Where’s Polonius? — And ‘Trixie’

CLAUDIUS: Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?

HAMLET: At supper.

Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 3

Yeah, I sometimes talk in a roundabout way, too, but I almost always prefer to say things in the simplest, most straightforward way possible. First, because that’s in keeping with the whole minimalist and unaffected Gwen John kind of approach to entertainment and art that I like. Second, because I am almost always trying to make people smile and people are more likely to smile if they understand what I’m saying.

*

Today’s post will complete a set.

Last week Friday’s post was the long, roundabout version of today’s post:

    Rocks And Mirrors: Scenes That Never Return


Yesterday’s post explained how I got from today’s post to last Friday’s post:

    Where’s Polonius? — And Jasper Johns


Today’s post is the original idea, the short, direct, initial imperative/initial response poem that I wrote last Thursday.

There were at least four personal reasons why I didn’t post this version last Friday. All those reasons still nag at me, but I’ve thought of a reasonably silly thing that kinda/sorta touches on all my concerns in one way or another.

And in my mind silly always wins.

Wednesday morning it occurred to me that if I just changed the name of the person I was writing about to a replacement name that I picked carefully, then I could go ahead and post this with something of the affection and humor I’d intended when I wrote it.

So here we go:

 
Rocks and Mirrors
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


My friend Trixie is a kaleidoscope.

She has rocks in her head. They’re beautiful

rocks, always tumbling, and when they reflect

off the fragmented mirrors of her self

they make beautiful, hypnotic patterns.


My friend Trixie is a kaleidoscope.

She doesn’t lie. She doesn’t tell the truth.

She is rocks and mirrors making patterns

that beguile and completely befuddle

anybody who gazes into her.

Where’s Polonius? — And Jasper Johns

CLAUDIUS: Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?

HAMLET: At supper.

Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 3

Yeah, I sometimes talk in a roundabout way, too. In fact, I probably have two or three different ways of speaking roundabout. Today I’m going to talk about one of them.

Today and tomorrow I’m going to finish up what I started talking about in the aside of Monday’s post.

Tomorrow I will put up the short, direct version of last week Friday’s post. (I haven’t gotten anybody’s permission to post it, but I think I’ve worked out a way to do it that won’t cause an international incident. But I’ve been wrong about such things before! Tune in tomorrow.)

Today I’m going to talk about the process of getting from the first poem, the short, direct version I’m going to post tomorrow, to the longer, roundabout version that I posted last Friday.

*

This blogging sequence is strange, starting with the final form from last Friday and talking, today, about what I’ll post tomorrow. But this seems kind of well-suited to a blog. You don’t hear the word “hypertext” much these days, but it used to be a very big buzz word. The whole idea of text on the net is that sequence can be defined by links and links can arrange different sequences in any order imaginable. The whole notion of ‘chronology’ becomes a kind of incidental condition, a variable condition . . .

*

Last week Thursday I wrote a short, direct poem. It was ten lines long and although I liked it, for various personal reasons I didn’t want to post it Friday.

So I thought of what Jasper Johns once wrote to himself about the process of creating art:

Take an object,
do something with it,
and then do something else with it.

Jasper Johns
from his notebooks
but quoted all over,
for instance, at the end
of this article

Thursday afternoon and evening, I did that with the short, direct poem.

I took it as the original object, and I did something with it. I wrote a second draft that removed one or two aspects of the poem that raised posting issues for me. I didn’t much like that second draft, but I knew it was only an intermediary stage. I then took that second draft and applied the second part of Johns’ advice, I did something else with it. I eliminated things, added things, and created a new version that I liked.

That’s the version that I posted Friday morning.

However, although I liked that post, it was quite different in many ways from the short, direct little poem that I’d started with. The original said something about a person. The original said something about my feelings. The original had—I hope!—a bit of humor to it.

The longer, roundabout version juxtaposed some of the original, person-oriented language with a mechanical subject. I thought that made for an interesting effect that would evoke different meanings for everyone who read it.

But it was completely different from what I’d started with.

This is an interesting issue that entertainers and artists have struggled with in many different media.

The painter Andrew Wyeth once said (quoted in, “The Helga Pictures”) that he’d like to get the spontaneity of a watercolor painted in twenty minutes in the solidarity of a finished painting. I’ve known musicians who would only buy live recordings because they felt studio work never captured the spark of a spontaneous performance.

Is it ever possible to keep the original spark and life of something you create from deep within yourself, responding to the particular, instantaneous realities of a moment—any moment!—while at the same time working over that creation consciously, systematically, adding and subtracting things based on conscious and external issues?

I don’t know. I suspect the answer is no. I suspect that’s why painters like Berthe Morisot remain true to Impressionist ideals their whole life—they become entranced by the primacy—and magic!—of the initial imperative and initial response.

But a very cool thing about the modern world, with the seemingly limitless quantities of digital storage available with easy indexing, is that everybody nowadays can have the best of both worlds.

Entertainers and artists can—somewhere—save their original creation and preserve the spark, the possibly idiosyncratic, possibly troublesome version of an idea. And they can—possibly somewhere else—save the more conscious, more crafted, possibly more presentable version of an idea.

Entertainers and artists win because they get to express all aspects of themselves.

Audiences and consumers win because they get—or can sometimes get—access to every manner of aesthetic experience imaginable. Art is food for the soul, and nowadays people have access to every manner of—so to speak—aesthetic protein, carbs and fats entertainers and artists can whip up.

*

Tomorrow will be a first for me and the blog. I’ll have two versions up of the same idea, one direct, straight from the heart. One more crafted and thoughtful.

I’m going to paraphrase Monty Python about this: If people reading these two versions enjoy themselves half as much as I did writing these two versions, then I’ll have enjoyed myself twice as much as they did!

Memories As Sacred As Stained Glass

In a curious way, and more than any other single thing, Thiebaud challenges us to be true to the real sources of our happiness, to the way that in a haphazard commercial culture, small areas of order appear—a San Francisco hill caught in a corridor of skyscrapers that look as inevitable as Monument Valley, a shop window seemingly laid out by the hand of God—and become in our memories as sacred as stained glass and at times as sad. What sustains his art is not so much how shadowed or complex his view of that happiness is, but how confidently he knows that getting the happiness down right will convey the sadness, too. He proposes that the American subject is the self-evidence of happiness, and . . . “The self-evidence of happiness!” (the little cakes seem to cry out at last, even as the pronouncer takes a breath for his last bite of the rhetorical apple). The self-evidence of happiness! Three bites and it’s gone.

