Day 82: Philip Guston

“In my experience a painting is not made with colours and paint at all. I don’t know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere, a trifle, some detail observed, wondered about and, naturally from the previous painting. The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.” Philip Guston

This was Philip Guston’s opposite point of view to the cliche that a painting is the paint on canvas and what you see on it. I think both are true.

I used to be obsessed with Robert Ryman, a painter who was constantly fielding questions about meaning and spirituality in his very white light paintings on regular and weird surfaces. He said there was nothing in them, that they were just what they were, paint on canvas, sometimes on aluminum screwed into the wall a certain way. He was playing with surfaces and how you put the painitng on the wall. I went to his retrospective at the MoMA – Sep 26, 1993–Jan 4, 1994. Wow! I thought it was later than that. I was just starting out as a painter and had become very enchanted by his marks and materials and ways to put a painting on a wall, also many are not huge. I sat and looked at a really huge one I had never seen. It had hardly any color but white and grey tones. I don’t usually sit a long time with a painting; it felt like a moment on LSD, my mind entered some weird door of perception and I had some kind of bizarre experience in the Twilight Zone. I’ve never had it since though I”ve had weird reactions to paintings.

I was also inspired by Ryman’s story connected to my own accidental collision with art making. Ryman started out trying to make it as a jazz musician and worked at MoMA as a security guard. Talk about dramatic irony. He saw the paintings and bought som art supplies and started painting on a whim and didin’t stop.

Does the painter really know what they are painting when they think they know? I would say no. I have made so many images that just came out or just resulted from a random drawing and continuing the theme. I’ve even arrived at what they are “about” when I’ve had to write the dreaded artist’s statement, which I always hated. I started painting to get away from making sense and using words to explain anything.

Anyway, one joy of making things is seeing what I made by hearing someone else tell me what they see. Even a few years ago, with this very large Flower Painting in my house, mostly there as it’s too heavy to carry to the studio between moves. I was talking about some work I was making and saying it’s 9/11 again, how weird. He said, “Of course. All of them are. That painting up there is about 9/11.” It was the huge flower one. Not such a stretch as I had been fascinated with the life of the flower, especially as it is sort of half dead by the time it’s in your vase and then you can see it slowly die. It’s even an image in the opening of Six Feet Under towards the end of the opening credits, a fast forward of white flowers dying in a vase.

Anyway, other people see things in my work and what they see is really there. Even if I start with a real actual concept like this Burial Mound idea, I’m not sure what people might say if they were up in my studio or a show somewhere or even when I post them. Maybe they don’t see Burial Mounds or see beyond them some other meaning buried in them.

The other day I was putting house shapes in the Burial Mounds, another way to tie in my experience with the front line workers who handle Covid corpses, not to connect to them by experience; in fact it emphasizes how I’m home and safe while they risk their lives every day and are at the nuclear core of the pandemic.

Then the next thing, I put some of my buildings from many of my past and recent series in the burial mound in a drawing and thought, here comes 9/11. Even the house shape in the other ones, it’s my 9/11 apartment an airplane engine’s distance from the towers. There actually was an engine on the corner of Murray and Church streets a few feet East of my place on the same northern side of Murray St.

I was thinking about Philip Guston who used to be a huge painter for me, whom I revered, especially his courage in the heart of abstract expressionism to say, “I’m not making those pretty paintings to make statements about America or the meaning of art or whatever. I’m going to be honest and make paintings of shoes, nails, paint, faces, buildings, piles of legs, sleeping and smoking, cigarettes, drawings of Richard Nixon, including his phlebitis.” (My words)

What other artist of that time made as part of their work so many caricatures of Richard Nixon? The great thing is that they aren’t in caricature style; they are Guston’s drawings, with his kind of line and roughness.

The reason I started this whole post was that I was thinking of Guston’s disturbing paintings of people in KKK hoods. Apparently at one of his shows, someone from the KKK actually destroyed one of the paintings. However, his answers don’t totally tell the story. He said he wanted to experience how it feels to be purely evil and look in the mirror. He was Jewish and was referring to their anti-semitism as a person growing up with post war looming on him, but I couldn’t find a discussion on racism and they didn’t seem to think of asking a black person what they thought of his paintings. You can find a lot of articles about why he did the paintings but they are strangely void of real discussion of racism and lynching.

