Tag Archives: art

The Care and Feeding of a REALLY BIG DOG

C360_2017-06-21-19-45-52-166

My neighbor, Wendy Wackyname, is the owner of a really big dog.  I asked her how she managed a dog that was bigger than a moose and weighed more than an elephant.

“You have to be able to solve problems you never thought you could have,” she said.

“Problems like what?” I stupidly asked.

“Well, a dog that big not only chases cars, but he often catches the littler ones like yours.  It became a real problem when he finished chewing on them and wanted to bury them in the back yard.  When we lived in Oklahoma, our back yard just wasn’t big enough, and the local police kept wondering about what might be buried there.  I guess they had a lot of missing persons cases.”

“Oh, that does sound bad.”

“Yeah, but moving here solved that problem.  We now live next to this nice big park with lots of room for a dog to bury stuff.”

“So he isn’t cured of chasing cars?” I asked nervously.

“No.  But that isn’t the worst problem.  Feeding him is really expensive.  We have to buy a truckload of dog food every week.  That problem has gotten worse since we left Oklahoma.  There used to be a cattle ranch nearby.  At least until the last of their stock mysteriously disappeared.”

I decided I should probably change the subject a bit.

“How do you walk a dog that big?”  I asked.

“Oh, I don’t.  I climb up on his neck and hang on to the collar as hard as I can, and we go for a run.  We ended up in Waxahachie, Texas, last week.”

“Does your mother ever let the dog in the house?”

“Oh, no.  Foozy is an outside dog.  If he wags his tail indoors, he breaks all the furniture in the room.  Besides, the doors in this new house aren’t big enough for him to fit through.”

“Wendy, did you ever read those kids’ books about Clifford the Big Red Dog?”

“Oh, sure.  But life with Foozy is nothing like that.  Giant dogs are a much harder pet to take care of than people think.”

I remembered then how my little dog somehow managed to make five poops a day.  Did Foozy do that, too?  And how did poor little Wendy go about bagging it and depositing it in the trash?  I finally decided I didn’t want to know.

Leave a comment

Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink, pen and ink paffoonies, satire

The Secret Gallery in Grandma’s Closet

After years of being stored away, I discovered that my mother had hidden a hoard of my old artworks in the upstairs closet in Grandma Aldrich’s house (now my parents’ house).

C360_2017-06-22-15-50-19-9622

This oil painting was done on an old saw blade at the request of my Grandpa Aldrich.  He wanted a farm painting on it, like the one he’d seen in a restaurant during a fishing trip in Minnesota.  I chose as the subject Sally the pig.  Sally was a hairlip piglet that had to be bottle fed and raised in a box by the stove until later in life she became a favorite pet.  Believe it or not, pigs are smarter than the family dog.  She became a pig you could ride.  And Grandma had taken a precious old photo of my mother and Uncle Larry riding the pig.  I used that photo to make this painting.  It was also the painting I wanted to find on this trip to Iowa.  Searching for it led to finding all the others.

These two are among the earliest paintings I did.  They were both done on canvases that I stretched over the frame myself in high school art class.  The purple one is a scene from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The blue one doesn’t have a title, but you can see what it is.  It is an ancient shibboleth water monster lurking under a dock, fishing for young boys to eat.

20170622_215004

This drawing was done on the front porch in the house in Rowan.  It would be years before mom framed it.  It is another example of what I could do as a high school kid.  In fact, I composed it from art-class sketches I did my senior year in school.

20170622_215257

The Boy in the Barn was painted on the remains of an old chalkboard that my sisters, brother, and I had used in grade school.

20170622_215408

Grandma Aldrich asked for this picture to hang over the sofa in the farmhouse living room.  It stayed there for many years.

20170622_214755.jpg

Great Grandma Hinckley passed away in 1980.  I created this portrait from a combination of photos and memory.  It was too good.  It was never hung anywhere because it always made her daughter, my Grandma Aldrich, tear up.

20170622_215535

This pencil drawing won a blue ribbon at the Wright County Fair in the late 70’s.

20170622_215115

This picture is called First Years are Hard Years.  It was painted in 1982 after my first year of teaching at the junior high school in Cotulla, Texas.   I painted mostly the good kids.  The girl on the lower right would later go on to become a teacher for our school district.  I can’t claim to be the one who inspired her, but she did make straight A’s in my class.

