WOOFOINK 2.0

It's Been a While

2010-10-17T07:33:00.000-07:00

The ten, I just found out, is a good omen in Chinese culture. It's just lucky for us that we did not wed on a Saturday, because for some reason, that's bad. I like any superstition that works in my favor.
My fortune said that I would be honored by someone I respect. I believe in fortunes when they work in my favor.

impromptu poetry:

Stolen candy
melts and recrystallizes
in the pockets of stealthy
juveniles.

Rotten molars
rattle in the skulls
of the halitosis hookers
in Fat City.

Gummi Bears.
The filling of a Twinkie
loading cheeks and gums
with the chemistry of excess.

The Tuesday Report

2010-09-28T04:56:00.001-07:00

Sacred Geometry, originally uploaded by 0WW0.

The weather has been more to my liking since yesterday.

In about 11 days, Jeanne and I will be married!

Work is relentless and whenever I think I get caught up with everything, more stuff just comes my way.

Drawing takes a lot of time and energy that I don't have anymore.

We all live on a tiny blue speck that floats in space around a star that you wouldn't even notice outside of this galaxy.

My body is just an organic system that wants to reproduce itself, take in food, and dispose of waste. Yet there is something that prevents blind animal instinct from taking over.

There's a reason behind it all, but that is for a consciousness even greater than mine to deduce.

Hoarding?

2010-09-17T04:40:00.001-07:00

35mm_scan_11, originally uploaded by Carl W. Heindl.

We watched three episodes in a row of Hoarders last night on Netflix. Couldn't help but be reminded of it when I saw this photo.
I have weird tastes in imagery, I know. This is actually the kind of photo I would take myself if I had happened upon it with a camera.

It's a Boston Friday after all!

Christmas Eve 2009

2010-09-12T05:51:00.001-07:00

Christmas Eve 2009, originally uploaded by Reggie Rachuba.

Let life never be deprived of its vibrancy.

May there always be something of great beauty that awaits you as you leave your front door.

May you find your spirit in all things wonderful.

Woman Leaving The Psychoanalyst by Remedios Varo-1960

2010-09-11T05:52:00.001-07:00

Woman Leaving The Psychoanalyst by Remedios Varo-1960, originally uploaded by kamikazecactus.

See more of this artist's work here.

Such a surreal day on the calendar, such a day that so many people want to talk about on and on and on, that a little bit of surrealism felt appropriate.
Those who know me well know that I am not easily whipped into a frenzy, be it for a sports team or for a day on the calendar. Where the crowd flocks, I tend to shy away.

Jelly

2010-09-10T04:27:00.001-07:00

Jelly, originally uploaded by Cyberesque.

I just love an aimless drifter...

Party On, Dudes!

2010-09-09T04:47:00.001-07:00

party on, dudes, originally uploaded by krupp.

A rule to live by. People who can do this sort of art really do impress me. Oh, and might I add: "Wyld Stallyns Rule!"

Metaphysical Foot Rub

2010-09-08T04:45:00.001-07:00

Vishnu, originally uploaded by nikhari.

One of my favorite images from Hindu mythology. Again, not my art.

Cultural fusion

2010-09-07T20:10:00.001-07:00

Cultural fusion, originally uploaded by tigric.

Not my photo. One of my favorites from Flickr. I don't travel the world. Much more interesting people do. On an Indian kick. Asian Indian, that is.

Another one.

Old Blue Lady

2010-09-06T08:22:00.001-07:00

Old Blue Lady, originally uploaded by Reggie Rachuba.

"A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality." - John Lennon

By medieval standards, I would be a senior citizen at the age of 33. I am very thankful that I have made it this far into the collaborative dream that we call life, and in the company of such wonderful people as Jeanne, no less!
Like everybody else, I often try to cope with both the ceaseless nature of time and the inevitability of death. I look at old people and I am not only grateful for what they have been through, but glad that they are still an active part of the collaboration. Why do we spend so much time fawning over the young when they haven't anything interesting to really talk about?
During the next 40 years or so, I hope to achieve at least one great ambition, namely that Jeanne and I will be able to spend these decades together! I have other ambitions too, but the realization of them is more dubious. For instance, I would still like to create a masterpiece one day; I would still like to capture something of the sublime in an artistic representation.
As a much younger man, I aspired to write and draw the perfect comic book story, and wouldn't this still be a wonderful goal? The only problem is that comics are a lot of hard work to create and I am a very lazy artist. I think that my dream job would be to simply design characters for comic books or cartoons and have somebody else do all of the hard stuff.
I also think that it would be awesome to create an animated TV series of my own and provide voice acting for the characters, but it's not very easy when you have no connections to Hollywood or whatever. A man can dream, though, can't he? Could Pepto-Bear: The Animated Series be just around the corner?

Somehow the conceive-believe-achieve sequence always gets thwarted for me. Perhaps my main issue is indeed laziness. Or maybe it's my lack of focus. Or maybe it's because my foot itches...what were we talking about?

What Are Hot Dogs Made Of?

2010-09-05T07:48:00.001-07:00

What Are Hot Dogs Made Of?, originally uploaded by Reggie Rachuba.

Mmmm...
As you sink your teeth into that first Labor Day wiener tomorrow, think about all of the little critters who comprise the hot dog matrix. Be they pigs, chickens, cows, raccoons, octopi, mantises, lemurs, griffins, jabberwockies, esquilaxes, manticores, unicorns, or stink beetles, they have all been ground up into a tiny pink cylinder of meat that has been boiled or grilled to perfection!

Bon apetite!

Fast Food, Envy, and Bewilderment: The Reggie Rachuba Story

2010-09-04T05:49:00.000-07:00

Every time I used to pass by the McDonald's on West Judge Perez Drive as a child, I would be filled with an unimaginable jealous rage. The cause of my vehement envy was the mob of kids who were sticking their faces out of Mayor McCheese's hat, squealing with glee. How dare they?! When would I ever get to clamber to the top of Mayor McCheese's hat and stick my own pudgy little mug out at on-coming traffic? I was choked with rage. I wanted them all to die.
Once I was at a Wendy's, and there was this old lady who smeared ketchup all over the table she was eating at. The newspaper decoupage design was turned from an antique white to a horrendous pink. The old woman sat and munched contentedly on her french fries, oblivious to the mess she had created.
Once when my Dad took me to Popeye's, there was this hippie guy sitting in the next booth. The hippie organized all of his pieces of chicken into neat rows before he would start eating them. For some reason I was mesmerized. He was probably a serial killer.
When I was in maybe first or second grade, my Dad had bought me a toy apple that was filled with little green plastic worms. We stopped at McDonald's on the way back. As we stood in line, I was struggling to open the apple so that I could play with all of the little plastic worms. The toy just burst open all at once, and the little green worms went all over the floor in front of the check out counter. My Dad was annoyed and we had to stoop down and collect all of the worms so that the customers waiting behind us could order their Big Macs and fried apple pies. I don't know how he put up with me.
I always considered it an insult to my juvenile intelligence that Chuck E. Cheese could be up on stage performing while carrying a pizza tray for us bratty kids simultaneously. Even a six-year-old knows that you can't be in two places at once! The same goes for Billy-Bob and his band of grotesque hillbilly miscreants. (The gorilla who played the piano used to freak me out.) (Rock-afire Explosion!)

When we lived in Houston and would eat fast food several times a week, Jeanne and I discovered a Magic Burger King! We were fighting our way through medical center traffic, ravenous after a full day of graduate school and blue-collar drudgery. We took a turn down a side street to avoid a cluster-f__k situation on Main Street, and lo and behold, that side street fed directly into the rear of a Burger King drive-through! We were jubilant and uplifted in spirits and from that day forward, the Burger King on Holcombe Street was known as 'The Magic Burger King'!