Now that we are quite aware of the constant lynchings of black people carried out by the police and others, there is no way to not be part of the picture.

What Guston didn’t say and maybe didn’t see because maybe it’s true that you paint the painting from a personal question or need, but it has its own life and refuses to be just what you and even others of the time say it is. He was admitting that even as a Jewish person, part of the Klan’s vicitims for sure, he was still white and could still be invisibly Jewish.

In 2019, those paintings bring home the fact that if you’re white, you’re priveleged and protected and always part of the problem in some way, some in smaller ways than others; you can still do something about it, contributing to Black Lives Matter, working in your community, electing the people who can effect change, especially people of color who are running for office all the time. Participating in the protest is one way, especilaly if you avoid the violence because once you get violent you mess up the movement, as the violence will always be blamed on black people. Listening to people’s stories and their art too.

If you google and look at those paintings now, they are very powerful and very true in a way that images can convey much louder and more directly than words. It was still an act of courage to paint them and say I dare you to see yourself I. This painting and to hang it on your wall…

Home Yoga Practice

Lessons: One is, if I’m having a strong reaction to something, there is something in it worth learning or reframing to use and get inspired by.

I have been reading a book entitled, “Yoga at Home: Inspirations for Creating Your Own Home Practice”. I saw it on a site about yoga and got it from the library. It’s a great book, and can be useful whether you read it from beginning to end or do what I’m doing, dipping into it and reading whatever I feel like. There are lots of photos, which is great, as it’s the kind of topic you get inspired by by seeing images of home practice, not just reading. There are a lot of points of view from different yoga teachers/experts.

I haven’t gone through the whole book. So far I’ve noticed a lot of great ideas and tips. The book gives you a wide range of points of view, ideas, yoga philosophies, and people’s homes in their home practice.

It struck me that the concept of home is everywhere in the book with the concept of practicing yoga outside of a class or teacher guidance and defining/redefining what yoga means for you and what yoga “space” is.

Some food for thought that came up as a theme was, your home practice is very personal to you, and doing a home practice involves figuring out, discovering what you want from yoga at home. The “where” part is fascinating to me and ranged from people saying, wherever you put your mat and intentions can vary;  the imortance and meaning can come from what you feel and do on the mat to people who have very specific sanctuary type spaces where they do their practice in their home. Even the people travelling in an RV made the inside of the RV look like a sacred meditative yoga type space. People also lucky enough to have outdoor space showed how they practice outdoors.

Another variable is, are you alone and focused simply on your yoga, or are you incorporating it into daily life involving partners, pets, children, music, etc.? Even the concept of the yoga mat and what surface you do yoga on is expanded to include the kitchen floor and rugs and grass/outdoor nature as well as more typical yoga mats one expects to see.

The book focuses on creative practice and going with your intuition in the moment, and doing things one woulnd’t expect, like listening to specific music or even playing music yourself, writing in a journal, coming to the mat and doing something, embracing the unknown, and of course, time of day and frequency of practice.

A while back, someone who knows me well said the obvious, “You want a Zen Garden, and your living space and life are not nor likely to be this perfect Zen Garden you’re imagining.” In this book, a majority of the people have created their own “zen garden” in which to practice yoga. They may think they are making “home yoga space” accessible to the average person, but the pictures in the book of course look slightly unattainable, just as the images of these yogis doing yoga are images of a range of people in different sizes and shapes, but they all look somewhat “perfect”, ie. out of reach, whether the pose they are in looks out of reach, or how they look and what they’re wearing and their physical shape seems out of reach. Towards the end of the book you get more range of physical bodies for sure, but it would be nice if they were varied throughout the book. Why does Magdaline Adhiambo get a two page spread at the end and no name in the table of contents at the beginning of the book? She should have been in the beginning or middle and be given several pages, considering how inspiring she is to many people and how she represents atypical yoga body size and shape. And the founder of “Curvy Yoga” is also near the end of the book. They do include a range/varitey of ethnicities, ages, gender only male or female so far in my flipping through the book. They should have included some of the well known yoga teachers out there who are challenged with not having legs or arms etc. There is something wrong with a book that puts the “curvy” yoga teachers at the end instead of right in the middle. That definitely is a big problem with the book, as well as excluding trans and gender variance as well as focusing on body shape/size and body limitations. If you want this book to inspire the average person who likes yoga, you need to welcome them at the beginning to see people they can identify with. Whom is this book for?

