emerging from a cloud

A few months ago, just in time for spring, my horoscope told me that I was "emerging from a cloud". It sounded great; I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. Now it's almost June and the smoke has yet to clear. 10x12 inches, mixed-media on canvas.

In the meantime, here's some links to old business ...

poker
here, here, here and here.

television
here and here

miscellaneous
here, here, here and here.

poems
here and here

stories
here, here and here

for illo friday ... {cars}

Cars. Another uninspired, limiting theme. So to hell with it: I decided to draw a demonic Speed Racer on meth, just before the crack-up. (Now come on, Penelope ... can next week's theme expand our consciousness beyond a Grade-Three level?)

susan is a worried lamb

Two weeks ago I agreed to do a portrait exchange with Susan; it was another go at this portrait party business.

First I tried a conventional portrait, but just to be different I used a red pencil. And then I soaked it in diluted red india ink. And then I washed it. And tried to flatten it.

The result was something like a dying leaf ... lovely in a destroyed kind of way, and almost entirely useless.


The details are certainly charming, I said to myself as I was tearing it into squares to make a collage. At which point it just stopped being anything. At least I took some pictures first.


Next I tried a painting. Canvas, 24x48. From the first few layers there emerged something that reminded me of a Barbie box. Then came the worried lamb.


I'd been doing a lot of cursive 'h's lately, and the word 'hello' just wanted to be there.


The tilt of the head is different but I hope the eyes remain the same.

illo friday ... {signs, heaven-sent}

I hope what these signs (especially the one in the middle) say is true; I could use all the invisible-magical friends I can get. (Besides, what's not to love?)

for illo friday ... {signs)

All sorts of signs here, but the darkest one, at the time, was that winter was going nowhere.

for illo friday ... {citrus}

The theme for this week's Illustration Friday is citrus. That's right: citrus. This is nearly as limiting as the week we did 'polar' (the bears came fast and furious, to avoid the rain of penguins). Since I have no intention of drawing a fucking lemon (or any of its cousins), here's an illo (an Arbus pastiche, actually) with the desired tincture in the background. Colour me sour.

utterly Lost

I had some dental work done yesterday, a repair on a filling. Needles, elephant-face freezing, high-pitched drills, low-pitched drills, that finger in the corner of your mouth pulling the big fish around. It was all my idea for a change, unlike the root canal and crown I agreed to for later this summer (something about a little cloud on an x-ray), so I could hardly bitch about the after-party of pain. Which led me to do what I always do in these situations: I had a nap.

When I woke up I watched Lost. Or I tried to watch it, because the channel's signal kept cutting out. Still, the technical difficulties didn't hurt the episode that much: it was the same old baffling disconnect of senseless story and fractured picture, punctuated by white noise. It made me long for the dentist's chair.

This was a good show when it was about an island populated by small but insistently dark mysteries. Remember the black smoke? That was creepy. Now the only formula seems to be to have everything unmoored, all the time. Take any character, say ... someone's wife. Have her going for a swim. But wait, she's not going for a swim; she's going down to do some paperwork in the hidden submarine. And she's not really anyone's wife. She's a ghost. Or a polar bear in a wife suit. In a ghost suit.

I mean, I know it's in the title and everything, but leaving the viewer completely lost -- and at a loss -- amounts to nothing more than an exercise in frustration. My tolerance for pain is considerably higher when there's a point.

for illo friday ... {neighbour}

Good neighbours watch out for hoods like this (and if not, at least get yourself one of those stickers menat to scare them away). Of course, if you lived in a really good neighbourhood then you wouldn't have to worry at all. 8 x 6 inches, mixed media on canvas.

a lamb to the slaughter

I posted this handsome little beggar on my Etsy site earlier this week. He came from some writing I've been doing about weddings and other disasters.