Why am I telling you all of this? Because every time you pass in front of a McDonald's with a play yard, I want you to think about little Reggie Rachuba and his bitter boyhood envy. Every time you order an eight piece box of chicken from Popeye's, I want you to remember that some hippies like to keep their chicken neatly organized. And every time you are famished after a day of work, and are looking for a short cut back to wherever it is that you dwell, I want you to remember that sometimes a greasy, heavily-salted pot of gold might await you just around the corner. :)

Hit Pause

2010-09-03T04:32:00.001-07:00

Nobody hits the pause button anymore.

(That is, unless they have to get up and pee.)

That's today's mini-blog. Tune in this weekend for extended ramblings. :)

Smells Like Katrina

2010-08-28T06:44:00.000-07:00

I helped Jeanne move into the apartment at 8330 El Mundo Street in Houston at the end of July, 2005. It was a very hot month. We stayed together for two blissful weeks and then, because I thought I had to go back to work, I heavy- heartedly boarded a Greyhound bus bound for the Big Easy.
As it turned out, however, I no longer had a job in New Orleans. The school board had decided that it was against the law for Audubon Montessori to hire its own staff, like us teacher assistants, and so we were all laid off. Whenever a voice in your head tells you that you need to do something, my children, you should at least listen to it. A month before, as we were loading all of Jeanne’s possessions onto that Penske truck, a voice told me that I should have loaded all of mine on it too.
Fast forward to Sunday, August the 28th.
It took me 14 and a half nightmarish hours to flee from the horrid, colossal beast that was Katrina. It was a drive that should have only taken six at most, but with every motor vehicle in the New Orleans metro area choking the I-10 West, it proved to be a slow and grueling exodus. When my dad told me the storm was a category 5 that morning, a guttural, instinctive feeling gripped me: run. Get the hell out and don’t look back.
Traffic crawled at best. Cars broke down. Cars stopped. People and animals got overheated. Tempers flared. Drivers got out of their idle vehicles and stared westward down the I-10 in frustration. And looming over everybody’s head was the constant fear of the needle pointing to E.
My father had insisted that I evacuate the night before. I had thought that it would turn out to be another big scare much like Hurricane Ivan the previous year, and even if it did hit, I would ride it out like we had done in the past. My dad wasn’t leaving- he planned on staying in Chalmette because my grandparents, as always, refused to leave.
At 11 AM that Sunday, I set out in one of our three old cars, the Lincoln Continental, at the request of my father and out of my own animalistic urge to flee. I felt a little bit like baby Kal-El being stuffed into the space capsule before the destruction of Planet Krypton, only not so heroic and without such flashy clothes. I turned around to wave back at my father who was standing in the driveway as I embarked on my journey, and the idea occurred to me that I might never see him again.
I arrived in the great metropolis of Houston at 3:30 AM on Monday the 29th of August. It would still be about another 4 hours before Katrina would wreak her historic havoc upon my native city, and I was finally back in my beloved Jeanne’s arms after the longest car trip of my life.
At this time I had no cell phone. For years I refused to get one because I thought they were a pointless nuisance. Thus, I could not communicate with my father or with Jeanne for the duration of the voyage. They each had heard the horror stories of some evacuees who got stuck on the road and died from the heat. When I finally got to 8330 El Mundo, and knocked on the door of 814, Jeanne regarded me as if I were a ghost.
If nothing else, my attitude toward cellular phones had changed completely.

Most of my family chose to stay. My mom and my step dad, wary of another media-hyped Ivan–level scare, also stayed in Chalmette. They had evacuated at the urge of the local government and media when Ivan was a threat in 2004. For them, as it was for many, the evacuation caused by Ivan proved to be more of a catastrophe that the storm itself. They even had a safe haven with my sister who was living in Baton Rouge, but chose not to go. Evacuating with three dogs and a cat was not an easy thing to do for the second year in a row.
Cowardly and selfish as I felt to leave them behind, they were all adults and they had made their choice. Moreover, they all had vehicles able to get them to safety. This was no time to be a hero.

While I was reunited with Jeanne at last, our joy was diminished in the weeks to come. We watched the news everyday. We saw the aerial photos of an inundated Crescent City. This was horribly, unbelievably bad.
New Orleans had drowned.
People were stranded in their attics, desperately waving down any passing helicopter to come and fly them to salvation. Those who did reach dry land had no water, no food, and no sanitation. There were corpses floating in the water. Mayor Ray Nagin was at his wits end, exploding at the federal government’s slow response time (as was St. Bernard Parish President, Junior Rodriguez, but that wasn’t as thoroughly documented). To save face, Bush the Second flies in on a helicopter, has his photo op hugging a little black child, and waves to the cameras insisting that the United States has enough money to both help the people of New Orleans and keep killing the people of Iraq.
Every cynical teenage thought that I ever harbored against authority was immediately validated.
But life had to go on. As a refugee in America’s fourth largest city, I had to get by. I signed up for food stamps. I got rental assistance from FEMA. I assisted Jeanne in her early days of graduate school at the University of Houston, to help take our minds off of the tragedy.
Most people in Houston said nice things to us; condolences and offers of assistance. May God bless such citizens of Houston, who knew the right things to say or to do. Many a Good Samaritan made himself know during this crisis, like the nurses who put up my father, my uncle, and my grandparents in a hotel near the Astrodome.
Others made snide comments and mean remarks about these poor, wretched souls who arrived en masse via school bus to their Astrodome, getting much needed food and supplies from their supermarkets on the government dollar. To these people, I emphatically say, “f__k you”. Houston never was, by any means, a crime-free utopia with streets of gold before the arrival of the Katrina refugees, and it never will be even years afterward.
And a very special “f__k you” goes out to all of those ignorant evangelicals everywhere who said that Katrina was God’s vengeance exacted upon the people of New Orleans for their wicked ways. No matter which part of New Orleans you live in, there is bound to be a church of some denomination within walking distance. There was piety in this ancient city long before there was the depravity you rail against. It is a city no less devout than any other in America.
I soon found employment at Texas Art Supply in the Montrose area. While this ensured that Jeanne and I could make an honest living, our minds still could not rest without knowing the whereabouts of my family and the situation back at home. It was some time before I learned that my dad’s side of the family was staying at a Super 8 Motel and that I could return his car to him. My mom and my step dad were taken first to Dallas, and then to Tulsa, Oklahoma before renting a car and finding an apartment in West Houston. Each of their stories was full of hardship and misery. I thought about my 14 hours on the road to Houston and felt as if I had gotten off easy.
Katrina killed my hometown of Chalmette. No news coming out of St. Bernard Parish was good news. Not a single house or business was left dry. Most people lost everything, myself included. One of the storage tanks at Murphy Oil Refinery topped over and was punctured, adding more toxic chemicals to the already deadly flood water.
Many people lost their lives. Many more lost their livelihoods. Many pets died, including Chee-Wee, the Chihuahua who was part of my family for over 15 years. No loss of life, no matter how small, needed to happen due to this storm.
Everything I knew, if it hadn’t been destroyed, was irrevocably changed. To this day, Chalmette has still not fully recovered from Hurricane Katrina. I doubt it ever will.

Saturday Morning

2010-08-21T07:27:00.000-07:00

Thank you for the gentle breeze and the cool shade that made our morning walk more pleasant. Thank you for the brief reprieve from the August sun that bakes the poor, misguided earthworms on the pavement. Thank you for Saturday morning.
Even as late as 9 o'clock, I still hear the almost mechanical hiss of the cicadas in the oak tree above my roof. Even now, as I sip my coffee, I still feel soiled by this past working week. But I am, above all else, very lucky to have a job.
Yes, I am grateful. There isn't much more to say. I know how much it doesn't matter. I haven't even drawn any pictures to upload here. But I can still express my gratitude for everything that I have, and who would blame me?

