Illustration & Children's Artwork

 I love illustrations of certain books. I just discovered a new one this week: Robert Ingpen, an Australian who illustrates a Classics series. The one I'm reading is Wizard of Oz. Why am I drawn to his illustrations? There's a softness to them. They appear a bit fuzzy around the edges. I like the brushstrokes. I like the emotion of the characters. I see some munchkins and the Good witch with a hunched back. His characters have spindly legs.

I also like the illustrations of Blair Thornley. Hers are simple, ink drawings of people. Also soft I might say in the sense that their backs are sloped. I guess the illustrations I'm drawn to show people in poor posture--maybe that's a subtle element of reality some people aren't capturing. She likes shoes. Her characters are doing something.

I'm thinking about, kind of daunted by, illustration, because I never feel I've been able to capture the human form adequately or do it justice. I'm more of an aiming-for realism drawer. But with this, I'll be challenged to capture an emotion, be simplified. Maybe I could think about the underlying tone/emotion of the whole piece and think about how that tone manifests in a human body. Hm.

Some things I'd like to think about if I dabble more this way: Consider details. Consider texture. I can still do it by hand, I think. Consider a human form/model I like. Remember details to make it interesting/fun--they are a little treat.

bubbling cresting breads

 I just discovered a new added instagram favorite, (new genre?): cook_as_you_feel_it. High drama, French, jazz, instrumental music played along to timelapse videos of baked goods baking. Camera in the toaster oven/oven(?) Breads liquid centers breaking, cresting, toppings growing apart. A loaf in a bread pan enlarging, center splitting, the Center cannot hold, liquifying parts of it sprouting upward, growing up, sending themselves up. Croissants wobbling, off-kilter, kneeling toward one side, disability as beauty. Parts of ourselves: seeds, toppings, growing at different rates, off center. Liquid parts of us becoming solid, as our life bends or sprouts or takes or gives air, bulging in one way, then another. Under heat, growing. Not only up but out and in all directions, growth. Cracks forming, the center like 2 hands drawing apart, gradually separating. Parts of us bubbly, fretting and quaking all over from the excitement of it. Browning, glowing as we're cresting. Many of us on the tray, growing into one another, burbling outward toward one another, little fits and spits and different bulges. Quivering with excitement.

Cut open: Blessed and broken. The beautiful intricate web of holes inside, the croissant's chocolate jeweled core, the thin veins of line holding us together, we who have burbled, blessed, squelched, grown under fire, reached toward our neighbor, bust at our seams, bubbled upward and outward at inconsistent rates, burbling, besting, becoming, blessed and broken.

Again.

5/31:

Weeping as necessary part of the process, our wet innards cresting upward toward warmth to become solidified. How we topple into our neighbor, are conformed by them. How we inflate, and then deflate. Parts of us growing at disparate rates. The beauty in the airiness, cut open at the end to find it was not us, but the airy pockets that allowed us to take our final space. Where we allowed space.

Videos made to be universal, at the end, pulling the product close to our face and wripping it over to reveal its texture.

And yet.

Eucharistic bread as unleavened bread. Flat, necessarily, Containing none of this beauty.

But Flat because of what it was not. Jesus' Last Supper, our Eucharistic meal, a Thanksgiving, a call. A gathering spot And a reminder of what's to come.

If you hear my voice, you're breaking bread, do not wait for the bread to rise. Instant obedience. Children of Israel had to leave Egypt in haste, could not wait for bread to rise. As soon as you hear God's voice.

Jesus at the Last Supper was celebrating Passover.

the Lord's prayer: Give us this day our daily bread.

Bread that has been given time to rise. The great blessing of what is to come. The Last Supper. Bread with sustenance. Bread with community. We eat of the Lord, unleavened bread.

These videos are also in haste: they are time lapsed, change does not. Change does not always feel beautiful. About being made. About being called upward. About being warmed by something that necessarily penetrates all the way to our core.

disability and the other

Disability. Re-reading About Us, collection of essays from the Disability Series of the NYT. What about disability intrigues? Is so articulable? Embodied experience that is truly other. Minority status that unlike race, we could be on the other side of tomorrow. only so many different ways to see the world but living with a sensory or physical disability a unique mindset, a truly different perspective. Essays clearly articulated, solidified, hardened, confident, because lives have spent so long forming, hardening their perspectives around it, living in it, it is solidified, it is hard, it is their reality. The social form, the outside, the environment as that which is disabling. That which we see as soft and fluffy kind party sphere as that which can be naive, blind, not twist an eye toward them. The need to be perceived with dignity. The need for inherent goodness, the ways in which disability comprise essential parts and also bring pain. Isn't it all stories? Our painful parts also defining us, sculpting us in ways uniquely us. About Us. Nothing About Us Without Us. Necessary Voices. Book could not include all voices. Could not include those whose disability prevents them from talking.

Hopefully if we live long enough we'll have a disability (idea somewhere in Chloe Cooper Jones' book, or an Ezra Klein podcast on disability). An inevitable part, often, of a long-lived life. John Altmann, "I Don't Want to be 'Inspiring.'" John Michael Reynolds, philosopher of disability, says the world is essential disabled. Remove an elevator or stairs and a man couldn't make it to the second floor. It would be absurd to accentuate this inability to the point where it's all the man was. John: "So too is it absurd to boil me down to my needing crutches to traverse the world. I am John Altmann, I am not my cerebral palsy. When this becomes common sense to the world, then I will have effectively escaped my disability, even though I will always use my crutches to do so."

