Tag Archives: creativity

November 13, 2025 · 2:09 am

Why I am full of Art

I started drawing with crayons and pencils sometime before I was five. I started telling stories around age seven and thoroughly scared my sisters and girl cousins. I became an exiled alien living in secret on Earth in second grade. I won an art contest in my fourth-grade class during fire-prevention week. That got me interviewed on television by Channel 3, KGLO TV from Mason City. From a very early age, I was a sponge, soaking up colors and shapes and weird connections, beautiful things, scary things, and taxidermied jackalopes that cost twenty-five cents to look at. And it filled me up to overflowing and spilled out on drawing paper and took up most of the pages of the spiral notebooks I was supposed to be using for school.

What came out of me was art.

I can’t claim to be a professional artist. I have to admit that most of the money I have made in life was earned by being a school teacher, babysitting in the monkey house and taming other people’s house apes for over three decades. I may have sold a hundred books as an author, but less than two hundred. I have never made a dime just for drawing or painting and making visual art pictures. Any art published in media by me has been for nothing more than exposure to the publication’s audience. So, can I truly claim to be an artist?

My entire life has been lived for art. I became one of the world’s all-time worst poets. I became one of the’ best story-tellers that nobody ever reads. And I enthralled over two thousand kiddoes as a teacher who told stories and intentionally made kiddoes laugh in class and try to tell stories themselves.

Why am I full of art? That’s what I WAS BORN TO BE.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

September 13, 2025 · 12:10 am

People Art

All art on this planet (with the possible exceptions of paintings by monkeys and elephants, and the songs of whales and dolphins) is about people. What is art, if it is not a reflection of who and what we are?

“Tell me a story with our people in it.”

I am the man from the setting sun who comes from the past to deliver the future.

Every bit of art I do now is done as my own mortality, the end of my own story, is soon to reach the final page. I have lived six decades complete and have begun to live the seventh. I am close to the sunset. But I have wisdom to share from a lifetime of struggle, and reversals, and successes, and joy. And in a dark time when it appears the world could actually be ending, I wish to do the only thing I can to help, provide pictures and stories that might prove useful to you.

“We are beautiful as the day is ending, because the day was worth living in.”
“Magic, like lightning, infuses the sky with that which makes us wonder. What is it? How do I use it?”
What we are is based on what we were. Our hopes for the future have their foundation in our past. We only have to see it and identify it. Then we can build on it.
Why am I obsessed with naked people? Because naked people are exactly what you see. Naked hides nothing, and honesty is like sunshine, the more we walk in it, the healthier we become.
Laughter is an essential part of who we need to be and how we deal with where we need to go. Laugh at mistakes, and chuckle with satisfaction as you correct them.
Life is like Moose Bowling because… in order to knock down all the pins, you have to learn how to throw a moose!
Art exists because it simply has to exist. My art exists because I exist. So, my art exists because you all made the mistake of allowing me to exist.

So, all art is about people. Even the art with no people in it. That art, at least, has a creator who was most probably a people… or a monkey… or an elephant.. or a… well, you get the idea, don’t you?

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, Paffooney cartoony, wisdom

Tagged as , , , ,

August 6, 2025 · 12:38 am

Native Americans Invade My Artwork

I don’t know if you’ve seen enough of my colored-pencil Paffooneys to tell this, but for an old white guy, I draw a lot of Native Americans and am rather deeply in love with American Indian images.  You may have seen this dream painting I posted before.

Magicman

The girl in the painting is a combination of this warrior’s daughter and myself.  I was naked in the dream and a female, facing this huge ghost-stag.  The dream came while I was reading Hanta Yo by Ruth Beebe Hill.  Maybe that book was the beginning of my Native American obsession.  Who knows?  I am a crazy dreamer.  But that wonderful book turned me on to the rich spiritual life that the Dakota people lived.  I identified with it so completely that I dreamed myself into their culture.  I was also struck by the manner in which a Native American culture handles education.  The grandfather is in charge of the boy’s learning.  He teaches by story-telling.  Here you see the grandfather in Sky Lodge teaching his grandson.  The girls would learn very different things from their mothers and grandmothers.

Skye lodge

I am also entranced by the life of the people expressed in dance and ritual.  Dance has deeper meaning than we white guys normally assign to it.  Dances could be magical.  Of course, the notion of a “rain dance” is the result of too much simplification in movie scripts and ignorant popular white culture.  Dance could connect you to the Earth, the Sky, and the Spirit World.  That’s what this most recent Paffooney shows.

Pueblo Bonito

So, you can see, I don’t really understand the concept of moderation when it comes to my obsessions in the world of colored pencil art.  Hanta Yo!  Clear the Way!  In a sacred manner I come!

child of fire

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

June 20, 2025 · 12:33 am

Homely Art – Part Two – Paul Detlefsen

Detlefsen-Swimming_Hole

Back in about 1968 my Grandma Beyer was seriously scandalized by an artist named Paul Detlefsen.  Detlefsen did a lot of covers for the “Ideals Magazine” that Grandma always had on her coffee tables.  He scandalized her by putting a painting on the cover that showed a young boy taking his pants off, the rear view only, so he could go skinny dipping with a group of naked boys.  Truthfully the picture shown above is by Detelfsen, but it is not the one that offended her.  I have discovered that this painter of old-timey things like blacksmith shops and one-room school houses has painted at least four different versions of “the Old Swimmin’ Hole”.  And Grandma was easily scandalized when we were kids.  She was a very conservative woman who loved Ronald Reagan and his politics most severely and thought that Richard Nixon was a leftist radical.  She didn’t like for people to be naked, except for bath time, and maybe not even then.  She is one of the main reasons, along with this painter whom she adored, that I came to learn later in life that “naked is funny”.horseandbuggydays-print  http://www.freeplaypost.com/PaulDetlefsen_VintageArtPrint_A.htm

Grandma Beyer also seriously loved puzzles, and besides “Ideals” covers, Paul Detlefsen did a beaucoup of jigsaw puzzles. (Beaucoup means a lot in Texican, I tend to think in Iowegian and talk in Texican and completely forget about the need to translate for those people who don’t know those two foreign tongues)   One of the puzzles we spent hours working on was “Horse and Buggy Days” that I pictured here.  They were the kind of puzzle paintings where every boy was Tom Sawyer and every girl was Becky Thatcher.  And there were a lot of them.  Here is another;

detlefsen

http://www.bigredtoybox.com/cgi-bin/toynfo.pl?detlefsenindex

Grandma had this in puzzle form also.  We put the puzzle together, glued it to tag board, and framed it.  It has hung on the wall in a Grandparent’s house, first Grandma Beyer’s and then Grandma Aldrich’s, since the early 1970’s.  My own parents now live in Grandma Aldrich’s house, and that puzzle-painting may be hanging in an upstairs bedroom to this very day.  Detlefsen is not known as a great artist.  He was a humble painter who painted backdrops for films for over 20 years.  In the 1950’s he switched gears and started doing lithographs that were turned into calendars, jigsaw puzzles, laminated table mats, playing cards, and reproductions you could buy in the Ben Franklin Dime Store in Belmond, Iowa and hang on your back porch at home.  I believe I saw his paintings in all these forms in one place or another.  According to Wikipedia (I know, research, right?) “In 1969, UPI estimated that his artwork had been seen by 80 per cent of all Americans.”  That is pretty dang good for a humble painter, better numbers than Pablo Picasso ever saw.  Let me share a few more of his works, and see if you recognize any of these;

db_Paul_Detlefsen_Covered_Bridge1 b01e8afaadde Artist Paul Detlefsen PaulDetlefsen_VintageArtPrint_B11 il_fullxfull.285794883

Leave a comment

Filed under art criticism, art my Grandpa loved, artwork, homely art, oil painting

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

April 21, 2025 · 12:04 am

Drawing for a Lifetime

I was born an artist. It has to be developed and nurtured and practiced over time to become what it can truly be, but artistic talent is something you are born with, and there is a genetic aspect to it. Great Aunt Viola could draw and paint. She produced impressive art during her lifetime. My father can draw. He has demonstrated ability a number of times, though he never developed it. Both my brother and I can draw and have done a lot of it. All three of my children can draw and paint. My daughter, the Princess, even wants to pursue a career in graphic design and animation.

