My Great Hobby-Novel

Friends,
    No pictures quite yet, but speaking of the macabre, I’ll taunt you with a snippet from my hobby-novel, with which I play on occasion. Being that my ‘work’ is visual, I find writing a fine flight into play. My ‘book,’ which may well never advance beyond scraps & bits, is a... what to call it: a grotesque, perhaps, concerning a deranged liturgical artist, a woman who’s lost half her face to fire, and a mighty strange sanatorium with it’s own chapel. The deranged artist, Philip Waithe, is painting murals in the chapel, which have to do with my Fiendish Plot. It’s set around 1900. 
    I toy with this dubious opus in first person; a journal for each main character. While I don’t consider myself quite as deranged, and certainly not as homicidal,  as the artist depicted, it does give a place to ‘use’ my own creative processes and curious adventures.
    From Deranged Philip’s journal, which he scratches on the scaffold in the Deranged Chapel, as he lies on a narrow scaffold board in the dome:
...

Philip Waithe, date unknown:

“I have lain seven  hours with Lazarus, and still I cannot see his face. I have caressed the winding cloth with ocher and sienna, touched the feet with a merest sliver of vermilion, yet the head where the spirit must look out remains blind.

It cannot be forced.

I look away. I shift on my narrow bed, and am held in an arc of scarlet tipped quills and gold. I  spread my arms into nothing, feel the fever bleed out, feel my breath settle, still. I say, Beloved, make me transparent. I wait, I lose thought, quiet my spirit to a flawless water.  I see.  I see reflected there the Descent into Hell.

I have drawn it on the East wall.”
...

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A horrid dream image...

    More pictures anon, kind and patient Visitors! 

    For the moment, just a note on an unsettling dream -- I do love dreams in their deep strangeness, however unpleasant...
    I slept last night after brooding over various and irreparable blunders, and dreamt that I was arriving late and in the night at a hotel room in some distant city. It  was a dim and ordinary room. As I approached the bed, I saw its covers were mussed, though it appeared empty.  Then  I perceived a dreadful thing protruding from under the blanket: it was a strange naked foot on a bone-thin leg, human-seeming yet somehow wrong. It took a moment of loathsome staring to see that in place of toes, the foot possessed human fingers, long and curled, and somewhere, I think, a thumb.
    There was no place for the rest of a body in those deflated bed clothes.  

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“Birds with Human Souls”

    A delightful book called Birds with Human Souls, A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Beryl Rowland, 1978) was given me by a dear friend (Cindy! You!). Amongst many a wonder, it tells of ancient Athenian coins on which “a chubby, smiling goddess with a plain helmet appeared with a well-groomed, self-confident owl.”
    It mentions the great flock of owl coins produced from the Laureotic silver mines, and quotes the most charming depiction of financial prosperity I’ve ever read:

Little Laureotic owlets
Shall be always flocking in:
You shall find them all about you,
As the dainty brood increases,
Building nests within your purses;
Hatching little silver pieces.

              ~ Aristophanes, The Birds, c. 414 BC

May many dear little owlets roost with us all during the coming year...

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My Mother's White Whale

"White Whale" by Lou Rogers. My mother painted this when I was quite small; it's one of the images I remember best, growing up. Happily  it is still with me. I hang it again today.  My mother loved Moby Dick, and spent a good bit of time in high school limping, being Captain Ahab. All her life she pursued the numinous. The solitude in her work speaks not of loneliness but of relationship with the vast and transcendental.

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Dance Upon a Chimney Pot

    Sitting in the coffee shop window this morning, thinking and planning and worrying, and drawing on a napkin, I looked out and saw against sky two pigeons silhouetted on a chimney pot.  It is a bright, frozen day, with only a distant chill whisper of spring, but one pigeon was doing his bowing dance to the other, circling and bobbing, rounding his chest, no doubt cooing his burred song.  He made me smile, and watch, and forget my thoughts.
    Soon, his lady flew away.  The pigeon paused in his dance.  I thought he would stop, or fly away, too. But after a moment of looking this way and that with his tiny head, he began his dance alone against the clear blue, turning in a pattern which, however instinctual, was a very song of delight, of joy in being, of love without care of return.
    No cramping fear of the morrow, though one pecks a meager living on a sidewalk, no shadow of foiled desire, no shame in the perception of others, indeed in a small gray bird a pure call to cast one's very soul upon the waters.

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My Sculpting Tools

    A fellow artist wrote me to inquire about sculpting tools for fine detail. I'd been pondering the same subject. It's a case of   "do as I suggest, not as I do." I'll post part of my answer here, in hopes it may be useful:
    A good question, tools, and funny you should ask, as they say: I've actually been looking at my two favorite tools and realizing they're incredibly clunky for the size critters I'm now making. I've been attached to them for ages -- years, I'm sure -- and just not taken the intelligent step of adding more and finer implements. I've been using a plain old #11 exacto knife, and an odd, small burnisher really meant for engraving:  

    I don't think any  other tools touched Eros, whom you'll find below (except sandpaper, nail scissors on the tiny leaves made of copper foil, and toenail clippers for cutting wire). Now, this is silly -- if  I saw somebody else laboring on tiny things with the above, I'd point out that there are much finer tools available. Indeed, I think I'll order some soon myself. The best choice I know of, for my particular needs, at least, seem to be the 'Perfect Touch' tools. The site:
PerfectTouch.com
    Some like the wooden ones, some the metal. Ideally, one might have some of both, I should think.
    Now, back to my great, blunt burnisher and the work table! You've put it well, Deborah: the burnisher is such a habit that it did indeed become like an extension to my hand. I know I've been equally attached to other tools before, usually faithfully, one at a time.  Monogamously. That's sort of unwise, given that when I lose the favored tool, I'm temporarily pitiful and helpless, till I bond with the next one...

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Forget-Me-Nots for the Dodo Bird


"The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again."
                                                                        ~  William Beebe


(With thanks to Bob Bills for the quote above.)

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