Disability as seeable and unseeable. How do we converse about it. How do we ask about an otherness yet ground in sameness. How do we see uniqueness, how what is interesting/constituent to another may be accessory to a self.

La Mer

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zEiokliXzs

Popespeed productions: On Lake Time

remembering...2021 (?) Love this slow moving, hair-rolling-in-the breeze, "Voyeux" (??) look at Mom lifting her hand, looking up, parents, siblings on the sea, slow reel laughter

free flowers

Were I Ross Gay, I would say,

my delight of the day: a jar of flowers upon my kitchen table, found "Free" item from a neighbor's curb, a few blocks away. Flowers I know not the name of, taken from a bush, I discerned upon a second walk-by within the week. Labelled "free" with a sign --one of two jars, Sunday early afternoon. I am not want to take free sidewalk goods, but flowers. 

Free, I realize as they are sitting, jarred, cut off from their life source, in fact the least free in fact they have ever been. Fated with their clipping. Their date to decay ticking from that point onward. Free? Jarred, not growing--subsisting, now, only, on a 3rd floor kitchen table, far from the earth from which they came.

Free: Without cost, the meaning of the sign, the indicator that they were mine for the taking. Though I saw, during the second passing, the second free-flower-picker left the glass there on the curb. I took mine: a roasted red pepper and artichoke tapenade stout jar--headed for the recycling anyhow, I gathered.

Free: without cost they were given to the homeowner, without cost given to me. Fragranced my rooms this week, of unknown name, from unknown person. Free. Emancipated? Liberated? No, but made or given spontaneously. Not bound by force. Having no trade restrictions, yes. Not fastened, except nesting in the jar. Frank and open in their own way, yes, their fragrance having something to say. Licentious? Favorable. Not allowing slavery? They are captured, now--but their open nameless buds' scent speaking of something not easily captured.

 

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell solitude is fine (-Honore de Balzac): aloneness, togetherness & authenticity

Reading Patricia Hampl's The Art of the Wasted Day includes her courting of solitude; solitude's courting of her. Makes me think of the deep desire for aloneness, for togetherness, how one holds the seed of the other. How Jesus going offshore, away from the crowds, is a confirmation to artists: the desire to be alone to be true. Rilke: "a lot that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other." Authenticity, true voice, necessarily born out of aloneness -- yet language, Hampl says, "More than a painter, much more than a composer, a writer can never be alone. Our very medium is held in common, the language we are born into...Language is a shared resource, not individual, not unique, not self-made." Typography references: ~Mind your p's and q's --because those letters can easily get interchanged; "out of sorts" --sorts being the individual letters; to make sure they are all in their correct places. Why can a writer never be alone more than a painter? Isn't color and looking also a shared medium, and more immediate, making it easier to grasp, immediately? A writer can remain more insulated, inside. A stranger can catch a fleeting glimpse of a visual artist's work and have a response.

This flux: quiet/chatter; dilation/pointed fixation, need to receive and listen/need to share. Jesus on the boat getting away, amidst all the crowds. A retreat of artists: a common gathering; one punctuated by times to ourselves. We are not ourselves except who we are in relation to other people; a necessarily enkindling spark to ourselves not achieved except in communion, in relationship.  When in a crowd, we are aware of our particular reactions to a scene. When alone, we are reflecting on a scene its significance --for ourselves, but do so in a medium understandable to others--calling them to see it, too, for what it is.

There's a quote out there I think that communicates eloquently the idea: that we are not ourselves except who we are in relationship with other people. Desmond Tutu: "We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are." Ubuntu: "I am because we are."  is true. The flux. The inward/outward. Exercise/sleep. Listening/talking. Sitting/walking. Nothing new.

I'm unfamiliar with Balzac, but find other quotes by him: 

"No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman." 

"Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love." 

"When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues."

"The heart of a mother is deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness."

A Thigmophilic being

 I put small bookmarks in pages of books where I want to remember one line--one reference to another book, one word. Usually by the time I am finished reading and ready to return the book to the library, I do not have the patience to go back, take each slip of paper out, and reread the two pages it was marking--to try to elucidate what, exactly, I was trying to mark for myself.

This one I knew I would want to go back for: thigmotaxic--an animal who likes to walk along walls, touching something as it goes. Its cousin: thigmophilic--touch loving animal.

I pictured myself on my walk down the long corridor to my office in the hospital. If I arrive a few minutes early for work, per my preference, I go to kneel in the chapel for a few minutes. Then, I walk toward my office. I've noticed as I do so, I skirt the wall, almost keeping touch with it through my jacket. The corridor is dark--not yet fully illuminated for the day--and quiet: the hallways have yet to shepherd the bustling crowd. In this darker and quiet walk, on my way to start the day, I hug the wall. It is a perforated wall; I assume some kind of sound barrier. My jacket sleeve graces it.

I am someone who likes touching things. I do not always love to be touched. But I can remember myself younger, in a Dollar Tree, exploring things by picking up each, feeling their textures.

Thigmotaxic in Alexandra Horowitz's On Looking describes rat behavior. "They feel most comfortable keeping in contact with something as they travel." Mice, cockroaches, caterpillars share the quality. Perhaps I'm one more animal, drowsy and weary, starting my daily march, making my way along in the dark, desiring this posture of humility--kneeling--then quietly scraping along the wall, as some sort of electrical grounding before the bright lights and bustle of the workday begins.