JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

Three just published books, all exclusively for the Kindle, at the moment:

Grendel, The Demon’s Inner Torment

In this short story, third in the Monsters series, Grendel, the ancient, legendary demon, tells a surprising story — one which we weren’t taught in school.



The Minotaur’s Tale

A short story in which a powerful being, condemned to dwell in infinite caves, gives his personal perspective.



Cerberus, Gatekeeper to the Underworld

In this short story,second in the Monsters series, Cerberus, the legendary gatekeeper, a terrifying creature with three snarling heads, reveals himself to be a bored, wise bureaucrat. Alternately conversational, witty and reflective, we get the scoop, up close and personal.

Alison Rosen, the most excellent cohost of Adam Carolla’s funny online show, wrote a 2001 guilty pleasure article about her affection for Thomas Kinkade’s paintings.

Guilty pleasures are defended against by sarcasm meant to dispel the idea of tastelessness. Guilty pleasures get it, they say, by way of irony and assertion. “So sue me,” the article says. This distanced irony is a species of “not that there is anything wrong with it,” as Seinfeld brilliantly satirized the ambiguities of political correctness in a single phrase. Credit to Alison Rosen for not taking that path completely, but stating her genuine affection for Kinkade’s work, and the effect it had on her.

Kinkade’s work has a warm glow that is reassuring to many. The pleasure is visual. It is the pleasure of color and prettiness. This will not get one applause as a sophisticated or sensitive soul. The thought police are always lurking, waiting to pounce on those not worthy. Not worthy at all. (How can you have taste if you are always on the lookout to deride and cackle? Where’s the taste in that?)

The Impressionists were derided for the pretty shallowness of their work, but soon their work became “banker’s art.” It was esteemed and bankable — high priced.

Liking the wrong thing is an oddity of social life rather than of aesthetics. But Kinkade’s work exists at the wrong end of the pop culture: it is not there to affirm one’s prejudices of correctness, but rather designed to reassure in a treacly way, but nevertheless reassure. I sometimes wonder if critics more despise the motive than its expression in Kinkade’s work.

The deficit of Kinkade’s work is the deficit of too much candy. Teeth and stomach hurt. Art of the 1800s created a more durable expression of visual pleasure devoid of depth. The artists of the time, neoclassicists, were able to incorporate an overflow into substance by sheer skill. The relationship here is that Neoclassicism harked back to Rome and not a dreamed of crystal city on the hill of fairy tales. A past that never was. The followup to Neoclassicism, with a few stops along the way, was the Academicism of the 19th century; brilliantly instantiated in the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Charlie Rose had two curators on today. They had put together a show of Van Gogh’s work. The work shown was all presented at an angle. Unless there was some restriction on photography of the work, it appeared the cameraman was being “creative,” showing the thickness of the paint. The paintings really should have been shown square to the frame of the screen. Neither Rose nor the curators made any mention of the curiously mangled presentation. There would have been no crime in showing well photographed slides to let the work speak.

These shows with convocations of experts have some merit. It is great that a great artist is getting attention. Van Gogh surely was not understood in his own time. Van Gogh’s work has an urgency that often results in an initial impression of crude rendering; but finally you feel a sincerity and energy in his work — it overflows. Van Gogh’s was an individual voice — always difficult in society, where consensus is a glue that is distrurbed at some risk. His work inhabited an obsessive attention, a child’s focus to surface. Vision, the embrace of sight, was a passion expressed in his work. The work reels like the vision of the inebriated.

Now Van Gogh is part of the canon. He was described by the curators in anecdotal and slightly pathological perspective. He was a great artist despite his mental afflictions, not because of…

The curators were a study. The older man spoke quickly, in a manner that was a cross between a Soprano’s character ordering a hit and Buckminster Fuller. He is a character. His colleague/assistant for the show was a young woman who also spoke quickly. This is a form of bonding one sees in couples. I’m afraid there was little insight. Perhaps Rose did not know what to ask. At any rate, the anecdotal and pathological are often draped over works of art — it’s a contemporary addiction. Art is bigger than its explanation, in any case.