20170622_215653

This is called Beauty.  It is done in oil crayon on canvas.  I did it for my mother to hang in the hallway in the house in Taylor, Texas.

So, it turns out, I unearthed art treasures by searching for the one painting.

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, colored pencil, homely art, humor, oil painting, old art, Paffooney

Paffooney Stories and Toony Cartoons

My House1 My house2 my house3 My House4Here is a page for collected stories that I mean to build on and expand.  It is my intention to file cartoons here and edit them and add more pages via posts.  So for a first attempt let me use an old cartoon that was rejected once by Heavy Metal magazine in the early 1980’s and rejected a second time by a cartoon magazine that no longer exists and I can’t even remember the name of…  I am thinking they had very poor taste in cartoon art anyway.

Now, of course, this a finished four-page one-shot.  It was intended for a magazine that sought this kind of full-color art and had an over-all science fiction and horror fantasy theme.  I was too light and colorful with this short for their needs.  Disney characters on the PJ’s might have been a legal problem too.  So I am left with an unsaleable example of my best colored-pencil art, done when I was still pretty much a clueless kid and not yet a teacher.  It was worth doing, but will never make me a single dime.

Leave a comment

Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney

Stuff That Works

What makes people visit your blog and maybe even click “like”?  I should tell you up front, I have no idea how best to navigate the crazy internet.  I want to.  I have a book to promote.  I have ideas and experiences to share.  I am a writer and I would like to make something more than excessive heartache out of being one.  But how you actually go about it is still a mystery.

Ima mickey

I know what I surf the internet for.  I like artwork, especially original artwork.  That is why I try to post as much of my own stuff as I can.  I am an amateur artist, self-taught with a little bit of college art classes, contact with real artists, and a lot of TV Bob Ross.  I surf to find other artists whose stuff catches my eye.  I post about artists like Loish, Maxfield Parrish, Paul Detlafsen, and Norman Rockwell.  I go to sites like DeviantArt (Example at this link) and follow artists like James Brown and Shannon Maer on Facebook.  I help promote their work by sharing as often as I can.  Do I worry about copyright violation with my artwork?  No.  I am long past the point of making a profitable career as an artist.  I like having people see my work and if someone decides to claim they are the artist instead of me, I have the real originals and even some pictures of work in progress.  The Big Eyes thing will not happen to me.

big_eyes_2014_movie-1280x960

So sharing pictures seems to matter.  I got lots of hits from the monster picture post because I used a lot of monster-movie images that people normally search for on the internet.  Pictures of pretty girls work too.  It doesn’t seem to matter if I drew them or if they are a picture of a relative, those pictures pull people in too.

19252_1208834303891_1319717771_30512468_3124599_n

Pictures of photogenic nieces aid my blogging popularity in a rather noticeable way.

Yes, I do believe I have just intimated that Minnie Mouse is my niece, a daughter of my sister-in-law.  Lying is part of blogging.  You have to put spin on things and make people understand the things they want to understand more than you need them to see what is really true in the empirical sense.

Jungle Girl

Being able to put the words “nude” or “naked” in titles or in the tags brings in more views too.  Those words get lots of hits on search engines and some of the people who visit my blog looking for that actually read what’s posted.  Just because an idea is a little bit naughty, it doesn’t mean only perverts and bad people respond to it.

487568_551418624928144_2068450047_n

This is a picture of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. It is NOT a picture of me.

And it doesn’t hurt to be a little funny now and then.  Humor is something I look for in the posts of others.  I try to be funny in my posts too… though whether they are hah-hah funny or merely eeuw! funny is debatable.  Much of my humor is only intended to raise a smirk or half a smile.  I am most satisfied when I make you think, “heh, that’s right, isn’t it.”

Millis

This is Millis, not me. He was an actual rabbit that was turned humanoid by a scientist’s experiment with alien technology.

So why is this post called Stuff That Works if, as I am claiming, I really don’t know anything about how blogging works?  I may have been a little less than truthful when I made claims.  Or maybe I was claiming with a little bit of “tongue in cheek”?  I hope I have demonstrated that I do know how.  The thing I have yet to wrestle with is WHY.  So now I have to get busy and work on that.

