Nemesis

Still playing with blobs.  This one was on the same piece of paper as the blob that became Charlie Bird.  I couldn't imagine that it would become anything at the time, but I let it sit on my desk where I'd see it every day.  The idea was that my sub-conscious mind might chew on it and come up with something worth pursuing.

In the meantime, my nemesis, the Octopus, slithered up from the deep and grabbed me by the ankle.  I've been battling it ever since the last post.  I think I'm winning.  I hope I'm winning.  My therapist voiced concern the last time I slipped into serious depression that if I didn't do something to treat it, she was worried it might become a permanent state of mind.  She suggested medications.  I suggested she keep them. 

I've been fighting the Octopus for nearly 60 years.  In the last cycle of serious depression, almost two years ago, I thought Octopus was going to win.  I almost gave up, so strong was its siren call.  The winter of 2011-2012 was particularly hard financially.  I couldn't heat my home properly, couldn't pay for medications or food and my worklife was beyond dismal - bordering on abusive.

But I didn't give in.  I'm still here.  But I was scared.  That's when I remembered the Book of Five Rings, written by Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi sometime in the mid-1600s.  I read it about 20-25 years ago and was fascinated with it.  I don't remember all the lessons, but enough of it stuck that I approached my battles with Octopus from the warrior's perspective.  I studied the Octopus, learning its tells when it is about to attack.   Having survived that winter, I paid attention to the survival lessons I'd learned.  Last winter, I was prepared for deprivation.  I was prepared for the Octopus and I defeated the rascal at every turn.  Not saying it was easy, but every time I turned Octopus back, I grew stronger emotionally; more confident.

Then illness struck and I was knocked off balance.  Octopus saw its opportunity and took advantage of my being distracted.  We've been in an ongoing tug-of-war for my soul since this Spring.  Thus far, it is a tie, but I am edging ahead.

My sub-conscious finally told be what to do with the blob above.  This is Octopus, my nemesis. 

 

It's a Bird! It's a Pla...What is it?

Still playing with blind contouring, finding imaginary creatures in blobs and trying to learn to have fun with art.  I so wanted to be (among many things) an artist when I was younger.  In particular, I wanted to be an artist like my mother, who was a natural at it.  But I was a perfectionist.  If it didn't look realistic, like my mother's drawings, then it wasn't good.  If it wasn't good, it wasn't art.  So, after many years of struggling to be as good an artist as my mother, and failing - in my eyes, anyway - I quit trying.  Then I stumbled upon some drawings and paintings by Carla Sonheim (previous post) and was inspired to try again.

Will I ever become as good as my mother was?  No, on many levels, including art.  But it no longer matters.  What I do now is for me, for fun and to share with friends.

The drawing in this post was an attempt to do another blind contour drawing, where you close your eyes (or at least not look at the paper or other surface you're sketching on) and just let your hand/pencil go where it will.  The key is to be loose, relax - trust the process, instead of trying to control the outcome.  Have fun.  Live in the now, in the moment.  (Good life lessons, too!)  The sketch below was intended to be a bird.  No one type of bird, just whatever developed. 

Well, what developed didn't strike me as a bird, but it made me laugh, laugh hard, so it served its purpose.  Meet Rico.

 

 

When Rico hatched from his egg, his parents knew he was special.  His siblings, all normal-looking tadpoles, asked if 'special' was another word for weird.  His father said he couldn't believe that millions of years of frog evolution could be undone in one instant.  Rico's mother worried that having his gills on top of his head would make him an easier, more visible, target for the fish which preyed upon tads and young frogs.

 

As his brothers and sisters grew legs and lost their tails, moving through the expected stages of froglet development, Rico simply grew larger, eventually reaching a mass of nearly a kilo and a length of half a meter.  As you can imagine, his size, not to mention the strange placement of his gills, dissuaded other creatures from trying to eat him. 

 

His brothers went on to chase female frogs every spring.  Rico chased bubbles.  He was obsessed with them.  Rico knew everything there was to know about bubbles: what caused them, how they were able to rise from the depths of heavy water to burst upon the surface, their usual lifespan; how they were, in fact, an engineering and physics marvel - like bumblebees - and all the wonderful things that could be made using the bubble shape.  He liked to point out that frogs' very lives began in bubbles, that there would be no frogs, or toads, or salamanders, perhaps all life, were it not for bubbles or bubble technology.

 

Rico lived to be 17 years old, having outlived several generations of siblings and their offspring as well as his parents.  He contented himself chasing and studying and admiring bubbles until the day he died. 

 

Death came swiftly to Rico.  He got caught up in the cavitation produced by a 300-horsepower Evinrude, so focused on the bubbles that he didn't see the spinning propeller that produced them.  He never knew what hit him.

Start with an Eye

I don’t know if it’s the heat, or facing another rapidly-approaching birthday or what, but I’ve been in a foul temper of late, finding it difficult to be grateful for anything.  I hate when I get like this! 