The central truth about Van Gogh’s aesthetic is one of a melding of the graphical and painterly. He took the images on Japanese wrappings which were prevalent in Europe at the time from shipments from the Far East and were known widely, and incorporated that flattened, graphical, linear imagery with his driven spirit into his great landscapes and studies and portraits. All Van Gogh’s work was a portrait of himself, his burdened soul and inner turmoil.

The above image is the cover of a new book in the iBookstore called “The Crowd”.

It is an enhanced eBook, with both video and a new format; a format currently only provided by Apple.

This is a book of suggestive, mask-like images, which can be thought of as a book of drawings only, but its goal is something more experimental.

These images are built around an ambiguous theme which the reader can choose to embrace, providing a complex landscape of ideas.

Included are 23 images with an introductory video depicting the creation, in sped-up fashion, of one of the images.

From the Foreword:

Our transitional age inspired this series of images.

With a daily overload of amazing and disturbing news from the town square percolating in my subconscious, these flickering images emerged from my regular practice of drawing and painting. They are images of suggestion and feeling rather than illustrations.

At one juncture I thought of these body-less visages as Beings Before Time; masked energy existing before the Big Bang. (It is thought Time was itself born at the moment of this astonishing cosmic paroxysm.)

In this metaphor, spirits inhabiting a timeless realm awaited their moment, entering our universe as sprites which now inhabit our minds, each spirit with its own predispositions; its own grandeur and deviltry. …

A number of great thoughts pop up in Adam Kirsch’s review of a book by William Gass, Life Sentences.

Gass insists that “neither story (which can be told in many media and in many ways) nor meaning (which can be expressed with similar flexibility) are active elements in literary work.
…
“What works of art testify to is the presence in this world of consciousness, consciousness of many extraordinary kinds,” …

… “not that of the artists themselves, for theirs are often much the same as any other person’s.…It is not the writer’s awareness I am speaking of but the awareness he or she makes. For that is what fine writing does: it creates a unique verbal consciousness.”

I’m quoting this because I agree with it. Not quite in the way Kirsch describes it in summary, but close enough; I spot on agree as far as the way Gass says it and would expand the idea to all the arts.

Art is about consciousness. Art is an expression of the cloud of identity which is what an individual really is, expressed at a moment in time. It is not a lecture, nor affirmation, nor negation of concept, nor political statement, nor craft decoration to impress, but an opening up of the spirit, mind and heart. Those elements of Being coalesce hopefully, and return the work, which the viewer can better sense than describe.

Art becomes something other than a single person, as the process affects the outcome, like a quantum experiment. That is what persists in art; art which succeeds. A unique voice, not of the ego, as the pop culture often portrays it, but of the sense of living; of a single life, speaking to others at the most fundamental, and trusting (because that is what civilization is) the audience to engage — sharing a brief portal of time.

Charlie Rose’s wonderful lunges at understanding Shakespeare and Hamlet was so provocative it had me noting things to myself:

I had often thought of Hamlet as a representation of a stepson’s possibly delusional, murderous rage – but the rage of a child, not an adult.

Hamlet is about being human because it confronts the dilemma of being human; our deep emotions and sense of right, our sense of unfairness and frustration at the conventions of society; Hamlet is about emotion choking action rather than generating it.

Hamlet can be thought an argument against revenge: about the futility of revenge, as the target seldom suffers as much as the enraged.

Although there was much tortured effort at understanding why Shakespeare persists with an almost biblical weight, his work, like the Bible itself, would only persist if the language and insight were of equal density.

The performances that were intercut revealed clearly that there is no barrier between the brilliance of the writing and the audience — the route of true art; this despite the compactness and arcane nature of the language; it still connects.

What was woefully left out – the English stain of anti-Semitism in Merchant of Venice, a clear marker that Shakespeare too was deeply flawed.