 

 

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, autobiography, blog posting, commentary, humor, nudes, Paffooney, surrealism

Aeroquest Art So Far

These are the pieces of art and illustrations that are going into the re-writing project of my novel Aeroquest.

I decided to totally rework the novel and illustrate it more fully because it was always supposed to be a science-fiction satire and parody that was more cartoonish than literary.

It is a story about a teacher conquering a space empire. It arose from a science-fiction role-playing game that filled my days in the 1980’s and early 90’s.

It parodies Star Wars, Star Trek, Flash Gordon, Buck Rodgers, Dune, and much more besides. And it includes many of my own wacky inventions about what the future might hold in store.

Here is the original teacher in space and some of his first class of students.

Many of the main characters are based on the actual role-playing characters made up by the boys and young men who played the game with me. Many had to be re-named, however, because, like Tron Blastarr above, they often had movie-character names.

This important character was a parody of Professor X of the X-men, from the comic books and well before the movies.

It was a simple matter to give him psionic powers and transfer him into outer space. Oh, and get him out of the wheel chair too.

The character’s creator was the son of the local high school science teacher.

Ninja powers were a thing with teenage boys in the 80’s.

Combat is an important part of the role-playing game.

We became well-versed on weapons and tactics… and how to manipulate the rolls of the dice… by cheating if necessary.

How else do heroes overcome impossible odds?

Two more player characters that play a critical role in the novels.

Again with the parody characters that came from player-character ideas stolen from TV and the movies.

Aliens are necessary to this kind of story.

I am near to completing this third novel in the series.

The Nebulon aliens, though very human-like, are blue of skin. That is not easy to depict in a black-and-white drawing.

The initial idea for the fourth novel’s cover.

Leave a comment

Filed under aliens, artwork, heroes, humor, illustrations, imagination, novel, novel plans, Paffooney

Finding My Voice

As Big MacIntosh welcomes more little ponies into my insanely large doll collection, I have been reading my published novel Snow Babies.  The novel is written in third person viewpoint with a single focus character for each scene.  But because the story is about a whole community surviving a blizzard with multiple story lines criss-crossing and converging only to diverge and dance away from each other again, the focus character varies from scene to scene.

20171214_121204

Big MacIntosh finds himself to be the leader of a new group of My Little Ponies.

In Canto Two, Valerie Clarke, the central main character of the story, is the focus character.  Any and all thoughts suggested by the narrative occur only in Valerie’s pretty little head.  Canto Three is focused through the mind of Trailways bus driver Ed Grosland.  Canto Four focuses on Sheriff’s Deputy Cliff Baily.  And so, on it goes through a multitude of different heads, some heroic, some wise, some idiotic, and some mildly insane.  Because it is a comedy about orphans freezing to death, some of the focus characters are even thinking at the reader through frozen brains.

20171215_084211

The ponies decide to visit Minnie Mouse’s recycled Barbie Dreamhouse where Olaf the Snowman is the acting butler.

That kind of fractured character focus threatens to turn me schizophrenic.  I enjoy thinking like varied characters and changing it up, but the more I write, the more the characters become like me, and the more I become them.  How exactly do you manage a humorous narrative voice when you are constantly becoming someone else and morphing the way you talk to fit different people?  Especially when some of your characters are stupid people with limited vocabularies and limited understanding?

20171215_084322

The ponies are invited to live upstairs with the evil rabbit, Pokemon, and Minions.

I did an entire novel, Superchicken, in third person viewpoint with one focus character, Edward-Andrew Campbell, the Superchicken himself.  That is considerably less schizophrenic than the other book.  But it is still telling a story in my voice with my penchant for big words, metaphors, and exaggerations.

The novel I am working on in rough draft manuscript form right now, The Baby Werewolf, is done entirely in first person point of view.  That is even more of an exercise of losing yourself inside the head of a character who is not you.  One of the first person narrators is a girl, and one is a werewolf.  So, I have really had to stretch my writing ability to make myself into someone else multiple times.

I assure you, I am working hard to find a proper voice with which to share my personal wit and wisdom with the world.  But if the men in white coats come to lock me away in a loony bin somewhere, it won’t be because I am playing a lot with My Little Ponies.

 

 

 

My best novel is free to own in ebook form for today and tomorrow. Buy it now with the link above. The offer is good until the end of the day on 12/14/2021.