Adam Gopnik
writing in —






The Weird Fact And The Big Romance


Dear Angie: Get Well Soon!


Wayne Thiebaud Where You Least Expect Him

Beard Talk

Right now I’m wearing a beard so my blog photo is a little out of date. However, my tentative plan is to shave off my beard next week, so I’m not going to update the photo.

I’m not wearing the beard as any kind of fashion statement.

A few weeks ago I cleaned out my closet and I found some old photographs of myself from when I went tandem skydiving with my friend Sandy. I was a bearded young man, back then, and I looked pretty happy. I remember feeling kind of happy back then, too. So I thought, what the heck, I’ll re-grow a beard and see if the look brings back a little cheerfulness.

The results have been equivocal.

Since nothing magical has happened—at least, nothing I know about as I type this—I might be going back to my more-or-less clean shaven look soon.

Next week Thursday will be my two year anniversary here at Impossible Kisses. I’m planning on updating my template and I might as well take the opportunity of updating my face as well. (Although the face bit will be going back to normal . . .)

*

I’m not really a snapshot kind of guy, but in the spirit of being wildly unusual (the theme of the blog is Forteana, after all) I’m going to put up three of the photos that inspired me to re-grow my beard.

One note: I’ve actually blogged about this particular day once before. My post “Magic, The Elder Gods, Fall Festivals” took place as my friend Sandy and I were driving home from our tandem skydiving adventure. (Or maybe we drove into town for lunch while waiting for the wind to die down.)

Anyway, on with the snapshots—


One cool thing about rural airfields—this was at Hinckley Field, Illinois—is that the whole place feels more like somebody’s backyard than like a real airport like Midway or O’Hare. This kind of stuff, old wrecks along the runway, frightened my friend Sandy, but I liked it. I wish I’d been drawing back then, because there was a lot that would have made cool pictures. This is me still in my street clothes.




This is me suiting up. My head, typically, is in the clouds. If you look carefully above the clouds over my left shoulder you can see one of the experienced skydivers coming down.


Here I am completely suited up, thinking. This isn’t me having second thoughts. This isn’t me nervous. This is me being envious. The skydiving club had two planes back then. One was a rickety, old single engine thing that looked like it was held together by duct tape and kind thoughts. My friend Sandy and I went up in that. The second plane—I’m looking at the second plane in this photo—was a big, beautiful, twin engine plane that looked like it had just flown out of an Indiana Jones adventure. Since Sandy and I went up on the same flight, I don’t have any photos of me actually coming down.

Where’s Polonius? —And The Real Emma Peel

CLAUDIUS: Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?

HAMLET: At supper.

Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 3

Yeah, I sometimes say things in a roundabout way, too. And I’m always on the lookout for other people saying interesting and unexpected things in odd ways. A few weeks ago—

I’m interrupting the regularly scheduled content of this post before it gets really silly for a completely unrelated behind-the-scenes aside:

Yes, I do sometimes say things in a roundabout way. In fact, last Friday’s post, “Rocks And Mirrors: Scenes That Never Return,” was a 27-line, roundabout version of a direct, 10-line poem I wrote last Thursday. For personal reasons I didn’t want to post the short, direct version. I still don’t. (Well, part of me does. But other parts of me do not.) However, I still have the short, direct version. And it is possible (well, it’s conceivable ) that someday I’ll speak again with the person both versions are about. If that ever happens, and if I get the chance, I’ll show her the short, direct version of last Friday’s post and see if she’ll give me her permission to post it. Then people can see and compare me speaking in a roundabout way to me speaking directly.

I now return this post to its regularly scheduled content. It gets silly fast . . .

— A few weeks ago I read a book from 1998 written by Patrick Macnee. He played John Steed on the TV show “The Avengers.” The book was, “The Avengers and Me.” It was a generally interesting book, but what stood out to me were a couple of stories Macnee told about Diana Rigg, the real Mrs. Peel.

The first story didn’t have any tricky language at all, but introduces Diana Rigg, right off, as not quite the same character as Mrs. Peel. Macnee allows one of the show’s directors to introduce Rigg:

“One of the girls I’d met about a year earlier, at Julian’s home, curiously enough, during a New Year’s party. It was one of those things where it was very crowded and someone knocked a plate of sandwiches from my hand. As I bent down to pick them up, I noticed a young girl lying under the piano and this wonderful voice said, “Hello. Who are you?” It was Diana Rigg.”

The second story is by Macnee himself and has a sentence that has stuck with me. I’ll put the sentence in bold:

“So Diana was kitted out, and given some lessons by Ray on how to tumble and fall. Not that she needed it, as she could move beautifully already. She had a gorgeous, direct carriage, a wonderful voice, stunning auburn hair and a look of flashing insolence.

“I thought, “My God. I’ve got to get to know her!” So I took her to dinner at the Connaught Hotel.

“We were both perfectly outrageous, obviously trying to test each other’s limits of what we liked and didn’t like, and naturally everything gravitated to sex. Di said she only made exceptions for men of intellect, and gave me a withering look which suggested that I didn’t fit the bill. I realized then that we had this strange communion.

“The very next day we went to work!”

“… only made exceptions for men of intellect …” What the heck does that mean?

Is Macnee saying—without saying it—that Diana Rigg preferred women but ‘made exceptions’ for guys she considered smart?

If that’s what Macnee is saying, then it’s a pretty British and tricky and roundabout way of saying someone is gay . . .

Rocks And Mirrors: Scenes That Never Return

I don’t know how they’re made now, but years back
a kaleidoscope was made with mirrors
and colored rocks arranged inside a tube.

When you rotated the tube the rocks fell
into colorful, random positions
and segments of mirror in a circle
made tricky scenes when you looked through the tube.

All of the scenes inside the tube were real
but any movement of the tube changed them
so you never could know what you would see.

And you couldn’t show someone what you saw
because the slightest movement changed the scene
so nobody else could see what you saw.

All of the scenes inside the tube were real.
All of the scenes were unique, interesting.
The scenes once observed, changed, never returned.
The scenes in the tube could be hypnotic.
Sometimes it could be hard to look away.
Sometimes you wanted to see more, more, more . . .

All of the scenes inside the tube were real.
The scenes inside the tube were never lies.

They were pretty rocks doing what rocks do,
shiny mirrors doing what mirrors do.

And everything you saw would go away
at the slightest movement, the slightest touch.

