Greetings!

You’ve stumbled onto my new patch of cyber [real] estate. It’s a work in progress, but It’ll always be more drawings than texts and more personal art than published work. I’ve been drawing for over 50 years and this blog/site/whatever is my better-late-than-never attempt to get all the stuff I’ve spent so much time on out there–wherever there is, that is. 

By the way there are many Howard Johnsons out there. These are some I am not: The hotel/motel/restaurant; the inventor of voice mail or a perpetual motion machine; a baseball or jazz tuba player; or the fantasy-realist painter.

Be forewarned I am a cynical sceptic and a left-leaning, semi-reclusive egoist. My personal art reflects this. If drawings of naked people will offend you, scroll no further and stay out of the personal drawings pages.

Constructive criticism is welcome. But remember you are a tourist here. Tread lightly and leave no trash.

HSUP

Here’s another drawing about self and other. Sorry, but it’s what I think about a lot.  Here you see our hero, my self of course, looking into the glass and seeing one woman all dressed up and on a date with another man as well as a naked one alone and facing him. They are all mixed up.

He is seeing memories of actual exes blending with fantasies. He can’t separate the woman of his “actual” past from the fantasy one of his possible (but not probable) future. Nor can he separate the actual women who’ve rejected him from the fantasy women who could desire him as he could desire one of them.

And what makes it worse is his “social dyslexia” which is his inability to read other people. Because of it he perceives a door, what else could PUSH mean? But it’s not PUSH it’s HSUP -PUSH backwards- which means you’d push on the other’s side to get through. Yet he pushes on his side and no surprise it does not open. The glass remains a wall and he remains alone.

That’s the confusing semi-ness of it all, the half-reality half-fantasy of looking at glass. The mixing of transmission and reflection and the mixing what one sees ahead of one with what’s behind. Past, present and future; time set in a spatial metaphor.

Yes, possibility, memory and fantasy are mixed up in the glass as window/wall/door metaphor. But they are mixed up even more by his subconscious mind as it censors and edits what he thinks he knows/feels about how un/successful he was or could be. It’s as much a “through the glass darkly” metaphor for the conflict between the conscious and subconscious mind as it is for the self-versus-other interface/boundary.

So there is the more general mixing of fantasy and memory, the real and the ideal. Fantasy is the ideal, the closest to which we can get is the possible future based on the memories of the past. Memories are the real; they are sensories recorded.

But memories are as imperfect as fantasies for fantasies are remembered, too. Then the new memories and fantasies are subconsciously edited to be made consistent with those that are already there. Nothing is ever recalled as it was truly was, ever remembered in an anyway objective fashion. And there is nothing we can do about it.

To go forward we fantasize the possible, then act based on causes and effects remembered as associated with such a possibility. Our success is determined by how accurately those memories map the current situation. In other words, how little the recursively remembered fantasies corrupt the objectivity of it all.

And our weak minds reflect on it all like glass. We don’t differentiate well between what is past and what is future, we see them all mixed up as one. We read memories as fantasies and vice versa. We see signs as guides for action but we often see them as if we are on the other’s wrong side.

Eye and Thou

“Through the Thou a person becomes I” – M. Buber

Allow me my pun based on cursory googling. I am no scholar, but I won’t apologize. The gaze and the breast are both hot topics in the articles I read on art, philosophy and psychology so…

For this post I put an actual bug-eyed frog key chain together with memories of a personal lost object, a plush mermaid with round, sewn-on breasts.

“Of course what most often manifests a look is
the convergence of two ocular globes in my direction.”
–J. P. Sartre

I drew the eyes and the breasts the same, as circles with dots to link the see-er with the seen to link two otherwise incompatible “see” creatures. A tadpole becoming, in time, a frog and in space a fish becoming a woman.

I made the drawing thinking about “existence as encounter,” (Buber) the necessity for being being the awareness of others in the world; and the “myth of the isolated mind,” (Stolorow) one can’t be aware but not aware of something (some one else) and its like to the figure/ground thing in art writ large now about shared agreements/divergences of meaning.

Sartre says the gaze is that which permits the subject  to realize that the other is also a subject. But Lacan says the gaze is more the object of desire — of attention if desire is too strong a word here — than the subject desiring. That object of desire is not another subject but only what the subject thinks it is.

If both the gaze and object of desire are “out there” belonging to neither the first subject nor the other subject, what are they? Can they be painted en plein aire? Can they walked around behind; can they be bought and sold?

His eyes and her breasts are all “ocular globes” they are circles with dots, icons and symbols aren’t they?  They are both gaze and object of desire, but they are neither I nor thou.

