really bad jokes and drew cartoons on the chalkboard.

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Filed under artwork, cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as Saturday Art Day

February 27, 2021 · 7:45 pm

Random Art, the Art of Picking at Random

Anatidaephobia (pronounced anna-tidy-phobia) is a pervasive and irrational fear that you are being watched by a duck. A person with this rare phobia fears that somehow, somewhere a duck is watching their every move.

I know, that’s pretty random, right?

But that’s how this Art Day post works. I had no idea what the first picture would be until I searched for it. This post began not with an idea, but a title; Random Art, the Art of Picking at Random.

Most of my art posts are exactly that. Pictures picked at random simply by going back through my media gallery and picking them. I usually pick up a theme along the way, sensing how the pictures are connected and deciding what that reveals about the artist and how that should be put into words.

I am aware that by relying on my library of already-used images, I am bound to be putting up something that you may have seen before. But I do have a large supply of already-downloaded pictures, and I find that I deeply love seeing some of these over and over again. However, they are all original artworks done by me. (Yes, I know I didn’t make any of the Pez dispensers or anything in the above photo. But I made the arrangement and took the photo. That makes it as much my art as Campbell Soup cans can be Andy Warhol’s work.) And I have seen them far more often than you have, and I haven’t tired of them.

Many of these pictures are actually self portraits. And that’s because an artist can only come up with whatever is actually inside him at the time.

I am not myself in this picture, but it is never-the-less very much about me and who I am inside.

You might be able to spot the connections between this picture and the last one if you are observant of small details.

This picture seems awfully random until you start to see them as Mr. Dickens, Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Disney, and Mr. Poe.

So, there it is, Random Art for Saturday Art Day. Picked totally at random. And yet, at the end it seems somehow organized. That is a sort of small miracle, and probably proof that God exists… at least in some random way.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as Saturday Art Day

February 22, 2021 · 7:55 pm

Into the Spring

The weather, amazingly, is more than fifty degrees Fahrenheit better than it was a week ago today in Texas.

The sun is now out.

“Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day...?”

‘Of course not. It is not Sonnet 18 out there.

It… “art NOT more lovely and more temperate.”

And William Shakespeare is just a pen name.

But I saw a pair of Robins in the park while walking the dog.

And I don’t mean Robin Williams and Robin Hood.

I mean the red-breasted birds that herald the arrival of Spring.

Though it is not Spring. And I have trouble sitting here and writing this due to painful hemorrhoids.

Still, it seems like something new is starting.

It has now been an entire year since the start of the pandemic. 501,000+ people have died.

It is definitely time for something new, something better, to begin.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, birds, commentary, healing, humor, Paffooney

February 13, 2021 · 8:59 pm

Where Portraits Come From

I painted this picture in the 1980’s because this boy was a very attractive little Asian-American child and I wanted to paint a picture of him.

But it became something else when I added the soldier’s helmet with the bullet hole in it.

It was the closest thing I ever did to something politically controversial. I was accused of making an anti-war picture… in Texas where you don’t disrespect a soldier. And the Viet Nam Conflict was still very much on people’s minds in the 80’s.

This is a Dickensian illustration. Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim. The boy was actually the son of a school secretary and grandson of a math teacher. Bob was modeled after a stand-up comic that I had a magazine picture of.

This reptilian fellow appeared in my dreams when I was twelve. He didn’t actually pose for me. I used a National Geographic picture to help me get the head right.

Grade-school me was the model for this one. I made it from an old school picture.

This is actually a portrait of Manuel. He was a seventh grader in 1984. Seventh Grade Language Arts, A-minus student and excellent oral reader.

This sweet child was actually a green-eyed brunette and holding a tub of autumn leaves in the original photograph.

There’s a lot of portraits in this picture. They are all from photographs, except for three imaginary faces. Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan were both in a black-and-white photo from The Kid. And the skeleton was made of plastic.

This is Black Timothy, dressed all in red. This is pretty close to what he actually looks like. Of course, he’s imaginary.

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Tagged as Saturday Art Day

February 6, 2021 · 7:32 pm

Why Mickey is Surreal

Literary realism attempts to represent familiar things as they are.

Surrealism definition: Surrealism is a type of literature in which the author attempts to display irrational or dreamlike qualities in his or her writing. Surrealism refers to writing that goes beyond the realistic into a creative, imaginative realm that often has dreamlike qualities.

Two definitions of styles of writing that are common in today’s literary realm.

Realism is a tradition that began in the middle of the 18th Century. It includes authors like Balzac, Alexander Pushkin, Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, and Charles Dickens. They tend to focus on the details that shine a light on the grungy, dreary realities of the Industrial Revolution, the American Experiment in Democracy, and wars like the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and wars against Napoleon, Hitler, and Communist Russia.

Surrealism, especially as it grew legs and began galloping in the 20th Century is really a reaction to the realities that Realism ground into our souls. Science Fiction imagines the problems and the possibilities presented by applying science and industry into our future. Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and Aldous Huxley are all surrealists because they apply the power of their imaginations to dealing with the limits reality hangs around the neck of the race horse we call life on Earth.

Fantasy writers like JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Neil Gaiman, and JK Rowlings apply apples of imagination hung from a string in front of the race horse to motivate him onward. The race horse of life on Earth is a dreamlike metaphor, somewhat like a dog who smokes a pipe and solves crimes, and is the kind of literary device that defines surrealism the way that Mickey sees it.

But enough about what surrealism is. It is just realism with a “sur” pasted on the front. So, let me just show you some.

These are ***Snow Babies*** from the book of the same name. If you see one during a blizzard, it might mean you will freeze to death.

This is a sample of an illustration for a friend’s children’s book idea that never got made. Accidentally travelling by bubble-gum-chewing goldfish.

This picture shows that, in order to do surrealism, you must make the dreamlike seem very realistic.

In ***When the Captain Came Calling***, the Captain is invisible and Valerie Clarke gets turned into a squirrel by Voodoo.

Mickey is not the only surrealist who thinks of Toys coming to Life.

So, now that you have seen the pictorial evidence that Mickey thinks surreal thoughts, you should be willing to admit… He probably really is a Surrealist. Or, possibly, he surreally is a surrealist.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, imagination, insight, Paffooney

Tagged as Saturday Art Day

February 4, 2021 · 4:16 pm

Mickey Being Mickey

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A new day dawns. It leaves me wondering. Who am I today? Who will I be tomorrow?

The opportunity to have any sort of control over who and what I am is coming to a close. I don’t really know how much longer I have before pain and illness dissolve me into nothingness. But death is not the end of existence. I may be forgotten totally by the day after next Thursday, but my existence will still have become a permanent fact. Yes, I am one of those dopey-derfy-think-too-much types known as an existentialist.

I am feeling ill again. Any time that happens may be the last time. But that doesn’t worry me.

The important thing is that the dance continues. It doesn’t matter who the dancers are, or who supplies the music.

We can be clowns if we choose to be.

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We can safely be fools if we really can’t help it.

An awful lot of awful things go into who and what we are. Those things make us full of awe. They make us awesome. Aw, shucks. What an awful thing to say.