I went from having a boring job to a job where I bore people. I don't really know what I'm doing, but I can act like I do. I'm just a piece of raw meat, uncooked and unseasoned. Can I go from a quarter pounder to filet mignon in only one school year? When young minds are the casualties of my ineptitude, it is not time to speculate, but to find out.
This is my confessional. I would never admit to the kids that I don't know what I'm doing. I can only admit it to myself, and to whoever made it this far into my writings. I find that typing is becoming more and more how I pray, as if some kind-hearted benefactor on a transcendent plane is reading these words and being motivated to act on our behalf. If writing really is a form of telepathy, then we are linked right now, cortex to cortex.
Belief is mystery. It is better to be mystified than certain. Certainty can lead to narrow-mindedness. A mind really is like a parachute, it really does work only when it is open. "Transparent to transcendence". Yes, better to let the Light shine through than to be opaque.
Help me to be more than just a dud. Help me to inspire, to motivate, to encourage. I have 26 different young lives intersecting all at once, and I have to give them a sign post. I can't treat it like something unimportant, I can't say that it doesn't matter.

The sketchbook is closed. Maybe it too can only work while open. You don't read a book simply by staring at the cover.

Woofoink!

2010-08-08T07:53:00.000-07:00

The original 'woof' and 'oink' components in this blog's title.

A 2008 rendition of the first Chimera hybrid freak to serve as this blog's mascot.

The current incarnation of our Woofoink mascot who doesn't have the same anatomical issues of his predecessor.

It all started, as many things do, one day when I was bored at work. It was back during the Houston years (2005-2008) while I was an employee in the Internet shipping department of Texas Art Supply. I was on my lunch break, and I had my miniature sketchbook with me. The two plastic figurines you see at the top were at my work station, and I decided that I would sketch them along with captions that read 'woof' and 'oink'. The resulting portmanteau became first the title of that little sketchbook, and later the blog of the same name.
This is, of course, the second blog to have the title, Woofoink. The first was a casualty of the rise of Internet 2 (it's still there, but Google won't allow me to make posts on it anymore)and this one has had the drawing in the middle as its mascot for a little while.
Fast forward to August of 2010, nearly two years since our move back to New Orleans, and the drawing on the bottom is Woofoink's new official mascot! He's bouncier, cartoonier, friendlier, and yet still subtly creepy enough to represent us. And best of all, he makes a lot more sense than having a seal in a fur coat with human hands as the header image.

Say goodbye to our old header image! We went with something that makes a lot more sense!

And so, a new chapter in the history of this widely read and highly reputable web log has begun! Make sure to join us as we forge new paths along the frontiers of creativity while discussing the vital issues that plague our minds in this information age. We here at Woofoink are happy to have you along for the ride!

Excelsior, true believers!

2010-08-07T07:42:00.000-07:00

This is not the age to bare your soul. We have made an alien of the poet, a sideshow of the artist, and a spoiled brat of the performer. We communicate in beeps, clicks, and tweets, effectively saying nothing. Yet many things remain to be said, and i might as well be the one to say them.
I offer no apologies for what I posted last night, but i am willing to lucidly elaborate it further. What I was trying to get at, in a less than coherent fashion, was that I am tried of having to hold back my thoughts for fear of others' disapproval or apathy. i am tired of suppressing the small things because they aren't grand enough, and believing, just like everybody else does, that something has to be terrible and overbearing just to be important. Here it is and it is what it is. i can write and you can read it or not.
Selfishness and anxiety are horrible reasons not to share my thoughts or my work. Even the most random of squiggles takes on a certain potency if it was rendered out of boldness and love.

All You Need is Love (seriously).

2010-08-06T18:51:00.001-07:00

Trust in the conquering power of love. William Blake was right when he said that "if a thing loves, it is infinite." Love is the gradual wearing down of all the bullshit barriers telling us that we are separate from one another. The more you love someone, the more the barriers erode. The more this happens, the more you merge. Love is like water. Water wishes to merge, but the land keeps it apart or the sun burns it away. But it always finds some way of reconnecting to itself, like in cool gentle rain upon the surface of a koi pond.

There is very little of value in the things that I make, but if only one can appreciate it, then it has served something of a purpose. I think that I have been stunted artistically. I still want for everybody to like what I do, but I am beginning to realize that this is not possible. I am basically a small child fastening his drawings with magnets to the refrigerator door, hoping to win praise from mommy and daddy. But if mommy and daddy are strangers, then why would they care?
This is why to me, it is futile to create works that do not inspire love. If it does not inspire love, then it is not infinite. Love is a cycle just like water is a cycle. It is always in your best interests to perpetuate love because when you do, it comes back to you. It just works that way.
Why not make work just for the people I care about? Who cares at all about a whole planet full of haters? They can't even perpetuate themselves since they're so busy bringing one another down. When they set about destroying someone else, they take themselves down too. And the saddest part is, most of them will never want to change until it's far too late!
i don't do things in an orthodox way. I don't pray in an orthodox way. Prayer is an act of giving something up, something precious like secret beliefs, and it is having full trust and faith that your giving will not be in vain. I think that's a prayer. You can recite familiar words, of course, like an Our Father or a Hail Mary, but those words don't mean anything without being given from the heart. They can be. These words, too, can be.
Words spoken, words thought, lines written, lines drawn, they can all in their own ways evoke the feeling of love. Music can evoke a feeling of love. It is easier than ever now to publish your own words, so why not do it generously? Why be stingy with what you have to offer?

Waddles, Mascots, and Folk Singers

2010-08-05T09:27:00.000-07:00

This is our last full week of summer vacation before having to go back to school. I can't gripe about it because I am glad that I have a job. Between getting ready and painting murals, there hasn't been as much time as I would like for sketching. I made the most of Jeanne's eye doctor appointment this morning and drew Chuck up there. The other two drawings have been worked on since last month.
Aren't turkeys gross? The only magazine in the office that had interesting stuff to draw was the same outdoors magazine that I referenced last time. Everything else was a lot of 'Better Homes' crap, or worse yet, Golf Digest.
For those of you who are just joining us, WoofOink, The Mystical Pig-Dog is this blog's official mascot. WoofOink's new look is a much cartoonier synthesis of pig and dog that doesn't have a head on either end. The thought of how the poor creature would actually poo was keeping me up at night!

I guess the reason why I like to draw and paint so much psychedelic hippie stuff is because I sort of wish that it would have worked- I mean their whole ethos about a more peaceful and loving world. I wish that it would have worked, but obviously it didn't.
There aren't any real hippies left today, unless you count all the ones who actually lived thorough that time period and are probably all grannies and grandpas by now. The people who define themselves as such in this century are either being superficial or delusional just like I was ten years ago.
Not to say that there aren't people in the world today who share those values, yet don't call themselves hippies. There are people with good souls and people who place much importance on their dreams. Just because they don't reek of patchouli and wear a tie-dyed shirt doesn't mean they aren't children of the revolution.

Fly your freak flag!

Musicians

2010-07-19T21:29:00.000-07:00

Copied from a photo in an old book from 1972.
Ink, Prismacolor, and acrylic in Moleskine, 2010.
I love hippies!

It hits on color combinations that I like. I am interested in exploring monochrome figures further. I am getting very accustomed to the cream color of the Moleskine being in the background!