Kaleidoscopes. Sometimes you want to see
more, more, more of scenes that never return.

Looking Back At Butterflies From Atlantis

At the Oak Lawn Public Library where
homeless people cool down in the summer
and warm up in the winter, if you do
a computer search of their catalogue
for “Paris Hilton” you will get two hits,
a horror DVD called “House Of Wax,”
and the book, “Confessions Of An Heiress,”
which Paris Hilton wrote with Merle Ginsberg.

If you venture into the stacks you’ll find
Paris Hilton’s book on a shelf in the
seven-nineties. In fact, you will find it
on a shelf right below another book,
“Price Guide To Plastic Collectibles,” by
Lindi McNulty. Paris Hilton’s book,
written with Merle Ginsberg, tells a person
how to live as if they were an heiress.

If you sit down at one of the public
access computers and do a Google
internet search for “Paris Hilton,” you
will get more than eighty-three million hits.
If you venture into those stacks you might
be wandering around for quite some time.





Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #5: The Butterflies From Atlantis

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #4: Atlantis

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #3: Fons Et Origo

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #2: Paris Hilton

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #1: Et In Arcadia Ego

I wrote that more than a year ago. It’s one of my favorite five-day themes.

Those five days were pretty content-heavy. I mentioned a lot of books that are important to me. I talked about an oddball Pangea theory that I find very interesting. And of all the metaphors I’ve come up with for this blog over the last two years, the notion of books as ‘butterflies from Atlantis’ might be my favorite.

However, of all the stuff contained in those five posts, I think the line that caused me the most concern was when I mentioned that a Google search for Paris Hilton returns more than 83 million hits.

First of all, that was true.

On the day I wrote that section, I sat down at a computer, did a Google search for Paris Hilton and got more than 83 million hits. I incorporated the number into my post and moved on. Early the next day I did another Paris Hilton search and got a different number, something like 72 million hits. A day later I got more than 85 million hits.

Since I was taking a lot of care making sure all the titles I used were real, making sure all the references I made were real, it bugged me that a person doing a Google search on their computer would come up with a different number than I’d used in my post.

I considered changing my phrasing to something ambiguous, like ‘dozens of millions’ but once I’ve written a little ahead it makes me nervous changing earlier words because everything, to my eyes and ears, goes together and a change just looks and sounds out of place.

So I left in the 83 million number. But it’s more than a year later and it still bugs me.

Now, back here in the present, I did a Google search this morning for Paris Hilton and got only about 65 million hits.

That’s way less than any of the numbers I got when I was writing those five posts.

On one hand, I hope people clicking through my index page and re-reading those five posts realize that I used a real number there, I didn’t just grab a big number out of the air.

On the other hand, I guess it’s kind of good news: The Paris Hilton obsession among netizens has died down by something like 20 million hits.

If Paris Hilton continues to lose about 10 million hits per year, in less than a decade she will disappear from the internet!

Politics, Philosophy And Hilary Duff

It occurs to me that some people might be wondering why a forty-seven year old guy like me even knows who Alyson Michalka is. It also occurs to me that some people might suspect they know why a forty-seven year old guy like me knows who Alyson Michalka is. The actual, real reason has a little politics in it, a little philosophy in it and a little Hilary Duff in it. I’ll talk in Wednesday’s post about why I started watching some shows on the Disney Channel.

My Alyson Michalka / Giant Clown Hammer Fantasy

Introduction

I am not by my nature a fan of anything Disney. I think there are real monsters in Disney creations. [The Monsters In Disney’s ‘Mulan’] But life takes us on expeditions and half the fun of an expedition is discovering things you never expected.

My expedition to the Disney Channel started about five or six years ago at a political website called “Free Republic.”


Politics and Philosophy

Five or six years ago most of the time I spent on the internet was at Free Republic. I’m not a very political guy and I’m certainly not a libertarian, but back then Free Republic was a wildly diverse, wildly smart and wildly fun site. A great many Freepers were the kind of people who were interesting to talk to about anything. [La Belle Dame Sans Merci]

One day I was going on and on about a great book called “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” and I was singling out TV violence, saying violence on TV was not only omnipresent, but it wasn’t operatic and it wasn’t realistic, it was just insane and almost always depicted with bizarre and unreal consequences. A Freeper agreed with me, but then suggested I might enjoy a TV show on the Disney Channel called “Lizzie McGuire.”

Now, normally if someone recommends something to me I just make a mental note and then move on, waiting until I hear a similar recommendation from two or three other people. However Freepers are a breed unto themselves and when a cool Freeper recommends something I generally check it out.

Free Republic is not the same today as it was back then. Many of the people I was close to have been banned in one or another purge at the site. Political groups do such things. Of course, many people return using a new screen name, but the general social tone of Free Republic isn’t as fun as it used to be. There are still wildly interesting people there, but the ratio of cool-to-mundane (or even cool-to-lunatic) has changed drastically.

The social scene at Free Republic seems to be following the basic laws of human stupidity as discovered by economist Carlo Cipolla.

Whether one considers classical, or medieval, or modern or contemporary times one is impressed by the fact that any country moving uphill has its unavoidable X fraction of stupid people. However the country moving uphill also has an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who manage to keep the X fraction at bay and at the same time produce enough gains for themselves and the other members of the community to make progress a certainty.

In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to X; however in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals. Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the X fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.

The Laws are not as easy to find as they once were, but right now they are here: THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY

Hilary Duff

So a Freeper recommended a Disney Channel TV show called “Lizzie McGuire” and I checked it out.

And I discovered what very quickly became one of my favorite TV shows of all time.

“Lizzie McGuire” was (it only filmed 65 episodes) ostensibly a kids’ show about a young girl and her friends making the transition from junior high to high school. But the creators and producers actually patterned the look-and-feel of the show after a reasonably adult and very odd film, “Run Lola Run.” The result was a “kids’ show” with almost always interesting stories almost always told in interesting ways. In a nutshell, it was like “Seinfeld” but without the adult, New York ethos.

It’s always a very good sign when a live action TV show involves animators, and “Lizzie McGuire” not only featured cartoon interludes by animator Debra Solomon, but some episodes were directed by the always funny Savage Steve Holland.

“Lizzie McGuire” stared then unknown Hilary Duff and the show became so popular that the young star was able to—or rather her parents were able to—leverage her success into manipulation of the show’s content. So, the final few episodes of the show were not as good as the bulk of the episodes.

