I have taken a vow to do only my own covers for my books from here on out. I can draw well. And I have a good artistic eye, at least until I lose my eyesight to glaucoma because I can’t afford eye doctors. So, today’s Art Day post will be about the covers to my books.
The spines of my 14 published books.
This clunky cover was my first published book, published by a big-mistake publisher called Publish America, a company that dissolved in class-action lawsuits.
I vowed to start making my own covers.
I-Universe insisted on giving me a cover that had nothing to do with the story in the book. A girl flying a kite at night? What is that? At no point in the story does anything happen that is even remotely like that.
Page Publishing at least used my own artwork to create the cover for Magical Miss Morgan. They were also incompetent publishers selling me overpriced publishing services that were basically worthless.
These are the covers that I used to replace the first clunky publisher’s cover.
This is the picture I wanted to use on the cover of Snow Babies. But the pixel size of the background photo was too big to use it in larger than postage-stamp size.
A version of this is what I had to settle for in a letter-boxed format.Here’s the cover of… well, you can see that for yourself.Recipes’ companion novel, same time, same place, same events, but a different point of view.The illustration for The Bicycle-Wheel Genius cover.Like Baby Werewolf and Recipes for Gingerbread Children, this one has a companion book.This is the other half of Sing Sad Songs.
Stardusters is the sequel to Catch a Falling Star
This is now the only book of mine not published on Amazon.
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My most-recently published novel.
My re-published novel.
The first novel I ever wrote and didn’t throw away.My current work in progress
So, there is a look at the current state of my novel covers. Not professional, but original.
I have begun work on a new 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.
I believe one of the primary reasons that art exists at all is because we are thinking creatures with a need to spend serious time in deep minding of the consequences of existence. We need to question everything. And art helps us do that by depicting the thoughts that existed first in the mind of the artist, and then must be translated through experiencing into the mind of the viewer.
Landscapes are very useful for contemplation. They present an interpretation of the real world you can mentally walk around in.If you are walking around mentally in a work of art, you are seeing more than just a place. You are walking mentally through the mind and the perceptions of the artist. You see what he or she has seen, even if you see it differently. Even if it is a photo the artist took. The people, places, and things your viewer-eyes encounter when mentally walking around in a work of art have to have some overall meaning. Some purpose. Some reason for being.What do you suppose the picture above means? I can’t tell you, even though I drew it. You, the viewer, must give it meaning.
Capturing faces and their varied expressions are a key feature of my art.I gravitate towards happy and innocent faces. Kid faces… Cartoon faces… goofy facesMary Murphy with her kids, Little Sean and Dilsey
Mike Murphy and his girlfriend, Blueberry Bates
Fiona (Firefang) Long
Junior Aero
Boris the Mummy
Littlebit the cabin boy.
Anita Jones and her boyfriend, Edward (Superchicken) Campbell
One never knows what mysteries can be uncovered inside the bird house. The plot of the story depends on what happens next in the picture.Details make the real story clear.Pictures tell a story even if the story-teller falls asleep in the process.A picture can spin a fairy-tale even if it doesn’t show a plot. Pictures easily establish a setting.Pictures can allude to many, many other things.
“The Wings of Imagination”Bird-brains speak outYes, this is in the air. See? No space suits.Travel by “airship”If we cannot fly, at least our spirits doTravel by bubble-blowing, gum-chewing goldfish.We all have wings… sometimes.
Because I was a teacher, I have a thing about kids, and making pictures of kids.Some kids, of course, tell lies… a lot. Or maybe all kids…
But kids have an inherent beauty.
And kids are naturally innocent and good.And they are naturally imaginative and individually unique.No matter what culture they come from…Or what color they are…They are worthy of making pictures of… And they are worthy of love.
One thing that I, as an artist of limited ability, appreciate about the digital age, is that I can get lots of mileage out of old works of art, and even new works of art, by cutting and pasting, photo-shopping, and re-using elements of the drawings done once… but turned into many by digital means.
Brent Clarke, farm boy and the farm.
Valerie, Denny, and Tommy at Christmas time during the blizzard.Snow Babies in the snow,,,Gyro the Nebulon and Billy on the rocket sledBrekka and Menolly as unofficial members of the Mickey Mouse Club.A self-portrait of me in the 1960’s.Imaginary ESL students… well, they didn’t look like this in real life.The imagination can range farther afield when digital magic allows the artist to take the ballgame to any sort of arena.
And the process can take you home again, no matter how far away and how long ago home has become.
No, I am not calling you an idiot, dear reader. I am the one providing the guidance material.
This idiot is not actually me… This is Doofy Fuddbugg. He is not overburdened with book-learning, but he can fix practically anything around the house or in the car. He can also tell a story pretty well that makes you laugh.
So, if I were to try to explain art day in an Idiot’s Guide aimed at explaining the essence of it to Doofy Fuddbugg, one idiot trying to educate another, I would explain that I am lazy on Saturdays. All I want to do is post pictures and not have to write a lot of heavily-thought-out words and ideas in the usual droning idiot’s essay of 500 words or more. So, I go through my WordPress picture file and find interesting pictures to post without having to draw or paint anything new.
I confess that I do not merely select pictures at random. I try to get pictures I haven’t used in a good while. This double portrait of Gretel Graymalkin, and what she looks like naked in the moonlight, hasn’t been used in a post since last year. And there is a bit of rhyme and reason to it too. Gretel is an idiot.
And this is a picture that any idiot can tell is a real picture of fairies in the park discussing the building of a new fairy circle after it finally started raining heavily again in Texas after almost a decade of drought. Of course, it has to be an idiot to tell that. Most people would recognize this as a pen-and-colored-pencil drawing photo-shopped over a photograph. Even the mushrooms are not real. I have it on good authority from fairy-kind that they are actually pixies in disguise.
And then there is this rare bird I drew a couple of years back. He is a surrealistic peacock who thought of auditioning for NBC before he learned they don’t still do those “Now in Living Color…” ads anymore. He’s surrealistic in that he could not possibly be real, unless he were really just a bowling pin and lady’s fan put together by a deranged painter with a mental disorder that makes him do decoratively dippy drawings on things you really shouldn’t be drawing upon in the middle of a bowling tournament.
And who can forget this idiot, an avatar of me as a purple Mickey in the style of the late great Don Martin of Mad Magazine fame? He’s the whole reason you get foolish lazy-Saturday posts like this at all, There has got to be a cure for that somewhere in the multiverse.
Catch a Falling Star 