“Consciousness, in its illusion of seeing itself  seeing itself,
finds its basis in the inside-outside structure of the gaze.” –J. Lacan

The mermaid looks at the frog/artist too. She sees him not looking at her subjective, conscious self but at breasts, objects to her as well. He’s reaching for them with his eyes, he wants them! No way! She says.

The artist/frog can’t stop the gaze. It’s a shot fired or a drawing posting. He’s still responsible for it, hence his guilt and her anger. The gaze is as much his object, his conscious self, as the breasts are hers. Eyes and breasts become the same in art — circles with dots, icons and symbols. Mermaid and frog/artist both watch the watching.

“I am (in the world), therefore I think.” –Robert Stolorow

Or “The world exists for the sake of the Self.”—Patanjali

Which?

Le Club Humaine

A warning: This text is meaner than the drawing which seems to be showing a couple going to a club where they will have fun dancing, drinking, chatting each other up, and making plans for later. The couple in the background, leaving the club, seems to have reached a plan. Everybody seems happy. But…

A kitschy tavern sign looms as an ominous rebus. Those implied words are made zoomorphic epithets hurled when cautions are numbed. Each an insult wielded as weapons (club?) in the battle of the sexes, combatants retreating and attacking in indecisive skirmishes.

The male is called a pig by the female, what does that mean? A pig lives anywhere and eats anything. It will also get hairy and violent if left on its own. Are men like this? Perhaps. And are women like dogs? Aren’t dogs loyal, eager to please? Read “To Build a Fire” by Jack London before you answer.

Do men constantly have to be re-domesticated to stay clean and peaceful? Do women need increasing compensation to continue to be loyal and pleasant? I hope not. Hope it’s only the drink talking. Hope nobody remembers.

Mate [model] Muse

What does the title of this picture mean? Is ‘Mate [model] Muse’ a tri-partite title belonging to one amazing woman or is that merely a fantasy born of a lifetime of daydreams and imagined-to-be-returned gazes remembered?

If there were a model for this picture of a painting she’d be real, a ‘sensory’ drawn from life, but there was no model here. I’ve philosophically bracketed* her and left only my memory or fantasy. And I’ve grammatically bracketed her making her the explanatory ‘word’ that makes sense of the out-of-context quote.

A model is real. Model explains the mate and muse thing. She can be muse-like (an inspiration) or mate-like (a working partner.) A mate can, in theory, be a model and a muse too but that’s beside the point.

I’ve also bracketed her pictorially. Because I, the maker of the picture-of-a-picture being made, don’t use models. I would if I could, but all I’ve ever had is fantasies based on memories and possibilities based on improbabilities. It’s not ideal but it works.

If the model was in my ‘studio’ she’d be now re-presented as she was, in the center of the picture. But she’s not there. She’s only there as a re-re-presentation in the painting-in-the-picture where she’s both mine and the painter-in-the-picture’s memory and fantasy.

So, I, like the phenomenologists, have erased the real from the picture. Sort of, it’s the gray pentimento in the center  faint but still connecting left and right.

Therefore this picture is not as simple as your typical artist in his studio painting from memory picture. There’s a hand on the right holding a brush redrawing the painting-in-the-picture of the now gone model, making it more intimate, muse-like, moving her arm so her breast can be seen. Is this hand an artist’s or is it on the painting-in-the-picture? How about the hand on the left? It is holding a woman who could be the absent model as well, now being mate-like. Does it belong to an artist, too?

*- Which I guess is ignoring as much of the physical/sensory and metaphysical as you can. To the philosophical bracketeer it’s all just random bits of light, silly pixels or 1s and 0s until he by attending and reflecting gives it meaning.  Kind of the opposite of grammatical bracketing, it subtracts rather than adds.

Crusty but benign

“I’m sad as hell and will continue to take it.”

So says the depressed resident of this apartment. The windows are “painted” shut. And even if he could do as Howard Beale (“Network” -1976) bellowed he do, nobody out there would be listening. Life is a blog — in cyberspace no one cares if you scream.

Think of this drawing as one of those illuminated medieval manuscripts where you can see several stages of the same event at once. If those crazy Pre-Raphaelites were true to their name they’d have done some of medieval stories they were telling this way instead of painting in their excruciating detailed early-renaissance manner. But I digress.

So think about this drawing being about Courtly Love – Courtly not Courtney- with the resident artist being the troubadour and his self-made representations of his ideal and unattainable beloved as: the woman in the window (1), the woman in the paintings (5), and she with her life (2-4) impossibly distant from his. She’s the la princesse lointain, the far-away princess, of that troubadour’s songs.