Those years—just after the turn of the century—were a kind of golden era for the Disney Channel. In addition to “Lizzie McGuire” there were three other shows that have become justifiable famous. Oddly—almost predictably—Disney allowed all these good shows to run out their contracts and did not negotiate reasonable terms to keep the shows in production. (The partial exception was “Kim Possible.”)

“Even Stevens” was another family show about kids in high school. But like “Lizzie McGuire” the creators and producers kept their eyes on the stories rather than just on “kids’ issues” and most episodes were fun to watch.

“Kim Possible” was an animated series and, again, the creators and producers focused on action and entertainment and avoided cookie-cutter silliness that seems to infect normal cartoon shows. “Kim Possible” won so many awards and became so popular that even Disney buckled and negotiated reasonable terms for a fourth season after production halted.

“Phil of the Future” was another family show about a family from the future struggling to get by in the present world. (Alyson Michalka played the young man-from-the-future’s present-day girl friend.) The show wasn’t always as independent-minded as the three other shows I’ve singled out, but it was usually pretty darn good.


The Disney Channel of the present day is pretty lame compared to what it used to be. (I don’t watch anything in their current lineup.) It could be the basic laws of human stupidity at work, or it could be the simple ebb-and-flow of behind-the-scenes talent in the TV business.

But a few years back, the Disney Channel, amazingly, was really fun to watch.

2008 1st Quarter Index

March Archive


Monday, March 31, 2008 -- My Alyson Michalka / Giant Clown Hammer Fantasy


Friday, March 28, 2008 -- Expeditions (500th post!)

Thursday, March 27, 2008 -- Today, Tomorrow And Yesterday

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 -- Jeffery Camp On Gwen John

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 -- My Two Favorite Monster Snake Movies

Monday, March 24, 2008 -- Me As A Supervillain Without A Supervillain Fortune


Friday, March 21, 2008 -- The Abandonment Of Meaning

Thursday, March 20, 2008 -- Fine Art, Pop Art And Andy Warhol

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 -- Big Reductions At The MCA’s Karen Kilimnik Exhibit

Tuesday, March 18, 2008 -- Closed Until Further Notice

Monday, March 17, 2008 -- Thoughtful, Troubled, Terrified Of Myself


Friday, March 14, 2008 -- Diane And The Can Of Squid (5 of 5)

Thursday, March 13, 2008 -- Diane And The Can Of Squid (4 of 5)

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 -- Diane And The Can Of Squid (3 of 5)

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 -- Diane And The Can Of Squid (2 of 5)

Monday, March 10, 2008 -- Diane And The Can Of Squid (1 of 5)


Friday, March 07, 2008 -- Water Soluble Oils On Plain Unprimed Paper

Thursday, March 06, 2008 -- “Lizard Man” Returns?

Wednesday, March 05, 2008 -- A Typical Day On The Road To Utopia

Tuesday, March 04, 2008 -- I The Titanic Strike A Neon Iceberg

Monday, March 03, 2008 -- How To Tally A Sorted List



February Archive


Friday, February 29, 2008 -- I’m Looking At A Photo On A Page

Thursday, February 28, 2008 -- If I Could

Wednesday, February 27, 2008 -- Confused And Weary

Tuesday, February 26, 2008 -- Rose Serf

Monday, February 25, 2008 -- The Difference Between Flowers And People


Friday, February 22, 2008 -- Three Oldies But Goodies (Annotated)

Thursday, February 21, 2008 -- Marisa Pretended She Didn’t Notice The Cartoonist

Wednesday, February 20, 2008 -- A Woman Always Knows

Tuesday, February 19, 2008 -- Stacy Wanted To Cry

Monday, February 18, 2008 -- Keira Knightley Is Hiring


Friday, February 15, 2008 -- A Paddy Chayefsky Valentine (Part 3 of 3)

Thursday, February 14, 2008 -- A Paddy Chayefsky Valentine (Part 2 of 3)

Wednesday, February 13, 2008 -- A Paddy Chayefsky Valentine (Part 1 of 3)

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 -- Goblin Universe Love (2 of 2): Christians

Monday, February 11, 2008 -- Goblin Universe Love (1 of 2): Clouds


Friday, February 08, 2008 -- The Muse Ship

Thursday, February 07, 2008 -- There’s Nothing Beethoven Could Do To Help

Wednesday, February 06, 2008 -- Ellison’s “Shattered Like A Glass Goblin”

Tuesday, February 05, 2008 -- Polaris In The News And Out

Monday, February 04, 2008 -- Susan Always Tries (Pencil Cartoon & Bonus Cartoon!)


Friday, February 01, 2008 -- Snow Day!



January Archive


Thursday, January 31, 2008 -- Pluto And Beyond #3: The Golden Age of Outer Solar System Studies

Wednesday, January 30, 2008 -- Pluto And Beyond #2: The Ecliptic

Tuesday, January 29, 2008 -- Pluto And Beyond #1: Clyde Tombaugh

Monday, January 28, 2008 -- Lost Pieces


Friday, January 25, 2008 -- The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #5

Thursday, January 24, 2008 -- The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #4

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 -- The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #3

Tuesday, January 22, 2008 -- The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #2

Monday, January 21, 2008 -- The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #1


Friday, January 18, 2008 -- “Liefde Baart Kunst”

Thursday, January 17, 2008 -- The Curse Of Loch Ness #2 — Heidi

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 -- The Curse Of Loch Ness #1 — Tess

Tuesday, January 15, 2008 -- My Five Celebrity Pencil Cartoons (Annotated)

Monday, January 14, 2008 -- Women And Captions


Friday, January 11, 2008 -- Why I’d Make A Terrible Rock Star

Thursday, January 10, 2008 -- Eagle Inn: Top Ten Nonsense Anagrams

Wednesday, January 09, 2008 -- Chiaroscuro Poses

Tuesday, January 08, 2008 -- Something Magic, Unknown, Daring Me To Know

Monday, January 07, 2008 -- Faux Mischa Dreams


Friday, January 04, 2008 -- He Drew Her, Then . . .

Thursday, January 03, 2008 -- Noli Me Tangere

Wednesday, January 02, 2008 -- 2007 Complete Index

My Alyson Michalka / Giant Clown Hammer Fantasy

This is a little convoluted, but it’s a glimpse into my gray matter and that’s nothing but convolutions.

*

This is one of my favorite fantasies—I’ve got dozens of these things. I’m thinking of retiring this fantasy, however, because it has a little pathos in it, at the end, and I don’t really like pathos at all.