The other problem for me was they emphasize creating a “sacred” space and the diversity of that and spaces in which to do yoga, but they don’t go far enough. Yes, your dog or kid might be there, but what about having a person whose house is messy show how they carry on a yoga practice in a sloppy setting? What about considering the many people who not only don’t have a good space at home, but who have a messy home?

Since they did not include that, I am going to write a post about that concept of yoga, the idea of Equanimity, being still and grounded in the midst of chaos and mess and changing settings, in the midst of outside distractions like other people watching TV, talking, etc.

To me an important part of yoga and my approach to therapy is the idea of accepting what’s going on and being more ok in the middle of imperfect aspects of life. This involves not resolving something with another person, leaving off in the middle trusting you can return to it later, not finishing things and being ok with it, trusting in the next moment and letting go of control, that a lot of creativity involves disorder and chaos and unexpectedness, spontaneity. In this book spontaneity is important, but it is limited to what you do every time you go to practice at home, how you do it and how you sequence your private yoga or not, when and how long you do it, whether meditation is a big part or not. Those are important ideas as well.

So I will write a post of my own ideas about my personal home yoga practice which I started on August 5, 2014.

Projects

I tried wirting a post about my unfinished projects yesterday for 15 minutes but it got too complicated. I’ll try the more organized approach. THis is a list of projects I’ve started in no particular order.

• Graphic Novel, I(3) (meant to read as “I Cubed”), memoir. Started in 2000. Stopped finally in 2017.
• Children’s Book: The Flying Poodle, done in late 90’s, abandoned and lost
• Art Therapist Made Activity Book for People with Airplane Flying Anxiety/Phobias, including: “Facts About Flying”, Word Searches, Coloring pages, Doodle and writing prompts, maybe crossword puzzles. Could be made like a journal format. Got to the idea point.
• Memoir in form of Picture Book for adults, inspired by “Depression, A Picture Book” and another one. Got to point of using Word Search cutouts to make limbs on characters, did 2 pages, recent idea
• Books: Using Altered Books in Art Therapy. Plan to edit the book. Got to the point of inviting some other art therapists to author chapters and emailed with Jessica Kingsley Publishers. They reached out to me last August about possibly writing some kind of book.
• Poetry and art therapy with/as case study: book with a client’s poems written in session and between sessions and my response poetry. Tried to start with categories of poems and with client going through her poems and picking out ones she likes.
• Possibility of trying to incorporate pages from abandoned graphic novel into some sort of other book with multiple media
• The Art Box, a book also personal narrative, about my creative process and using pieces about work as an art therapist, artist and personal life to do with creativity. Memoir of Creativity
• Some kind of compilation of my comic strips from my art therapy Instagram account, comic strip, “The Daily Grind
• Website for my art, with newest work and prices to sell directly from website
• Spreesy an app to use to sell art from social media, getting organized and trying to sell through it.
• making this current website more organized, going through the “Pages” to make it more coherent and look better

It’s interesting that I almost “forgot” about “The Art Box” project, as it is supposed to be something I’m working on now. That was the idea in spring of 2018, to use some time weekly to work on it.

These projects are all in category of “Other”. The main projects are my art projects that I need to finish to sell the work on the website mentioned above. Current art projects:

• Mandala collage paintings
• Cityscapes
• Abstract square drawings, made bigger on wood boards

 

Everything Old is New Again…

15 Minutes: Everything Old is New Again

I’m doing very different drawings from when I started “Drawriting” with 15 minutes of drawing and 15 minutes of writing on the back of the drawing. These pieces below do not have writing on the back; I’m not sure if I will write on the back or not. perhaps this post is the writing part for now.