La Princesse Lointain, the object of desire is a necessary character in the medieval art form “romance” now corrupted into “chick-flick/lit.” Ironically the original was written from the male P.O.V. (or “-gaze”, but that’s another story, see Laura Mulvey, et al.) …

Plus: a) even before the woman became the object; the object was wisdom in the form of a grail, a shared glass of wine with a toast of great import – in vino veritas? b) Back then women were objects. When a man married, he married land and the woman was thrown in for good measure.

… But the male, here and now, is the one locked up in a tower not she.  The princess is the one who healthily interacts with the world one-on-one and self-to-self, not he. She‘s on a date with  his Jungian shadow — all he is not – personified, while he quests in private, drawing his grail as shared sacrament. But it’s more solitary than shared, more whine than wine because it is shared not with a princess, but with his so-called art.

I’ll let you all figure out what the leaky penis.

Little Oeddy or the Terrible Threes

This is one of 3 drawings I began thinking about back in Oct. The working title for the set was “Thrill Rides.” The other two are not even penciled yet, they exist only as word sketches in my journal. Back then, in this one, there was no dad with his foot having been run over by the stroller there was just the kid curious about the mom.
Anyway about the time I finished it I became a grandfather- 5:10 pm, Dec. 6, 2009 – mom and son are doing fine.

No, they are not gonna name the kid little “Oeddy” but that title is a play on the old Greek dramas/myth about Oedipus the king. He would have had a nickname as kid, right? Also I’m picking up on some Freudian stuff too.
In the dramas/myth Oeddy’s birth parents hear a prophesy that Oeddy will kill his dad and marry his mom. Unhappy with this, mom and dad abandon him to die. But he’s found by and raised by some local peasants.
He grows up and he hears the same prophesy. Not wanting it to come true he gets far away from the kind and good peasants who he thinks are his parents. He grows up arrogant and wealthy. And in an early road rage incident he kills some asshole who tried to run him down.
He grows up smart, too. He outwits a half babe/half monster and gets to be king of a nearby city which is actually his real home town. As the new king he gets to marry the widow of the former king who was recently killed in a road rage incident. See where this is going?
Sensing something is wrong here he goes and gets another prophesy and finds out wife is mom and the asshole he killed was dad. He can’t keep this a secret. So mom finds out and kills herself and he blinds himself. All their kids kill themselves too, I think, but that’s all in sequels I’ve not read or seen. The Greeks, they love their theater.
Move ahead 2 millennia, when Freud said all little boys wanna do mom and pop dad. He called that the Oedipus complex. Odd he should get that from this because little Oeddy did every thing he could not to do this. I think it was little Siggy who wanted to do his mom and pop his dad but didn’t wanna come out and say so.
Kids are curious about how they came to be and they run through some odd hypotheses as they gather data about self and other as they grow up. Whereas most kids forget their old theories when the come upon more realistic ones. Sophocles and Freud remembered theirs, then they wrote them down.
Back to the drawing. Little Oeddy here is a typical curious kid he’s using the mirror to investigate his origins. But this is well after the mirror phase of the neo-Freudian Lacan. Our boy here certainly knows he’s an entity quite separate from mom or dad. But he sorta remembers being one with mom and liking that better than the cold, cruel life he now has.
He has seen dad trying to be one with mom and that pisses him off, frustrates him as he can do nothing about it as dad is huge and he is small. Well not exactly nothing, he can run over his foot with the stroller. (Oedi-pus, swollen foot in old Greek, get it?) It’s a victory, a little victory in his little life.
Soon enough the cycle of life will overcome him and he’ll be a new dad after many false starts, with a new mom after several bad endings. If he’s lucky, that is. Good luck little Oeddy.