*

This fantasy starts with me booked to appear on the David Letterman Show to promote some best-selling book I’ve written. Also on the show that night is the actress/singer Alyson Michalka who is booked to promote some new movie she has coming out. On the morning of the show, during show prep when Alyson and I are sitting around backstage in the green room, word gets around that the show’s musical guest for that day has cancelled at the last minute. As the producers scramble to get a replacement, Alyson and I put our heads together. She’s a great singer, I point out, and I’ve been playing guitar for years as a hobby. If they can’t get a replacement musical guest, maybe the two of us can save the day by doing a musical number . . .

So we talk to the producer and he thinks it’s a fun idea and Alyson and I quickly rehearse something cool, like, for instance, a duet version of “Whipping Post” which I just happen to know.

So we rehearse, say, “Whipping Post” and some other songs and everything goes really well and Paul Shaffer even asks us to sit in with the band for the whole show and play through the commercial breaks.

During one commercial break, Alyson and I do a little schtick, where I start to play and sing a sappy, old, folk song/love song kind of thing and, as I get started and the audience realizes what a sappy song I’m performing, Alyson picks up a giant clown hammer and gestures behind me. As the audience applauds and cheers, Alyson brings down the giant clown hammer and bonks me on the head. I immediately launch into a better song, a cool song, maybe something like Mott The Hoople’s cover of “Ready for Love” as a duet with Alyson.

The cool songs go well and the audience enjoys themselves and everybody comes away from the show happy. That’s pretty much how the fantasy ends. Everybody’s happy. Cool fantasy.

But—

Now, there are a lot of sappy songs that fit such an occasion, that call for a bonk on the head with a giant clown hammer, but for personal reasons I usually imagine myself starting to play and sing Bread’s “Diary.” The trouble is, having a fantasy like this means I’ve been thinking about these darn lyrics every time I run through the fantasy. I like the fantasy, but the actual lyrics to “Diary” are pretty much pathos-driven. Most people just know the chorus (“Wouldn’t you know it/She wouldn’t show it”) and maybe the first verse, but actually the final verse reveals what’s really going on and it’s not so much a love song as a loss song. I’m retiring this fantasy. Here are the complete lyrics:

I found her diary underneath a tree
And started reading about me
The words she’d written took me by surprise
You’d never read them in her eyes

They said that she’d found the love she waited for

Wouldn’t you know it
She wouldn’t show it

When she was confronted with the writing there
She just pretended not to care
I passed it off as just in keeping with
Her total disconcerting air

And though she tried to hide the love that she denied

Wouldn’t you know it
She wouldn’t show it

And as I go through my life
I will give to her my wife
All the sweet things that I can find

I found her diary underneath a tree
And started reading about me
The words began to stick and tears to flow
Her meaning now was clear to see

The love she’d waited for was someone else not me

Wouldn’t you know it
She wouldn’t show it

And as I go through my life
I will wish for her his wife
All the sweet things that she can find
All the sweet things they can find

Wouldn’t you know it
She wouldn’t show it

Wouldn’t you know it
She wouldn’t show it

Wouldn’t you know it
She wouldn’t show it

P.S. It occurs to me that some people might be wondering why a forty-seven year old guy like me even knows who Alyson Michalka is. It also occurs to me that some people might suspect they know why a forty-seven year old guy like me knows who Alyson Michalka is. The actual, real reason has a little politics in it, a little philosophy in it and a little Hilary Duff in it. I’ll talk in Wednesday’s post about why I started watching some shows on the Disney Channel.

Expeditions

It’s always disconcerting, venturing
after the creature from the Black Lagoon
and encountering Frankenstein’s monster
or going out looking for UFOs
and seeing a rainbow that collapses
down around you like colorful rubble
but rubble that grows hands and reaches up
colorful fingers that somehow you know
would grab you and strangle you if they could.

Monsters. And that’s what makes monster hunting
so interesting, addictive, hypnotic—
you never know what you will discover.

And if you can just keep yourself alive
through the boredom between expeditions
and if the terror of imagining
what the monsters might do if they caught you
finally doesn’t become too much for you
that’s what makes monster hunting so much fun—
down deep you know the next expedition
might take you to what you are searching for.






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This is my 500th post.

Pretty cool, huh? I can cook, too!

Today, Tomorrow And Yesterday

Tomorrow’s post is going to be something special for the occasion.

Tomorrow’s post will be short. I wrote it yesterday morning. It will be short, but it summarizes my feelings about life in general and this blog in particular. And it’s about monsters, so it’s not wildly off-topic for a change!

*

Before I get to tomorrow, however, I want to revisit two very recent posts.

*

Just a few days ago, back on Monday, I wrote:

Although I try pretty darn hard to have as few
of the seven characteristics of a supervillain as possible,
just like Lex, the supervillain on Smallville,
I still manage, damn it, to push away
everybody who tries to be my friend.

I wish this were not true.

In fact, in my whole life, of all the subjunctives I’ve banged my stupid head against, this one is the hardest, this one hurts the most.

I won’t forget. Nope. Won’t even try to forget.

I won’t forget for two good reasons:

First, lucky people get a second chance, and when they screw up that second chance, really lucky people get a third, fourth or even fifth chance to try and get things right. If I’m one of those really lucky people, if I get a completely undeserved third, fourth or even fifth chance to get things right, I want to remember all the stupid things I’ve done and I want to remember all the wonderful, cool things my mistakes cost me.

Second, even if the people in my present life sail off beyond the horizon, out of sight forever, I will meet new people in the future. Any stupidity I can spare them by remembering what I did in the past can only help.

So, no, I’m not going to forget. I’m not going to try to forget.


*


Last week Friday I posted:

The title of this painting by Karen Kilimnik is “Chloe (from Blood on Satan’s Claw).” It is an oil on canvas work from 1996 that was shown in an exhibit called “Facing Reality: The Seavest Collection of Contemporary Realism Exhibition” at the Neuberger Museum of Art.



This is an oil painting of an unknown actress playing a bit part in an obscure film. (The film “Blood on Satan’s Claw,” 1971, doesn’t list a ‘Chloe’ in the credits.) Does the process of Kilimnik singling out this image and calling our attention to it in an oil painting make a statement about something? Old movies? Unknown actresses?

Is there a point to this?

Yesterday afternoon I was reading Andy Warhol’s autobiography. A passage made me think about how Kilimnik made use of that fleeting, lost moment from a fleeting, lost film.

