I have completed work on a novel called A Field Guide to Fauns. In it, I will make use of one of the most central metaphors in all of my art and writing. The mythological figure of the faun is usually portrayed as a young boy or youth, nude, and potentially having goat horns, goat legs, a deer’s tail, and/or pointed ears. It represents sensuality, connections to nature, and a willingness to partake in enjoyments without hiding anything.
Fauns were defined in art long before I came along. The Marble Faun was a book by Nathaniel Hawthorne that I read in college. I looked endlessly in libraries after that for pictures of Praxiteles’s masterpiece from all angles. I would eventually be inspired to make the picture above by a picture made in print by Maxfield Parrish printed in Collier’s Magazine. I have been fascinated for years by fauns. And I began drawing them repeatedly.
As a teenager, I had a faun as an imaginary friend. His name was Radasha. He made it his business to lecture me about sex and nudity, morals, religion, and what was wrong with me. At the time I was repressing the memory of being the victim of a sexual assault, a very painful and traumatic experience that I did not allow myself to remember and admit was real until I was twenty-two. Radasha turned out to be a coping method who helped me heal, and helped me realize that just because it was a homosexual assault, that did not make me a homosexual.
Fauns would come to dominate my artwork through the eighties. I drew Radasha multiple times. I would use the image to express things I feared and fought with and won victories over .
I would come to learn that there were fauns in real life to be found. The portrait above is of Fernando, a favorite student from my first two years as a teacher. He is portrayed as a faun. The cardinal on his shoulder is a symbol of courage and endurance, a bright red bird that never flies away when the winter comes.
Devon Martinez is the main character of my novel in progress. He is an artist like I am. He is fifteen at the time of the novel, and faced with living the rest of his childhood in a nudist community. He doesn’t consider himself a faun to begin with. But that changes during the course of the novel.
Here is the first illustration done for the novel. It is supposed to be a picture drawn by Devon himself.
So, as always with Saturday artwork, there is more to come.
Catch a Falling Star 
Made-Up People
I often get criticized for talking to people who are basically invisible, probably imaginary, and definitely not real people, no matter what else they may be.
The unfinished cover picture is from the novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius which I just finished the final rewrite and edit for. All of the characters in that book are fictional. Even though some of them strongly resemble the real people who inspired me to create them, they are fictional people doing fictional and sometimes impossible things. And yet, they are all people who I have lived with as walking, talking, fictional people for many years. Most of those people have been talking to me since the 1970’s. I know some of them far better than any of the real people who are a part of my life.
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These, of course, are only a few of my imaginary friends. Some I spend time with a lot. Some I haven’t seen or heard from in quite a while. And I do know they are not real people. Mandy is a cartoon panda bear, and Anneliese is a living gingerbread cookie. I do understand I made these people up in my stupid little head.
But it seems to me that the people in the world around us are really no less imaginary, ephemeral, and unreal. Look at the current Presidentumb of the Disunited States. He is an evil cartoon James Bond villain if there ever was one.
Animated cast of OUR CARTOON PRESIDENT. Photo: Courtesy of SHOWTIME
People in the real world create an imaginary person in their own stupid little heads, and pretend real hard that that imaginary person is really them in real life. And of course, nobody sees anybody else in the same way that they see themselves. Everybody thinks they are a somebody who is different from anybody else who thinks they are a somebody too, and really they are telling themselves, and each other, lies about who somebody really is, and it is all very confusing, and if you can follow this sentence, you must be a far better reader than I am a writer, because none of it really makes sense to me. I think everybody is imaginary in some sense of the word.
So, if you happen to see me talking to a big white rabbit-man who used to be a pet white rabbit, but got changed into a rabbit-man through futuristic genetic science and metal carrots, don’t panic and call the police. I am just talking to another fictional character from a book I just finished writing. And why are you looking inside my head, anyway? There’s an awful lot of personal stuff going on in there. Of course, you only see that because I wrote about it in this essay. So it is not an invasion of privacy. It is just me writing down stuff I probably should keep in my own stupid little head. My bad.
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Tagged as characters, imagination, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius