A big share of my surrealistic bent comes from the influence of Walt Disney on my childhood. Lady and the Tramp, Babes in Toyland, the Junglebook… Disney made me dance and dream.
Tag Archives: paffooney
Being and Artistry
Being an artist is a matter of genetics, luck, and loads of practice. I began drawing when I was only four or five years old. I drew skulls and skeletons, crocodiles and deer on everything. My kindergarten and first grade teachers were constantly gritting their teeth over the marked-up margins of every workbook and worksheet. I drew and colored on everything. I eventually got rather good, drawing in pencil, crayon, ink, and as you see here, colored pencil. I loved to draw the people and things around me. I also drew the things of my imagination. I drew my best girl, Alicia, and I drew the half-cobra half-man that lived in the secret cavern under our house. I drew a picture of the house across the underpass from Grandma Mary’s house. I drew cardinals, and I drew Snoopy cartoons. I drew my sports heroes in football and hockey, Donny Anderson and Gordie Howe. I drew monsters with fangs and fuzzy animals with huge soulful eyes. I still draw and it’s mostly the same things that I drew when I was a child. I will post more of the drawings here in the near future to dazzle you with my talents and ridiculous sense of the absurd.
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Rooster Riding
Do I believe in the little people? Of course not. If Tinkerbell depends on me, she is dead meat… or maybe dead fairy dust.
But if they do exist, then they are like the rooster riders in my picture, exploiting the world in the same way the big old slow ones do.
They are not our inferiors or our superiors. They are us. They mirror us and our beliefs, our dreams… our nightmares, and all the things deep within us that could ever possibly go bump in the night.
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Novel Nooz
This drawing was created when I started this blog as a way of illustrating the kind of writing I wanted to do. Not only the book I published called Catch a Falling Star, but everything else I have written and plan to write. There’s a certain surreal philosophy expressed in this picture if you look at it right (squint your eyes and tap yourself on the temple hard with a brick).
December 15, 2013 · 8:44 pm
The Creative Process (Something Blossoms in my Brain)
Let’s see… I left off at step seven… come back to it. So I did. Here is the piece with photo-shopped background borrowing a snow picture from friends and relatives back in Iowa.
Step eight… Take a hammer and bash out some new connections and fresh ideas to justify the project (I didn’t steal this idea… Really! I did not!)
Step nine… Knowing this idea reminds me of Dickens somehow… Little Nell, Agnes, Nancy, maybe even Tiny Tim… (That’s it! I’ve been obsessing about Christmases past!)
Step ten… finally realizing there is no final step (Okay, this is weird. Why ever did I do such a silly, stupid thing?)
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Long Ago It Might Have Been
This Paffooney was created with the mistaken idea that I would never have a child or be a Dad. Little did I know that after I turned 37 it would happen three times. This picture is one of my dream children, of the sort Charles Lamb once wrote an essay about. This is little Disney-Michael Beyer… a child who never was and re-created me in the birthing.
December 14, 2013 · 2:05 am
The Creative Process
Step one… perform some random act. (choose a random illustration from Spiegelman & Mouly’s Classic Children’s Comics)
Step two… redraw in the Mickian style (stupidly recast images in garishly wrong colors and cutsie goofishness)
Step three… realize you don’t have any idea what you are doing this for (What am I doing this for?)
Step four… yield to despair and get depressed (let me think about this too much and end up moping)
Step five… do other things and try not to think about it (What was that movie I wanted to see?)
Step six… give it time to percolate or get forgotten (Say what?)
Step seven… come back to it eventually (maybe later this week… or in 22 years)
How’s that for a Pointless Paffooney Prose Poem?
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Rabbit Walking
In the novel I am working on at the moment, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, I have a character that does something weird with rabbits that I used to do. I had a plastic dog-walking collar and chain that I used on a pet who definitely was not a dog. Ember-eyes was my New Zealand White buck rabbit. He was a large rabbit with bright red eyes, whiter than snow. He liked to go for walks, but it was definitely a dangerous undertaking for him. Dogs lurked around the neighborhood wandering loose and uninhibited. Dogs, of course, viewed old Ember-eyes as a tasty snack. I never really got into trouble with that, though, until my neighbor and friend Harry brought home a baby raccoon. He also bought a dog collar and chain, planning to walk the raccoon as I walked my bunny. Did you know raccoons will attack and eat a rabbit? Me neither. But they will. Nasty little hissy things they become when they are presented with food at the end of a chain. And of course, it was a baby coon, so my buck rabbit was larger and more muscular than her. And Ember-eyes didn’t like the idea of being a rabbit-burger for any teeny bandit that wasn’t even a proper predator. So the scratching claw-fight went on for about fifteen hare-raising seconds. I ended up carrying the victor back to his hutch, his heart beating so hard I could feel it with the hand I had under his behind. Harry had to figure out how you treat claw wounds to the nose of a raccoon. The vet didn’t want to see a vermin like that on his exam table any more than Harry’s dad wanted to pay the bill for it. Some salve on the tip of the nose was the eventual solution.
In the Paffooney I have a picture of Tommy Bircher and his pet rabbit Millis. Here he’s crossing Main Street Norwall in front of the VFW Hall.
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Scary Dreams and Paffoonies
Yep. Danged snake-men used to keep me awake as a kid. Kept checking under the bed… the closets… Could one of them swim through the plumbing and get into the upstairs toilet? One never knows. Drawing them was a way to make them go away.
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What Does Paffooney Mean?
You may have noticed the word “Paffooney” used in some of my posts. You may have been deceived into thinking it is some kind of real word. Sorry. It isn’t. It’s my own original made-up word for postable buffoonery, baloney, and goofiness… with accompanying picture. Yes, the picture is the key, though it may have no discernible connection to whatever the heck I happen to be writing about. It is an illustration for illustration’s sake… and a story for the sake of putting words with the picture. I confessed early in my blogging endeavors that I am basically a surrealist. I juxtapose disparate images and ideas and make meaning by forcing the relationship. Of course, you have no idea at all what I just said, and rightly so, because I tend to speak in college-art-history-meta-cognitive-gobblety-gook-speak, a language I first learned in college and have since banged into weird word-sculptures over the last thirty-three years by trying to explain things in a classroom to teenagers. (I love the job, but I do not recommend it for those with a loosening grip on sanity.)
So, here is the definition; Paffooney, proper noun, (Origin from a silly blogger’s head, consisting of Paff, meaning a silly cartoon sound effect, and fooney an even sillier derivation from buffoon and looney.) A silly picture and post combination caused by a brain fart or other gaseous anomaly inside Mickey’s head.
Forgive me, for I know my sins are many.
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Catch a Falling Star 