Pondering the Piggybank of Life's Days

Inspiration & Happiness... they are mysterious and elusive creatures.

They'll be there, hiding in the shadows... or just lounging around in the open. Only they're disguised as something so familiar that I can't recognize it for anything different.

Inspiration & Happiness both are like life-saver rings that are kept fixed on the railings of boats. As much as I'd like to take one off the rail and toss it out just anytime... they'll only allow themselves to be really useful in the middle of a real storm, with lightning and desperation and dark clouds and darkness.

Inspiration & Happiness are as fickle as butterflies that only land when they're ready to land. But it's a gift when they do.

Usually they're right there in the same room with me. Only I have to lean back in a corner where I usually never stand and look at things from a different place than I did before. Then maybe they might reveal themselves. And then it's so simple to just walk over and pick them up.

And so one more penny's worth of philosophical pondering clinks merrily into the piggy bank of life's days.

8 Things About Me

1) I'm usually sad... life and the world make me that way. My middle name ought to have been 'Pierrot'. Mozart makes me cry.

2) I usually wish I was somewhere else and far away. That probably explains my fondness for TV and foreign films.

3) I don't understand how the world works and suspect I never will. I also suspect I will never own waterfront property.

4) I'm no good at math and still count with my fingers.

5) I lived in a small town in Kansas once where I got my driver's license at age 13.



6) I never travelled to Antarctica, but I understand my work is well appreciated by penguins.

7) Brahms & Tchaikovsky share my birthday. They were both viola players too.

8) My least favorite part of any journey is when I turn around to go back home.

Breaking the Rules of Art

My step sister, who is an aspiring actress, once wrote to Katherine Hepburn, asking her advice on how to break into acting.

Amazingly, Katherine Hepburn wrote her back. I have a copy of the letter somewhere, written in a shaky sort of penmanship.

I remember her answer as to how to break into acting was very direct and simple. Ms. Hepburn wrote that the best thing she would recommend would be to come to New York and look around to see what everyone else was doing. And then think of something different... and do that.

Good advice. Just shows how the Rules of Art are mostly made to be broken.

What does an artist really know?

* Caution! Philosophical Zone Ahead!

What does an artist really know?

I mean it's such a mystery really. It's everything and very little... all at once.

If you stopped and had to write down instructions as how to do your job, what would they look like? Most professions would have a fairly clear set of principles to follow I imagine. An accountant would have a set of rules, an engineer would have a set of standards... as would vendors of insurance.

But artists practice their art through an ineffable, mysterious collection of learned skills. It's impossible to write them down... and even that sounds like some conjurer's cop out.

What could anyone write down?

1) Place the subject in a prominent manner in the illustration.. but not dead center.
2) Try to depict a meaningful emotional moment
3) Don't overemphasize, be subtle.
4) Draw loosely...
5) Try to capture a feeling...
6) Overlay the foreground objects ahead of the background..
7) Use colors with moderation...

Umm... I doubt that would help anyone.

I'm sure every artist has spent hours and days and weeks learning to draw everything they know how to draw. Artists have spent years learning how to just splash a little paint on a drawing to fill in the color. But even so, the method cannot be described really.

Mysterious! But everything an artist knows to solve the mystery is all there... hidden at the tip of that pencil.
I suppose it's even more mysterious for writers... here's your paper, here's your pencil... have at it.

* End of Philosophical Zone ... you may safely resume your net clicking

Drawing & the Illegible Me

I wonder... is it just me... or does drawing for years on end lead to crappy penmanship?

My penmanship in writing words seems to have steadily grown worse over the years. It's like the muscles in my hand are only trained to hold a pencil and draw. When I try to write words, the letters start taking every imaginable shape.

I can usually manage a blocky print that I can read... but sometimes I write down an item on a grocery list, and 10 minutes later I have NO IDEA what it was. (that's if I don't lose the list between the car and the shopping cart)

Doctors are supposedly known for illegible handwriting... I wonder, do they draw a lot too?

But the really strange thing is that when I watch one of those closeups of a character in a movie doing their handwriting, so smoothly and evenly and orderly... then I can do it too, if I think of that movie scene and slow down and be measured and methodical and paced. It's all in thinking about that same smooth, slow mindset.

But when I'm just me... I'm practically illegible. I'm in too much of a hurry to do anything right.

Good thing I draw pictures for a living. Sometimes it's just easier to draw pictures on the shopping list instead of writing it out.

Steamboat Rock... a Virtual Vacation

If you need a vacation... but can't take one, there's always Google Maps to take you away on your virtual travels... floating, as you will, like a cloud over the desert landscapes.

Amazing new places can be visited... and you can also return to places you've been. All without leaving the comfort of one's computer.

It was with a real sense of adventure that I searched out Steamboat Rock. It's on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, bordering both Colorado and Utah.

First I found the Green river... then I followed it along until I arrived at the unmistakable shape of Steamboat Rock.

I wanted to go back... I've been there twice on camping trips. Once by raft, going down the river and once I drove in by truck, down a winding hairpin road. It's a magical place. Peaceful, timeless, forgotten, almost inaccessible. A very difficult place to get to except via a Google Map instant tour.

There are Anasazi Petrogyphs that are high up on the cliff side... 40 or 50 feet up. No telling how the artists climbed way up there to paint those mysterious figures.

