Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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"

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

The day's offerings

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

He's a mountain man!

Faceboat

Le drawing du jour.

Lineage of Stupidity

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

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

One eye is bigger than the other, but whatever.

Combover Tactic No. 257: Go Freakshow On It!

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

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