Sleepy ...

~

 

Does Coffee Make You Sleepy?

Azhrarn, Lord of the Night

 

iH ooT

~ 

 Here's a couple drawings by a 4 year old I found in an old sketchbook, from the 70's. I don't remember who she was but I loved her art. The earnest adventurousness of her lines is utterly fascinating. And if you flip the first one or hold up a mirror, you'll find that her apparently asemic text perfectly describes the childhood condition. 🤩

 

I wish I could remember her name and stuff. Kid was way ahead of her time and so what we need in the world today. She once gave me a couple of her drawings, then handed me some coins, actual money she had. I asked her, "What's this for?" She said, "'Cause you took my drawings." She was paying me for taking her art!

 

Trying to ... allow ...

"Trying to understand is
like straining through muddy water.
Be still and allow the mud to settle."
Lao Tzu

 

 

 

 

Wasp

 

 

 “We have a belief that we need not believe in, no dogmas, no ritual, no mythology, no church, no priest, no holy book--what a relief!”
― Frederick Franck 

97_2021-6-30_3:20am Alarm

 

 5x7" oil over acrylic on canvas panel

  
   3:20 AM June 30, approximately 18 hours after my first Moderna jab, and about 20 hours  after my last dose of precious beautiful delicious coffee - to which I am powerfully  'addicted,' - (I mention both of these factors because, for all I know, either could be implicated) an ALARM went off in my mind, sounded like my malfunctioning doorbell, almost a  ding-dong but garbled, more of an electric hum with tones trying to bubble up through it,  like it's underwater, but this time it was LOUD and right through my  head; at the same  instant an image flashed, clear as if I was standing in front of it, but right in my eyes,  like the sound was right through my ears. One second or less and I was  wide  awake.
   

 I tried to reproduce the image, but I'm not that good with watercolor & ink wash, so that one failed, and I had to get it right. The green was very insistently definite.  I finally got at least very close, had to resort to my trusty oil paint, and even that was on top of an attempt with acrylic.

 I was in the process of weaning myself down from coffee, because of stomach problems, so I  could have been well into withdrawal, which can get weirder than most imagine. But it's  never been as psychedelic as this. It's been 2 weeks and nothing like that has happened again, and I've been even deeper into coffee withdrawal. The only new element in the mix is, um, the vaccine. Another week and a half I get jab #2...

 What a time to be alive.

 

98_2021-7-15

 

 

 Oil on canvas 7" x 5" 

"It is exactly the no-way-out situation in which the human being finds itself - that fundamental and unbridgeable inner cleavage of that being which is conscious of itself - that is said to be the way . . ."
  - Shin'ichi

Creek Tree Shade

 

HB pencil in 8.5x5.5" sketchbook. Out at Harmon's Field yesterday, about 30 minutes toughing it out, "in the field,"(sitting in my car with the AC going), then some touch-ups back at home, trying to save it from being a scruffy mess.

I'm clearly out of practice.

I recently did some reading and video watching on 'notan' and 'chiaroscuro' and concluded, who needs fancy terms when all you gotta do is look. Well I think I just found out who. Might have served me well in simplifying my lights and darks, prevented that rather chaotic scratchiness in the tree foliage, if I'd pulled those tools out of the box.

At least this part looks pretty good. To me.

~

"Practicing's good in theory. In reality it just tires us out." --Hank Yarbo 😂

"Wall Street" Paragould style

~

 

Pencil in 5.5x8.5" sketchbook. Small town humor; "Wall Street" is what we used to call 2nd Ave., because in Paragould's heyday as a railroad town, the depot was right in back of buildings like the one pictured above, and that whole block was warehouses and such, chocked full of freight and it was what put us on the map. So, take 'at New York City! 😉

I don't remember if the depot had been torn down yet, the day I made this sketch, but it was long in disuse either way. At one time, in my youth, I think this building housed a retail outlet for some brand of bread and snack cakes. Something is still there, but it doesn't look like this.

And for some reason, I guess I was thinking hard on it that day, I associate this drawing with a trip I made 6 days later, to the picture frame factory outlet store in Pocahontas, during which I spotted the subject of the sketch below. It was around 11 am, she and two young men came into the motel coffee shop I was in, looking like they just made it out of the room in time for check-out, after a night of ... revelry. A disheveled lot they were, but she caught my eye and I sat in the car afterwards and tried to sketch her from memory. I think I got the haggard look, at least.

~

"Sea" shell ...?

~

 

Ballpoint pen in 6x4" sketchbook. I don't remember if it came in a pack or I found it in the yard. Either way. I like how the back-lighting produced a glow you can see right through it, especially in the open end there. Wonder who made it home.

 

 ~

"Once we start to draw, all of a sudden we begin to see again. Were we so blind? How could we have ignored the beauty, the intricacies of these 'simplest things' ... The moment the eye opens up, all becomes equally fascinating, equally inspiring, equally pregnant with meaning."
— Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: Meditation in Action, Frederick Franck

~

Starfish

~

 

Back when I was married, there were magnets on the fridge. One was a starfish. One of its arms fell off, broke off. I drew a picture of it, evidently with an HB pencil, in an 8.5" x 5.5" sketchbook, on the 25th day of January, 2008. 

~

"I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful." --John Constable.

~

Dump Truck 1993

 

 Pencil, 8.5" x 5.5" sketchbook 

Made in the Shade: Main St.

~

 

"The eye does not judge, moralize, criticize. It accepts ... the long bamboos being long, the goldenrod being yellow.”
― Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing

~ 

Liq_

 

16" x 20" acrylic and Liquin on canvas. Possibly finished, possibly underpainting for an action passage to come ... 

