Drawing of the Month

Mr. July

February 2023 Drawing of the Month

The February 2023 Drawing of the Month is Mr. July which I made in 2005.

I think that I picked this drawing for several reasons:

1. Because I can’t wait for Summer!

2. And this drawing is WARM!

3. And quite frankly, isn’t this drawing of a man, a Beauty? Lean and strong, glad to be alive, not conventionally good-looking, but very appealing with his battered, lived-in face, big-eyed, ready to talk, easy-going and at ease, someone you might like to hug you, sprouting flowers, surrounded by all those Suns! I called this drawing, when I made it in 2005, Mr. July because even then, I thought that he in effect, represented all the best parts of the Summer…

Meanwhile, we must wait out the end of winter and all the various moods of Spring, sleet, rain, warm days, chilly days, drizzle, cloud cover, cold snaps, trees briefly in bloom, our not having to wear so many layers of clothing, the various holidays…

Can’t wait for summer! Looking forward to not feeling cold, to needing ice in my drink or water chilled in the refrigerator, to wearing no more clothing than is considered decent. And eating all the fruit that is in season!

The Bird!

January 2023 Drawing of the Month

“Crowd Roars Thunderous Welcome!”

And well they should, given the drama of the bird’s passage. The bird’s feminine escort, whose face is made-up and whose body dressed to the nines in a multi-colored costume, gingerly negotiates the steep path, led by a vividly green top-knotted bird on a leash, both walking at an acute angle, heads down, concentrating on what lies ahead… Also, in effect, because so much still lies ahead!

After the white polka-dots on pink surface passes, will come a field of thousands of scented flowers and beyond the flowers, an orchestra dressed in uniforms playing waltzes. After the orchestra, acrobats performing in mirrored costumes to fireworks! Then a choir singing popular songs to chamber music.

After that, there are still more decorative distances the bird and her escort must walk, that will eventually bring them in sight of thousands of people waiting inside and outside to cheer the bird on a leash, led by her keeper.

Meanwhile, the little green bird remains utterly intent on her walk from inside to outside.

Dogboy on Mars

December 2022 Drawing of the Month

Very adolescent, this one! Has no trouble believing that a Martian would have the hots for him! When actually the little Martian child has never seen a man on a horse before, And can’t tell where the man leaves off and the horse begins… Listen to your horse, young man! Looks like a Martian horse, too, with a strange head that has big eyes and a back wheel instead of two hind legs, doesn’t have hooves, and is color-matched to its rider.

Well, we’re on Mars and the young Martian has only one eye, and so no matter what the earthling thinks, we have no idea what she/he/it sees with it. His/her doll looks pretty normal, and though the little Martian does wear a skirt and seems to have two arms, she has hooves instead of feet. Why should Mars be exactly like Earth, for that matter? The atmosphere is apparently dense enough for everyone to do without oxygen and there are stars, so it’s either midnight or dark like this all the time.

Actually, it just occurred to me that the horse the young man is riding might have been imported, too. That it might be in effect some kind of computerized wonder-beast designed for this kind of adventure on a different planet from the place where it was made, namely Earth. Change a few items and everything seems to get a little strange…

Fruit Salad

November 2022 Drawing of the Month

“But you gotta hold on tight to what you got.
You gotta do what’s right whether you like it or not!”
(Said the DJ on a local radio station)

One of the guys in the drawing wants a cheeseburger and fries for dinner and the other fellow, the one who does the cooking, says that fast food will kill them both, that fruit is a wonder food and they are lucky to have it.

I don’t live with these two nut-cases, but if I did, I wouldn’t discuss food under any circumstances. I would just sneak out of the house, buy what I wanted to eat and eat it, and then come back home! If the one who wants an occasional cheeseburger and fries won’t stop living with a control freak (maybe they have a great sex life) then he has to find a way to eat cheeseburgers and fries from time to time, instead of fruit. He might even consider a long-term plan to find a partner who tolerates a certain amount of junk food.

When it comes to arguing matters of principle, it is better not to directly defy the one embracing the principle. He may end up using his principle to bash you in the head.

G. with Grapes

October 2022 Drawing of the Month

There isn’t much to see when it comes to G. with Grapes.

That’s a large part of its charm… It is just a man’s figure seen from the left hand up, holding a bunch of grapes.  But the various parts of his head, in effect a mass of smears and blotches set against a big irregular block of black: the biggest schmear of all in red, namely his mouth, and the smallest and most focused, his blue left eye, are in charge of the party. That is, the various details of the head, all the smears and blotches, do a lot of the heavy lifting for this drawing.

In the meantime, the blue continues to travel down his throat to the sleeve and chest of his shirt, while the yellow of his shirt leads to the gold of his lower left arm-and-hand, which holds a bunch of grapes… And the dimensionality of the grapes makes all the difference!

Meanwhile, all the fireworks of the head and body and the grapes are set against the endless up-and-down wobble of the patterned background.

Where the Horned God Lives

September 2022 Drawing of the Month

The man shown front and center, set against a mottled sky, is so strange that he should be considered a God. Not coincidentally, he is one. His dark head with its little horns is made of cast powdered steel-and-resin. In fact, his head is a sculptural relief, patinated with black enamel. And those are the very things that make him a horned God while everything else, including his body rising from a decorative bar in front, is one kind of an illusion or another.

Not that illusions should be taken lightly…

His body, for example, is simultaneously a body and a chunk of imagery, half-mountain, half-sky, with a few broken leaves or butterfly wings on either side to serve as extremities. (Nevertheless, the orange against the blue looks very fine.) The bar holding his body upright is black except for a red and gold braid running across its bottom. The bar itself is set in front of a sky that rises to fill the entire page… Meanwhile, the horned god raises his right arm in an eloquent gesture and lets his other arm lie still against his left side. He is consumed by an urgent need to tell us something. I am sure of that.

I wish I knew what it was.

Tea Dancer

August 2022 Drawing of the Month

Sometimes a drama starts with a stage, a curtain, and music. And you have to figure it out as it goes along. In this case, here is a curtain so richly daubed with color (oranges, white, and  greens and  yellows, mostly) stretched from side to side, up and down and out of sight, that you don’t know where to look.

Except for the fact that there are two figures in front of the curtain, it almost doesn’t matter where you look. The orchestra is hidden. One figure, on the left, the smaller of the two, is that of a woman dressed in a kimono, holding a teapot and bending forward to watch the second figure, who is not so easily described because he is much more stylized, bigger, and in motion, a man with red round shiny hands, a little red nose, and thick pink and white lips. Only one of his eyes, a somewhat sad and weary one, is visible (a plumed floral cloud obscures his other eye). He wears his hair tied up, carries flowers wrapped in paper, and he is dancing. Somehow, the fact that the man is dancing changes everything.

He is the Tea Dancer.

His fan flares out above the floor in rhythm with the music, his legs flash and shine! And it seems as if he might dance forever…

The Act

July 2022 Drawing of the Month

The Act is a drawing that shows three performers going on stage for the first of two acts they will perform that day. The bearded man in the middle is urging the other two to excite (epater) the audience. The little fellow in front is already looking forward to the ice cream he will be given afterwards. (What a young one!) Meanwhile, the snake-woman in the man’s left hand is more than ready to take credit for any success they might have, and for all I know, she may be right! She is more sophisticated than the others.