Cranach the Elder: Original Gangsta, 1508

2010-07-16T13:00:00.001-07:00

Prismacolor, ink, acrylic, collage in Moleskine, 2010

The detail from Lucas Cranach the Elder's original painting, The Martyrdom of St. Katherine, that the central figure comes from can be seen below.
It is with great ease that I can draw and paint grotesques. It is much easier to render something hideous than it is to create something beautiful. One reason why I like Cranach's paintings so much is that the old master was also adept at painting horrendously ugly creatures, and it tells me that I am not so far off base.
Some art historians believe that this was actually Cranach's self portrait as St. Katherine's executioner. Sneaking my own face into drawings I've made is also something I enjoy doing.
The works of the old masters can provide interesting subject matter for new compositions. I was never much a fan of doing straightforward 'master studies', I am more interested in only paying attention to details that intrigue me. I do put some effort into being thorough and honest about my sources, however.

Doodles From the Noodle

2010-07-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

On the left is an imaginary home I designed for me and Jeanne. On the right is a self-portrait with cartoon eels where my head should be. From my fingers dangle the four yellow talismans that once in a dream foretold my doom. Sometimes I don't know where I'm going when I have a brushpen in my hand.

We are preparing for our wedding which is in less than 90 days! We are painting murals for the nursery in the school where we work and we are not getting paid a dime for it. I am inadequately prepared to teach my first classes when school starts up again one month from now. There's a lot on my plate. Yet I am still finding the time to exercise, make playlists, read fantasy novels, and go for twilight bike rides around Old Metairie.
I hear crickets outside my window. The moon is a fingernail sliver in the sky. Cats are sleeping on top of my car. Nighttime in the summer is a fragrant and muggy affair that most people ignore within the confines of their air-conditioned palaces. I like to glimpse inside of them while passing, usually to see nothing more than the glow of their TV sets.
The nights of suburbia inform my dreams. I ride upon zephyr wheels, inexhaustible, down amber-lit tree-shrouded avenues. The occasional quaint architecture stirs the imagination. In my nocturnal paradise, I am surrounded by funny old buildings with elaborate gardens. To glide down an empty street is a favorite pastime.

A Dessert So Sweet, it Made Cake Taste Like Straw!

2010-07-08T07:52:00.000-07:00

Images from last night's somnambulist slide show.

systema magicum universi

2010-07-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

Prismacolor and graphite- two kinds of media that never look the same after they are scanned. Nonetheless, here we have a random stranger transformed by the alchemy of drawing. Is drawing a kind of magic? Our ancestors in the caves at Altamira seemed to think so. Drawing is my systema magicum universi.
I don't pretend to know rationally how this system works, I just have faith that it does. Even failed attempts at art enrich my reality. Looking at any drawing I have made evokes the thought process that went behind it. It almost becomes an exercise In mapping my consciousness as it solves creative problems.
Drawings conjure up the dichotomy of light and dark, of form and void, of all there is and of all there could be. Stare at any pattern long enough, or at any image with a high enough contrast, and then close your eyes. What do you see? It is as if your optic nerve has taken a picture, as if the negative is burned into your memory. The image is transformed into mental energy, and mental energy becomes thought.
Pick up a pencil and do it yourself. Make a new reality. You have the power.

Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

2010-06-30T06:52:00.000-07:00

This is something that I found on a site called Language is a Virus. It is meant for writing prose, but I also find it to be good advice for visual art, or for life in general. It was written by beat generation author, Jack Kerouac.

Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose:

# Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
# Submissive to everything, open, listening
# Try never get drunk outside yr own house
# Be in love with yr life
# Something that you feel will find its own form
# Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
# Blow as deep as you want to blow
# Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
# The unspeakable visions of the individual
# No time for poetry but exactly what is
# Visionary tics shivering in the chest
# In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
# Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
# Like Proust be an old teahead of time
# Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
# The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
# Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
# Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
# Accept loss forever
# Believe in the holy contour of life
# Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
# Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
# Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
# No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
# Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
# Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
# In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
# Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
# You're a Genius all the time
# Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Long Trips and Dream Incantations

2010-06-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

Ink, gouache, acrylic, collage, in Moleskine, June 2010.

A turkey from an outdoor magazine, a man from the cover of an evangelical comic book, Christ Pantocrator from the Manuscript of Lambert Saint-Omer, 1260, scribblings and doodles, the eyes of Buddha, an upside down selfie, and a vague description of last night's dream.

The aforementioned comic book, slightly smaller than actual size

Alchemy, mysticism, abstraction, "The grand lines in nature", fundamentalist cartoons, dream interpretations, the collective unconsciousness, egotism masquerading as shamanism, mix and match world religions, suspicion of divine intervention; all that went into these pages over the last week.
Baffling, perplexing, stupefying, perturbing, and utterly discombobulating- just like a dream. A year ago I kept a sort of dream journal and I stopped when the school year started. Recently, my dreams haven't been that notable except for the one I had last night. I won't bore you any further with the details, just try and decipher my handwriting.

Remixing Huber

2010-06-22T15:39:00.000-07:00

Working on good paper is more appealing than canvas. The figures in this one are from Wolf Huber's painting, Crucifixion Allegory from about 1550. Lately I've been studying Renaissance and post-renaissance paintings for their backgrounds more than their main subjects, and these faces popped out at me from Huber's.
Below is the original masterwork as well as the details that I stole from:

The following has nothing to do with Wolf Huber, just my own imagination.

Lately, I've been looking at mandalas as a meditation device, and these pages were partly inspired by Yantra. A yantra is sort of the visual equivalent of a mantra, or a device for the consciousness to fixate upon. The yantra represents the union of male and female energy with the upward triangles representing one and the downward triangles representing the opposite. The Hindus say that the male principle is the active one while the female is passive and the Buddhists have it flip-flopped. Either way, it symbolizes a reconciliation of opposites that forms the basis of consciousness.

Happy Father's Day!

2010-06-20T06:52:00.000-07:00

Ink, gouache, Prismacolor, and acrylic in Moleskine ,2010.

Happy Father's Day to the very slim margin of dads out there who are reading my blog!

Expect these posts to only appear once or twice a week instead of daily. I have a wedding to prepare for as well as a new school year, and the drawings and paintings are going to have to be given less of a priority. As I said last time though, the quality will not suffer even if the quantity declines.

As for the drawings:
The guy with the beard was a background figure in a painting by Wolf Huber from 1550.
Jeanne and I were having fun with a sticker machine, and these pages have all sorts of scraps stuck to them from found objects and smaller drawings. I enjoy occasionally making a collage of my own work.
Manabu Kurita tied the world's record for catching a bass that weighed over 22 lbs. back in January of this year. I copied him from a photo in an outdoors and fishing magazine I found at the doctor's office. I don't really give a shit about fishing as a sport, but Japanese dudes with mullets are always of interest.

Matsya was the first avatar of Vishnu in Hindu mythology. He appeared to Manu (the first man) to warn him of a massive flood that would destroy all life, and instructed Manu to take all kinds of herbs and seeds so that they could be replanted after it was over (sound familiar?) As to why he is headless, I don't know. I copied the weird vignette from a Taschen book called India Bazaar.
Lately when I am not reading novels I'm going to have to teach to 5th graders, I've been dipping into The Hero's Journey, which is Joseph Campbell's biography in the form of interviews. It's been causing me to think in a more mythological sense about the books I'm reading, the shows I'm watching, and the stuff I'm drawing. I'm a lot nerdier than most people realize.

