Caveman

Actually I did watch the show "Cavemen" last night. I think it's pretty funny and I love the corny and absurd premise. I had created some caveman portraits several years ago, which were created in a similar spirit. But that's not the subject of this post! Well, it sort of leads into it...A friend of mine has a brother who she describes as grumpy, dull and for the most part unimpressed with just about everything. He was over at her new apartment for the first time and saw my drawing "Penguin/Python" hanging on her wall. He basically stood there for about 20 minutes reading all of the text, including all of the letters pasted on the frame, all the while barking out questions to my amused friend; Who is this artist? Where did he get these letters? What is this all about? He stood there like I've said for twenty minutes, tilting his head to read everything and when he had soaked in every last aspect and queried every last unexplainable detail she told him that he could turn it over, that there was another drawing on the otherside! This was the last thing that he had expected and basically floored him! Or should I say it was the icing on the cake? For my friend it was a modern day art triumph and a supremely satisfying "gotcha" for a big brother who, until now, had always had all the answers!

swallow my tears

I've been pretty much finished with the drawing part of this series for the last month and focusing now on creating the frames, which I'm fabricating out of re-claimed spruce framing lumber from my carpentry jobs. I've been covering the wood with cancelled checks, glueing them down, sanding them to create a "worn" look, then polyurethaning them giving them that decoupage look. I've been working from this huge pile of cancelled checks, that my sister gave me five years or so ago, and only now, being about one third of the way through this project, have I finally run out of these checks. This got me to thinking about finding something else to use that could carry the same conceptual weight as cancelled checks. I thought of a box of old love letters that I had, maybe they would somehow work, in an interesting way, in relation to the prison record forms that I've been drawing on? These letters were from a former girlfriend of mine going back 25 years. As I began to re-read them I started to experience a flood of memory, emotion and melancholy. I've been happily married for 21 years, and still am, yet somehow these letters tore into my psyche.

I've been struggling with all of the implications of this new exploration for several weeks, trying to get feedback from friends and family (the latter not being the best source to expect open discussion from!) and probably the most interesting thoughts have come from my old college friend Robert, who is just now between jobs. We weren't talking about this issue of mine, just the dynamics of his job change. He observed the strange phenomenon of feeling a sadness at leaving his old job even though he might have hated it. He went on further to speculate that even a prisoner might even feel this kind of sadness upon gaining his freedom.

That got me thinking about how I had reacted to these letters, not that I had any hate for this former girlfriend, but I guess it's just the perspective one has once one is no longer in a situation, one can see things differently. And for me it's been a pretty powerful, cathartic experience to contemplate the changes that I have experienced in my life.

archivism

Well, I said that I would write about this and have yet to do so. Simply put it's the belief or passion that holds that documenting just about anything is an important function for art. Much of this work revels in this vein. Next I'll talk about creating comics....I think that part of this blog thing for me is to just try to hold myself accountable to my thoughts...by publishing them publicly.