And I’ve only seen the drawing, not their act. But the patterned curtain is about to rise to show a scene in a city park.

In the park, the audience will see cast-iron benches, paths and hedges, a working fountain, several trees, and a place for dogs to play, a scene that provides the three performers with room to run through a set of routines: various pratfalls, magic tricks, little jokes, and acrobatics. If their act feels more than a little old-fashioned, that gives it a sweetness it would otherwise not have. You are welcome to stay to see the performance!

The Gallerist

June 2022 Drawing of the Month

This drawing makes loving fun of the contemporary art scene, where gallerists (no longer called "dealers") must walk the walk and talk the talk to sell the art that doesn’t necessarily sell itself. However wonderfully strange he looks, I modeled the gallerist in the drawing on two real-life dealers I know; likewise his skeptical customer, after an acquaintance who subscribes to the classical canon.

Making the two major figures sufficiently strange to satisfy my ever-growing need to go beyond previous drawings and yet still coherent enough to be recognizable as gallerist and client took weeks of doing, un-doing, and re-doing to get right. I was particularly pleased with the gallerist’s coarsely baroque head, topped by an embroidered shell, and the economy of the client’s body, composed of two shells from the same source. Have you noticed that his right eye and her left eye share the same pattern, from an African wax-print? But she’s so feminine, while he’s a proper bruiser! In fact, the gallerist looks slightly scary, ready to pounce, as if he would do almost anything to make a sale.

Near the end, I could see that the drawing needed a border and was relieved to find something in one of my boxes of trim that was just right. The buttons under the gallerist’s feet also came late to the party. It took some arranging and re-arranging to find the right number and colors. I don’t know what they are meant to represent. They just had to be there. And so did I.

Life Is a Circus

May 2022 Drawing of the Month

Life is a farce, a goof, a joke, a series of bad moves, trouble in spades… And depending on which side of the bed you get up on, you might as well admit what you're letting ourselves in for, and laugh and/or cry about the fact that it's a set-up. Everybody knows! That's why Life Is a Circus. Depending on when you sat down, where you are sitting and who else is in the audience, you might turn out to be the star of the show, or the butt of the joke, or the new ring master.

The main reason that Life is a Circus, though, is because circuses happen in rings where profoundly skill-based performers toss off tricks as if there were no other way to do them. That's the difference between the audience and the performers, at least most of the audience. The audience may be very good at doing something, but not this.

But if you think about life as a circus, the ring is much bigger, big as life, with clowns on every corner, gifted performers of all kinds, actually, playing games with breathtaking skills, working in shops of all kinds and making magic on the street, where they ride bikes and drive cabs, stand behind lunch counters, making food for customers without dropping anything or screwing up the orders, ride in an ambulance, bringing somebody back to life, patch holes in roads, wash windows high above the street… What tricks they must know, to function so beautifully!

Nevertheless, sometimes we all screw up, and that's when we're in for it, the butt of the joke, and we didn't see it coming… (Cue the applause!)

Heavenly Creatures

April 2022 Drawing of the Month

I think of Heavenly Creatures as a re-imagined, re-created Nativity Scene. Just look at the Child, snug in his lace-trimmed creche, set against a patch of blue sky with clouds, near a spiffy manger, surrounded by vegetation richly colored in blue, golden brown, and off-white, with lace flowers sewn down here and there! Just consider the reverence of those who watch over the Child, cool him with a fan, play music for him, those who seem in these and so many other ways to acknowledge his holiness…

If you consider the attitude of these people, despite the fact that a few of them are animal-headed, including young Jesus, all of whom are richly clothed, this scene might summon memories of older versions of the same events, painted, etched, and drawn throughout the centuries. As highly stylized as this image is, it is such a product of our time that it might very well function as an update for 2022, true enough at least for most of today's audiences, even though there may be other even better contemporary versions of the Nativity Scene elsewhere in the world, if we only knew how and where to look for them. I can discuss these Heavenly Creatures only because I made them. But there must be others.

Ghost Rider

March 2022 Drawing of the Month

Ghost Rider is one of my favorite drawings, perhaps because it doesn't make any more sense than it absolutely has to. The Ghost Rider used to be a cowboy, but something happened and now he is a ghost instead, a tangled mass of contradictions, an assorted miscellany of various items, barely able to talk, but still moving. Quite a contrast to the cowboy who recognizes him from his previous life!

The Ghost Rider now drifts rather than strides, slumping boneless in the saddle, wearing a bib. His head is a swirling mass of goop but still has two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, after a fashion, but is otherwise goop. He wears a pair of skates on one foot; his other foot is a red hook in a container of water. His horse has a strange head with a pointed red lower jaw, and three legs, each one different, with a tucked-up tail ending in a star.

But he and his horse are still moving forward, at least for the time being…

This poor fellow seems to understand that he is not Tom anymore, but not how that happened. The man who used to be Tom knows only that nothing makes sense anymore but not what comes next. And neither do I.

Hell-Bent

February 2022 Drawing of the Month

Hell-Bent is the title of a little drawing that I made eight years ago and had forgotten about until a number of people nominated it for the February 2022 Drawing of the Month, which prompted me to look for it and to laugh when I found it! These days we need all the laughs we can get. I do, anyway.

My drawing shows a fellow in a flowered helmet and an artificial left arm handing himself over to the Devil, because this fellow is one of an amazing number of people who regard that as a serious option. (Go figure!) He has just said good-bye to a young girl with a wooden leg, holding a man-headed cat. But his lady friend fails to understand why anyone would volunteer for endless torment. It isn't as if we don't get jerked around enough while we're still alive when most of us are eager to complain about it to anyone who will listen.

What's striking about Hell-Bent, given its size (13 x 15.5 inches) is how positively medieval it is, in the way it shows as much as it can of the whole process whereby the damned are collected, including the burly demon helping things move along, the one who collects both the miscreants who deserve to suffer and the fools who volunteer for it. The drawing also shows the Devil itself, in the form of a big-headed snake with three or four rows of shining teeth and at least one arm that ends in a hand, probably more. Also, as might be expected, though I may have imagined this part, the Devil has all-seeing eyes and a voracious appetite for sinners…

Clown Princess, Coming Undone

January 2022 Drawing of the Month

My drawing, The Clown Princess, Coming Undone, began life as a contemporary tapestry copy of the painting Boreas, by John William Waterhouse, which I bought from a company in the state of Washington and sewed into for days and weeks to turn it into something more than a little different, The Clown Princess, Coming Undone.

I had to find ways to turn the central figure in Boreas, a classic late 19th century Waterhouse woman, into the Clown Princess, to produce someone much stranger and goofier, but still beautiful. I applied lace wherever I could to bring ease and grace and to lighten the essential weirdness and humor I’d created. And I used a range of imagery to render the chaos my changes made aesthetically compelling; in effect, to make them as inexplicable, implacable, and inevitable as possible.