Words Only

2010-06-15T09:01:00.001-07:00

There will be no image posted today. I have come to the decision, even if it is a temporary one, that it is a disservice to my drawings if I rush through them for the sake of immediate publishing. What do you think is a better strategy: to spend several days on a piece and fill it with many embellishments and details, or to spend about ten minutes on a scrap of paper and only show ten minutes worth of work? I am going with the former option. Sorry to disappoint anybody, but the work suffers when it is rushed, and that's a greater disappointment.
There are multiple projects going at once. It is more comfortable for me to work on them in stages than it is to force myself to work on one exclusively. Rest assured, I am drawing and painting every day, and I will continue to do so this summer, but work will only be uploaded maybe once or twice a week rather than daily.
A better venue for daily drawings is my sketchbook, which has been largely neglected over the last two weeks. Open-ended projects are always more interesting to me, and a sketchbook is very open-ended.
See you in a few days!

2 Lynxes Revisited

2010-06-12T21:39:00.000-07:00

Crayon, Prismacolor, and pastel on bristol, 2010.

This counts for tomorrow's drawing. I am taking off from doing any daily drawings, working on any paintings, or doing any posts about them on Sunday, June 13th. I 've been doing this for two weeks straight, and I need a break.

Two Iberian Lynxes

2010-06-12T12:04:00.000-07:00

Gouache and ink on paper, based on a National Geographic photo, 2010.

The one who's winning is the mother. The baby is wearing a radio collar.

Remember the drawing I said I'd messed up yesterday? Well, this is it. I managed to revive it with another coat of gouache. I think I am beginning to fall in love with the process of applying a coat of gouache and going back on top of it with watercolor; you can still blend them into each other even after the gouache has dried. It's a pretty big difference from acrylic which has to have another layer painted over it in order to have the effect of blending after it dries .
Speaking of acrylic, I know that it's been a couple of days since I posted the canvas panel I am working on, but I painted over a lot of stuff, and I am currently trying to build it back up again. Even for a work in progress post, empty areas of paint aren't that interesting to look at. I will try to work on it some more today, and maybe there will be an update tomorrow.

iiwii

2010-06-11T15:43:00.001-07:00

Ink and acrylic on paper, 2010.

No more, no less.

Daily drawings are a good little exercise, but they don't always make for masterpieces. This is the way I like it, though. I like for drawings to look sort of "disassembled". Perfect finishes are usually disappointing to me- at least as far as my own work goes.
It makes me feel kind of crazy to have multiple projects going at once. Even when I have time to relax, I don't actually relax. I messed up a pretty decent drawing this morning because I was pushing too hard. What I should really be doing right now is reading a book.
I am used to posting a drawing and having it get ignored, and my expectations aren't any higher for this one. Maybe it's sign of maturity that I don't think I'll be hailed as some new artistic visionary anymore. This is just the kind of stuff that makes me happy when I do it, so that's why it's here.

"Hermetic Lynx Swimmer"

2010-06-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

Acrylic, ink, watercolor, colored pencil, on paper, 2010. Sometimes the byproducts of paintings are more interesting than the paintings themselves.

The day's offerings

2010-06-09T12:10:00.000-07:00

Ever notice that in science fiction, the benevolent aliens are usually the ones with more feminine qualities, while the malevolent ones are often brimming with testosterone? Just a thought.

This is my second full week of summer vacation, and I have tried to be much more productive than I am during the school year. Not everybody realizes the amount of time and energy that goes into painting. It is work, it's not just fun and games. However, it is enjoyable work. Few people get to do work that they enjoy, and over the next two months, I will be a very fortunate person.
Ordinarily I don't post works in progress, but documenting the development of this piece might prove valuable if I screw it up at any future stage. The next step will be a Prismacolor and dry pastel overlay, which will then get filled in with more acrylic.
Yes, I am focusing on my own enjoyment, and no, I did not choose 'artsy' subject matter. It looks very sci-fi or surrealist, and I like it that way. I start out abstract, and then I paint the images I see on the canvas, sort of like staring at a cloud and seeing shapes. My brain just works better that way.

And yes, I am going to talk about the sheep drawing. It was made while sitting in the eye doctor's office, looking at a travel brochure about Alaska. It is a dall sheep. I messed up on his muzzle, it's supposed to be a lot longer than that. I didn't want to go off of the page. I drew it with my favorite implement, the Pitt artist pen, which is a brush-tipped pen full of India ink.

Jeanne and I have been watching seasons one and two of Lost all week on Netflix. We usually watch two or three episodes consecutively. I never realized it was such a good show. This will be our Lost summer. :P

Facebluff

2010-06-08T06:19:00.000-07:00

He's a mountain man!

Faceboat

2010-06-07T06:20:00.001-07:00

Le drawing du jour.

Lineage of Stupidity

2010-06-06T07:44:00.000-07:00

Two glaring examples of what I can do when I have little else than my own instincts and impulses to go on. Going grotesque is so easy for me. The challenge is making something beautiful. It's been quite a while since I've done that.
The guy on the bottom looks like a Masters of the Universe reject. The drawing above him looks like something Barry McGee might have sketched in his sleep when he was in first grade. Quality matters more than quantity, and if I want it to matter that I draw everyday, then I need to come up with better ideas than this.

Entangled

2010-06-04T06:05:00.000-07:00

Ink and Prismacolor on paper, 2010.

Sepia lines with a rosy pink aura is very trendy looking but it still pleases me.

Attempt at a Self-Portrait Wearing Headphones

2010-06-03T06:10:00.000-07:00

One eye is bigger than the other, but whatever.

Combover Tactic No. 257: Go Freakshow On It!

2010-06-02T06:58:00.001-07:00

The only issue here is the amount he spends on hairspray every month- the Aquanet company hasn't made this big of a profit since Poison was in the Billboard Top 100 back in 1987.

She Goes to Wal-Mart Dressed Like This

2010-06-01T07:57:00.000-07:00

Perhaps my true calling is to design hats for eccentric old ladies. That is a live animal in there, btw. It steals for her.

Zeng and Friends

2010-05-31T19:31:00.000-07:00

Prismacolors on Bristol, 2010.

According to the 1985 edition of The Guinness Book of World Records (which published the photo that this drawing is based on): " ...the acromegalic giantess Zeng Jinlian of Yujiang village in the Bright Moon Commune, Hunan Province, central China... was 8 ft 1 in when she died (at 17 years of age) on February 13th, 1982...Her hands measured 10 in and her feet 14 in in length. She suffered from both scoliosis and diabetes. "

Am I a morbid person, or do I just have secret aspirations to design fashion for the exceptionally tall? The truth is, when I don't know what else to draw, I always copy from old photographs, preferably no more recent than 20 years ago. Somebody on my street was throwing out a Guinness Book from 1985, so I snagged it with the hopes of mining images from it. One man's trash is another man's art project.
No doubt, there will be more drawings to come. I still have all of those old National Geographics. Now that school is out, I can make elaborate drawings on a more regular basis, but I am not any more inspired than I was while classes were in session.
You don't normally think of a giant as a fragile person, but they usually are. Reading about Zeng is very sad, but I embrace any opportunity to embellish a scene of emotional ambiguity. Are the two normal-sized girls her friends, or just two passers-by whom the photographer recruited for his shot of the giantess? Did her community accept her or treat her badly?
We always get the facts and the stats, but The Guinness Book doesn't include any human drama. When I add bright colors to the figures, I fictionalize the image. I'm sure that living on a commune meant that the clothing was more drab. I am a sucker for patterns and color relationships. I wanted to suggest harmony among the three young women by my color choices even if there wasn't any in their lives- that's why I say it's a fictional drawing.

After Ten Centuries of Wandering, The Medieval Christians Enter The Elysian Fields

2010-05-23T09:29:00.000-07:00

Digitally colored drawing, 2010. The figures are from an illuminated manuscript that I copied, and the butterfly is based on a Chinese design. The big red foam glove is from my imagination, I don't know any more than that.

Happy Saturday!