However…

…to distract myself from my grumpy state of being, I am turning to art.  Rather, I am trying to learn a new art form – illustration and watercolors.  While cruising the Internet for info on an unrelated matter, I followed several links to various sites until I stumbled across a silly-looking bird drawing that made me laugh out loud, a loud, long and joyful laugh, like I used to have when I was a kid.  (I have no idea how I ended up at that site, but I’m glad I did.  Oh.  I guess I am grateful for something, after all.)

The artist is Carla Sonheim.  She’s written a couple of books I now have in my library: Drawing and Painting Imaginary Animals and Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun.

Just perusing the first one had me in stitches, my fingers itching to grab paper, pencils and ink to see if I could make silliness happen for myself.  I’m no Sonheim, to be sure, but I had a blast.  Each drawing has a story that came together as I finished adding ink lines.

Carla advises us to start with an eye.  I love the eyes on her blobimals (blob-animals), which are not that easy to accomplish – leastwise, not for me.  Here’s my first attempt.

(This eye belonged to an alligator that had been trained by the US Navy to retrieve underwater explosive devices [UEDs, for short] and take them out to sea where they would be detonated away from ships.  This gator was the slowest one in his class, and didn’t remember he was to spit it out when he reached the destination.  The alligators were supposed to drop the UED, then swim to the reward buoy, where they’d receive a whole turkey.)

Another technique I tried is blind contour drawing, though I think it’s called something else.  You close your eyes, pencil to paper and begin drawing a shape – animal or plant or anything.  Some of Carla's funniest looking creatures started out unintentional; no particular form in mind.  Alejandro was my first attempt. 

Carla states there are a lot of three-legged dogs in her neighborhood.  Same in mine, evidently.  Our minds seem to forget that fourth leg!  (Alejandro is a Chihuahua.  He lives on a Basque sheep ranch in Wyoming.  Alejandro weighs about five pounds/two kilos and is the prime herd dog for his owner.  In fact, he is the only remaining sheep dog.  Sheep ate the others, and tried to take Alejandro down, but he escaped…with his attacker’s nose.  Since that event, the sheep give him a wide berth whenever he enters their pens.)

Next blind contour was intended to be a cat.  By the time I finished drawing the features (my eyes open, though not much better), it resembled neither a cat nor a dog, but made me think of a fox.  Meet Reggie. 

(Reggie is a ladies’ man, a smooth operator, a cunning fellow.  His sartorial style is the envy of all canids the world over.  A rakish devil, Reggie has been divorced nineteen times and is the father of 37 kits.)

Next, I tried letting watercolors flow into quasi-animal shapes, trying to keep a loose hand, as Carla suggests in her bird tutorial.  My first one was too wet and colors flowed everywhere.  In addition, I thought the first color I used was too watery, but it turned out not watery enough.  It dried much more opaque than hers did.  This is Gloria, a Vegas fan dancer.  Not happy with the results – overworked, tried to ‘think’ the results instead of just letting things happen naturally.

(Gloria is from Chile, originally.  She was brought to the US by magazine-magnate, ex-society-prison-inmate Martha Stewart to be one of the breeder hens for Stewart’s planned “Easter Egg” line of chickens, the name of which she would copyright and sue anyone who dared refer to the birds in writing, or even just say the name out loud.  Remember, “It’s a good thing”?  Gloria ran away from Stewart’s farm when Stewart went to prison.  Gloria held a variety of jobs [nanny to a nest of copperheads, her least favorite] before landing in Vegas, where the green hue of her feathers made her a natural for the chorus line – no expensive costumes needed, you see.  In the drawing above, Gloria stepped on a sequin and did an unexpected split, causing all the other girls to collide with each other, many of whom fell off the stage and into the audience...of a convention of weasels from Manhattan.)

Finally, there’s Charlie.  With this one, I followed Carla’s bird tutorial closely.  I thinned the color, wiped the brush tip to remove the excess and just let the color go where it would.  I changed colors and added the rear end of another bird, to create the illusion that Charlie was in a flock of birds.  Then, unfortunately, I gilded the lily.  Carla flicks additional color onto her backgrounds to give texture to the painting.  I picked up some lovely brown color and tapped the brush against my finger.

Oops!  Brown blobs fell across the beautiful bird shape I had just carefully created.  Drat!

I thought the painting was ruined, until I turned it around and around, as Carla teaches, to see if anything else ‘appears’.  That’s when I knew how to finish the drawing after the blobs dried.

  (Charlie was flying back east to visit his brothers and sisters, but couldn’t afford first-class accommodations.  He ended up in coach, at the end of a long line of grasshopper-eating pigeons.  Charlie vowed he’d never again fly coach, with pigeons, or eat grasshoppers!)