I'm starting to wonder if what's left of my interest in painting is perhaps more spiritual than artistic, and may in fact have always been.

~

PM At The Oasis

~ 

"We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day." - Brad Meltzer

 

 

 

 Ballpoint pen in 5.5" x 8.5" sketchbook.

Sitting in the van, in the parking lot of Oasis liquor store in Buckingham, Richardson, TX. There's a bank now, where those trucks are. In the foreground you can see stakes with black stuff draped between them; that's that construction plastic/tarp stuff they put down under a concrete pour, so BOA was on its way, even then.

I did a number of sketches at various times in this area, but this is the best one.

~

"... classic poise ..."

~

Slightly digitally enhanced version of pencil in 8.5" x 5.5" sketchbook, unenhanced scan below. The edit was an attempt to make up for the paint splatters ...
 

Study from a small photo in a magazine of Ryeui ryu karate kata champion Tsuguo Sakumoto. The likeness is not great, and it's all I had to go by for the subsequent black/white 20" x 16" oil painting(1996), so I gave up on that and just went for human-looking.

 ~

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." (Yogi Berra)

~

Darkness At Times Edge

~

The year Christopher Reeves' first Superman movie came out, 1978 apparently, I'm at home trying to draw this Frazetta illustration from TV Guide -- the grayscale version to the left was in the magazine, below is the full color image -- promoting that week's episode of Battlestar Gallactica.

I mention the Superman movie because that's what interrupted the drawing: friends showed up and coaxed me away to go see the newest incarnation of The Man of Steel. 

I was glad I did but don't know why I never finished the sketch.

Anyway, it's pencil in a 11.5" x 8.5" sketchbook.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~

Rita Drive, Garland, TX, '08

~

 

Pencil in 5.5" x 8.5" sketchbook. A view from my 'studio' window, in those days.

~ 

"We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches.
 That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future –
all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would
 soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By
 contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face
 with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of ancient hills."--Goethe

~

Granbury, TX, '02 ...

~ 

... from a hotel balcony overlooking the lake.

 

 

Pencil in 9" x 12" sketchbook. I just recently got this one cleaned up the best I could, after curious children took a kneaded eraser to it. Understandable temptation.

~

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."  -Mike Tyson

~

South on Carson

~ 

 "The chief enemy of creativity is good sense" - Pablo Picasso

 

 

Sitting in the car outside J'boro City Water and Light, one day back in '86. Pencil in 5.5" x 8.5" sketchbook.

 

~

C Kali Strong

~ 

"I don’t really know whether art can exist without a certain degree of tranquillity or spiritual poise; without a certain amount of quiet you can have neither philosophy nor religion nor painting nor poetry. And as one of the specialties of modern life is to abolish this quiet, we are in danger of losing our arts together with the quiet of the soul that art demands." - Saul Bellow

 

 

Way back in the early 80s I was breaking in some new pens with refillable reservoirs, to accommodate colored ink. Doodle page in 5.5" x 8.5" sketchbook.

~

Old sketchbook page

~ 

"I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time." -- Orson Welles

~

 

 "Bare Tree," ballpoint pen in 8.5" x 5.5" sketchbook

I like to commit as much as possible, old or new, to digital.

~

Action figure

~

 

 

 Pencil in 12" x 9" sketchbook, cropped. From a book of figures in action poses, photos for artists. 

~

Then again ...

~

 I was frequently castigated, for staring out the window, in school.

~

Well, maybe not ...

~

 

 

"... flapping down the poisoned air, A ten-clawed monster."

 

"Science Fiction"
 by Kingsley Amis

 What makes us rove that starlit corridor
May be the impulse to meet face to face
Our vice and folly shaped into a thing,
And so at last ourselves; what lures us there
Is simpler versions of disaster:
A web that shuffles time and space,
A sentence to perpetual journeying,
A world of ocean without shore,
And simplest, flapping down the poisoned air,
A ten-clawed monster.

In him, perhaps, we see the general ogre
Who rode our ancestors to nightmare,
And in his habitat their maps of hell.
But climates and geographies soon change,
Spawning mutations none can quell
With silver sword or necrocmancer’s ring,
Worse than their sires, of wider range,
And much more durable.

~

Killing Joke - I Am The Virus (Lyric Video)

New shot of an old painting

~

 Backyard Luna, 2008 oil on canvas 11 x 14"

~

Tree Neighborhood

~

 pencil sketch 8.5x11"

 

 oil painting 20x24"

1985

 

 ~

The Primacy of consciousness - Interview with Brenda Dunne

Basic Universal Law

 

Grant Cameron

4tSpo hunsroreiesduuu  ·

"Seems the message has always been the same. The FREE survey showed 54% of experiencers got the following message as well. George Adamski, the first reported alien contactee relayed a message he received from the aliens - there is a Basic Universal Law: all things are connected; there is a Oneness of consciousness throughout the cosmos. An alien referred to as a "master" told Adamski, "You must impress, as best you can, understanding in the minds of your brothers on Earth that knowledge of themselves is the first requisite. And the first questions: ‘Who am I? Through what avenues can,(sic) I express in order to return to the Oneness from which I have fallen?""

 ~

The Thunderbolts Project Picture of the Day: The Persistent Illusion

HERE

 

https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2021/01/12/the-persistent-illusion-copy/?fbclid=IwAR3_fGsk1ZJQa-0BxWq6B97bMjF535_-RXPU2BZSLezjwua6tfziUNsvoGM