Leave a comment

Filed under commentary, goofiness, humor, insight, NOVEL WRITING, photo paffoonies, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor

Pez Head

If you have seen any of my numerous posts about dolls or old books or even, you guessed it, Pez dispensers, you know how badly I am gifted with hoarding disorder.  You know the disease.  Every old string-saving grandpa or scrap-booking maiden aunt you had as a kid had it.  Piles and piles of useless and pointless things all neatly stacked and sorted somewhere in the house, or possibly garage… lurking like a monster of many pieces waiting to take over the whole house.

I can’t help it.  Collections have to be completed.  If you see it and you don’t already have it, you must possess it.  Twenty-seven cents short of the full price with tax included?  Go out to the car and dig in the cup holder.  Oops!  Can’t part with those particular State Quarters.  Will they take that many pennies?  Have to try.

C360_2017-04-08-09-45-07-112

Lately I have been victimized by a combination of my disorder and the fact that Toys-R-Us is a convenient restroom stop on the rush-hour drive along I-35 to pick up the Princess at her high school in Carrollton, Texas and my son Henry at his school in Lewisville, Texas.  It is a killer two hours and I need to go potty at the halfway point.  And I can’t make my way to the restroom without passing the Pez dispenser display.  And I can’t pass the Pez dispenser display without… well, you know.

C360_2017-04-08-09-44-34-460

What can I say?  I’m diabetic.  I have to visit the restroom frequently.

C360_2017-04-27-08-46-47-764

And they do look good on my bookshelves with a lot of the other junk I collect.

C360_2017-04-27-08-47-45-109

And not all of these are new, bought some time this school year.  In fact, not most of them.

C360_2017-04-27-08-47-56-750

And they only cost a couple of dollars each.

C360_2017-04-27-08-48-08-562

And I do resist the urge to buy one once in a while… honest, I really do.

C360_2017-04-27-08-49-05-335

And see here?  Only Minnie Mouse and Pluto  on this shelf are new.  And how could I leave this collection without Minnie and Pluto?

And it’s not like butterfly collecting, which I shamefully admit I did as a kid.  You don’t kill and mount Pez dispensers.  Although I admit, I really don’t know for sure how their factory works.

But I also have to admit, Pez dispensers aren’t the only thing that turns my collecting urge up to the highest possible settings.

C360_2017-04-20-13-28-15-571

So don’t hate me for hoarding.  If you’re worried, all of these things are available in stores too.  And I have worked on my photographicalizing skills a bit to share them with you.  And who knows where these treasures will end up when I pass on to the cartoonist’s paint box in the sky?  My daughter has vowed not to let them end up in a landfill somewhere.  Somebody will play with them and love them when I’m finally done.  MAYBE EVEN FUTURE GRANDCHILDREN.   There is a possibility, you know… always a possibility.

C360_2017-04-27-06-11-02-515

Leave a comment

Filed under collecting, foolishness, happiness, humor, photo paffoonies, photos, self portrait, sharing, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Synesthesia (Part Two; The Color of Music)

Okay, so on the synesthesia tests I didn’t score as a synesthete on the music/color test.  But I was extremely synesthetic on the tests for color/months/days of the week.  I was a little over the mark on letter/number/colors synesthesia too, but it was more a problem with manipulating the color-selector device when I don’t have a mouse to use on my laptop.  The test for music did not test the way I see colors with music.  They wanted me to respond to what color each individual note seemed to be, and that isn’t even close to the way I experience it.  For me, the perfect description of how synesthesia works for me is Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D minor as it is depicted in Fantasia.

I was shocked when I first saw it.  The colors are wrong for this piece, but the visual experience is almost exactly how I experience music, especially wordless instrumental music.  The only problem with this piece is that the overall color schemes are wrong.  But this comes about because every synesthete sees the colors differently.  And I have no doubt that at least one of the artists who created this had synesthesia.  If there were more reds, yellows, and magenta in the opening and more indigo contrasted with silver later, this interpretation would be perfect.

DSCN4453

Music synesthetically works in two directions for me.  The picture above, called The Wings of Imagination, makes me think of La Mer by Claude Debussy.

If you listen to the piece, don’t look at the YouTube illustration, look at my picture if you want to see the music the way I do.  The following song, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, is a multicolored song that I can best express with the colors in the picture I call Rainbow Peacock.