A client of mine once explored a concept she said was summed up as : “Everything old is new again.” Her words. I’ve been thinking about that idea, as I reflect on 2018, and now, in terms of my personal art making as a visual artist, about 30 years into making drawings and paintings, collage, etc. Even last May as I started a daily drawing practice, I noticed I was reprising my 2006 – ? work and had revisited that stuff in my sketchbook last year, coming from the “Inner Landscapes” series. I have the old sketchbook journal where the images emerged that later became buildings and Inner Landscapes, which I have now embraced as “Cityscapes.” Before, when I did these, I thought of them as buildings, but as expressing some kind of inside landscape of the psyche. Recently I’ve returned to seeing that it is my relationship with New York City and how the city is part of who I am…

More recently in the past few weeks, I have been revisiting my drawings of faces and leaves. It started with my redoing my Sketchbook Project, in December 2018, drawing faces and leaves. These faces started many years ago; I can’t even remember when. Then I reused them in my Scribble Drawings Collage series in 2007 and 2008.

A while back I drew two bees in my sketchbook project. For some reason I’ve been drawn to drawing bees, no pun intended. Yesterday, I started drawing hexagon hive shapes, due to thinking about bees and because it’s a great kind of drawing connector. I’ve got faces, bees, and mushrooms, so now I have the hive shapes in and out. I haven’t gotten far with it as you can see in the pictures of these works in progress.

Drawing on smaller paper is very rewarding because I can really do a drawing in one sitting and feel like it’s done. It’s hard to be patient with doing drawing/painting on wood and canvas because it takes a lot more time and the discipline to revisit the work and continue it.

I took some of the wood drawings I did in November, which were moving towards being city scapes, and tried to sort of add in the new imagery with limited success, still using fountain pens to draw with.

For some reason it is harder to add in this imagery. I will paint over the wood with white paint and start drawing on top, like the painting in the photo below. That painting has endured a lot, like an archeological site. I don’t know what the first concept was, but there was collage I pulled off years ago, and then drawings of buildings and white again. That was March 2018. Then I went into it more. Anyway, today I turned it “upside down” so I woulnd’t see buildings in the marks underneath the white paint.

The above wood drawing with oil paint is the only one I saved. The rest I painted on top of.

Online Art Exhibitions: The Sketchbook Project

I am currently involved with a two online art exhibitions. This post is about The Sketchbook Project.

As I have been working on my 2019 Sketchbook Project, “Pictures and Words: Buildings and Birds”, intensely in the last few days and weeks, and during summer break, I have become more intentional about utilizing the “Community Space” aspect of the Sketchbook Project, to get more involved and be part of this “Crowd Funded Sketchbook Museum and Community Space” that continues to expand. You can find what I call “side projects” and events on their website as well as past sketchbooks and an easy way to sign up and partipate. They sell materials as well, something for another blog post. The latest project I signed on for is the “Tiny Sketchbook Project.” I haven’t received my sketchbook yet, but they look like they are a few inches in size! I also love tiny very small and small works… TIny Sketchbook Project Link

This is their website: The Sketchbook Project Website

It’s defined as a “Crowd Funded Sketchbook Museum and Community Space.” You do have to pay to get a sketchbook and pay extra to be included in the digital art library and exhibitions. I am grateful that one of my clients told me about it in 2013, as it is very fun and unique; also, I’m obsessed with sketchbooks and of course, altering books. The one thing all my sketchbooks have in common is the amount of working and overworking involved. It’s never a simple process for me no matter what…

(It’s a perfect project for my ADHD: While avoiding something too stressful, I hyperfocus on the sketchbook, and have added hyperfocusing on promoting and participating more. I will be part of their “Infinite Drawing” series, and have done a canvas for “The Canvas Project.”)

Here is the link to my latest Sketchbook, (2018), “Inner Landscapes”, from The Sketchbook Project:

https://www.sketchbookproject.com/library/19305

I highly recommend participating in the Sketchbook Project! It’s a very democratic inclusive approach to art and exhibiting art. Anybody can participate. Here are the links to other years I’ve made sketchbooks; each year is completely different from the last year.