And then of course, form followed function. The left fist of the Clown Princess is wrapped in lovely lace, her right hand clutches a card showing Death… The fellow in striped pants holding an umbrella and striding hard right at the bottom echoes the up-kick of the woman’s boot at bottom left. Anywhere there is a hole or a gap, it is usually filled by a beast or a hand or a foot or an airplane, except when it’s not. Meanwhile, some of the by-standers can’t shut up. And at least two of the trees have eyes. We are in new territory…

All in the service of encouraging the Clown Princess to Come Undone!

Savage Grace

December 2021 Drawing of the Month

I’ve chosen to end this strange and difficult year of 2021 writing about a strange and difficult drawing from 2018, Savage Grace. This drawing has conflict built into it, summoning a time, actually not so long ago, when men still rode horses into battle behind shields, carrying banners and holding lances, a time when even a family fight might require tooth-and-nail combat.

Savage Grace shows a man so eager for his son to join him on the battlefield that he comes right out and says so. This man is a veritable freak of aggression, eager to fight someone, anyone, anywhere, which is why he brings along whatever might possibly give him an advantage. His horse, saddle, and shield know the drill, and because he owns them, do whatever he asks…

In one corner of the drawing, we can see the man's son, the very one he wants to ride into battle along with, lying half-naked on his bed: a big-headed boy with a flower tucked under his chin and a balloon in his right hand, looking directly out at the viewer. (He takes advantage of an audience to announce that he writes poetry, communes with a dead clown, and will never to go to war!) Right behind the boy, perhaps only visible to him, Death sits astride Mankind, who doesn’t look happy about it.

Riding horses into battle went out of fashion years ago and other weapons of war have also changed considerably, but we still fight wars and it is still men who are expected to be willing and able to fight them, unless if they’re too contrary, too afraid, or too conflicted and beg off. Then people think that there is something wrong with them…

The Secret Lives of Saints

November 2021 Drawing of the Month

Having grown up in a secular home, it wasn’t until I began to study art history in graduate school that I understood the powerful hold that religion had on art until recently. All the images of Jesus, Mary, Joseph! The Crucifixion! Noah’s Ark! Other scenes from the Old and New Testament! Various saints, if martyred, often shown with the instruments that martyred them! Kings and queens in prayer! Angels variously depicted, while the Devil and his minions plot to corrupt us! Stained glass windows, cathedral interiors, various elements of worship, goblets, tapestries, and so forth.

Being a story-teller, my drawings always have a narrative.

It happens that saints come ready-made with a story, which doubtless encourages their worshippers to identify with them. But I re-worked the lives of St. Claire and St. Francis to make them a little more part of the 21^st Century. In my drawing, St. Claire is shown turning into a werewolf at night to manifest her love for all animals, supernatural or not, and in order to drink a little blood for strength, given the endless demands of her worshippers. St. Francis is seen living on the moon so that he can escape the interminable cries for help and pleadings for surcease, asking him to buffer the suffering that never ends. He does what he can, but there’s no way to answer all the prayers that come his way and the last few years have really worn him down. Which is why he lives on the moon.

The other way to think about this drawing is to remember that St Claire and St. Francis are not my saints and that in my drawing I can make them as oddly human as I like. I’ll bet that they didn’t realize that they were signing up to be saints for thousands of years …

Love Is Strange

October 2021 Drawing of the Month

Anybody who’s ever been seriously in love has gone through this. Someone’s lover takes things a little too far and there’s no way for him to take it back.Everything he tries to make it better makes it worse, confirming her anger and despair, leaving him frustrated, twisted, angry and helpless. The poor guy ends up feeling as wounded as she does. But he is determined not to quit, is in fact willing to do whatever he can to make it right, if only he had any idea of what that might be, or she did and was willing to tell him.

This kind of drama happens only when two people are absolutely crazy about each other. Sometimes their passion actually gets in the way. Or different life-styles complicate things. And unconsidered words always make it worse.

If these lovers were my friends, I’d suggest a cooling-off period, possibly finding a kind friend willing to act as an intermediary, and not getting involved with anyone else in the meantime.

But here I am in 2021, trying to patch up a relationship shown in a drawing of mine from 2015. Wish me luck!

Flower Boy

September 2021 Drawing of the Month

Flower Boy is a strange drawing, exquisite, stylized, and weird. Though of course I remember it - who could forgot a drawing like that? - I have absolutely no memory of making it.

The boy has a lavender plaid shoulder and one lavender eye, the left one. His right eye, his nose and mouth are sewn lines. Otherwise, he’s mostly white. The shape of his lavender eye echoes the flower he holds. But the flower he is holding in his right hand, the flower with a smiling blue-eyed baby leopard at the center and its lurid petals, has more going on, chromatically and aesthetically, than almost anything else in the drawing.

Meanwhile, the boy is watching us unpack the drawing, waiting for us to read the text at the bottom and to agree with it.

Don’t you?

Field Array

August 2021 Drawing of the Month

I made Field Array ten years ago, not long after I started adding found text to my drawings, and I still remember working on it, because I didn’t entirely understand what I was doing: laying out and sewing down three disparate figures and text on a deep green field, embroidered in gold, under a soaring sky. I felt as if I was enacting a mysterious ritual at the same time that I was making a drawing.

The armless man nearest us on the right runs across the field, fixedly staring at the strange beast in the middle, trying to make sense of what it is and why it is …. The superhero on the other side of the drawing, behind a podium, with nobody to rescue, is staring, too. The found text doesn’t help; it only complicates things. What does it all mean? The Beast, the Last of His Kind, a curious hybrid of vegetable and animal parts, seems both profoundly indifferent and confident of his powers. He looks out and away, at us, not at them.

I called this drawing Field Array because the best I could do in 2011 was to make these figures, set them on this field, under that sky, and add text, not explain it. I’m not sure that I can do any better now. I still like the drawing, though.

Dark Angel

July 2021 Drawing of the Month

Dark Angel began with a small embroidery of a sweet little boy at the bottom of the page. When I put a kitten on one side of the boy and a small monkey on the other, the three of them looked very happy together.

Until I drew an angel in the sky above, an angel spreading darkness even before he opened his mouth. That changed everything. The angel comes from a much older, darker place, where things so rarely turned out well that no one ever expected them to, which explains why the angel looks and acts the way he does.

The angel also functions to tell the little boy, who lives in much better times, that things might not always turn out that way. This boy would never eat his kitten! But if widespread crop failure happened in the years ahead, the boy’s great grandchild might have to.

Hey, if we still need to be reminded that there could be bad times ahead, why not an angel?

A Robot Runs for Congress

June 2021 Drawing of the Month

One of the drawings I made last year, A Robot Runs for Congress, measures only twelve inches square, but has impact above its size, because (I think) it focuses on essentials and lets everything else go. The drawing shows an almost empty square in a small town, where two men are standing, less-than-half-listening to a speech by a robot running for congress. The army wouldn’t let the robot enlist, but he still wanted to serve his country, and one way or another, live out the American dream, so he’s running for congress! Robots dream. I am sure of it.