Steamboat Rock itself is an amazement. At sundown, the deep swirling river whirls in eddies under the cool shadow of the rock. You might be lucky enough to see a couple of mule deer swimming across to the other shore. But just basking in the immensity of space and time is fine too. Sometimes a person just needs to sit on a hot rock in the middle of nowhere and try to forget everything else.

There's signs up warning about rattlesnakes... wouldn't want to be bit way down there, in the middle of nowhere.

Steamboat Rock is carved by the Eons from Navajo sandstone. It's a beautiful light smooth sandstone that weathers into gently rounded shapes. Navajo sandstone covers most of southern Utah, where it has created lots of magical places. I don't imagine anywhere else I've been has the same sense of eternity... where one can feel and see the ages of time.

Planet Earth

A woodland picture... not too far away.

Nature... it just can't be improved upon, try as we might.

Maybe in the beginning everything was as peaceful and whole and fulfilled as a woodland scene like this. But it's all the striving and working and toiling that turns things awry.

I have been watching that fabulous 'Planet Earth' series on TV and really wonder why anyone would think it's worth spending millions to travel to Mars to look for bacteria... when so much life on planet Earth is going extinct.

If only Darwin could have seen the DVD of 'Planet Earth'!

Unexpected... Astonishing... Never Seen Before!

Nevermind the 'Perfect Pinkness' from that previous poem. This Astonishing fungii appeared in my backyard, appearing as mushrooms always do... unexpectedly.

It's growing on the trunk of a eucalyptus tree that was cut down a few years ago. It's amazing... but then Nature ought to keep all of us sentient beings in a constant state of amazement, if we only pay attention.

I think that there could never Bee

I think that there could never bee
a thing as quite as loverlee
as a Tulip...

There's just some thing about them
so balanced and so fair...
a curving sprite that seems just right
so elegant and spare.

You can keep your Peonies,
Daffodils just make me ill.
Roses don't do that much for me...

This thing that is so Tulippy,
something simple that I see,
so elegant a simple shape
that folds into a tulip's nape.

It's all so perfect and so fair
as perfect pinkness fills the aire.

I think that there could never bee
a thing as quite as loverlee
as a Tulip...

© Johann Abbottsford Neezovitch 2007

Graffiti on the electronic waters of oblivion...

Why does one blog?
Blogs are graffiti on the electronic waters of oblivion.

Because no one else will listen... or just because we might have something to say.

Movie reviews today:

Carnival of Souls (Classic B Horror movie) 1962

"I don't belong in the world….something separates me from other people" says Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) in perhaps the most lyrical horror film ever made. It is the unlikely 1962 masterpiece "Carnival of Souls".

I guess I've watched Carnival of Souls about half a dozen times now... and it still keeps working it's magic. I keep thinking it's 'my' movie... probably because it was filmed in Salt Lake City, where I went to university... (BA English). And probably because I lived in a creepy rooming house exactly like the rooming house in the movie, and all I wanted to do was escape and leave town. And probably because I once went to a crazy midnight bacchanalian ball at the SaltAir Pavilion... just like in the movie. (only with modern dance majors instead of ghouls)

Weird stuff! Highly recommended.

What's Up Tiger Lily? (Woody Allen) 1966

My other movie choice this weekend is Woody Allen's debut film, 'What's Up Tiger Lily?'. Very funny! The beauty of this movie is that it philosophically proves a point that anything that happens in life can be considered to mean almost anything in any number of ways. One might as well choose an entertaining script. Like Garrison Keillor says, "God writes mostly comedy... only people don't realize it."

The Prince & the Pauper

Rejection is part & parcel of any freelancer's life, of course. But stories like this one can help to ease the sting of the critical masses.

It's a news story about Joshua Bell, the world famous violinist. As an internationally acclaimed violin virtuoso his concerts regularly sell out at $100 a ticket. However recently he fooled everyone. Joshua Bell appeared unannounced and played for free... for an hour in the D.C. Subway (on his $3.5 million Stradivarius no less) as a busker.

What happened? For an entire hour he performed his free recital and basically nothing happened. The thousands of people walking past just ignored him completely. Only one person recognized him. Children stopped to listen, but were soon whisked away by their parents.

I think it's a valuable lesson to not take rejection too seriously in the creative arts. Nobody knows the value of one's own creativity better than we do ourselves!

"Some people occasionally put money in Bell's violin case, as he played the gorgeous Bach Chaconne (actually twice, the first and last piece), as well as other pieces by Bach for unaccompanied violin and the famous Gounod Ave Maria. No one stopped until the very end, when one young woman stood taking it all in, with the crowd rushing by her. She then chatted with Bell, saying that she caught his concert at the Library of Congress the month before."

A Mysterious Excursion

Here we have it... a little weekend getaway to the mysterious world of paint sloshed on canvas.

What am I trying to paint? Depth... Mystery... Nature. Primeval places that are overlooked by the workaday world.

Why do I paint the same scenes over and over? It's interesting how one painting begets the next. Before long the artist has developed their own lexicon of imagery. I've got lots of things nagging to get painted. All in good time...

Does it matter what an artist paints? Sometimes it doesn't seem to matter at all. Anything is the perfect subject matter, but some are more perfect than others.

Anyhow, now I've started into my new shipment of BIG canvases... so maybe I'll make some headway to wherever it is I'm going... despite my contentious relationship with those new blank canvases.