This one from 2017, entitled “Many Minds” is my favorite of the five completed sketchbooks:

https://www.sketchbookproject.com/library/18294

 

This one is my 2016 Sketchbook, “When Objects Talk”. I mixed together two drawings series, one that involves comic strip art:

https://www.sketchbookproject.com/library/17880

Here is my 2015 Sketchbook, “Marks on the Edge”, involving mixed media including yarn, fabric, sewing, colored tapes.

https://www.sketchbookproject.com/library/17107

Here is my first Sketchbook, from 2014, “Mosaica for Khakasa”,worked on mostly in the fall of 2013. It’s the most complicated in terms of the process and times spent on it, as well as having things I do in altered books, like extra pages, changing the size of the page, and making windows. I also incorporated Chinese Funeral Paper and dried flower petals.

The Sketchbook Project is on all social media and easy to find. It’s home in Brooklyn is the Digital Art Library. The sketchbooks travel all over the United States and in Canada. I’m predicting they will branch out to other countries soon.

 

Fundamentals, Day 4: Identify Your Audience

Since I started this Fundamentals class, I have noticed that when I see an assignment, my first thought is, “I’ve already done this. This probably won’t be helpful. I wonder what the next assignment is?” Part of that is my ADHD, which is after all a “learning disability”, so it’s kind of my approach to learning anything. Either or both of these all or nothing attitudes, “I can’t do this. I don’t know anything and I won’t be able to.” and “I know all this already. I don’t need to learn this.” This happened with the first assignment, and I was wrong, and in writing the post, I figured out a lot of new things that I want to do that I had no idea about when I started the assignment. With the assignment about the Title and Tag Line, I was even more surprised by the end of it. I had no intention of changing the title or tag line, nor did I have any clue that I would end up with the “Impossible Things Before Breakfast”.

By now, I am trusting that the whole reason to take “Fundamentals” and start from square 1, or, as the Tarot card says, Ground Zero – the Fool Card, which is number 0 – is that whole thing in Zen philosophy about Beginners. It’s the idea of starting at the beginning again and kind of making not a circle but a spiral. So today’s assignment is about my audience. I thought I already knew everything about it, so I will answer the questions with an open mind, assuming I don’t know what I think I know and do know that there is a lot I don’t know!

1. First, brainstorm the kind of person you hope will read your blog. What do you want to say to them?

This is challenging, as I know some of the people who read this blog, but I haven’t looked at who is following it in a long time, so I actually don’t know for sure. OK. Looking at site statistics is too confusing for me, but I looked at who has been following me lately, and it seems like a bunch of other bloggers who are following me are involved in film, including the LGBT Film Festival in Toronto. Then writers and blogs about writers, art therapy and healer blogs and comic strip/animation people. What surpises me are the film blogs. If I were to brainstorm who would look at my blog, film makers wouldn’t not have come to mind. Maybe it’s that I love writing about films? It’s also very weird for me, as I was interested in film making when I started college and wanted to study it.

So I guess the kind of people I want to see and read my blog already are doing it. Maybe some visual artists as well as film makers, writers, art therapists and other healers would be great. Some people who are very obsessed with the nature of drawing more than any other medium in visual art. Other comic strip people too. And then of course people with ADHD and other mental challenges. What do I want to say to these people. I guess, Thank you for finding me, and thank you for following my blog. I’m honored and I will go on the page of followers and make sure to follow you back. Thank you to people who don’t blog themselves and are reading this! I also want you in my audience.

One thing I could improve a lot is to be more attentive to who is looking at this blog and notice when there are new followers. That was the third assignment about the Reader and following blogs. I noticed that I follow over 500 blogs, and it seemed so overwhelming I wanted to find out how to erase the Reader contents and start over with following blogs but coulnd’t figure that out. Now I think the way to go is to look at my recent followers and older followers and look at their blogs and make sure I’m following blogs I’m into that follow me. It’s hard to use the Reader to keep up with blog posts, so I also should be more aware of subscribing to blogs where they will email me new posts, so I actually easily have the link to keep up with their blog.

So now that I’ve written about my audience, here is the rest of the assignment, which would involve a whole new post. The other thing I’m curious about is whether posting on my “new” blog much more often, especially during this class, will result in a lot more traffic to my blog, or whether other things are more effective. While looking at the stats, I saw that in March there was a big spike in views because I posted about the controversial Karen Pence Art Therapy issue and posted about it on some Facebook groups and on Facebook. It may be that when I either take on a big issue and advertise about it, or when I advertise in several places about a post, more people will check out the blog. It’s still a mystery as to who reads and checks out most of my posts regularly, although some of you I see in my emails have been regularly looking at my posts, and I thank you.