2010-05-22T06:19:00.000-07:00

When people hear that I paint, they might sometimes think that I'm some academic art snob. My interest in the arts actually has a much geekier origin than that, namely comics. I learned to draw from not just reading, but studying comic books. I didn't really draw from life until I got to college. To this day, when I visualize things, I usually see them with heavy black outlines and Ben-day dots before I see them in paint strokes or soft pastel.
I am an amateur at Photoshop. Everything I know I either learned from Jeanne, or from Internet tutorials. I just see it as another tool, really. It makes more sense to color drawings digitally if I know they're going to be posted on the Internet. I can also evoke a more comics-like feel with Photoshop than with colored pencil, or whatever.

Summer is almost upon us, and not only do I have a wedding to get ready for, but I feel like it's time to go back to making presentable art. Putting pen to paper is a step in the right direction. I just want to have some fun.

How Captain Clueless Got Banned From The Donut Shop (a work of fiction)

2010-05-21T22:14:00.000-07:00

The cape came from a stage magician's yard sale. The Great Gambini, I think he called himself. Anyway, I donned it for an afternoon with every intention of fighting crime and righting wrongs, when I got a craving for blueberry cake donuts and then I forgot about the whole thing.
All I wore besides the cape was a pair of y-front Fruit of the Looms. This might have gotten me arrested, had it not been for the privacy of the video poker booth I was sitting in. A mosquito buzzed around my neck. I slapped it hard. I looked at the obliterated insect carcass and the spatter of my blood on my palm, and pondered how closely it matched my cape. Then I heard a sound.
It was the anguished cry of one of the regular customers of Sweet Things and Grill. The woman had apparently just discovered that she was the reincarnation of St.Francis of Assisi, and she felt the pain of the mosquito's violent death by my hand.
"Murderer!", she screeched in a very unsaint-like manner, "You killed an innocent!"
"Ah, shaddap, ya crazy old broad!", bellowed another one of the regulars, a portly gray-haired chap who went by the name of Huggaboo, "She went off on my brutha yestiday fo' sprayin' dem roaches dat came outta da kitchen, an' now ya can't even defend yaself from dem muskitas! Whydoncha go back ta church an pray da rosary or somethin'?"
While sipping the last of my chocolate milk, I mulled over the irony of wearing a cape and tight underwear for the sake of fighting crime, and yet here I was accused of murder. The regulars and I entered into a discourse about the nature of good and evil and whether or not pests such as mosquitoes were truly God's creatures. Then after the crazy woman calmed down, the regulars took note of my unusual garb.
I explained to them that the cape was procured at the yard sale of the Great Gambini, and that it only cost me about two dollars. I have a tendency to regale strangers with even the most minute details of my daily experiences, which I am aware they usually don't want to hear about. Perhaps that is why I have so few friends.
Finally, the cook emerged from the kitchen and told me that I had to either find a pair of pants and a shirt or leave. Really, does Namor The Submariner ever endure such indignity at the hands of those he protects? I think not. Unfortunately, after I cried, "Imperious Rex!", and took down the glass display case containing many appealing jelly donuts, I was banned for life from Sweet Things and Grill.
To be perfectly honest, I felt worse about that than after I killed the mosquito.

(This is what my life would probably be like if I hadn't met Jeanne.)

05/17/10

2010-05-17T19:38:00.000-07:00

"Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one consciously, by means of certain external symbols, conveys to others the feelings one has experienced, whereby people so infected by these feelings, also experience them."

- Leo Tolstoy

Do it again. Do it again and again and again. And again.

What I want to say is something beautiful, but it only sounds repetitive. I am beginning to sicken myself. It's easy to give when all you offer is junk. By what right do I say that I have transformed this trash into art?
When I think back on what I have done, I see that I revisited the grotesque so many times because it was so easy. It is child's play to render an old, withered face with a crooked toothed grin. But to reach the sublime- that is a difficult endeavor indeed!
I know that there is a sweetness to ordinary life perceptible only under the optimal conditions. I call it the ecstatic ennui. This seeming paradox is really just a heightened appreciation of what goes on around you. An artistic representation of it elevates it to the sublime. Sort of like the idea behind a zen tea ceremony, of finding enlightenment within ordinary actions.
In the bakery section of Dorignac's, Three women reached for bread on the exact same shelf at the exact same time. Last Christmas, right before the break, a third grade boy idly hummed the melody to Frosty the Snowman on his way to the bathroom. The ugliest telephone pole on Metairie road is festooned with vines of jasmine in early May. There is harmony, synchronicity, and utter loveliness in all of the things we overlook. Why does this bring a tear to my eye?
I have attempted to find it on my own with my work, but I have always missed the mark. I perceive it in the art I admire, yet I have never made such work myself. How can I move others with what I do when I am not moved by it at all?
When I listen to the album, If You're Feeling Sinister, I am moved. When I see The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, trendy as it sounds, I am similarly moved. Perhaps nothing that I've ever drawn or ever painted has had the same level of involvement as record album or a motion picture, but by my own work I am never moved.
Sometimes it amuses me. Sometimes I giggle at naughty caricatures or visual puns, but it is a short-lived titillation at best. It never reaches the heights that I would like it to.
As today commemorates the 33rd year since I was extracted from my mother's womb by cesarean section, I lament that no great piece of art bears my name. I could say I am working for my own satisfaction, but masturbation also gets that job done. I could say that I work for the enjoyment of a small circle of people, but it becomes about little more than an inside joke. When I blew out the candle today, my wish was only for an idea, a single idea that wold enable me to infect others with the same feelings I have been infected by (to borrow from Tolstoy's definition of art), and to use that idea to steer me into a new period of creative productivity. Suddenly, I cannot bear to think that I shall never create something that can induce a feeling of sheer visual bliss within the viewer, that the reception for my work will always be apathetic and cold. I have to reach out to the world, to offer something up as a testament of hope for the human condition.
I want to create something that makes you hear music in your head when you look at it.

a destination

2010-05-16T05:25:00.000-07:00

Be ever so grateful for the small joys in your life. I reflect everyday upon the fact that I have stereoscopic color vision, and I know how important it is to me. Also, I have a right hand that I have trained to hold various implements of writing and drawing; this too is of great importance. (Don't ask what I use the left for :P)
Occasionally I am granted visions to put the eye and the hand to good use- this is called art. Art has a way of enriching our world, of illuminating even the most mundane experiences. This is what I strive for, but it seems impossible without the help of someone above.
Thank you, God.
When I create with the intention of giving, the work takes on a new tone. It no longer feels like I'm spinning my wheels, but that I have a destination to look forward to. Art is a wonderful thing, yes, but all the more wonderful when we share it.
In my limited free time, when I feel as if I should be making something, I will make small give-away art, like the bookmark you see above. Eventually everyone I know will receive something that I have made, but my first objective is to reward those who have displayed random acts of kindness. Look out, you unsung saints of the work-a-day world!

Head Full of Birds

2010-05-10T18:54:00.000-07:00

Let nothing but a floating feeling and the sweet sound of music occupy the space within your skull. Kick back, relax, and pull out that favorite album. I feel as if I've been given ears only to hear this beauty! There's nothing better to do at the end of the day...
I feel like I've been taken care of. I dare not ask for more, and I certainly dare not seem discontent. Blessed and blissful, please allow these gifts that keep on giving to remain in my life.

Thank you, Oh God!