Warhol wrote:

I always like to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things. Things that were discarded, that everybody knew were no good, I always thought had a great potential to be funny. It was like recycling work. I always thought there was a lot of humor in leftovers. When I see an old Esther Williams movie and a hundred girls are jumping off their swings, I think of what the auditions must have been like and about all the takes where maybe one girl didn’t have the nerve to jump when she was supposed to, and I think about her left over on the swing. So that take of the scene was a leftover on the editing-room floor—an out-take—and the girl was probably a leftover at that point—she was probably fired—so the whole scene is much funnier than the real scene where everything went right, and the girl who didn’t jump is the star of the out-take.

I’m not saying that popular taste is bad so that what’s left over from the bad taste is good: I’m saying that what’s left over is probably bad, but if you can take it and make it good or at least interesting, then you’re not wasting as much as you would otherwise. You’re recycling work and you’re recycling people, and you’re running your business as a by-product of other businesses. Of other directly competitive businesses, as a matter of fact. So that’s a very economical operating procedure. It’s also the funniest operating procedure because, as I said, leftovers are inherently funny.

“The Philosophy of Andy Warhol”

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This is post #499.

Jeffery Camp On Gwen John

Gwen John is one of my favorite artists.

She has the three characteristics I admire most in any artist or entertainer:

1. She developed a technique that said a very great deal with what appeared to be very little effort.
   
   
2. She sharpened her sensitivity and awareness so that she knew (or could take good guesses at) what was the simplest thing that needed to be said, the simplest thing she needed to ask her technique to accomplish.
   
   
3. She had the strength-of-character to keep her self restrained, to trust her sensitivity and technique and the audience to carry the day, to accomplish art, to allow art to happen.
   

Jeffery Camp is an accomplished, contemporary British artist who knows Gwen John’s world well. This is Camp writing about John:

Augustus John learned a kind of sweeping line drawing from Tonks. It was swishy and not very useful. It was less slick than Tonks, but compared with Sickert’s workmanlike drawings, or the gentle poetry of his sister, Gwen, it was too polished to be good for anything, except its august boast. But Augustus was fond of his sister, and by his example showed exactly what she did not need. She went and found a greater ego in Rodin (an even faster draughtsman, and a great sculptor). She met Picasso, whose enormous ego had a brilliant pencil to go with it. Plainly, surrounded by so much macho puff and virtuosity, she was left only a little space for spiritual retreat: a tiny room, a chair, a softly filtering light falling on a table and a book, a stillness punctuated only by the silent paw-falls of her cats. Her technique for painting was frugal and sufficient and no different from the one she learned at the Slade. Flax canvas tacked to a stretcher was sized with warm rabbit skin glue, then coated with a half-chalk ground, left rather absorbent. She used only a few primary colors—the main one bright, the others less bright. They were mixed with half-and-half turpentine and oil with more oil added as the painting proceeded. She had been taught to paint tonally, sight-size. But what they could not teach was Gwen’s feather-light touch, the delicate crumbles, the pale colors, or the power of her spirit. (Have you ever tried to break a feather with a straight pull?) Gwen posed for Auguste Rodin. It is difficult to imagine him posing in Gwen’s cane chair!

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This is post #498.

My Two Favorite Monster Snake Movies

First, a note to blogger “Gideon:” Thank you for your comments. However, if you want me and others to be able to visit your blog, you must change the setting in your profile that keeps your profile private. You must set your profile to ‘sharable’ so that people can click on your name in the comment box and visit your blog.

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My two favorite monster snake movies are “Python” and “Python 2.” They’re both very low budget, but really good fun.

I think what I like most about “Python” is that almost all of the monster snake scenes take place outdoors and in bright daylight. Most monster films arrange to have monster scenes take place at night. Directors and producers will say the darkness heightens the dramatic effect, but they really do it because night scenes let them cut corners on special effects. Darkness and shadows make cheap special effects look a little better.

“Python” simply throws caution to the wind. The special effects aren’t all world-class, but just seeing almost everything in bright daylight makes for something like the kind of excitement and fun of the old Ray Harryhausen movies when he did almost all his effects in ‘normal’ lighting situations.

“Python 2” is in many ways the opposite of “Python.” Where “Python” took place mostly outdoors in sunlight, almost all of “Python 2” takes place in a generic ‘underground military base.’ Most of the action is people running through corridors, running from shadow to shadow.

However “Python 2” has a beautiful Australian actress named Simmone Jade Mackinnon as the heroine. She’s very pretty and she plays the whole movie with a strange Russian accent that somehow manages to be both almost believable and almost cartoon-like at the same time. Watching—and listening to!—Mackinnon struggle with her boyfriend, CIA agents, a Russian soldier, two monster snakes and her odd Russian dialect makes for a very pleasant movie experience.

Neither of these films is, you know, cinema, but they’re both lots of fun and because they’re a few years old most rental places only charge a dollar or two to check out the DVDs.

*

Oh, by the way, this week Friday will be my 500th post. Today is post #497.

Me As A Supervillain Without A Supervillain Fortune

1. The supervillain has a selfish, antisocial mission. The supervillain seeks something—typically wealth or power, but often fame or infamy in addition—that will serve his interests and not those of others or the larger culture.
   
   
2. Supervillains are superior to the ordinary authorities. They have cunning, genius, resources, powers or extraordinary abilities that render the ordinary agents of the social order helpless to stop them, or at least put the authorities at a distinct disadvantage.
   
   
3. The supervillain’s dream reaches far beyond the acquisitive scheme of the ordinary crook. The supervillain is an artist whose medium is crime.
   
   
4. The supervillain’s mania is what raises him above the common person and above the common criminal. It is this mania that permits the supervillain to view the epic criminal acts as art or as analogous to great accomplishments in other fields and also to accomplish (or nearly accomplish, as he is almost always stopped by the hero) his great scheme.
   
   
5. The supervillain’s selfishness is absolute, solipsistic. He sees himself as the center of existence.
   
   
6. This self-aggrandizement arises from a sense of victimhood, from a wound that the supervillain never recovers from.
   
   
7. The supervillain’s wound prompts him to monologue, to sit the hero down—whether to dinner or in a death trap—and tell his story.
   

Seven Characteristics Of A Supervillain

Lately my self-image has been very . . . crumpled.


Lately I’ve seen myself as a kind of penniless, irrelevant version of Lex Luthor, the supervillain on the TV show Smallville.