Deaf to the novelty of a robot asking them to vote for him, the two men in the drawing display their indifference as if it proves their manhood, and as if nothing else, like democracy, really mattered. Only one little animal, attracted by the commotion and hoping for something to eat, is paying any attention at all.

I was born and raised in a much bigger place, but where certain neighborhoods, where damaged men spent most of their days and nights, make me think of this one. During the summer, those men slept in the local parks, but in the winter, shivering in doorways, they huddled together for warmth. As we drove by, my father, a doctor, would point out the ones who were sick in ways that showed…

Girl on a Flowered Horse

May 2021 Drawing of the Month

In addition to making drawings from scratch, since 2014, I have also drawn into contemporary tapestry copies of 14-20th Century paintings, subverting the original imagery and narrative to make them my own. Drawing this way, I have transformed, reconfigured, re-imagined all kinds of imagery, but it isn't always straight-forward. Sometimes the formal conventions of the original painting put me off or worse, don't make sense to me.

In 2019, I encountered both those problems in a tapestry copy of a 1898 painting of Lady Godiva by John Collier. First of all, Collier's paintings are a little dead-in-the-water, not very inspiring, more like book illustrations than paintings. Secondly, being a pre-Raphaelite, Collier depicted Godiva as a weedy adolescent instead of the well-nourished, willful wife of a powerful noble, as the traditional story suggests.

Seeing a teen-ager clinging to the neck of such a big horse made me profoundly uneasy. And so I added flowers, lace, and other decorative elements to the horse to make it a less formidable creature. When that wasn't enough, I cut off chunks of the tapestry, including parts of the horse, to change the overall proportions. And I re-worked the girl to make her funkier and less pre-Raphaelite. Then, finally, I reduced the big tapestry to a small oval, showing only the girl together with a bit of her horse, no longer concerned with the Godiva Legend, but wanting only to fulfill her dearest wish for a one-man band!

I didn't plan any of this; it was, as is usual for my drawings even when the changes are less dramatic, process-directed. That is, it happened over time as I tried to make some kind of visual sense of an eccentric version of an old tale. But a funny thing, after the fact, it is now one of my favorite drawings.

The Horse He Rode In On

April 2021 Drawing of the Month

What can I can say about a drawing whose title is a perfectly inoffensive part of an otherwise profane epithet, a drawing that features a huge, more or less anatomically accurate hard-on, a drawing that shows a horse pleasuring a butterfly with his tongue? Quite a lot, actually.

I’m not sure that when I started drawing into a tapestry copy of a painting of a soldier with a horse that I realized that it would turn into a burlesque of a hot night out, stripped down to its nitty-gritty, in which we witness the soldier (entirely shorn of dignity by the various ways I’ve transformed him) coming on to a doll-sized woman wearing heels, dwarfed by not only by the soldier, his monstrous hat, his oversized organ and his ego while at the same time both of them cope with the fact that his attempt at seduction seems to be taking place on a stage in front of an audience (we’re sitting in it!) as his horse offers advice from off-stage on how to turn the evening to his advantage... Some romance! But I’m not entirely surprised. Even if all my drawings don’t turn out like this one, they are more likely to depict folly than success. It is my nature, and ours.

Having suffered through many a wrestling match in the front or back seats of cars as a teenager on dates encouraged by my mother, who was only trying to make sure that I would eventually meet a nice young man, a fate worse than death, I’m not at all sorry about making this drawing, where the soldier and his date strike out, and only the horse and the butterfly seem to be having a really good time.

The Devil's Workshop

March 2021 Drawing of the Month

Before the Garment District diminished to almost nothing, there were big shops that not only sold the most up-to-date fabrics but also had a big room in back or upstairs filled with oddities, fabrics that were misprinted or old-fashioned or for some reason didn’t sell, where I found wonderful things. So years later, when I discovered a blotched, misprinted length of fabric fused to canvas and rolled up on a cardboard tube at the bottom of my big thread storage unit, I knew exactly where I’d gotten it and also why after I’d fused it to canvas, ready to sew/draw into it, I’d lost my nerve and put it away.

What I had fused to canvas was fabric from the end of a camouflage print. I could see some leaves, lines of texture, and here and there, as is customary, the name of the manufacturer, otherwise, mostly big and little blotches. It was too incoherent for me to deal with when I bought it, but in 2018, I thought I could handle the chaos; in fact was eager to, even though, as usual, I didn’t know what it would turn into. I never do. I don’t call my drawings “process-directed” for nothing.

As best as I can remember, making the big, complicated, grotesque figure of the Devil was the first thing I did, which not only contextualized things nicely but also let me show his feet and legs in one place and his head in another, astride the world, as it were... Then up and down facing him, I made his minions, reporting his triumphs: perversion, suicides, power grabs, poisoned flowers, etc. Trump was still President then and this drawing reflected as well. Behind the Devil, we see a guard and an open window.

By the end, I had a lot going on, but given its origins and what I had turned it into, the whole space also reeked something noxious, as befits The Devil’s Workshop.

Remember!

February 2021 Drawing of the Month

When I made this little drawing in 2016, I thought of it as a kind of a joke, if you could even consider it a joke. You might not, because of how self-evident it was; that is, people generally breathe without having to think about it. They don’t have to be reminded.

But five years later, the United States finds itself neck-deep in a pandemic that has already killed hundreds of thousands of people who at some point just couldn’t manage to take another breath. Some of them had underlying conditions, but not all of them. Besides, without the pandemic, people with underlying conditions wouldn’t be dying right and left, as they are.

So in February of 2021, as I do everything I can think of to remain fit and well and wish the same to everyone out there, I must take a deep breath and confess that Remember! doesn’t seem so funny anymore...

At the Winter Palace

January 2021 Drawing of the Month

I began this drawing to make use of what seemed like a sudden and almost alarming abundance of blue and blue-green fabrics, but within a few days, without my meaning it to happen, the drawing had turned into something that looked like a mixture of a Beckett play and a slasher film, cold, scary, and slightly absurd, with no exit, and with no room for anybody or anything else. Such a cold drawing is perfect for January, this January in particular!

An abstract blue print functions to describe the jagged walls and floor of the Winter Palace. Immediately adjacent, a blue-green pleated chiffon offers an expansive view of a ideally beautiful but inhospitable outdoors. Just inside the Winter Palace, a big bird-like creature is screaming at a man who looks kind of like a beat-up clown, wedged into a footed red vase. Does he have legs or not? We can’t tell. In the nicest way imaginable, the clown asks the birdman to stop screaming at him. Fat chance!

In the meantime, at this very moment, it happens that we have been made aware of various dangers, toils, and snares, the pandemic being only one of them. We have had one of the warmest autumns on record, but that just makes us more uneasy. What is going to become of us?

Bunny

December 2020 Drawing of the Month

I still remember making this drawing, in some ways a very straight-forward, rather stylized portrait of a man, but complicated in various ways... For example, what is that sticking out of his mouth? My best guess, go figure, a rabbit’s ear. And notice the small right eye be-petalled in pink and the huge left eye, both of them fixedly, emptily staring. Meanwhile, an impish, duck-billed fairy child hovers on the right, engrossed in the spectacle. What’s going on?

