Getting There
Ancestor Figures
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”.
Winter Figure
Draw. Erase.
Draw. Erase.
Draw a symbol of renewal
: crocus, baseball, robin. No. Rub it out
: too romantic, too sentimental, and much too soon.
Draft instead the black-plumed preacher
in the back woods—be-sooted raven, riled fundamentalist,
that besotted Cassandra high in the black back woods,
who frets over winter’s excesses and counts/curses/condemns
every person, dog, cat that comes and goes below it
on the road to hell in a freeze-dried world.
Sketch cats agoraphobic that slink/crouch/slide
with flattened ears from barn to bush to shed
, schizoid from nightmares of being fed
to a fanged and hackled open space.
Draw euphoric people multi-hued and mechanoid.
Scatter them helter-skelter on wheels/tracks/skis,
ecstatic hearts pacing the harangue of oriental pistons.
Trace the stubble and tattered stems of Queen Anne’s Lace
where it decays and smudges the drifts of the paper white back lot slope
: charcoal remnants / trace reminders of seasons long erased.
fillière 