One of the factors that weighs heavily on a career in art is the starving artist factor. To be a serious artist, you have to study art in great detail. You need lots of practice, developing not only pencil-pushing prowess, but having an artist’s eyeball, that way of seeing that twists and turns the artist’s subject to find the most novel and interesting angle. It takes a great deal of time. And if you are doing this alone, you are responsible also for building your own following and marketing your own work and creating your own brand. You need to be three people in one and do this while potentially not being able to make any money at all for it. I have taught myself to do the art part, but I paid the bills with something else I loved to do, teaching English to hormone-crazed middle-schoolers.

An important part of art is what you have to sacrifice to do it.

Many artists become alcoholics, drug users, or suicidal manic-depressives. There is an artistic sort of PTSD. Doing real art costs a lot because it alters your lifestyle, your mental geography, and your spiritual equilibrium. Depending on how much of yourself you put into it, it can use you up, leaving no “you” left within you.

I am not trying to leave you with the impression that I mean to scare you into not wanting to be an artist. For many reasons it is a great thing to be. But it is a lot like whether you are born gay or straight… or somewhere in between. The choice is not entirely up to you. You can only control what you do with the awful gift of art once it is given to you. And that is a serious choice to make. Me, I have to draw. I have to tell stories. My life and well-being depend on it. It is the only way I can be me.

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, drawing, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , ,

February 27, 2025 · 2:05 am

Meaningless Corrections and Correct Implications

A lot of critical art viewers will randomly tell me that using AI Art programs is plagiarism because these programs have been trained on people’s posted artwork without permission or acknowledgment. I agree that that is not fair. I also think that is not how I use AI programs. The above picture used Picsart AI Photo Editor and AI Mirror in its creation. The Harlequin Girl is drawn from a model I saw on Instagram, a human dancer in a costume that is similar to my drawing. I used AI Mirror to make my imperfect drawing look better than I can do with arthritic fingers. I used the uncorrected version here with the problem hands so you could see the kind of things you have to go back and draw over with digital art tools. I used Picsart to turn her into what is called a “sticker” that I could place upon a background. I used a colored mandala that I got from Tapcolor Digital Coloring Book as a background. Before I put the sticker on top, I added the butterfly and altered the round design elements into flowers.

This is how I use AI Mirror to improve my artwork. The picture above is nothing but a pencil drawing inked and guidelines erased. If you look at it carefully you can see how I skewed the eyes when I inked the pencil drawing. One on the left is the roundness I wanted. The right one has a lower eyelid that cuts too narrowly to make the eyes look mismatched. So, I ran the photo of the finished pen and ink drawing through AI Mirror allowing it to make changes up to 50 %. Below you can see the best result. It took eight tries to get the eye match I wanted.

You can see that the program made changes to more than just the eyes. It took much of the 50% to adjust the background, adding art tools that I had in previous photos of the drawing board used in similar pictures I used AI Mirror on. It also changed the hairstyle, and since it didn’t like the ladybug theme of the dress, changed it for white roses which I have used in similar pictures repeatedly. I did go back and add whiteness to the roses to make it look a little cooler.

This one above is intended to be a surrealist interpretation of a piece of music. Of course, the AI Mirror program and the Picsart program are both overly sensitive to copyright and trademark. That’s why it intentionally screws up the sheet music and the words on the t-shirt of the drawing I did for the girl sticker. It doesn’t reproduce things that could potentially be trademarked. And the flower stems the girl held in my drawing got turned into a short black stick and a sword? There were multiple things I needed to correct as I continued to change it to make it fit my vision for the piece.