I don’t know for sure, because I only make the drawings, I do not determine their contents. But from the title I gave this drawing, you can see that I came to the conclusion that the man was being taken over, inhabited, as it were, by a rabbit, and in the process, his human qualities were extinguished, supplanted by an animal presence.

At the time, 15 years ago, it made me think of my father, a surgeon and an athlete, playing singles handball into his mid-70’s and still winning games, a handsome, gifted man who was gradually and inexorably extinguished by Alzheimer’s or something like it. He didn’t turn into a rabbit, but instead became a kind of zombie, silent, with dead eyes, walking, eating whatever came to hand, edible or not, and sleeping, tended by my mother who to her credit never lost sight of the man she loved. I was more like the duck-billed fairy child, watching the whole thing at a distance, except that I wasn’t smiling, because you know how fathers and daughters are, it broke my heart.

Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans

November 2020 Drawing of the Month

I made Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans in 2007, but not long after I finished it, the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University in Manhattan, KS, acquired it for their collection. So I haven’t seen it in a very long time. And when I looked at an image of this drawing after all these years, the first thing that struck me was that Monkey Boy had something in common with a number of my other drawings; namely, it is a near-square, 43.5 x 42.5 inches. I don’t try to make near-square drawings, but I often do.

But I’d totally forgotten how richly complex Monkey Boy is and how profoundly eccentric, like a story-telling uncle with candy in his coat pockets for anyone who listens all the way through... A wondrous spectacle, indeed, rich with incident. A flower and a wheel make Monkey Boy’s eyes, the knees of a goddess represent his nose. I still remember constructing Monkey Boy’s head, my heart thumping, as it looked quite different from anything I’d made up to that point! Monkey Boy’s chest is almost empty except for an upside-down hero. The upper arm we can see is packed with roses. His bottom is still under construction. Meanwhile, in an upper corner of the drawing – tick, tick, tick – time is running out, as Night impinges on all four sides.

There are flowers everywhere in this drawing, along with a couple of birds, and a riot of pattern. Some of the pattern spills onto Monkey Boy. He shares the space with a cat-headed boy carefully making his way across the landscape and a haughty fellow who sits snug in the center of a flower. And coming from nowhere, but already dressed for the occasion, a beautiful stranger offers Monkey Boy magic beans. What is the nature of their magic? Does he want it? I guess it depends on what she wants in return.

The drawing doesn’t say.

A Witch Standing on One Leg

October 2020 Drawing of the Month

This is not my first drawing with a witch in it. I don’t know what it is with me and witches, or for that matter, why my drawings seem to favor angels, birdmen, angled entities over cartoon characters, though they, too, show up from time to time, but I am not in charge of subject matter. My process is. What I mean by process is everything it takes to make one of my drawings, the cumulative and ongoing effect of the machines I draw with, how I use scissors, pliers, and forceps over time in the service of the drawing, all the materials the drawing consists of, such as thread, fabric, trim, linen or canvas, buttons, beads, or google eyes, fusible adhesive, etc., thousands of knots that must be tied, the quality of light in my studio, the weather, local and national politics, the music that happens to be playing on the radio on any particular day, as well as what I am thinking and doing, not only when I am working on a drawing, but when I am reading a book, walking my ancient dog, or having a drink with friends. Drawings-in-progress wake me up at night from sound sleep.

Process also encompasses endless revisions. I eventually recognize what doesn’t work and must be undone. If not the first time, then the second or third. And I eventually get it right.

Witch though she may be, I like this forthright woman, clutching a skull, morphing here and there, trying to catch someone’s eye. Unashamed of how she looks and what her looks might say about who she is, she advertises her services. Need a spell cast, a potion made? If I believed that casting a spell might cause me to prosper, I would hire her, in part because no matter how odd the figures in my drawings seem, by the time a drawing is finished, the characters in it are so fully alive that the witch in this particular drawing might well persuade me.

It is a great shaggy, sometimes seemingly interminable process that conjures my drawings from nowhere-ness and makes them come alive at the end. I am a small part of the process, an essential part, but only a part. I trust it.

Dead Man Dancing

September 2020 Drawing of the Month

I am delighted that Dead Man Dancing (2017) was chosen as the Drawing of the Month for September 2020, because it is an old favorite of mine, eccentric as all get out, unapologetically so.

It began life as a contemporary tapestry copy of one of Botero’s paintings of dancing couples. The subjects of his paintings are always fat and jolly, which begs to be mocked. Accordingly, we see a fat lady, dressed to the nines in an embroidered silk dress, dancing cheek to cheek with a dead man. To the best of her knowledge, he wasn’t dead the last time they went out dancing. So she can’t help asking what happened. But he tells her as little as possible, just like a guy, even as his feet sprout leaves and a very large maggot joins the couple on the floor. Meanwhile, they are about to dance right out of the frame and into our laps, perhaps to get as far away as possible from the centerpiece on the table at the back of the room...

With all this going on, the couple is no longer so jolly; in fact, the whole drawing seems much stranger. The fat lady is dancing with a gentleman who thinks that even though he’s dead he can still give his sweetheart a good time. But can he, really? He has already begun to decompose and the maggot isn’t going to wait forever.

Winging It

August 2020 Drawing of the Month

Winging It is a sweet little mouthful of a drawing, a Short Subject that I started on my computerized embroidery machine and finished on one of my two industrial zig-zag sewing machines. (In Frequently Asked Questions, you can find a description of how Short Subjects are made.)

I don’t know if the fellow on the left really wants his wings washed or has something else in mind. But their eyes have met. The one bent over her laundry, who answered his question with another question, is waiting for his answer. Something deliciously fraught is going on. Whatever it is, we have a ringside seat. Enough said.

Six Gods

July 2020 Drawing of the Month

I spend most of my time making drawings, but I have also made at least one one-of-a-kind book every year since 2007. Late in the Fall of 2019, I was hard at work on a complicated book with quite a lot of dialogue when the computerized embroidery machine I use to generate text began to fail. This was not entirely unexpected. Like all of the machines I hack to make art, the embroidery machine wasn't designed for what I make it do, and so it spends a lot of time in the shop.

But the friend who is usually available to take the machine to Bayside for repair had other things to do. But even if she had been available, the wait list for repair was already three weeks long and growing daily. The year was almost over and time was running out. So I put aside the book with all its imagery and dialogue and started over again.

After years of making complicated books, this time I kept things simple. I left the cover blank and patched together the title page from scraps that were at hand and things that I could make on the fly. I don’t even remember when or why I came up with the idea of showing gods, but having thought of gods, I pulled them from a single source so they would make sense together. Their names and attributes emerged as I put the book together. Because the embroidery machine didn’t have many words left, the text was minimal. When I sewed the pages together, I let the stitches show. But nothing was there that didn’t absolutely have to be, and with this book, that was more than enough.