Prufrock’s Mermaid

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.”
– T. S. Eliot

If you follow the numbers you can see that each panel is on a floor above the previous except 4a and 4b which are of one floor. Here they are with their original subtitles, obscure papers by S. Freud. Don’t ask me what they mean as I was just trying to be clever. The garage; Panel 1 – “A Mythological Parallel To A Visual Obsession” (1916b)- will take you to an art gallery; Panel 2 – “Instincts And Their Vicissitudes”(1915c) – on the ground floor. Above the gallery is the hotel hall; Panel 3 – “On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love (1912d). one up are the kitchen; Panel 4a – “Civilized’ Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness (1908d) and the studio: panel 4b – “A Special Type Of Choice Of Object Made By Men”(1910h). Then there is the attic; Panel 5 – “Remembering, Repeating And Working-Through”(1914g). Finally there’s panel 6 – “Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes” (1925j – the “Peaceable Kingdom” homage.
In panel 1 There’s a chimerical limo-snake, the serpent pushing the fruit of an apocryphal “The Tree of Wealth” which the writers of Genesis were careful to leave out. The First Woman is about exit said vehicle or is that leg something else?
In panel 2, does this First Woman who enjoyed fruit from that tree, who is now being enjoyed herself, measure up to art? Is her aging flesh a match for eternal bronze? The good Herr Docktor doesn’t have to choose. He is rich enough to enjoy both but with his mechanical hand can he? Yes, he can pretend and remember.
Siggy actually had a mechanical jaw late in his life. Long after he mechanized the talking cure, mechanized writing about the talking cure where he, in theory, banned touch from the consulting room, so he says. He saw desire as fuel for a human machine; as steam pushes an engine along tracks. This metaphor of his time is from personal experience – in and out of the consulting room – as well as introspection. So I give him a mechanical hand.
In panel 3, which is about desire for what you can’t have; can’t be with, even if you could survive in her world, without protective gear. You’d not hear the mermaids singing in your diving suit nor would human voices wake you to drown. The artist is safe there but alone. Note the empty bottle and the pair of glasses/two empty glasses outside a hotel room door. They are both a symbol of desire met and a pun on “look but don’t touch.”
In panel 4a there’s a party in the artist/Prufrock’s kitchen. There’s no one who’s all human here. There’s the mermaid hiding her fishy parts with her sea-green dress. “That makes me so digress” Is she pulling it up or down? There’s Siggy with his academic, Midas-like, mechanical touch; and the diving suit from panel 3, now perhaps empty.
Empty, the suit is a symbol of the art object. Art is about drowning. The suit allows the artist to be where he would drown yet live to tell. The art object is the suit back on dry land, still damp, now empty. Therefore the art creator is not now needed.
Are these rooms an everyman’s rooms, Prufrock’s? Sorta, as there is an atypical pool in the studio. It symbolizes the bi-worldness of the artist. There are stairs up and down here; either or both could be Prufrock’s “Do I dare?” stair of hesitation. The stairs down lead to where he can be “Scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” via the “restless nights” hotel, past “sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown” and further down to the “farther room” of women and the arts; where with his single pin his “modest and rich” social acceptance is asserted.
Or up the folding stairs to an the attic where art could either save the day or be just a memory storage devise recalling a pointless lust over and over again, year after year where there is J. Alfred’s second pin, the pin upon which he “formulated, sprawling” and “wriggling” where he spits “out all the butt-ends of my days and ways.”
Substitute pen for pin or worse. And he for me, but I’ll never say “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.” But Prufrock says it twice, once for each of us.
There follow the yellow fog and smoke – computer screen or window; make a sudden leap. “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’” No, go ahead ask Lazarus. Exit up out the window or down through the computer to a peaceable kingdom, your choice. Either way the top panel (6) is my take on Edward Hicks’ many peaceable kingdoms.
Siggy is in there again, he is wearing a cowardly lion suit, introjecting the real lion that’s always in the Hicks paintings. Then there’s the bull that’s often, but not always, in Hicks’ art/work/obsession. The bull here a stock market bull-man; it/he’s a macho dude that all the babes go for. Could he be J. Alfred’s Prince Hamlet?
I substitute a mermaid for Hicks’ typical angel which adds problematic sex to the mix. Angels  are asexual, neither desirable nor possesseable and mermaids can be  desired but never can never be possessed. So it’s a chimerical ménage a trois: bull boy, mermaid and the freudy-‘fraidy lion. Add the limo-serpent for show, call the discarded leg and the empty suit sex toys and it’s a fantasy, a triple XXX myth, pornography for faux intellectuals like myself.

The Comet Narcissus

Don’t know how well you can see it on the 485px version but on the 1200px original you can see that the comet is a self portrait. Took me a while to get the lighting right, thank you photoshop. Wacom, too couldn’t have done it with a mouse.

There was a TV show, couple of nights back, where a man said, “There comes a time in every man’s life when he realizes he’s invisible to all attractive women.” British of course, in American TV all older characters are jokes. To which I’d add the fact of his invisibility comes long before his realization of it and in that time/space there is much embarrassment.

The telescope being upside down is on purpose. The handsome -and youthful- couple has no desire or need, reason to look at the aging/fading artist.

The original digression from reading a psych text to metaphor-ing an understanding of via image-ry to thinking that that might make a good drawing to actually making a drawing had a planets vs. comets theme. Thinking about planets staying in orbit because of a balance of momentum and gravity as a metaphor for people “libidinally cathected.” Thank you Hr. Dr. Freud, I now don’t have to embarrass myself by talking of love.