Binary Ghost

2010-05-09T13:10:00.001-07:00

I found that Inaugural Ball ticket from 1989 on the ground outside a couple months ago. Looks like whoever had it didn't go. The other thing I posted is a doodle I made on an old calendar page that I am going to use as a bookmark. See, that's what I do nowadays. I have no time or energy to paint, so I make bookmarks and pick stuff up off the ground if it's over 20 years old.
Happy Mother's Day to the very, very slim margin of moms out there who might be reading my blog! This Mother's Day, May 9th, happens to fall on the birthday of my grandmother Lucia who passed away eight years ago. She would be 94 years old by now if she were still with us.
So in honor of my grandma, I am posting this poem that I wrote about my childhood since she was there through all of it.

"Breakfast With Aquaman", a poem in no- verse by Reggie Rachuba

Trio street trees swaying in the streetlight-here an elephant, there a dinosaur.
Running to exhaustion, granny-beads of dirt and sweat.
Maw-maw's front porch, boysenberry jam.
Church bells on the hour.
A yellow teddy made of yarn.
Little Golden Books, an encyclopedia set.
Deep sea divers, dogs in armor, masked stallions.
A pliable Popeye, Superman, Batman, Aquaman.
The patches of green, the placid cows, the bike seat.
Lights on the river at night, the fairy boats, the singing of little fishes.
Show Biz, Billy Bob, flat pizza.
The candles, the saints, the organ, Darth Vader (a baptism).
With my own Millennium Falcon, straining to reach that great Wookie in the Sky .
Every dog a friend.
The small hairs on the elephant's back, the wasp, "Don't you touch them!"
The Saturday mornings with Godzilla and Son.
Black velvet peacock tapestry, classical ruins, the fan in the attic.
Listening to Big Bird but staring at the Moody Blues.
Prehistoric plastic monsters, real dirt, little snails.
Mint in the iced tea.
Listing all of the animals, some of them twice.
Grey moments filled with owls and pines, three paintings of boys I'd never be, a stain on the ceiling.
A cowboy on big wheels, a ray gun, my thieving friends.
Feeding the ducks, stepping too close, my split second as a hippopotamus.
Hospital ice cream, wooden sticks, my dolphin voice.
Sea turtles, blue lizards, Dr. Chin.
"No cookies, no cakes, no pie!"
The last time I saw my dad in the kitchen.
The blue elephant, the vacant sky, a scolding from teacher.

Happy Mother's Day!

Drawing Therapy

2010-05-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

For those of you who don't know, I work at a school, and the school year is almost over- thank God! Those of us on the faculty who don't act worse than some of the kids we teach occasionally enjoy having "therapy sessions". In these sessions we help each other cope with certain individuals who make our work environment less friendly. The doodles above were made yesterday during the discussions.
Maybe I'm not such a good visual thinker. Maybe I think with language too much, and maybe that's why I've had artist's block for so long. This was a pretty good stream-of-consciousness exercise, and there's even a bit of observational drawing in the 1982 piece.

Last night I did something I had said I'd never do, which is make a Facebook page. Guess I gave in to peer pressure. Hey, maybe it'll get more people to read this blog, and I can actually start to make posts more often.

I saw my own corpse

2010-01-03T08:14:00.000-08:00

He was all dressed in yellow with jaundiced skin. Upon his chest he wore four yellow talismans. One was like a lightning bolt with a spiral on top of it. Another was shaped like Texas. The third looked like a piece of cheese. The final talisman's shape eludes me, but its color had shifted from a deep cadmium to a lemon yellow.
I touched his chest. It felt as if I were his killer and I had no remorse. "Reggie Rachuba is finally dead." And with that thought, the weight of the situation dawned upon me: I would have to dispose of the body somehow. The corpse was going to rot and putrefy. People would notice the stench and they would find me out.
Suddenly, the corpse's facial muscles began to twitch! His eyelids fluttered! The corpse of Reggie Rachuba came awake!

The build-up: Feeling like a miscreant, I walked down a random street in my dream neighborhood. It started to rain. I made my way down to the river. This was not the same Mississippi that I spent most of my life near with all of its filthy refineries and tanks full of toxic chemicals, no. This was the true Mississippi, a river for the people! And there they were, awaiting a celebratory fleet of river boats.
It was like Mardi Gras on the water. The prow of each boat featured the likeness of an artist. The people were jubilant and I was the opposite.
There wasn't much standing room left, only thin poles by the shoreline. There was an open spot among some excited children, and though I was hesitant to be near them, I stood there and beheld the spectacle.
The bystanders were trading with the boats. One crew had furs to trade with the locals. The boys around me began shouting for them. A woman in the crowd responded, "Yes, there are furs for everyone, even for Metairie and Carondelet!", and then I saw some familiar faces in the gathering. They were teachers from the school where I work. I averted my gaze, feeling somehow ashamed of being seen here. I turned to walk away, but the poles in front of me began to look more like a cage.
Finally able to escape, I came upon a boat that was also a house, and therein lay my jaundiced corpse adorned with his four yellow talismans, which I already told you about. Dreams can take you to strange places.

How do we not know that the most dire sin we all commit is neglecting every small miracle we witness while alive? A rainbow after a thunderstorm, with the smell of ozone in the air; a tiny green tree frog leaping into the palm of a small child; an egg sack bursting forth with a hundred infant spiders; best of all, a clear crisp night beneath a full Autumn moon. You might say that none of these compare to healing the blind, walking on water, or multiplying loaves and fishes to feed the multitudes, but when we ignore our lesser miracles we make a grievous error. For these minuscule miracles are symbols of God's love for us.
Dreams are like this. Dreams are small, personal miracles. Being able to fly and to run at high speeds without getting tired; a taste of religious ecstasy in an impossible TV temple; Soaring upon the back of a great turtle above and beneath the world's oceans; all of these are glimpses into a realm of great wonder, held somehow within thick bone and squishy brain fat. The inner eye sees everything. Our dreams complete us.
I saw my own dead body. I saw him open his eyes, and then I opened mine. Am I he, or did some transference take place? Is Reggie Rachuba dead in my mind? Has he been replaced, looking at the world through zombie eyes?
Nonetheless, such dreams are still miraculous. To see yourself truly from the outside is incredible. Not like a mirror or a movie, but standing above your own body while it is dead or sleeping. Thank you, God, for showing me a miracle.

"Magic Bullet Exit Wound"

2010-01-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

Digital collage, 2010

2010 is more fun to type than 2009 was. Last night we watched a documentary about the JFK assassination, and I guess that's where this title comes from. You can't say 'assassin' without saying 'ass' twice.

This is my electric onion.

2009-12-18T19:53:00.000-08:00

This is my electric onion. Savor it like the taste of a battery on your tongue. Everything is new and updated and electrified. Is this the end of my tricks? No, you're wrong if you think I can't get any more mileage out of this. Doing the same shit over and over again, that's contemporary art, right? Right.

2009-12-12T07:38:00.000-08:00

People who like to say, 'think outside the box' really don't.
People who consider themselves to be 'low maintenance' usually aren't.
People are living contradictions.

Writing just to write something

2009-11-21T20:16:00.000-08:00

Jeanne and I went out for a pancake breakfast this morning. It was wonderful! Then we bought medicine for some ailing tropical fish (we think it's Ick.), and we got the new Super Mario Wii game, which is fucking fantastic! As if that's not awesome enough, we had pizza for dinner and we watched an episode of a BBC "programme" called "How Art Made The World", which was all about why humans have exaggerated the human figure from The Venus of Willendorf down to The Ranaissance. The general tone of the episode was actually kind of simple-minded and not really from a very artistic point of view, IMHO. Right now I'm doing a post just because I feel like it.

Painting in Progress

2009-10-19T04:17:00.000-07:00

(Detail.)