The best commentators were Greenblatt and Harold Bloom. Those who deal with the mechanics of the theater can never get it right, and don’t have the insight.

Of the performances:
Captain Picard and Richard Burton seemed Jon Lovitz Great Thespians – drawing attention to acting rather than character.

Olivier and Branagh clearly the best, most brilliant of actors. Astonishing in the revelatory power of their performances.

Rose’s brilliant question: Is Hamlet a sympathetic character?

Shakespeare evokes a truth academic scrutiny alone cannot parse; the meaningless question, asked of his plays, of life, and by Charlie Rose: What does it mean? It means, Shakespeare wisely answers, that there are no pat answers; that the human estate is ambiguous and can be noble.

The pop culture is really the commercial culture. It is business by other means. But because talented and clever people get involved you periodically get really good results — work that surpasses the defaults and becomes something special.

That is true of Gin Wigmore. Wigmore is from New Zealand but lives in Australia, which, from what I can tell, is California without the pretensions. You tend to form mental maps of places to which you’ve never been.

So how did we hear of Gin Wigmore? Searching for who sang the song in the Lowe’s commercial. The TV version of that commercial, with the dancers morphing into old age, is beautifully directed and choreographed and edited. And then they choose a great song, beautifully rendered.

Wigmore’s father died of cancer when she was sixteen and she wrote the song Hallelujah to tell her family she had finally accepted the loss of her beloved dad.

Here are Gin Wigmore’s heartfelt lyrics for Hallelujah:

Take your last step towards heaven and its glow
Take your last breath of sunlight, don’t let it go
Take your last look to remember, so that you know

I wont let you fade from no mind
I wont let you fade from no minds
I wont let you fade from no minds

Hallelujah for these eyes to see your painted life
Hallelujah for the touch of skin to skin with mine
Hallelujah for this mind that keeps our souls combined
Hallelujah for this life that let me be your child

Have your mind, have your strength to stay alive
Keep your eyes open with mine

You followed the road for the angels and you left me behind
A face without words can last a lifetime but it’s never the same
So, don’t say goodbyes that last forever just for a while
Because I’ll be by to see you some day soon

Hallelujah for these eyes to see your painted life
Hallelujah for the touch now of skin to skin with mine
Hallelujah for this mind that keeps our souls combined
Hallelujah for this life that let me be your child

Hallelujah, to be a part of your life
To see inside of all your smiles
You’re a traffic light of fire
You’re a man who I believe will never die

© Lyrics And Music Composed By Gin Wigmore

A new book on the iBookstore:

Old Peculiar Tales

This is a book of eleven speculative tales of fantasy. Image rich, created as a “picturebook”.

I used a new App called Book Creator for the iPad to construct this book. There have been no dedicated tools for creating fixed position books, and, out of the blue, a wonderful developer in England, Dan Amos, has done what billion dollar corporations could not. Picturebooks are books that look like formatted books; like a PDF, rather than flowing web pages. An excellent format for image heavy eBooks, but mind-numbing to create from scratch by code.

Dan uses a very simple, transparent interface — he had set out to make this App useful for kids — but it turns out to be fully capable for professional production as well. In the latter case a bit of knowledge about CSS would help for tweaks, but in most cases, you can get along with just the tools offered by Book Creator.

Book Creator is fun. You open the app and you immediately figure it out.

You create the book in the app. Instead of following a meandering path to get the eBook into iBooks, you simply tap a menu choice and BC constructs the ePub and places it in iBooks. You can edit without the usual hassle of creating on the desktop, transferring to iTunes and syncing — a tremendous time saver. Dan is currently working to enable audiobook capability and later videos.

I once taught in an after school center with the charge of introducing printmaking. You should have seen the pure delight expressed by children when they see a print of their drawing appear. It made you smile. Some kids would laugh out loud or even shriek. I can imagine whole classes filled with delighted children at seeing their creations appear in iBooks using Book Creator.