The effect was uncanny, almost devotional, appropriately so, given the subject matter… If they weren't gods to begin with, they are now.

A Passing Glance

June 2020 Drawing of the Month

This has probably happened to you, more than once. You are on your way somewhere, either focused where you’re going or thinking about something else, when you sense someone’s eyes on you. And if you look up quickly enough, you might even be able to catch them at it. If the connection, however brief, is strong enough, positive or negative in affect, you will remember it for some time afterwards, almost as if your mind had taken a picture of the scene. I remember such things happening to me.

Well, that’s what this drawing is about, the sudden, transient apprehension of a sympathetic or at the very least attractive other. The drawing shows a half-human beast of burden pausing in mid-stride, which his impatient passenger doesn’t like at all, to look appreciatively at a button-nosed, blue-eyed, red-haired girl in a red knit cap, with a flowered teapot for a body. Only the upper part of her is visible on the page, where the two salient figures barely overlap. But what we can see is more than enough.

She senses his gaze and is warmed by it.

The air is crisp and it is just beginning to snow.

That’s my idea of everyday magic, making not much into something, summoning the ineffable on a small scale.

Winter Comet

May 2020 Drawing of the Month

Winter Comet was one of a dozen Short Subjects I made in 2016, all quite different. Short Subjects are drawings that start with a black-and-white line drawing, perhaps an old drawing of mine or an illustration that I find in a magazine, a book, or a coloring book. I scan the drawing to make it into a jpg, then use software to translate the jpg into a vp3 file which my computerized embroidery machine sews out, black thread on a white or off-white fabric, sometimes with remarkable fidelity to the original image, but often much more approximately.

The drawing I used for Winter Comet came from an old children’s book, an oversized book that originally belonged to my big brother, now in his late eighties, when he was a boy. The original drawing possessed a sturdy integrity that was still visible after its translation into thread and fabric. I wanted to keep that straightforward goodness if I could. Usually, once I have some version of the drawing in thread on fabric, I collage and sew into it to make it into something entirely different. But this time, I did only what I absolutely had to. I changed proportions and clothing, replaced a hand, a foot, a face, and put something uncanny in the sky, to make it somewhat stranger, even a little weird, but not fundamentally that different.

Its solemn truthiness remained intact, translated into a new context, where a child could see something immensely, gloriously singular that night and never forgot it. To tell the truth, such is the power of this drawing that I’ve appropriated that memory.

I would swear that I saw the comet. I was there. It happened to me.

Tomorrow the World

April 2020 Drawing of the Month

Tomorrow the World began life as a contemporary tapestry copy of a still-life by Cezanne.

A bad tapestry copy as they usually are, approximate, blurred, things left out, colors profoundly changed by the use of modern dyes and woven pixelated on digital looms. As usual with tapestry copies of various paintings, famous or not, that I make into drawings, I regard what was done to this painting as giving me permission to go ahead and find any way forward to make it into something more artful. Whatever I turned it into would be light-years better than the tapestry copies of the Cezanne still-life that are sold by the dozen online.

And so I transformed the tapestry from a still-life into a drawing that was full of motion, with a long-armed, short-legged, big-headed, big-eyed fellow at its center, wearing a Gaudi cathedral, La Familia, in the form of a tapestry copy and so not quite what it originally was, as a hat. Striding forward, he marshals his forces, all blindly loyal, three air-borne, three on the ground, but this is just the beginning. Today Cezanne’s studio, tomorrow the world.

Meanwhile, on the right, we see two lone bystanders immune to his charms, quietly despairing, and on the left, the Lord of Misrule himself agog at how quickly everything has turned. Above and behind all the figures, hangs a bruised and roiling sky. In 2017, we’d recently had an election which changed everything, so there was that, but the brutish aura of this thug wearing a cathedral as a hat also makes me think of the old newsreels showing Mussolini, swaggering, drunk with power, speaking to enormous crowds enthralled with him. Now of course, I cannot help thinking of the crowds that gather now, closer to home. Some things never change.

I didn’t mean to make this drawing. I never do.
I just start drawing and it becomes something I could never have imagined.

Things Break Apart

March 2020 Drawing of the Month

This crazy little piece of art, already four years old, four herky-jerky lines, speaks for these times. I started making broadsides in the spring of 2013, after I received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant that paid for a computerized embroidery machine and software to write files (coded instructions) for the machine.

I needed the embroidery machine and software to write dialogue for the characters in my books and drawings, but once I had the ability to write freely, I could not shut up. So in addition to writing dialogue and punchlines for my big and little drawings, I began to construct pieces made entirely of words and learned from my friends at the Center for Book Arts on 27th St. to call them broadsides. In 16th and 17th century England, opinion pieces and late breaking news such as a sensational murder or a runaway coach were printed on full sheets of paper called “broadsides” and sold on the streets. Sometimes popular ballads were sung on a street corner next to a stack of broadsides printed with the words and music, available for purchase. In the 20th century, poets printed their poems as broadsides, with or without illustrations, and in the 21st century, some still do.

I’m not a poet, just an artist who continues to put words in her drawings and still occasionally writes broadsides made entirely of words. There is already plenty of discussion on-line and off-line about the parlous state of the nation and the disturbing state of the world. But that doesn’t mean I can’t say something, too.

The Surrogate

February 2020 Drawing of the Month

I like The Surrogate both because of how it looks and what it is about. Everything is out front. All its seams show, but in a really interesting way, even to me, who made it, as if it assembled itself from whatever it could find in the ruins of an old quarry or a junk pile of stuff washed clean of color from years of rain, bits of old stone, concrete, and less savory stuff, coming to life to act out a little drama.

And I have seen that fellow many time before, the one sitting on top of the beast, all around town, a classic passive-aggressive type, letting his big dog run free, unleashed, wreaking havoc. The owner will swear, almost always smiling, that his dog didn’t mean any harm by it. As if what the dog meant to do makes any difference.

I have always suspected that letting unleashed dogs freely express their animal nature gives their masters the opportunity to do the same, by proxy as it were, while protesting otherwise; that is, to express profoundly uncivilized, panting, drooling little acts of aggression against society without ever having to take responsibility for the consequences.

Some dogs have been carefully trained to walk without a leash. This drawing is not about those dogs or about the people who go to the considerable trouble of training them. Rather, it depicts the much more common fool who lets his beast run wild in a way that evades the consequences, and in a small pay-back, laughs at him.

Her Big News

January 2020 Drawing of the Month

This drawing endeared itself to me by daring to be no more than its own shambolic self. It shows a tough-looking dame in a mini-skirt and a flowered hat telling a friend that she’s started getting “weird” messages from Mars. We actually see one such a broadcast taking place. Her friend, a man-headed tiger, accepts the woman’s account at face value. “What do they want?” he asks. I’d love to know myself.

We might also ask why the Martians have chosen to communicate with a woman far outside the central government or the scientific establishment, an ordinary person without any authority to act, someone nobody except perhaps for a few close friends would be likely to believe.