If any of you like to draw, or just want some silliness in your lives, I recommend Carla Sonheim’s web site and her books. (The only payment I've received for this unsolicited recommendation is the laughter and joyfulness found therein.)

(Edited because of grandson.  7-21-2-13)

Counting Coup by the Light of the (Super)Moon

under the oak beech
tree Saturday night 

 

A couple or so weeks ago, I met a wolf leading an Apache-Inuit man down the street.  The wolf, named Ee-see (phonetic spelling), allowed me to touch her, to pet her from head to tail, for nearly three minutes, all the while leaning hard against my legs.

 

 

I told my friend Mike that that counted as one wolf coup and that I would celebrate it at the next full moon.  (Mike responded that he wasn't sure who had counted coup on whom - Ee-see, or I on her.)

 

Tonight, I celebrated.  (I hope the Butcher from Pittsburgh wasn't looking out his windows this time, not that it matters.  I think he has come to expect just about anything coming from my property.)

 

I danced in the dazzling light of the nearly full moon.  Wearing a tanned deer hide over my shoulders, I carried a fan made of crow feathers I've found over the years.  The counting coup ritual is supposed to be carried out in the company of other warriors who could attest to the bravery and success of your deed, but there was no one to vouch for my coup.  

 

I sang a song of Ee-see and her man, Chief, quietly so as not to disturb the neighbors.  Of course, a couple of dogs heard it and began barking, but not consistently.  I sang to the Moon and she joined me, her mouth forming a circle as she howled Ee-see's part.

 

At first hiding in the shadow of overhead oak branches, I moved out into the alley between my house and The Butcher's.  (The surface was level and better lit.)  I dipped and swayed and pranced in a circle to the imagined sound of drums and dozens of voices repeating my story, until my legs got tired and I was out of breath.  That was enough.

 

The fireflies twinkled in place of the stars.  A soft breeze came up and rustled the oak leaves.  The magic of the moment was waning, so I stood still and quiet, listening to the sounds of the night: mosquitoes humming in my ears, whispers of the leaves in the breeze, dogs half-heartedly barking now and then, a cat yowling at a rival for its territory.  The urban sounds faded from consciousness as I stood, arms stretched out from my sides, letting the intense moonlight shine down over me and my tiny patch of earth.  I felt whole and at peace, grateful for the opportunity to touch a wild thing and have it touch me in return.

 

Things like this don't happen very often in a lifetime, and should be cherished and remembered for the rest of one's days;  celebrated with song and dance and joy.

 

And moonlight.

 

 

 

(A little bit of Bruce doesn't hurt, either.)

 

(Mike, when you touch the bear, I'll come celebrate with you, deerskin, crow feathers and all.)

UNDONE

The last straw for me with FB came this morning when I opened my account and was visually assaulted with images and messages from other peoples' accounts about what they liked, what was on their minds, and so on.

I must be getting old.  I can't take the unending barrage of images of people I don't know, and information about other Facebookers, every time I check in.  Plus, Facebook makes it too irritating and difficult to secure my privacy (We are FB.  Privacy?  You ain't got no privacy.  You don't need no privacy!  We don't have to protect your stinkin' privacy!*).  So, I deleted my account (**).

 

I guess I'm just not sociable enough for social media.

 

(*Sorry, Alphonso.)
(** I think...I hope!)

Oh, No! What Have I Done?

I swore, up and down, right and left, that I'd never - ever! - open a Facebook account.

I opened a Facebook account.

My bad; way bad. 

The second mistake I made was trying to pick a few people from my email file to tell about my FB site.  I thought I would be able to open my email list and click on the two or three names I wanted.  But, no-o-o!  FB doesn't work like that.  Quicker than I can think, my entire address book was uploaded onto FB.  Even faster than that, any of those people who also had FB accounts suddenly appeared on my screen, under the heading People You Might Know.

Okay; at first.  I had forgotten I had some of these folks in my address book, but they are friends, so it was okay.  Surely I had some control over the selection of email addresses...right?

I'll never know, because faster than a speeding bullet or a bolt of lightning, or ice melting in the Mojave, hundreds...thousands...billions of other faces tore across the screen.  Who are all these people?!  Friends of friends of friends of friends - crikey, even Bill Clinton didn't have this many "friends of”! 

The images became a blur, a morphing confusion of features I almost recognized, moving too fast for my aging brain to register clearly.  I was getting seasick, despite sitting still in front of the monitor.

Then they started slowing down.  One group looked as if they’d fallen into a blender, all the bits and pieces mashed together into an amoebic blob.