At first it was a surprise to see the solution BC offers; one expects a desktop application to create these picturebooks. It makes so much more sense to have the app on your iPad.

At the App store: Book Creator

Dan’s site, redjumper.net

We’ve been listening to singer songwriter ladies’ man Leonard Cohen. A mention somewhere and we started listening via Spotify. Spotify seems it could establish a new standard for online listening. The prices seem high, but it is a nifty idea.

Who By Fire is our favorite song by Cohen. This piece, after some background checking, is based on the Unetanneh Tokef, an ancient Hebrew piyyut or hymn. Who shall live, and who shall die, the subtext. The excellent lyrics, as always with Cohen, performed with deep melancholy, truly resonate. His voice is not his strong point; it is the intelligence and poetic yearning that wins you over finally.

Cohen needs accompaniment, a good group of musicians behind him, and even some more subtle orchestration — something to give the work shape. The purity argument seldom works. We’re not talking Las Vegas glitz-ification here, although just such SNL satirical treatment springs to mind. Listen to Who By Fire in solo and accompanied version; the latter much rounder and more effective.

I wasn’t surprised to read Cohen is depressive. I was surprised to find he is a cult figure. Like Dylan, who has so much more range, Cohen gives pop music an honorable hook into traditional strains in human culture — both in poetry and music.

Cohen about the writing process:

…like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it and it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful and yet there’s something inevitable about it.

In 1998 Cohen said:

I feel that we’re in a very shabby moment, and neither the literary nor the musical experience really has its finger on the pulse of our crisis. From my point of view, we’re in the midst of a Flood of biblical proportions. It’s both exterior and interior. At this point it’s more devastating on the interior level, but it’s leaking into the real world. I see everybody holding on in their individual way to an orange crate, to a piece of wood, and we’re passing each other in this swollen river that has pretty well taken down all the landmarks, and pretty well overturned everything we’ve got. And people insist, under the circumstances, on describing themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ It seems to me completely mad.”

Ahead of his time, was Cohen in that insight.

Since we are quoting: listening to that sensitive soul Anne Lamott, she quoted John Gardner about writing — about creative work as creating a dream,

Gardner said:

…the dream must be vivid and continuous.

All art shares that dream well spoken quality, because life has that quality.

Lamott also mentions Blake’s reminder, that we are here:

…to endure the beams of love.

The Philip Pearlstein of the Brits, the painter Lucian Freud, died July 21. His renown, usually judged — although never admitted as the metric — by price of work, was enormous. A true lone wolf — noble in his sense of dedicated mission and in his persistence of vision: realist, nudes (he called his subjects naked), small scale works. He was a serious artist who was viewed as a serious artist, a rarity in a contemporary world engorged with junk culture.

He was the grandson of Sigmund, and knew him. A man who told jokes, is the way Lucian remembered grandad.

I was happy Lucian Freud was celebrated if only because he had talent. I did not take to Freud’s images themselves. By the time you are eighteen you figure out that the process of gaining a reputation is filled with holes. At least Freud’s rep brought something to the table.

The excruciating treatment of his subjects was meant to convey a close-up lens: all warts. And more warts. Freud’s gaze could be said to be related to Van Gogh’s intense scrutiny, but Freud lacked the passion and joy. Human beings are more than their warts; sensuality and spiritual longings are also there to be seen. Those qualities were heavily manifest in Freud’s life — still a chick magnet in his 80s, with a reported tribe of offspring — but never made it to his work. Although I respected his work, I felt his vision had little scope. The fading shadows and enveloping compassion of Rembrandt were outside his ken.

Making the audience suffer the grimness of life might seem serious, because life is such a battle, and it is easy if adolescent to get cynical and angry, but such an approach presents only a thin slice of our human existence and so is fundamentally false. A true depth of vision takes in more.

iPad Sketchbook 4

This is the fourth in a series of digital sketchbooks containing expressive images created on the iPad. This is an enhanced eBook, with thirty images, and includes sped-up movies which depict the creation of two of the images.