Lately, in fact, I’ve seen myself as Lex as he appeared at the end of the episode where he winds up in a straightjacket, banging his head against the padded wall of a cell in the Belle Reve mental hospital. (Season three, episode 8, “Shattered.”)


At first, my thinking was something like this:

        Although I try pretty darn hard to have as few
        of the seven characteristics of a supervillain as possible,
        just like Lex, the supervillain on Smallville,
        I still manage, damn it, to push away
        everybody who tries to be my friend.


Then I did some soul-searching. To be honest, I told myself, I’d probably have to admit that all seven of those characteristics apply to me (in one way or another). So then my thinking changed a little, to this:

        Although I try pretty darn hard to manifest
        as few of the seven characteristics
        of a supervillain as possible,
        just like Lex, the supervillain on Smallville,
        I still manage, damn it, to push away
        everybody who tries to be my friend.


Then I did more soul-seaching (and a lot of sighing). Now, my thinking is something like this:

        Oh, what the heck. I am what I am.
        Those seven characteristics do
        pretty much describe my deepest secret soul.
        I’m going to push away
        everybody who tries to be my friend. Instead
        of fighting my inner nature, I should re-dedicate myself
        to acquiring a suitable supervillain-type fortune
        (through some suitably clever,
        supervillain-type scheme) and just embrace
        my true, inner self. Then I can get a lair
        where I’ll have a little privacy.
        I can get a beautiful sidekick
        who will roll her eyes
        when I launch into a monologue
        about my latest silly-ass scheme.
        And then I can just have some fun
        with the whole supervillain thing . . .

The Abandonment Of Meaning

The title of this painting by contemporary artists McDermott & McGough is “My Happiness Is Misery, 1966.” It is an oil on canvas work from a 2008 exhibition at the Cheim & Read gallery. (The ‘1966’ is part of the title. More on that later.)



This is one oil painting, divided into two images. The top image is actress Tippi Hedren in a scene from the 1963 film, “The Birds.” The bottom image is actress Patricia Neal in a scene from the 1949 film, “The Fountainhead.” Many of the paintings in the exhibit are ‘split-screen’ type images. All the paintings, though contemporary, contain ‘1966’ in the title. I’m not sure what significance there is in the date, but since neither of these movies is from 1966, I’m assuming the date has some personal significance to the artists. Perhaps it was the year the artists (or one of them) first saw the films. The exhibit is titled, “Because of Him” and all the films excerpted in the oil paintings were heavily melodramatic stories with strong leading men.

These paintings aren’t about life in 1966 in general. They aren’t about movies in general. They’re simply oil paintings of cinema images people may have seen in 1966.

Is there a point to this?

*

The title of this painting by Karen Kilimnik is “Chloe (from Blood on Satan’s Claw).” It is an oil on canvas work from 1996 that was shown in an exhibit called “Facing Reality: The Seavest Collection of Contemporary Realism Exhibition” at the Neuberger Museum of Art.



This is an oil painting of an unknown actress playing a bit part in an obscure film. (The film “Blood on Satan’s Claw,” 1971, doesn’t list a ‘Chloe’ in the credits.) Does the process of Kilimnik singling out this image and calling our attention to it in an oil painting make a statement about something? Old movies? Unknown actresses?

Is there a point to this?

*

Don’t get me wrong. I like these images. I think they’re interesting. When I was flipping through art magazines or clicking through New York exhibitions on the web these are the images that caught my eye and caught my interest. They intrigued me enough to make me want to write about them on my blog.

But I don’t know what to think about these images.

The thing is, thirty or forty years ago painters in the fine art world did have a point to what they did. Painters like Lichtenstein and others created pop images as visual explorations of the nature of painting. Painters like Andy Warhol and others created pop images as ways to visually comment on and participate in contemporary life.

But what is happening in the fine art world today?

These images—and they seem to be reasonably representative of a lot of stuff going on in the fine art world—don’t seem to have any particular meaning beyond the range-of-the-moment meaning they embodied for the particular artist.

I suspect that the fine art world today is embracing the most pervasive trend in the modern world: The abandonment of meaning.

Throughout the internet, television, the music business and the various print media one common thread to everything we see is that content is defined not by some larger or deeper meaning but rather content is defined by its significance to this or that person. Something is important to a celebrity so the media makes it an issue. Something is important to a politician so the media makes it an issue. Something is important to a corporation so the corporation pays the media to make it an issue. (The very existence of ‘genres’—which people now take for granted but which did not always exist—is just a way of making these arbitrary groupings and exclusions ‘official.’)

Throughout most of human history there has always been a shared, collective understanding of shared, collective meanings that were of value to the individuals of a culture. The individuals, then, through their creations in the art world or the entertainment world or even the industrial world manifested these shared, collective meanings in deeply personal ways.

Now the whole notions of ‘shared’ and ‘collective’ meanings have been replaced by arbitrary personal meanings. People don’t take it for granted, as a default, that they are part of a larger whole. (So, for instance, Lichtenstein may have seen himself as a “painter” with all the history of that profession behind and surrounding him. Warhol may have seen himself as a ‘citizen artist’ with the history of that label behind and surrounding him.) People in the contemporary world simply accept themselves as individuals acting out their own individual dramas or comedies or horrors or whatever as if that is all that people can be.

Consider this blog, Impossible Kisses. This blog has a theme, Forteana. The unexplained. The wildly unusual. The odd. Now, often enough I indulge myself and drift away from this theme. But the theme is always there, it’s what I stray from, it’s what I return to. It’s my blogging focus, my blogging meaning.

But before I started Impossible Kisses I looked around the blogging scene and I was struck by how arbitrary everything was. Mostly I looked in on Jerry Pournelle’s site and was struck by how often he devoted a day’s posting to discussing how his sinuses felt or what happened when he walked his dog.

I understand the point of personal comments within a larger context. I don’t understand the point of personal comments being treated as a larger context themselves.

It strikes me that pop art thirty or forty years ago consisted of some interesting personal comments within an interesting larger context. In the contemporary world, it strikes me that pop art has become personal comments—some interesting, some banal—being treated as a larger context themselves.

It makes me wonder what the next two decades will bring . . .


