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.
Filed under art criticism, artwork, imagination, insight, Paffooney
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
Filed under artwork, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney
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Filed under artwork, drawing, humor, illustrations, imagination, Paffooney
The three figures in this painting were all drawn from photographed models. The girl was actually nude, skinny-dipping with friends.. The buck deer was photographed by a wildlife photographer with a telephoto lens. The warrior was drawn from a photo in National Geographic. They were put together to create meaning in this picture. It is a spirit-animal encounter in a lightning dream as talked about in the novel Hanta Yo by Ruth Bebe Hill. It depicts a spiritual experience. But it depends on my ability to draw figures anatomically correctly. And to accomplish surrealism with any realism requires practice drawing actual nude figures.
I was an English Major in college at Iowa State from 1975 to 1979. And during that time I took a lot of art classes. Every drawing class they had I took and excelled in most of them. But art was a part of the Home Economics curriculum at the time and you couldn’t actually take a minor in Art. So, when I was a junior, I became eligible to take the Anatomy Drawing course based on my success in all the other drawing courses. And, of course, I was the only student artist in the class who was not an Art Major. So, it was a class where the other 25 ladies and 3 guys in the class were all Art Majors and all resented my presence.
Of course, a fact of my life was that at the point when I entered that class with its nude models and highly demanding, anal-retentive art professor, I was still repressing my own memory of being a sexual assault victim. Dr. Lou Bro demanded that we all were very aware that we were doing art and not porn. She made eye contact with each of the four males in the class as she said it. It was all a matter of point of view, what you focused your drawing on, and what you emphasized, consciously or not. Porn drawings could fail you. And you had to know the difference.
It was explained to us that the nude models would come from among the art students. We could earn ten dollars for posing for an hour, and though she planned on using mostly senior art students from outside the class, she needed some of us to sign up to fill in some slots, especially if we were male, and especially if we were willing to pose for the whole two hours on a Tuesday or a Thursday during winter quarter. And the intention was to have the model pose completely nude.
.Pressure was put on each of the four males in the class. I was not really expected to volunteer since I was not an Art Major, but the ladies were bullying each of us to take the plunge. The girl who was nicest to me warned that Dr. Bro only gave about three or four A’s in any of her classes and lots of students who didn’t make A’s didn’t pass. She also encouraged me by telling me that volunteer models got points added to their grade as well as the monetary reward. So, being nagged and, in one case, sweetly encouraged, I made the mistake of putting my name on the list. Two of the other guys got bullied into it as well. I found myself shivering a lot that December, and not all of it was from the cold.
There comes a time with every repressed memory when it suddenly all comes rushing back. It happened to me during the course of this nude drawing class. I fell victim to the flu virus running around campus, and I ended up reliving the entire horrible event on my dorm-room bed. And, my turn as a nude model happened to come up on the Thursday after I got sick, and so, it was my good fortune to acquire a note from Student Health Services signed by a doctor that said I was excused from classes for a week, and longer if my fever stayed high.
And so, I did not have to get naked in front of 25 females plus Dr. Bro. She graciously accepted my doctor’s note. I eventually got a C in the class. So, I don’t know for sure that I didn’t get a grade penalty, but she was nicer to me than the other two guys who didn’t show up for their turns either. Neither of them were sick. And when we did finally get a nude male model, he was a senior Art Major who had also been ill a couple weeks before he posed, so he was actually wearing a long-underwear shirt and bluejeans.
So, I learned to draw nudes in that somewhat traumatic but also humorous situation in college. I learned that it had nothing to do with sexuality, and everything to do with seeing how light and shadow plays across the surfaces, and how that gives depth and a sense of form to the body you are drawing. And the genitals do not have to be depicted, but if they are they are not the focus of the work of art. And clothing is a whole other layer of complexity that you can’t possibly get right if you don’t know how everything underneath fits together. I also learned that Dr. Bro was stern and demanding because getting it right matters. Some of the Pre-Med students took that class (though none during the quarter I took it) because they needed to develop their hands and fingers to become surgeons, and you also don’t want surgeons who don’t know how it all fits together.
All of today’s artworks were chosen because they were drawn from real models. The third one, Her #2, is the only one where the model posed for me in person. Her boyfriend was my roommate in an efficiency apartment that had separate bedrooms and studies. She posed in his bedroom while he was also there. The one I have posted here is the copy of the pencil drawing, Her #1. I gave the original to her personally. She loved it.
The rest of these nudes were from photos of the model. The seventh and eighth pictures weren’t completely nude in the picture. The boy was wearing a very brief swimsuit, and the girl was wearing the bottom part of a bikini. I enjoy drawing nudes. And some of my nudist friends know that and appreciate it. But I am always careful about drawing from real people. Privacy issues and propriety issues make things complicated.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, nudes, Paffooney
It’s true. You have seen these multiple times before. They are some of my favorite drawings , paintings, and pictures.
You may not agree that these are my best work. That isn’t why I included them. These are pictures I simply like, and I could’ve added another hundred or so easily.
Lord, grant me peace
In times of great violence
Grant me wisdom
As everything around me burns in ignorance
Let the cold blues
Be tempered with warm reds
Let me juggle life’s fortunes and misfortunes alike
Red balls over blue balls
Yellow, purple, and green
Over and under
The spiraling path
I’ll keep written records
In journals with pictures
And share my discoveries
With any who’ll listen
And I’ll always keep close in my heart
The people and places and memories
That mattered and shattered
The whole color wheel
Because Shakespeare once showed us the whole color wheel
Is necessary for magic to form on the page
And though yellow is also a primary too
It’s the reds that warm life as the color of blood
And the blues let us chill as the deeper color of ice
But let there no period be
To stop the color progression
Of this warm/cold blank verse
Nor rhythm or rhyme sully
The Reds and the Blues
My blog on WordPress, Catch a Falling Star, now has 2,103 followers for the very first time. And I have posted 646 days in a row.
You may have noticed that my blog is about surrealist art, fantasy fiction for young adults, and a somewhat strange idea of what humor is all about.
Filed under announcement, artwork, blog posting, Paffooney
Catch a Falling Star 
Living in the World I Once Drew
It is normal for the world we live in to inspire us to draw pictures of it. But architects do the opposite. They imagine a world we could live in, and then build it.
Sometimes, like in the picture above, I draw real people in imaginary places. Other times I draw imaginary people and put them in real places.
Sometimes I put imaginary people in imaginary places. (I photo-shopped this planet myself.)
In fiction, I am re-casting my real past as something fictional, so the places I draw with words in descriptions need to be as real as my amber-colored memory can manage.
When I use photos, though, I have to deal with the fact that over time, places change. The church does not look exactly like it did in the 1980s when this drawing is set.
Drawing things I once saw, and by “drawing” I mean “making pictures,” is how I recreate myself to give my own life meaning.
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Tagged as Saturday Art Day