1. Next, start your new post by clicking on the button below. Remember to include a media element (an image, a video embed, etc.) you haven’t experimented with yet.
2. Finally, give your post a few tags, including bloggingfundamentals, and publish it.

Writing with a specific person in mind is a great way to focus your thoughts and goals. Exploring new media elements adds more tools to your storyteller’s toolbox and helps engage your readers.

I am not sure what kind of media element I have not yet experimented with, as I have already posted many of my drawings and also embeded videos, but I will try to come up with something new.

Another whole topic is Categories and Tags and the discipline it takes to always put in the Categories and Tags on every post. I once tried to go back and on every post that had “Uncategorized”, edit it and put in the categories and tags, but there were too many posts that I had been lazy on, so my other big thing with these new posts is making myself do the Categories and Tags right away!

Favorite Video Of Last Week: “Raised Without Gender”

A 10 year old showed me this video last week.  It was really great to see how schools of the future may eventually evolve to adopt a philosophy of not inculcating gender norms and gender roles on young 4 and 5 year olds. Maybe in about 50 years, most schools will just be like this. The family in it is really great. My favorite part is when the parent is sort of accused of inculcating their views of gender and forcing them on their children. The parent replies, Yes I am doing that. So does every other parent. I’m just not doing it the way many others do, but I’m doing the same thing all parents do. So true.

15 Minutes of Writing

I wrote a post yesterday that I can’t access, so I’m starting over with another 15 minute writing exercise. I have found that using a timer is quite interesting and magical, in that you can see how much longer 15 minutes is than it seems. When you exercise, 5 minutes can seem like an eternity. I think writing and drawing for 15 minutes in the morning is like a kind of mental going to the gym.

I’ve been obsessed with various art materials over the years. I’ll discover or rediscover something and then use it a lot and get into getting more of them. I’ve been obsessed with pens for a long time, first Retro 51 writing pens, and more recently, all kinds of art pens. I usually get random art supplies thinking people who come to my studio for therapy or supervision or hang outs will use them. Sometimes I discover something because a patient picks it out to use. A few years ago I got a few paint pens. One night someone in my supervision group started using them and I was really impressed and thought, “How is it I had little interest in these? Look at the cool stuff this person is making!” So I copied them and started using the paint pens. Of course I needed more than just a few metallic and primary colors so I ordered more. Then I looked into other brands and also got into different size nibs. I mostly liked the medium nibs at the time because they get paint in them quicker and you don’t have to struggle so much with them. Getting into the paint pens got me re acquainted with metallic markers, the cheap ones I found at Walmart years ago that are better than Sharpie metallic markers. One time I was in a session with someone and they opened one of those markers and there was mold growing on the tip. That was the weirdest thing I encountered with a pen. I hadn’t ever seen mold on a marker.

I also bought a lot of gel pens because so many people like to use coloring pages in sessions. The Japanese jelly roll pens have always been my favorite because they really are great quality. Recently when I started drawing 15 minutes a day, I got re acquainted with very fine pens. I had tried them out a few years ago and dismissed them as being too annoying because they are hard to use and take a while to build up any color. Then I got some supplies from the Sketchbook Project. Once in a while they send free supplies with the sketchbook or with some other project. Recently I got some thin nib pens from them and tried them out in my 15 minute drawings and got hooked. The Sketchbook Project over a year ago sent me some pens and pencils and one of them was a Letraset Aqua marker. I used it a little and then left it for a long time. I recently picked it up again and got obsessed so I ordered a set of 12 in off colors, like peach, light lavender, light brown. These are great markers as they are a cross between brush pens and illustration pens. Like those, they have a dual tip, but one tip is fine but not really thin and the other looks tapered like a brush but doesn’t flex the way a brush tip does. Unlike illustration markers, they are watercolor like the brush pens, so they are kind of a paint pen and have a wash quality. They come with a blender pen and you can layer thinner pens on top of the marks you make.