I had a sense of dread come over me by the time the reel of faces faded to black.  If these unknown faces are polluting my Facebook account, is mine now embedded in theirs?  Am I going to have to hurt their feelings by denying their Friend requests?  Am I now responsible for remembering strangers’ birthdays, anniversaries?  Sending graduation gifts to their offspring?  Sending greeting cards at the appropriate occasions?  Will I be asked to sit their houses, children or iguanas while they vacation in the Bahamas, or Paris or Spain?  Or to lend them money?  Give them an extra body part?  (Actually, that might not be so bad, provided all they want is some body fat.  I have lots of that to spare.)

All this angst because I needed a Facebook account just to enter a contest sponsored by a television show I’ve become addicted to watching.

Will it never end?

(Edited 6-18-13)

Tuesday Extraordinaire

I touched a wolf today.

A young female, about 6 months old, similar in markings to the one in the photo above, but smaller, leaner, coat not as full; on two leashes, leading a man down the sidewalk.  I noticed her far down the street because she was loping along in a most un-dog-like fashion, almost sideways, nose to the ground, scanning side-to-side, as if tracking something.  As she (and he, on the other end of the leashes) came closer, I then noticed how large her ears were ("the better to hear you with, my dear") relative to her head, and her sharply pointed muzzle.  She was so unusual I stopped and waited for them to reach me.

Then I noticed the man.  About six feet tall, dressed in jeans, a blue cotton ikat-dyed shirt opened halfway down his chest, moccasins; two strings of large beads (18-24mm beads) around his neck (one looked like Arizona turquoise; the other, obsidian); long black hair, center parted, which fell down his back well past his ribs.  Beautiful brown eyes, equally beautiful smile.  I recognized him.  I had seen him at a convenience store in downtown a couple of days before.  His appearance and bearing are striking, in part because of his stride and his deep red-brown skin; in part because he doesn't look like any other person in this town of homogeneous men.

He looked as if he had stepped out of an old John-Wayne-western movie, or might have been a stand-in for Kevin Costner Rodney Grant in "Dances With Wolves."  The scene felt surreal, as though I had crossed the street into another place and time.  Weird  and unreal feeling, but exciting at the same time.

I asked him about his companion, guessing that it might be a coy-dog, or a German Shepard mix.

"No."  (That's all he said, just the one word.)

Well, what is it?

"She's a wolf.  Pure wolf.  Almost six months old, still a pup."

Wolf?  Really?

"I wouldn't lie to you."

He clicked his tongue and the wolf-pup loped back to him, standing between us, not looking at either of us, but scanning the road, the traffic, ears turning this way and that as she listened intently to all the sounds around her.  I put my hand near her nose, not certain if she would merely sniff it (as domesticated dogs like to do) or have it for a snack.  She gave it a cursory sniff, then looked up at me.

Grey eyes looked deep into my faded blue ones.  An intense gaze that began to make me uneasy.  She blinked and looked away, resuming her hyper-vigilant scanning of the world around her.  I had been dismissed as not important, no threat, put in my place.

I looked back at the man she was taking along on her hunt. 

Are you Native American, I asked?

"Yes."  Laconic, monosyllabic, yet friendly in tone.

What tribe?

"Apache and..."

My brain ran through all the names I knew for the different groups of Apache peoples - Kiowa, Mescalero, Chiricahua, Jicarilla, in preparation for asking my next question.  Bad habit of mine, jumping ahead like that, not listening carefully.

"...Inuit.  I'm from Alaska."

While my mind tried to figure out the logistics of that pairing of DNA donors, I asked the wolf's name.

"Easy."

Easy?

"Ee-see," he said, slowly.  She-wolf came back to his side.

Ee-see then stepped in front of me and leaned against my legs.  A wolf...leaning into my body.  My heart beat faster, really thumping against my chest. 

I reached down and petted her back.  Ee-see leaned even harder against me.  I rubbed her coat from her neck down to her rump, over and over again, lost in the moment.  Her fur was so different from anything I've ever felt before, dog-like yet not, soft but not - if that makes any sense.

I rubbed my hands along her sides, patting her chest and belly.  Then I touched her ears.  A soft growling noise rumbled up from deep in her chest.  No touching the ears, evidently.  Since ears are just a side-long snap from all those teeth ("the better to eat you with, my dear"), I moved my hands out of harm's way and stood still.  The wolf continued to lean into me, and I against her.

I extended my hand to the man, introducing myself.

What's your name?  (The man doesn't offer much chatter.)

"Chief."

(Nah, he didn't just say that to me...did he?!)

Is that your name or your title?

"I am Chief Golden Wing.  Please call me Chief."

(You just don't get smart-alecky with someone whose wolf is leaning against your legs, you know?  Chief, he says, so Chief it will be.)

What brought you to Hanover?

"I moved here."

(Okay, then.)

Well, thank you, Chief, for letting me pet your wolf.  I'm glad to have met you both.

"I didn't let you pet my wolf.  Ee-see did."

I know.

I touched a wolf today.  And...and, she touched me.

(Mike: that's 1 wolf-coup.  I'll celebrate next full moon.)