This isn’t a final version either, but it is closer. It still needs to have the sheet music tamed to look more like ordinary sheet music. The main character’s bikini bottom shows up in a way that proves that making it two-color black and brown needed to be more contrasting to the shadow color on her legs. And the nudity of her companion was my idea, but I will have to make the further correction of not sending this post to Facebook. Facebook is ready to sanction me for showing bare breasts in their news feeds.

I am now done complaining about the nagging little things that annoy me about the AI art process. But I do the drawings that I present as my work. I am not plagiarizing anything. And I thoroughly enjoy this whole process.

Leave a comment

Filed under art criticism, art editing, artwork, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

September 30, 2024 · 12:04 am

Mickey’s Secret Identities

edo1

Yes, there is very definitely a possibility that there is more than one me.

If you look carefully at the colored pencil drawing above, you will see that it is titled “The Wizard of Edo” and signed by someone called Leah Cim Reyeb.  A sinister sounding Asian name, you think?  I told college friends that my research uncovered the fact that he was an Etruscan artist who started his art career more than two thousand years ago in a cave in France.  But, of course, if you are clever enough to read the name backward, you get, “beyeR miC haeL”.  So, that stupid Etruscan cave artist is actually me.

It turns out that it is a conceit about signing my name as an artist that I stole from an old episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show and have used for well over two decades through college and my teaching career.

And of course, the cartoonist me is Mickey.  Mickey also writes this blog.  Mickey is the humorist identity that I use to write all my published novels and blog posts since I published the novel Catch a Falling Star.

Michael Beyer is the truest form of my secret identity.  That was my teacher name.  It was often simplified by students to simply “Mr. B”.  I was known by that secret identity for 31 years.

Even more sinister are my various fictional identities occurring in my art and my fiction.  You see one of them in this Paffooney.  The name Dr. Seabreez appears in Catch a Falling Star as the Engineer who makes a steam engine train fly into space in the 1890’s with alien technology.  He appears again in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius as a time-traveler.

The young writer in the novel Superchicken, Branch Macmillan, is also me.  As is the English teacher Lawrance “Rance” Kellogg used in multiple novels.

So, disturbing as it may be to realize, there is more than one name and identity that signifies me.  But if you are a writer of fiction, a cartoonist, an artist, or a poet, you will probably understand this idea better.  And you may even have more than one you too.

2 Comments

Filed under autobiography, foolishness, humor, irony, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as , , ,

June 7, 2024 · 1:33 am

Something Creative Goes Here

Not Alone

Sometimes the creative brain gets a little too hot and needs time to cool.  That means I need a meaningless filler post to maintain my every-day posting.  So, I give you a picture of Mike Murphy carrying his girlfriend, Blueberry Bates’ books home from the bus stop on a country road in Iowa.  And, of course, they happen to meet an alien named George Jetson, whose father named him after a character on his favorite Earther TV show from the 60’s.  It is a strange thing to have your brain over-heat from too many creative neurons firing at the same time.  But it can lead to notions of intergalactic peace and cultural exchange… or racist comments like, “Tellerons have heads that look like giant boogers!”  But I should be able think more rationally tomorrow.  I hope that turns out to be a good thing.

2 Comments

Filed under aliens, artwork, blog posting, conspiracy theory, goofiness, Paffooney, self pity

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

May 16, 2024 · 1:17 am

Disappointing Outcomes

This is an all-felt recreation of my picture of the Girl with the Green Eyes. It was simply a matter of running my digital picture through the AI Mirror Felt Filter which used its special AI magic to transfer every part of the image into a needlecraft-looking thingy made of what appears to be felt. But no beaver pelts were chewed on to make it. It is a brief look at what the incredibly single-minded magic of AI can actually do. And I would like to submit more of my artwork to this filter, but that would cost money to use it. That’s the thing about AI. It is meant to generate lots of money for somebody… and that somebody is not me.

