Wigwag Larynx #2 (September 2, 2013)
Howdy folks,
Below is the second surrealist cartoon that I created for this series that just never went anywhere.
Wigwag Larynx (August 23, 2013)
While looking through some of my old portfolios, I came across a short series of cartoons that I originally intended to publish in some newspaper or journal. Of course, they never got published and have never been seen by anyone. I am not even sure what year I created them. They were created as a surrealist comic strip satire and titled “Wigwag Larynx”. This title was suggested by my friend, Doug Haire, a music artist, performer and sound engineer. When I didn’t ever do anything with the comic strip, Doug put out an album titled “Wigwam Bendix”. You see his work at this link:
Over the next couple of weeks I will collect and scan all of these comic strips and then post them to the blog. Below is the first one.
Audubon Automatron (August 15, 2013)
One of my favorite sculptures in this city is the James Audubon automatron located in the park office at Miami Whitewater Park. I love this piece. It is a life size figure of James Audubon sitting down and next to him is a pond with live turtles that swim around. If you press the buttons located at the pedestal – he comes alive and you hear him talking and he moves pretty realistically. It is very surreal. So, of course I decided to draw it and document it before he breaks down. It is nice to have a human subject that stays still long enough to draw them.
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Bad Plant, Good Plant (August 8, 2013)
While I was hiking along some trails I noticed how this good plant and this bad plant always seem to grow in the same area. So I stopped to draw both of these plants in my sketchbook. The first bad plant is poison ivy and it is identifiable from the three leaves – the leaf in the middle is always symmetrical with three points on the leaf. The middle leaf is flanked by two leaves that both have two points on them. The two flanking leaves look like mirror images of each other. It is the urushiol oil in the leaves and stems that give you the rash.The second good plant is jewelweed and has a very knobby, crunchy, juicy stem when you smash it. The juice from this stem can be applied on your arms and legs to help neutralize the urushiol oil in poison ivy. It can also be used to relieve and itch that you get from a insect bite or stinging nettle. This plant may have beautiful orange or yellow flowers or not. I also apply the juice of the plant to my arms and legs to avoid mosquito bites – it seems to work for me. The interesting thing is that poison ivy and jewelweed often grows in the same area. Jewelweed likes a slightly more wet, swampy soil.
Thomas Hart Benton (July 22, 2013)
Thomas Hart Benton is one of my favorite American painters. His oils have a very organic almost cartoony quality that is very rhythmic. When I found out that I could see some of his original murals at Indiana University, I took a trip there. There is quite a bit of his artwork there. Inside the Auditorium are two very large murals that flank each other and two smaller works at the end. In Woodburn Hall, inside the lecture hall there are another two murals. Apparently there is even more work of his in the cinema – but there was a class going on – so I was unable to view those. I guess I will just have to make another trip there some day. My favorite one was inside the Woodburn lecture hall and titled, “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press”, and was originally painted for the ”Century of Progress” exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. It was placed in Woodburn Hall in 1941. This is about Indiana’s history and the inclusion of the Ku Klux Klan in this panel was quite controversial at the time. I like the inclusion of the fire fighters and circus performers. I have attached a photo of it below along with the mural that flanks it in the Woodburn lecture hall. It is free to go in and view these amazing works and I would urge you to do that.
Who Does Your Landscaping? (July 16, 2013)
On my way to bike this weekend with some buddies at a park, I noticed this building. Most companies hire some kind of landscaping service to maintain their premises outside and keep it looking nice to attract their customers. I immediately saw these trees and thought about leaving a note for them to reconsider their landscaping service.
Oiling the Road (July 8, 2013)
Last week I visited Pittsburg and stayed at a friend’s house who recently moved there. I noticed the road sign below at several different locations around his home. I was rather flummoxed by this sign. Are they really going to place oil on the road? Wouldn’t that be very slippery and dangerous? Perhaps this ‘oil’ is a colloquialism for some other process. My friend was just as confused. Does anyone know what this means?
Snakes in Trees (June 27, 2013)
I try to do Tai Chi everyday. As I was practicing it the other day in a park, I noticed some disturbance in the leaves of the tree next to me. When I was done practicing, I looked up and saw a huge black snake in the branches of the tree. It was about four or five feet long and seemed quite comfortable moving amongst the branches. This was the first time I had seen such a large snake in a tree so I took a few photos below. I believe it is a black rat snake. What do you suppose it was doing in the tree? Was it looking for birds to catch or maybe bird eggs or maybe bugs crawling on the tree. It was big enough that I think it was waiting for birds to prey on.
Wildflower Color Palette (June 17, 2013)
I went on a wonderful long bike ride and noticed all the fresh smells and colors of the wildflowers. As I was biking, I thought to myself that the colors were so beautiful and that it would be hard to get those colors if I wanted to paint them. Then it occurred to me that I could photograph the colors and sample those colors in Photoshop to reproduce those colors. As I stopped to photograph the colors I thought it would be a great idea to compose a color palette for an entire composition based completely on what colors you see on a specific hike at a certain time of day. Following is a specific color palette based on my bike trip. I included the actual photos that I sampled the colors from. I call this palette, June Wildflowers. This could easily be turned into a lesson to teach students about color palettes and the different value of every color.
Felt Axe (June 7, 2013)
Below is my latest felt sculpture. I constructed it with just raw felt and needles, I did not wish to color it. I think that by leaving it the raw uncolored wool, the object becomes more abstract and metaphoric. I put a ‘deckle edge’ on the cutting edge of the blade. A ‘deckle edge’ is a term used in hand made papermaking. A deckle is a wooden frame to control the size of the paper slurry, which results in a very thin, irregular, feathery edge. In contrast, a machined paper has a very sharp geometric cut edge. I liked this detail and think that it and the raw color evokes other objects like paper, bones, or maybe white porcelain.
But, then again, what do I know? What do you think?