(10/18/09)

(10/11/09)

(09/07/09)

2009-10-12T04:17:00.000-07:00

"As the Heart Finds the Good Thing, the Feeling is Multiplied"
Acrylic, Prismacolor, and graphite on canvas
October, 2009

The title of this piece is borrowed from "The Good Thing" by the Talking Heads. All I really do is borrow. The kids in this painting were all in the local newspaper. The towers in the background and the figures in the door are from an illuminated manuscript. I select, I assimilate, and I assemble. There is no real plan to it, I just wait for the right elements to come along, which is why this piece took so long to complete.
Painting as a response to external stimuli is nothing new, but it is indispensable to the painter. I am not the first to say that I enjoy arranging more than creating but I find it to be true. When I had to describe this piece to someone yesterday without being able to show it to them, all I could really do was list the ingredients- as for the composition itself, I was at a loss for words.

Hell Yeah, Spocktober!

2009-10-04T18:45:00.001-07:00

Happy that it's Spocktober again? I sure am.

I know I spelled the word 'missile' wrong. Don't bother pointing it out. This isn't a fucking spelling bee.
Mind the braintrust. I won't tell you whose brain it is they've got in that jar. They're just no good. Avoid them.

media: ink, watercolor, colored pencil, acrylic
surface: vellum Bristol
2009

Sketchbook page detail

Let's see if I can manage more than two goddamn posts this month. Sheesh! I'm not such a good blogger, I guess. Whatever.

2009-09-13T12:10:00.000-07:00

"Grandpa's Back From Outer Space!"
Collage, acrylic, colored pencil on cardboard.
2009

"Like The Taste of Venison"

Collage, acrylic, colored pencil on cardboard.
2009

Jeanne Cassanova's sketchbook pages, circa 2004

2009-07-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

All images are copyright Jeanne Cassanova. Used with permission.

Before making such ground-breaking large scale paintings in the graduate program at the University of Houston, Jeanne Cassanova drew delightful pictures such as these with Prismacolor, ink, and watercolor in her sketchbooks. These are some of my favorite drawings of her's, and Jeanne's art has never stopped being good! Be sure to check out her wonderful website: www.jeannecassanova.com/

Unintentional Flying Objects

2009-07-04T07:43:00.000-07:00

"Unintentional Flying Objects"
digital collage, 2009.

The Redneck Riviera!

2009-06-28T09:46:00.001-07:00

Summer is here in full force! I mean it is really freaking hot outside! When I was a lad, my family used to escape the New Orleans heat and humidity and head to the Gulf coast, or as some affectionately call it, The Redneck Riviera.
New Orleans is located in the south, but it is not culturally typical of a southern city. Places we used to visit like Biloxi, Mobile, or my favorite, Panama City, Fla, really are southern cities, culturally speaking. These were the places we would visit where the locals would remark to us in their thick southern drawls: "Ya'll talk funny."
The three Polaroids above are putt-putt courses from Panama City Beach. I had no interest whatsoever in playing the game. I only wanted to see the plaster dinosaurs that adorned the course, much to the chagrin of my family and miniature gulf enthusiasts who just wanted that annoying little kid to stop blocking the holes.
After I threw many a tantrum to get the over-priced rubber dinosaurs and monsters that were sold in the gift shop, we would leave such places and dip in the clear green waters of the Gulf of Mexico, all the while keeping an eye open for the occasional stingray or jellyfish. Lots of people want to go to Pensacola or Destin, and while those places might have pretty beaches, Panama City has more amusement parks, putt-putt courses, and other tourist traps in addition to public beaches.
My last visit at 21 killed the romance, however. The water was all full of thick green seaweed that looked like spinach and smelled like briny rotten eggs. The only clear water was at an over-crowded jetty, and it was freezing cold. Not only that, but I had clearly out-grown all of the junk that used to fascinate me as a kid. In recent years, Miracle Strip Amusement Park , a major attraction in Panama City closed down. I guess it's the same story pretty much everywhere else in America.
Here in New Orleans, we do have Lake Pontchartrain, which was re-opened to swimmers a couple years back, but you still might come out of the water with a thick, chitinous shell forming over your genitals. I wouldn't recommend it.

Saturday!

2009-06-27T12:41:00.000-07:00

With the recent passing of The King of Pop, we lose an important icon from the decade of my childhood, the 1980's. I have a love/hate relationship with the 80's. I love them because Jeanne was born in 1982; because I had some pretty respectable collections of Lego, M.U.S.C.L.E. , Transformers, and Masters of the Universe toys; and also because in 1987, I first started collecting comic books, a hobby that would continue until 2002, thus stunting my development as a productive member of society.
But I also hate lots of things about the 80's. Even as a child, I used to hate the way people looked back then. Everything was ridiculously ugly, all poofy and pastel. I hated a lot of the popular music of the time (I had no way of listening to punk and all that stuff) , and while I did enjoy watching Michael Jackson videos on MTV, exposure to all of the cheesy hair metal like Poison and soft-rock wussies like Richard Marx used to make me hate music altogether.
Cold War paranoia was still going on, and along with other Reagan-wrought propaganda like "The War on Drugs", there was a lot to scare little kids. Add this to my being in Catholic school for most of the decade, my parents divorcing, living on government cheese for a couple years, and my uncle killing himself, and you might understand why the 80's were not my favorite decade.
There were things that sucked about the 90's too, of course, but I always felt like that was my decade. I was comfortable with the way things looked and sounded back then, and it was a noticeable change around 1989 when the Soviet Union broke up and the Berlin Wall came down. I was too young to really understand the politics behind the first Gulf War, and was too interested in comics, girls, and Nintendo to care much about anything else. Most of what I knew about the world came from Mad Magazine.

That's why I say that the 80's are like the new 60's, because retro style just works that way. You don't want things to be the way they were when your parents came of age, because after all, they are the people who fucked you up! So you look to the decade before your parents were your age, and marvel at how awesome things seemed then. That's what we did as young people in the 90's, and that will be what the youth of the 2010's are going to do.

But then, what do I know? I just run off at the keyboard sometimes...

Here we go again!

2009-06-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

This is the relaunch, yo! Now that the Internet is all new and better, it's time for WoofOink to follow suit and upgrade to WOOFOINK 2.0! Not that I had much of a choice in the matter; Google practically forced me to do it, and at first I was a little pissed, but then I decided to make lemonade out of it.

Followers of the old WoofOink ( I just want to give a shout out to all three of you!) will no doubt remember my bitter, cynical rants about being trapped in a world I never made, much like a hapless, physically deformed Marvel Comics character from the 70's. Well, cranky Old Man Reggie will always have a home here, along with all of your cartoon pals like Pepto-Bear, the Man-Eating Turkey, and of course our beloved mascot, WoofOink, The Mystical Pig-Dog!

But WOOFOINK 2.0 will also take us further into the wonders of this bold new electronic age we are all a part of - that is, barring some nuclear Armageddon, in which case I will be too busy foraging for food and fighting off mutant rats to write a blog post or concern myself with anything other than my own survival and that of my loved ones.

If you like the obscure, then you'll love this blog! What could be cooler than an updated version of a blog that had a following so ultra-exclusive that only a few cutting-edge, super- hip graduate art students from Houston (Shout out to H-town!) even knew it existed? Don't you feel so totally hip and in-the-know right now? Like one of those people who listened to (insert name of popular band here) before they became popular, and who always shit-talks their latest album because it wasn't as good as (insert name of any of that band's previous albums here), but really it's just because they can't stand how accessible that band has become, and how it makes them lesser hipsters now.

God, I hate hipsters.

Anyway, a fresh start is always a good thing, even if it is forced on you by a massive corporate entity whose cafeteria actually serves the very sandwich that killed Luther Vandross! A hamburger whose bun is a glazed Kripsy Kreme doughnut! Have they no decency?!