But she may have been one of the few people in the vicinity willing to listen to what the Martians had to say and to believe what they told her. Everybody else was glued to their phones, posting online, making money, watching porn, listening to music, streaming a series, checking their e-mail, downloading apps, plotting the downfall of the United States as we know it, or otherwise engaged.

The next time a stranger on the street tries to tell you about his trip to another galaxy, listen to what he has to say.

Dark Angel

December 2019 Drawing of the Month

Dark Angel began with a small embroidery of a sweet little boy at the bottom of the page. When I put a kitten on one side of the boy and a small monkey on the other, the three of them looked very happy together.

Until I drew an angel in the sky above, an angel spreading darkness even before he opened his mouth. That changed everything. The angel comes from a much older, darker place, where things so rarely turned out well that no one ever expected them to, which explains why the angel looks and acts the way he does.

The angel also functions to tell the little boy, who lives in much better times, that things might not always turn out that way. This boy would never eat his kitten! But if widespread crop failure happened in the years ahead, the boy’s great grandchild might have to.

Hey, if we still need to be reminded that there could be bad times ahead, why not an angel?

The Morning After

November 2019 Drawing of the Month

This drawing is an old favorite of mine, though I really can’t say why, except that it has a real sweetness to it. A pig did something inexcusably rude the night before and has returned to apologize for it through an open window. Without entirely letting him off the hook, the woman inside offers sympathy and invites him to breakfast. Her room has big flowered patterns crawling up its walls and a space-age-print rug covering the floor.

The pig and his girlfriend, whose tattooed, blue-haired head seems considerably bigger than her body, are full-fledged flesh-and-blood characters in a domestic drama, the kind of drama that could be a television series, but is described here in a drawing instead. The lovers seem to realize that their relationship is at stake and are talking to each other as honestly as they can. They are lucky to have found each other and they know it. Nothing else matters, not the wallpaper or the rug, his lack of social graces or the size of her ankles.

Except that the patterned wallpaper and that awful rug and the woman’s appearance are what give her character. She is a domestic creature, carefully albeit oddly dressed and house-proud. Just hearing those two talk, even though I am actually reading the dialogue, not listening to it, and I can’t see below the pig’s neck, I’ll bet he is another kind, street-smart and quick-tempered… Opposites sometimes do attract.

I wish them well.

The Ghost Came Back

October 2019 Drawing of the Month

This drawing is full of things that are usually unspoken and unseen, thus worth a second look. And since The Ghost Came Back gained enough votes to be chosen as the Drawing of the Month, I am not the only person who thinks so.

“Looking for me?” Like a proper eccentric, the man holds a tiny leashed antelope with one hand and a flowered branch in the other. Toddling along, sweating heavily and humming a little tune, he encounters a ghost. Which does not seem to disturb him. Rather, it is almost as if he has been expecting some kind of reckoning, and while remaining half-fearful, even welcomes it. He may have grown weary of the part he plays as a strange and not especially attractive older man. But I cannot shake the sense that he is guilty of something beyond eccentricity and is finally prepared to own up to one kind of corruption or another, though perhaps no more than what afflicts most of us in the midst of life....

The ghost is an entirely different creature, incorruptible and uncanny.. Despite his fixed stare and utter stillness and the fact that despite his considerable presence, he seems to weigh nothing, he is almost adorable. According to the title of the drawing, he has been here before. What prompted his first visit? And why has he come again? The man in the drawing is about to find out, unless of course he already knows.

And She Cast a Spell to Bind Him to Her

September 2019 Drawing of the Month

Since the fall of 2014, I have created a large body of work using contemporary tapestry copies of 13-21st Century paintings, purchased online, which I fuse to linen to give them enough body, so that I can collage and sew directly on and into them for days and weeks, subverting both imagery and narrative. I also write dialogue and commentary which I embroider out and sew down.

And She Cast a Spell… is one such drawing, using a contemporary tapestry copy of Vermeer’s painting, The Lacemaker.

In my drawing, I turned the lace maker into a witch - perhaps it is more accurate to say that in the process of making the drawing, where I play an essential part but am not on the leading edge, the lace maker became a witch. Witches often live alone and sometimes get lonely. In consequence, we see this particular witch constructing a live-in companion out of what she has on hand, a funny little fellow wearing a high cap, just coming to life. He waves one very branch-like arm and flexes his right leg, but opposite it, in place of another leg, there is a wheel. A boy peers out at us through its spokes. Who is that? The little man has a blue lace ruffle in front. The witch herself wears a hand-stitched thematically appropriate lace cap and works at a table faced with a deep border of machine-made lace. This is one way in which the drawing betrays its origins.

Another way is how the deep concentration of the lace maker is transferred to the witch with her strange eyes and little hammer, so intent on her work. The whole drawing remains quiet, with no sudden moves, respecting this singular focus. Woman at work!

And She Cast a Spell… was recently included in unfoldingobject, an exhibition of collage-based work curated by Todd Bartel, at the Concord Center for Visual Art in Concord, MA, June 20 through August 11, 2019. A catalogue of the exhibition is available online here.

Stay or Go?

August 2019 Drawing of the Month

Even though I still remember making this drawing, it has always seemed a little foreign to me, I don’t know why, perhaps because it is so different from most of my drawings, starting with a big internal frame, whose pattern makes me think of a vertical oil slick. The frame contains an artificial landscape, a stage set as it were, so fixed is the couple looking out at us and how upright the vegetation standing behind them. Indeed, they cast shadows in several directions at once. The ship and its crew at the back of the set function to offer a way out, even if it is illusory...

The stage set itself is further framed by a few desultory mountains and the monumental leg and body of a great grinning creature - Death? - flourishing a net, soliciting business. His rippling net is the liveliest thing in the entire drawing, which is no great surprise, because everything else in drawing comes from another time, long past. Not death exactly, after death? perhaps, or just remembered, conjured from things in previous times read or heard about that somehow mattered.

I suddenly remember that not long before I began work on this drawing, I had admired the work of another artist, whose elaborate collages, constructed out of old engravings, maps and other ephemera, seemed to exist out of time.

Though my drawings, however metaphorical, are almost always firmly rooted in Present Time or even an imagined Future, Stay or Go? offers a strange bouquet from the past.

Monument to Desire

July 2019 Drawing of the Month

A head, one of many I have made over the years, constructed as a monument, uncannily lucid but still quite strange, a jazzed-up structure comprised of various patterns, implied anatomical references and circuitry, coexisting with pin-ups. The head is set against narrow vertical zig-zag stripes of red and green embedded in yellow-gold. Everything is connected, but what does it mean? Meaning mostly takes care of itself. (This was before I started putting words into my drawings and complicated things further.)

I can tell you this: despite his lolling tongue, his dreams of pursuit, and his all-American drive to consummate, despite the women casting glances, one of them bending over and offering a flower that stands for something else, the women shown are pure fantasies. We’re in la-la land.

Most of us live in la-la land, most of the time. We live in our heads for want of anything better. I created a Monument to Desire to acknowledge how wanting things that are mostly out of reach but still seem almost within our grasp — fame, riches, endlessly gratifying sex, and so forth — gives substance, color, and meaning to our lives. If we lived strictly within our means psychically and emotionally, what a dull world it would be!