I started writing about art making and art supplies in more detail a few years ago when I started writing personal narrative pieces about art and life. I’ve noticed that it seems like a good subject for my writing because it’s something I’m really into and writing about materials seems to bring up other interesting topics.

I recently got rid of a bunch of old canvases. I had made paintings in oil on them in the early 2000s.

Writing for 15 Minutes:

I’ve tried different options each day. Some days in the journal just to get out thoughts, even shred the pages sometimes. Other times I write in my journal parts of my ideas for my Drawing/Writing project or a different essay format project.

This is the latest, putting some of the writing in the blog. Last week I thought of changing the subtitle to: “Pictures and Words”. Maybe that would be the title of the Drawings I’m doing, but “Drawings and Words” or “Lines and Words”.

The blog does feel like it joins pictures and words. “Words and Pictures” sounds off. It’s weird as the film “Words and Pictures” sounded fine and stuck in my mind. The film isn’t great but there are cool things going on in it. Like the idea of pitting students against each other in a crazy contest between words/writing and pictures/images. Why shouldn’t writing and making art be a kind of sport and why not have competitions like that. The students had to struggle with how to convince people that Words and writing, uses of words are most important or that images of all kinds, whether paintings, drawings or photos, or some mixture, are more vital than words. Which does the world need more?

It’s an absurd idea but to some aliens, people going nuts watching a bunch of humans dressed in a costume run back and forth across a field kicking a round object seems as absurd as a contest between pictures and words.

Cake or cupcakes? I say definitely cupcakes for lots of reasons. Coffee or tea? Tomato or tomato?Dogs or cats? Football or soccer?

Books or Films? Graphic novels and comics are so perfect in their genre combining both pictures and words, the actual written form on paper, as opposed to films with image and speaking. Obviously TV and film accomplish both, but at the same time, they are missing the thing of turning pages, of reading or reading/looking in the case of the graphic novel.

Right now I am reading the Lemony Snickett books, whole post could be on that, out loud with my 10 year old. We’ve seen the TV series, so it’s interesting reading the real books that spawned the film and TV. It’s great most of all because it’s a book about books, about reading and how reading is the escape from the troubles and unfortunate and fortunate events of life. It’s about words as well, and how we define them.

It appeals to me because books were my haven as a child. I put off learning to read until first grade, probably because I liked being read to. Once I started reading, I found a magic place that is impossible to describe and unlike TV or film or even audio books. Sitting alone with a book, you have a companion full of great stuff, words and pictures…

Gender Feature Story 1: The Shoes Review

In writing my other Gender post, I was reminded of the day I was on the Payless Shoes Website and saw a very cool review because it was a self described “gentleman” wearing “ladies shoes.” I then went back to the website just now and hunted down the review to quote it here. I posted it on something when I first saw it a year ago. It bears reposting just because it’s so great how gender and gender identity are not some side topic but are part of everywhere. I proposed my Gender Identity Altered Books Workshop and the person in charge said it may be too specific a population to do a workshop on, so I explained that it is extremely relevant to every clinician and ubiquitous and in fact everyone needs to be trained in gender identity sensitivity.

Anyway here is the review in all its glory. Thank you to this person who bravely put himself out there! And FYI, while they should be “unisex”, they are Mary Janes and look like non fancy practical shoes but have that element that makes you think of little kids (female) shoes.

“I just received my “Geanette” Mary Jane shoes today and have been wearing them most of the day. I could not be more pleased with them. My new “Mary Janes” are very comfortable and nice looking. I am a gentleman who enjoys wearing women`s shoes exclusively and find these to be very suitable for around the house or street wear. This shoe would be excellent for women as well as men, as it is a true “unisex” shoe. I am a red-blooded male and have already received a few compliments on this attractive looking shoe. I heartily recommend these well made nice looking shoes for anyone. I think I`ll order another pair just in case they are discontinued.”

Here are the shoes if you’re curious or want a pair, whatever your gender!

https://www.payless.com/womens-comfort-plus-geanette-mary-jane-shoe/77840.html?dwvar_77840_color=black#q=mary%20jane&prefn1=gender&prefv1=Women&start=3