Thinking about how different is a comet, like planets in an orbit but an object not by its gravity but because of its coldness –a ball of ice and dirt, it is- and that coldness is only from its distance from the star it orbits.

With further cogitation, the metaphors kind of fell apart. I’ll not bore you with exactly how. But they held until the drawing was too far along not to finish.  So here it is.

The comet is now a metaphor for narcissism, which is a defensive position. After the optimism of desire fades into envy and before wisdom makes it yearning, the narcissist  says, but doesn’t really believe, “I’m better than that, I’m above all this,” and gets though it.

The desirer first thinks he can get what/who he desires but after multiple failures he loses that desire, but gains an anger, as he’s now envious of others’ successes. Finally the anger fades leaving just an aggregation of sadness for his loss, with a tail of pride.

The sadness is not mourning but melancholia. For with the former, there he could grieve his loss accept that it/she was here-then, it/she is now-there. Realize that both places are really here-now. Accept this and move on.  But with the latter, attempts to grieve fail because there’s no here-then to be here-now and now-there was there-then. he never really had what he feels he’s lost,. And pride won’t let him admit that.

I think about things i sorta/barely-if-at-all comprehend, because I read books over my pay grade. I do it to jiggle loose artsy stuff, which is generally all about me, whoever I am. Today it seems I’m a narcissistic melancholic, but that’ll change when I’m reading a different book. The above mentioned psych text is “On A Darkling Plain” edited by Ivan Ward. And I apologize in advance to those offended by my miss-constructions. But I also say to them: “Get a life.”

Quae Nocent Docent

Yes, many red-heads. You have a problem that? I don’t. The projection of the painting is a cut and paste of the mural from the ‘I didn’t get to Woodstock’ drawing a couple of posts back. It, in panel 1 is bright compared to the dark lecture hall. In panel 2 there’s a spot light that obscures as much as it illuminates the work. And in panel 3 there are multiple backlights but none on the art.

Panel 1 is subtitled Ars Gracia Ars, ‘Art for the sake of art’. The art here is being critiqued, compared and contrasted to only other art in a typical academic fashion. The just dating couple are, as well, wholly into themselves and only themselves.

Panel 2 is Caveat Emptor or ‘Let the buyer beware’. The art is now for sale, given a ‘cash value’ and compared to everything else in the real world.  Likewise the lovers are now married, more contract than couple.

Panel 3 is In Flagrante Delicto or ‘While the misdeed flames’ the couple becomes no more. And you could call what’s left in the frame a modernist abstraction or a post-modernist ex- [or dis-] traction; you could call it no art at all.

So what does it all mean? Stuff I could’ve learned in my youth had I been mature enough to put forth appropriate effort? A career I could’ve had had I been aggressive [and thick-skinned] enough? Or a mate for what ever reasons I don’t even now know I lack?

So … Absit invidia, readers, which means ‘envy apart’ or I mean you no harm.

Ps: the title of this rant [also the title of the poem at the end of it] means ‘things which injure, instruct’ or ‘no pain, no gain’ or even Nietzsche’s  ‘That which does not kill me makes me stronger.’ The epigraph is a plea for lost years from Virgil, also quoted by Kant. I admit I’ve not read any of either [read lots about Kant, tho’] and little of Coleridge.

O! mihi praeteritos referat si Jupiter annos!

Oh! might my ill-past hours return again!
No more, as then, should Sloth around me throw
Her soul-enslaving, leaden chain!
No more the precious time would I employ
In giddy revels, or in thoughtless joy,
A present joy producing future woe.
But o’er the midnight Lamp I’d love to pore,
I’d seek with care fair Learning’s depths to sound,
And gather scientific Lore:
Or to mature the embryo thoughts inclin’d,
That half-conceiv’d lay struggling in my mind,
The cloisters’ solitary gloom I’d round.
’Tis vain to wish, for Time has ta’en his flight —
For follies past be ceas’d the fruitless tears:
Let follies past to future care incite.
Averse maturer judgements to obey
Youth owns, with pleasure owns, the Passions’ sway,
But sage Experience only comes with years.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1789

Its Own Wreck

A contemplation on a conundrum. An outsized fantasy, a muse that’s both and neither a model and a mate. A muse as a bridge, a relationship to relationships, oversized, impossible and unrealistic, inflated in value and ability to be that, a bridge stretching across and beyond his sort of real space. A selfobject if you’re into that sort of thing. Stretching from his fantasy within a fantasy (this drawing of a painting from life), filling his little room, to over and out the door into his depressive realistic view of not-his-space. There she’s a mate, as they all seem to be, with another.

“…to hope til Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates”
–p.b.shelley