Generations

June 2019 Drawing of the Month

It has been seven years, but I still remember sweating over this drawing, which I made the year before a Pollock-Krasner grant funded my purchase of a computerized embroidery machine and CAD software, when for want of anything better, I had to use appropriated text. This required me to wrangle a great variety of letters into place as well as imagery. But the extreme stylization of the words that resulted from that effort married well with the flamboyant figuration, producing a veritable opium dream of a drawing.

The old woman’s body is quite solidly made out of landscapes containing buildings as well as a couple of plump birds, strong enough to hold up an elaborate head-piece. The girl is much slighter, perhaps because her youth. She stands on tiny feet wearing tottery shoes. But she is carrying a geisha on her head without apparent effort, wears a mixing bowl for a hat, and doesn’t seem at all concerned about what else she might lack.

Each woman inhabits her own world. The older one’s world is symmetrical, with everything perfect and in its place. The younger one’s world is off-center, flower-strewn, and somewhat trippy, but so what she seems to say. In effect, the way the girl and her world look now makes it possible for her to resist taking possession of whatever the old woman so grandly wants to give her: symmetry, gravitas, and the rest of it, now and maybe forever.
But they’re still talking, and that gives me hope for the future, whatever shape it takes. The inscription at the top of the drawing sums it up:

Generations are like Sovereign Nations, each speaking a private language and worshiping a different god, complicating relations.

Beach Head

May 2019 Drawing of the Month

As is usually the case, I began Beach Head without having any idea of what it would eventually look like. All I cared about was making a big, eccentric head. When I had taken the head as far as possible, at least for the time being, and looked through my boxes for a ground fabric to surround and support it, I chose something with finely detailed scenes of mothers and children at the seashore in Edwardian England, because it had a lot of red in it, and the big head was mostly red... When I sewed the head into the center of the ground fabric, it felt simultaneously immensely benign and profoundly destabilizing. In turn, the ground fabric destabilized the head, which required a whole series of further revisions to earn its anchorage at mid-drawing.  Some people read the head backwards, as a fish, or forwards as the flayed skull of an ox or as a giant bloody heart. For me, it remains a vastly powerful head with a rainbow smile, around which the entire drawing revolves.

The large, looping, raggedy wave forms at top and bottom enhance the seaside mood. Their A-B rhymes reference the original print, while the commentary of the horse-headed little girl addresses the much altered imagery of the final drawing. Over many weeks, almost everything was transformed into something different, landscape and figures. I never imagined that I would have to make so many changes. There were times when I thought that I might never finish, but eventually I did. And after all my work and endless attention to detail, I was surprised at how expansive the final drawing still seemed, full of light and the tang of salt air, at least when seen in person, at full size.

Beach Head can be seen by appointment at the Owen James Gallery,
owen@owenjamesgallery.com
718-395-4874
69 Wooster Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012

Say It with Flowers

April 2019 Drawing of the Month

Thanks to those who vote for the Drawing of the Month, I am reminded of how many good drawings get lost as I make even more books and drawings and broadsides. I don’t mean to forget them, I cared about them deeply when I made them, but once they were done, I moved on…

Nine years old, Say It with Flowers is one such drawing, strange as the devil, but oddly compelling, even beautiful. We can see what’s happening. Against a buzzing blooming ground, two beasts offer flowers to a bird-headed girl. But what does it mean? It may be better not to know for sure.

The child is just watching, not accepting any offerings, as if to take any flowers would pull her into a larger scheme that she is too young or already too canny to want any part of. The grinning flower-headed fellow with a leopard’s body is the scarier one, I think, his very posture promising some kind of imminent awfulness. The tiger wearing mittens and an artificial leg seems almost cuddly by comparison. But a tiger wearing mittens could still eat a bird-headed girl and enjoy it greatly.

Despite there being large flower-bearing beasts on either side of her, the child doesn’t seem afraid and so we are not afraid either, despite the charged atmosphere. In fact, the drawing has a curious equipoise; as if anything could happen, but so far, nothing has, so why worry, one way that drawings differ from life.

Ripe for the Picking

March 2019 Drawing of the Month

I drew Ripe for the Picking on a contemporary tapestry copy of John William Waterhouse’s painting Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May!, one of several paintings Waterhouse made that feature lissome young women variously engaged with roses. Here two women pick roses in a landscape enclosed in a painted frame. The painted frame in the tapestry was mindlessly garish, so I changed it, along with a lot of other things…

In my drawing I made the two women picking flowers somewhat grotesque, no longer Waterhouse’s usual late pre-Raphaelite cliches. Here they usefully contrast with the perfect “flowers of womanhood” they pick to sell. On one side of them, a little dragon-headed woman dances and blows smoke or is it steam? That is Sex. Another figure, somewhat bigger and more deliberate in manner, made out of images of the forest and its creatures, steps in from the other side. I call him Nature Boy. The field behind them stretches back to a little river.

A skull-headed woman waits on the other side. She is Death. Nearby stands a tree bearing the golden apples of forgetfulness. It may be a little schematic, but the layout of the original landscape strongly suggested it. And stories of life on one side of the river and death on the other have a long history.

Meanwhile, Nature Boy, the eternal innocent, asks the pressing question: Who invited Sex and Death? The women answer him: Sex and Death have always been here.

A Guide for the Perplexed

February 2019 Drawing of the Month

A Guide for the Perplexed is a broadside, entirely text-based, except for color, pattern, proportion and placement.

Only three lines long, it recommends engaging in an act of extreme aggression in order to redress economic wrongs. It means what it says while simultaneously mocking the sentiment.

But life is unfair, in case you hadn’t noticed it, and can’t be made better so easily.People who smash and grab are put in jail, if they can catch them...
Bigger thieves get away with murder.

Cat, Coming to a Head

January 2019 Drawing of the Month

My drawing, Cat, Coming to a Head, began life as a contemporary tapestry copy of a 19th century phrenology chart.

Phrenology flourished in the 19th century as a kind of pseudo-science asserting that the locations and size of bumps and depressions on someone’s head corresponded to his or her mental state. The chart always came in the form of a old-fashioned head, and the tapestry copy of the chart was such a big head that I thought I might be able to make it into something new.

Over weeks I collaged, and sewed/drew into the tapestry copy of the phrenology chart, doing, undoing and re-doing, in order to transform it into what appears to be an almost endless library and museum in the shape of a head, suggesting a vast, intricate repository of analogue knowledge, such a repository already outdated by today’s standards, but none the less quite beautiful and seductive and even a little frightening in its immensity.

With such a transformation of course comes the joke, that almost no one with access to a cellphone or a computer has any interest in a vast analogue repository in the shape of a head, however seductive. And so it stands, entirely accessible but almost completely ignored, entirely out of context, and for all its beauty, unwanted. Too old, says the young cat.

Some kind of metaphor? Maybe. Almost everything gets old, at which time, in retrospect, most of it seems stale, quaint or even stupid. Nonetheless, some kinds of beauty and meaning persist, and we find new meanings in things we once ignored.