Rainbow peacock

The full range of primary colors together in one picture, or one song, always means completeness, fullness, and happiness to me.  If there is absence of one or more of the basic colors from the color wheel, the mood and emotion present in the song or picture is altered to something other than happiness.  The Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky goes from the indigo and navy blue of fear and confusion to instances of angry red and feverish orange.  It would look something like this in the theater of my imagination;

20160424_181130

And one of my favorite instrumental pieces of all times, Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun by Claude Debussy, is full of melancholy and sexual tension, deeply felt vibrations in the depths of my stomach, and would look like my picture Sleeping Beauty with its teal and blue melancholia juxtaposed with candle-lit yellows and wood brown mixed feelings of joy and anxiety.

Beauty

Now, if you have waded through all of this goofy color-and-music analysis from a source whose sanity is questionable at best, you probably have no earthly idea what any of it has to do with anything.  But if you have that aha!-moment and see it all clearly too, then I suspect you probably are a synesthete too.  Poor you.  It is not a treatable condition.  But it is also not a burden.  Learn to enjoy it.  It resonates in your very soul.

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Uncategorized

Synesthesia (Part One; French Blue Monday)

This link will help you understand Synesthesia

Francois spotlight

Yes, Mondays are blue.  Specifically French blue.  Every day of the week has its own color.  Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre,  Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue.  I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints.  I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head.  I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world.  I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name.  It is called synesthesia.

Image

It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”.  When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence.  I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns.  Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns.  It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color.  Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word.  But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue.  It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”.  And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.

sunnyface2

Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.

I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do.  I certainly was.  I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue.  My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing.  I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word.  I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there.  But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true.   The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded.  I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls.  My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters.  She is left handed and also gifted at drawing.  I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.

Creativity

Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.

Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about.  But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about.  And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases.  It is not a bad condition to have.  In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing.  I could use some good for a change.  Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway.  (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, autobiography, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Uncategorized

Being Iowegian

I was born in the 1950’s in Mason City, Iowa… the town that produced Meredith Wilson, the creator of the Broadway Musical, The Music Man.  Yes, River City in The Music Man is Mason City.  So I was born into a unique Midwestern farm-town heritage where swindlers came to town and saved the day with music and an eleventh-hour change of heart.  I was born into the land of Chmielewski Fun Time on the black-and-white TV, Lawrence Welk champagne accordion music, and the Beer-Barrel Polka, courtesy of loads and loads of German ancestry.  I am that unique crossbreed of Scandahoovian and sqare-headed Deutschmann  known by the only slightly racist term of Iowegian.

Corn Country!

943363_457313854350548_485543538_n388135_298275616878726_103835066322783_936339_2005428082_nLand of Long Winter and the ice-storm breezin’ down the plains.

And if you ask an Iowegian if he loves Iowa, he will answer, “You bet!”

And if you ask a northern Iowegian the same thing, he will say “You betcha!”

Iowans talk funny, don’t you know…

There are still corner stores and farm supply stores, though they have gone to brand names now, like Casey’s, BP, and Tractor Supply Co.  You can still find HyVee and Safeway grocery stores.  There are still a precious few family farms that haven’t been swallowed whole by big corporations and agri-businesses.  If you go to the county fairs, you will still find kids showing the cattle or pigs that they raised for 4-H projects, and if you go into the barns after the auction, they are still producing tearful kids hugging and kissing that calf that won a red ribbon and now has to be sold… and they will never see poor Barney or Moo-berry again…

1399024_220039334824422_480122723_o 1450109_688917614523503_5237770938249269421_n 10418988_688917684523496_8272199480536313576_n 10350345_10152788940611349_2865049925004654610_n 10563018_688909541190977_6371844517698833981_n DSCN7127It is the land of the lonely gravel road… the back-street cattle pen… the Saturday night tornado (nearly every Saturday in Spring)…  The VFW and the Lion’s Club Fish Fry at Lake Cornelia….And it is a place where most everything reeks of the past and old ghosts and times long gone, soon to never be remembered because there’s no longer anybody around who is old enough to tell the stories that grandparents and aunts and uncles used to tell.  I not only miss it desperately, but I feel deeply saddened by the loss.  Would I like to go home again?

“You betcha!!!”

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, nostalgia, photo paffoonies