I enjoy using digital and AI tools to draw. Arthritis and color blindness and muscle spasms have been leeching away my art abilities. These tools make drawing easier and not only restore my drawing ability, they help me go beyond what I have done before.

This gives you an idea of what I used to be able to do, drawing freehand and blending colors with colored pencils. I have been told by friends and family familiar with my older artworks that they prefer my old style to the new anime-style, AI-filter digital stuff. And I understand that sentiment completely. I wish I still could do that.

This is an example of the very best I can do the old way that is also done this year. The colors are no longer fully blended and solidified. It hurts too much to put enough layers on to achieve the solid colors and the blends. My hands no longer manage the repetitions of small lines in layers.

This is about an hour’s worth of work on the digital drawing pad. You can see the basic design and you can also see the splotches and glitches caused by arthritis. I did take it further before applying the AI Mirror art editor, but the flaws are not gone until the AI cleans them up completely.

Here it is after the first application of AI Mirror.

Then clothing is added. That, of course, needs to be cleaned up too and a background added.

And I reach an endpoint that satisfies my need to draw and create. Picsart AI Photo Editor inserted the background.

I know there is way too much AI artwork out there on the web. Much of it is downright lazily created and awful. I hope mine isn’t too. But I have seen things that are masterfully done which reveal possibilities of using AI tools in very artful ways. I am not satisfied with AI art on the internet. But I don’t believe we are wasting our time completely either.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , ,

May 11, 2024 · 12:08 am

Cloudscapes

Cloudscapes

Once upon a time, the English poet and, I would argue, cartoonist, William Blake once said, “You look at the sky and see clouds, while I see the assembled heavenly host!”  This is why my literature class in college about the Romantic Poets of his day made him out to be a certifiable nutcase who probably belonged in in a mental institution.  (And back then, in the 1800’s, the sanitarium was a place where inconveniently crazy people went to die.)

20150419_080550

Look at a couple of my cloudscapes.  Do you see angels?

Cloudscapes (a poem)

Blue and white and filled with light…

The cloudscape burns with angels…

And wholly bought with grace unsought…

I long to fly with angels…

Are they really there in the cloud-filled air?

I see them there, they’re angels!

So, there you have it.  I’m a loon.  I don’t even have the excuse of being a Romantic Poet and well-known for my poetry as a defense against the loony bin.  But as the matter stands, I am fully willing to accept the consequences.  Creativity has its price.  And, while you may not agree that I am somewhat creative, I am swimming in a vast ocean of perceived revelations that enriches me and fulfills me at the very same moment that it drains all the energy from my soul.  If that is not what it means to see angels… then I do not know anything of use to anyone but me.

The word “angel” (according to Wikipedia, the source of all true knowledge) comes to English via Late Latin and the word “angelus” which the Romans stole from the Greek  ἄγγελος ángelos,  The ángelos is the default Septuagint’s translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal’ākh denoting simply “messenger” without specifying its nature.  (Notice, I am giving full credit to Wikipedia because it is far more all-knowing than I.)

I have many atheistic and agnostic notions in my ultimate belief systems, but still, I claim to be a Christian and believe in God Jehovah… within limits.  I still communicate with God on a daily basis, and while I don’t publicly pray anymore (a notion promoted by the Biblical Jesus) I find answers to my questions and solutions to my problems from the observable universe around me.. the messengers of God.  So, now that I have fully rationalized being crazy as a loon, I am going to tell you where that craziness is taking me.  I started a new Paffooney for one of the books I am working on.  Here is the pencil sketch;

pencil sketch

 

This will be a picture of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, the farmer Kyle Clarke.  In my fiction, Kyle loses his farm to the bank (in the Family Farm Crisis of the 1980’s) and believing himself incapable of any longer supporting his family, kills himself.  But the thing is, the love of his daughter transcends death for Kyle.  She is able to reconnect with him time and again because the angels work for her as well as for Kyle.  I may be loony and ill in real life, facing the Angel of Death myself, but I am not done doing God’s work… not yet… not for a long time to come.

The finished picture.

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, Paffooney, poem

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,