As my resolution to illustrate my novels grows further and further into solid, irresistible form and driving obsessional shape, I have been working on new pen and ink projects. Some are for AeroQuest. Some were for The Boy… Forever. And I will soon need to create new ones for A Field Guide to Fauns. Today’s post is just a glimpse of what I have been doing.
Filed under artwork, humor, illustrations, Paffooney, pen and ink
Three Fifteen in the afternoon on that damned classroom clock takes forever to arrive.
Each individual click of the red second-hand takes an eon to click the minute hand towards the three.
So, what is the cause of this seventh-grade hell in Math Class?
Well, he wants to get to the bus first before someone else sits in Mazie’s seat.
Of course, he teased her relentlessly and she told him she hated him on Tuesday.
But he has hopes that he can kiss her before they get to her drop-off spot.
If she does chase him off, he can sit with Buster in the back where he’s forbidden to sit.
Buster talks about football, and they can try to predict what the Cowboys will do on Sunday.
But maybe Buster won’t be there because he needs tutoring if he’s ever going to get back on the seventh-grade team.
When he does get home, he can polish his personal pleasure pole in the bathroom.
That’s the highlight of the day, though it probably means he’ll go to Hell when he dies.
And then the final bell at long last rings, and the world is wonderful again.
Filed under Uncategorized
Who was William Shakespeare?
If you’re sure you know, then let me shake your world.
We know who Mark Twain was. Sam Clemens never kept that a secret.
Shakesspere, Shakysper, Shaxpeer, Schakespeire, Shackper, Shexpere, Shaxkspere and Shakspeyre.
All of these refer to our boy WIlly in the records of the time.
Even those that he misspelled when he signed them himself.
If you believe he was the glovemaker’s son, the theater owner, and the character actor
Who lived in a house in Blackfriars, London, and grew up in Stratford on Avon,
I will not disrespect you for your beliefs.
But that man, if he was the greatest of all poets, owned no library of his own,
Nor had such a thing available,
Nor ever left the area of Southern England where his entire life was lived,
Nor evidenced any sort of formal schooling beyond the earliest schooling.
Reading English and Latin at the King’s School of Stratford,
Though nothing beyond the age of fourteen.
These things we are mostly sure of;
Ben Jonson knew the real William Shakespeare.
The real William Shakespeare knew Christopher Marlowe,
And the patron of his poem books, the Earl of Southhampton,
Probably knew the real Bill too.
What we know about the real William Shakespeare comes from his work.
This was perhaps the most literate man who ever lived.
Thirty-seven plays, 154 Sonnets, and two narrative poems
Demonstrate he knew the Italian countryside,
He knew the ways of European courts, especially the English court.
He understood points of English law.
He accurately portrayed emotions like depression, hatred, love, and madness.
He knew the stories of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Othello the Moor, and King Lear and his daughters,
Though he did not invent any of those stories collected from other lands.
So, who was William Shakespeare really?
Francis Bacon? Kit Marlowe raised from the dead? Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford?
Or a combination of men coordinated by Sir Francis Bacon’s secret plan?
We will never know for certain. But we can ask him through his work.
The iambic pentameter of William Shakespeare still lives and reveals the mind of Shakespeare.
Though the true name behind the pen name will never be revealed.
Filed under Uncategorized
From the first sweet notes of the violins suggesting the proud prow of the ship cutting through the waves,
To the cellos and the bass suggesting the roll of the deck and the power of the west wind,
To the rumble of lightning in the kettle drums…
The music tells the story… For the Ages… To the last lingering note.
The music tells the story, marks the time, and unreels the tune.
The love song is sung in a poignant voice, making you feel the heartache and pain…
And the sweetest successes of note and counter-note take you to the kiss before death.
Sopranos and tenors, altos, bassists, and harmony…
The picture gets painted with the oil paints of sound.
The music tells the story, marks the time, and unreels the tune.
You step into the spotlight in the center of the stage…
And that microphone is intimidating…
But you reach into the deepest places in your soul…
And your beating heart forces you to sing!
The music tells the story… For the Ages… To the last lingering note.
The music tells the story, marks the time, and unreels the tune.
Filed under Uncategorized
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.
Filed under artwork, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
These are third-draft pictures that explain why they are naked. The clothing and props are added in later layers. The anatomy is not only a nudist thing for me, but it gives me an accurate shape to hang clothing on.
I put him in a space suit below, one of several different versions.
I showed you this one above before. But last night my computer couldn’t figure out which picture was which and I downloaded unfinished pictures by accident.
Filed under Uncategorized
I have been drawing these mock-Star-Wars science-fiction-heroes for thirty years. Some of these are that old. Some of them are new this year. All of them illustrate the adventures that started as a science-fiction-role-playing game and became the series of novels called AeroQuest.
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Filed under aliens, heroes, illustrations, novel, satire, science fiction
Perhaps there’s something wrong with him…
Something makes him want to run naked in the woods.
What’s the one thing he can say that explains…?
Why the naked romping, tell me, what’s the good?
It seems he likes the freedom, no movements bound by clothes.
He seems to love the sun and the wind on his skin.
The absolute sense of glory and joy…
It defines the soul and the goodness of him.
Filed under Uncategorized
Yes, she was a real car. My dad bought her in the 60’s as a used car. But she was a hardtop, not a convertible. She was the car he drove to work every day in Belmond. We called it the “Pink and White Pumpkin”, my sisters and I, referring to the pumpkin in Cinderella which the fairy godmother changes into a coach. But it would only later become the car of my dreams.
You see, she was killed in the Belmond Tornado of 1966. Her windows were all broken out and her frame was twisted. So the pictures of her, though they look exactly like my memories of her, minus the rust spots, are not actual pictures of the car in question. Our next door neighbor, Stan the Truck Man, was a mechanic always on the lookout for salvage parts. He took her apart piece by piece while she sat in our driveway. We continued to sit in her and play in her until all that was left was the bare frame. My friend Werner told me for the first time about the facts of life and where babies really came from in the back seat while she was being gradually dismantled. Of course, I was nine at the time and didn’t really believe him. How could that grossness actually be true?
But she still lives, that old dream car… She is the reason that I objectify my imagination as a ship with pink sails. My daydreams, my creative fantasies, and those long, lingering plays in the theater of my imagination as I am drifting off to sleep all start in the three-masted sailing ship with pink sails. And that dream image was born from the Pink and White Pumpkin. I have sailed in her to many an exotic place… even other planets. And when I die, she will take me home again.
Catch a Falling Star 