Category Archives: artwork
Story-Telling for Art Day
Filed under artwork, drawing, humor, illustrations, imagination, Paffooney
Taking to the Air (Saturday Art Post)
Filed under artwork, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney
Kid Pictures
And they are worthy of love.
What Dreams Will Reveal
I respond to dreaming in ways that make sense in my stupid head, though the responses probably seem crazy to others.
The picture above was painted in oils in the early 1990’s before I met my wife. It was in response to a Bambi dream that seemed to be about my family as a family of deer. This was not about my family from childhood. It was, at the time, about my family in the future. Somehow I got it right. Two boys and a girl. Together for 25 years next month.
Some pictures are dream images that can only be interpreted metaphorically. This one is about me being creative and artistical… or autistical as the case may be. It is also about being a synesthete with pronounced synesthesia.
This dream was a dream about being a Native American during a thunderstorm. It is called “the Magic-Man’s Daughter” because the Dakota Sioux tribe held the belief that dreams about lightning reveal you as a Shaman or Magic Man. Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka is the Lakotah word for “the Great Mystery”. That was a dream that sent me to the library to look things up.
I have dreams with clowns in them that are not nightmares. Here the clown known as Mr. Disney is encouraging me to sing sad songs.
I wrote and entire novel about that whopper of a dream.
It is not uncommon to dream about death and mortality. More than once I have dreamed about my own death. None of them have yet proved prophetic, but you never know.
I think dreams can be prophetic because they are not bound by our perceptions of time in the physical universe. You can look ahead in a dream to that which has not yet happened. You can also look backwards into the past beyond the boundary of your own birth. I often think some of my most vivid dreams are about peering into past lives and a very different me.
I know I sound crazy when I talk about my dreams. But they are a significant source for my artwork and creative endeavors. And dreams have a logic that doesn’t work by the rules of the world we know. Rather, it is a world of wonder.
GingerBread-o-Palooza 2019
Every Christmas break for the last four years has seen us put together a decorated gingerbread house. It was always a way to spend quality time with my kids and come up with a semi-artistical product that I could take pictures of and then eat. But this year, in addition to the gingerbread house kit purchased at Walmart, my fancy was struck by the gingerbread ninja cookie kit for sale cheaply at Aldi’s.
Because our cook-stove is gradually dying of electrical-baking-cancer, we had to move the cookie baking to my son’s apartment with a brand new oven and range. While gingerbread house kits come pre-baked and assembly-ready, gingerbread ninjas tested my limited cookie-baking skills. And believe me, though the Princess gamely tried to help, we did not bake ninjas like pros.
So, due to our negative levels of baking skill, the cookies came out looking not so much like dangerous ninjas as they did like seriously deformed mutants and bomb-blast victims. And it didn’t help that we could not make the white outliner frosting. It came in powder form and you were supposed to add powdered sugar and water to it. Powdered sugar was the one ingredient totally forgotten. Saving the beauty of artlessly-created cookies was left up to our skills applying cherry and chocolate frosting with butter knives and decorating with colored sugar beads. The cherry frosting made the cookie people into nudists rather than ninjas. And trying to make frowny faces with beads led to gingerbread men looking like they had multi-eyed spider heads instead of angry expressions. The chocolate ninjas turned out to look like forest-fire-blackened wilted Christmas trees. So, I ornamented most of them accordingly.
I had intended to end this article by interviewing one of the surviving chocolate-covered gingerbread ninjas. But when we started talking, he just got angrier and angrier about my lack of cookie-making skills. It started with insults and devolved into threats.
So, I ate him!
Filed under artwork, gingerbread, goofiness, humor, photo paffoonies
Holiday Health and Wealth
In order to celebrate the fact that I didn’t catch the flu from my daughter for Christmas, I decided to do something totally out of character for me. I drew a picture. I know… I know… I draw a lot. But this was different. I drew the picture with a Santa hat on, and I smiled a lot.
I usually wear a cowboy hat and frown.
So, I started doodling, and I doodled up a familiar face in a picture I am now calling, “The Toymaker”.
I will definitely scan this little doodle-bopper. And I may give it the colored-pencil treatment. If I can… before Christmas.
And I may not have any money, but I can draw, and I can make my own happiness.
Filed under artwork
Peanut Gallery… Re-purposed Art
One thing that I, as an artist of limited ability, appreciate about the digital age, is that I can get lots of mileage out of old works of art, and even new works of art, by cutting and pasting, photo-shopping, and re-using elements of the drawings done once… but turned into many by digital means.
And the process can take you home again, no matter how far away and how long ago home has become.
Filed under artwork, illustrations, imagination, Paffooney
Photoshopping Art
As I get older and older and more arthritic, it has been a real boon to me that I can use actual photos in artwork to electronically complete visions of what an artwork should look like even though I no longer have the digital dexterity necessary to execute complex and detailed backgrounds.
Filed under artwork, drawing, photo paffoonies
To Laugh… or Cry
I have claimed that I am a humorist and all my novels are comic novels, to some degree at least. But it is often pointed out to me that I write about things that make people cry. And I freely admit that I most certainly do.
But if you think about it carefully, analytically, or even emotionally, you have to admit, even a book like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has some weep-worthy moments in it. I have read the book more than once myself, and I never get past the scene where Huck looks down at the body of his young friend Buck Grangerford, killed in the Shepherdson/Grangerford feud about something nobody living even remembers, without shedding gushers and gushers of heart-busting tears.
And in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, as much as I laugh and guffaw at the antics of quiet Mr. Dick and his kite, or the much deserved downfall of villainous Uriah Heep, it is the drowning of Little Emily on the boat with David’s school friend and idol Steerforth that leaves me surrounded by puddles… nay, lakes… that I have wept.
And I think that I may justify the sad parts in so many of my weary works with the fact that I am merely providing the necessary counterpoints to my merry-making and mirth.
There has to be that necessary balance, that well-rounded-ness, to a story that makes it feel truly complete. And, of course, we know that even in a horror novel by Stephen King, you find humor used as a balance point to lighten the moments just before the monster delivers its liver-shaking, earth-tilting scare.
Snow Babies, among my published books, is a good example. It is a story that celebrates how a small Iowa town comes together to survive a deadly December blizzard. And while it tells funny stories of kooky characters battling the elements, and both surviving the blizzard and ’84 Reagan/Mondale political debates, as well as putting up Christmas trees, it is still also about death and loss of loved ones, finding and losing love, and just what sort of self-sacrifice or other accidental happening truly makes someone a hero. Or a bus driver… this book has more than one bus driver in it.
So, I think, in the end, that I have made a cogent case for the notion that in order to be a humorist, you have to manipulate many emotions, not just mirth, but sadness also. As well as fear, bitter irony, and pain. And that may well also be the underlying reason that comedy is harder to write than tragedy.