In the spirit of this topic, however, I’m going to give the final word, this week, to artists McDermott & McGough. The title of this painting is “The Shadows Fall, 1966:”

Fine Art, Pop Art And Andy Warhol

Today and tomorrow I’m going to post in a very quick, superficial way about the use of pop images in the fine art world. It happened thirty or forty years ago and it’s happening now. But the use of images from pop culture in fine art now doesn’t feel quite the same as I remember it feeling back then. I don’t have a specific point for today and, to be honest, I don’t foresee a specific point emerging tomorrow. But I want to get this stuff posted as background in case I ever do think of something interesting to say on the topic.

By “fine art world” I’m just speaking in a practical way about artists, critics and fans who generally live and/or work in or around the New York art gallery scene and who generally see art as an end-in-itself, not as just or primarily a commercial tool. (Yes, even as a working definition there are problems here, but I’m trying to be quick and any quick definition is going to have problems.)

I once mentioned that growing up the artists I heard people talking about were Peter Max, Frank Frazetta, LeRoy Neiman and Andy Warhol. Of those artists, Andy Warhol is the only person who is typically associated with the fine art world and, thinking back, I believe people I knew always discussed Warhol at the same time as Roy Lichtenstein, who also was from the fine art world.

For today’s post I’m going to be talking about Andy Warhol. But, technically, I suppose I should be discussing Lichtenstein because Lichtenstein was doing pop stuff before Warhol.

Legend has it that Lichtenstein was doing abstract images when one of his young children showed him a comic book and said something like, “I bet you can’t draw as good as this, can you, Daddy?” To amuse his children, Lichtenstein did an oil painting of a comic book scene. [“Look, Mickey,” above] Looking at the completed painting, he liked the image and decided to explore the theme further. But I’m not going to talk about Lichtenstein because I’ve never read of him saying anything interesting about the conceptual content of his art. And if I talked about Lichtenstein I’d spend the entire post commenting on his practice of “borrowing” actual comic images created by actual comic artists and using them as his own with only minor alterations. I have mixed feelings about that but I’m just going to ignore the issue here and move on immediately to Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol now and then did say interesting things about the conceptual content of his art.

I’m going to reproduce here a quote from the Wikipedia entry on Warhol and use this quote as a starting point tomorrow to discuss what Karen Kilimnik and others are doing today.

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

That’s an interesting view and it creates an actual conceptual framework for Warhol’s work.

Almost always artists speak simply of the “power” of an image or style or technique. Artists usually speak simply of their “emotional reaction” to this or that image or style or technique. But we humans are conscious creatures. The stuff going on in our mind is both emotional and conceptual. The purely visual creation without an underlying conceptual continuity (to borrow Zappa’s typical term) is always going to be incomplete and, in a very real way, dehumanized and dehumanizing.

Besides, I also like this quote because the notion of a kind of all-encompassing consumerism defining America, all America from the bums in the street, to the normal person, to the celebrities and artists and up through and to the President, makes for an intriguing commentary on Warhol’s possibly most famous image of all:


Okay. Tomorrow I’m going to talk about this topic again, but focusing on Karen Kilimnik and others in the contemporary world. But I’ll probably be referring back to some of the stuff from today’s post. (I’m going to try and come up with a specific point to make, but I don’t feel any great confidence anything will present itself to me overnight.)

Big Reductions At The MCA’s Karen Kilimnik Exhibit

A couple of Tuesday’s back I drove north of the river and visited the Museum of Contemporary Art to see the Karen Kilimnik exhibit.

It was interesting to see in real life the drawings and paintings I was used to seeing in magazines and on the web. However, my two main memories of my visit to the MCA aren’t about the content of Kilimnik’s work at all.

First of all, in the MCA’s gift shop I saw that they sell designer toys. Although I’d posted about that cool trend, this was the first time I’d seen designer toys in real life. They were pretty cool and I’ll be posting more about them in the future. It’s my favorite trend. Designer toys combine art, industry and low-cost accessibility.

Second, what struck me most about Karen Kilimnik’s work was the scale at which she created things and the big reduction in size necessary to reproduce her work for the media. Kilimnik’s pieces are typically two or three feet across. Magazines and the web typically reduce such images to an inch or two across. That is, the media typically reduces images by 70% or 80% or more.

Working at a large scale and then reducing the finished piece for reproduction is very common. I’m focusing on Kilimnik just because she’s an artist I’m interested in now.

When large, hand-made images are dramatically reduced in size, a lot of rough edges get smoothed out. The whole look of a piece can change. The Gestalt—the overall totality of the image’s effects which are always greater than the sum of its individual characteristics—can change.

You see this a lot in good and bad art instruction books. Good art instruction books almost always reproduce images at their real size, and almost always note that images are reproduced actual size. Bad art instruction books reproduce images and technique demonstrations at 50% or more because they look better. But the reduced result is always something that appears oddly different than the life-sized work a student creates.

I decided to do some work myself at a slightly larger scale than I normally work.

A few days ago I mentioned I wanted to experiment with water soluble oils on plain paper. Recently I did an underdrawing in graphite for an oil painting. (Yes, I know pencils aren’t recommended for drawing under oils because the graphite can ‘migrate’ up through the paint layers, but working with oil on paper isn’t recommended, either. Besides, I’ve read that if you smooth the surface of a pencil drawing to remove excess graphite the image will stay on the paper.)

I created an underdrawing based on a fashion photo of socialite Amy Greenspon. I made sure to use the full page, even though I’m more comfortable working at a smaller scale.

Now, an interesting thing about underdrawings is that they don’t have to have any particular style or character. They just have to map out the composition. It is paint and its application that will create style and character. Underdrawings are utilitarian images and you can be very relaxed sketching them.

But even an underdrawing takes on a bit of interest when dramatically reduced in size.

Here’s my underdrawing of Amy Greenspon reduced to about 80% of its normal size. If you click on the image you can see it life-sized. At its full size, you can see the utilitarian nature of the image, the random smears and random erasure marks. Yet reduced in size there is a kind of unity-of-effect that looks like a pleasant, finished piece.

I suspect there’s something very revealing here about the whole nature of the mass media. Almost everything we see in the media is just plain different than what it is in real life. This creates a kind of unreality in our consciousness. Or at least an acceptance of the unreal.

On a simple, practical note, these digital and media-driven days it’s a good idea to work at the largest scale your scanner can accommodate. That helps make things look cool.




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What about the bats in the belfry?

It turns out there weren’t bats in the belfry after all. The creatures were just a troupe of flying monkeys resting for a while. They flew off yesterday, flying away to do their witchy, flying monkey stuff someplace else. So this place will remain open for some time longer . . .