Getting There
Ancestor Figures
One consults this quicksilver analyst this parroting psychiatrist this counsellor whose Da Vincian observations, conclusions, notations are inverted on its walls.
One sees the impossible: flesh | mind | spirit & only will at hand to construct a harmony.
One reads a Rorschach world of ravages with each new day’s inscription engraved upon this wailing wall.
One sees the analyst reflect a target in his lidless omniscient stare.
This time I will insert one of my YouTube videos, a drawing of my niece Jenna –three years old this week– but drawn a couple years ago.
My prime goal was to avoid cute; difficult to do in drawings with very small children, but the reference photo was all about her unusual sleeping pose, a superb, very unusual, neatly folded, accordion-like composition. I would only need to follow its lead and focus on that dynamic pose she had been so used to, and which had been so practical in her previous life.
As the drawing went forward I photographed its progress moment by moment, eventually arriving at what seemed a satisfactory finish. The drawing resolved itself without effort, and later on it was very easy to convert its dozens of stills into a video format.
For the music also, since I so enjoy creating the odd piece, I decided to take the most challenging route and discover whether something in a jazz mood might be less cute, less cloying than a lullaby. I think I found it.
The blend of image/music is surprising and, personally, is as close to flawless as I could hope.
When I made this sculpture in 1987 I couldn’t help myself from inscribing a little poem into its plainer side. I had chosen to give its two sides as thorough a contrast in treatments as possible; hence, one side got a brilliant burst of contemporary colour and texture, while the other got my signature, tonal/colour/textural restraint, and an original poem.
As the inscribed version of the little poem cannot be read in full from the sculpture, I’ve made the words visible by arranging them in the thumb-hole of this “palette”.
fillière 