Fictional Identikit

There's a game going about to identify one's self via three or four literary characters.

Here's my submission from the four quarters of my soul, or some such:

Jim Hawkins, from Stevenson's Treasure Island;
Ishmael, from Melville's Moby Dick;
Frank Bascombe, from Ford's The Sportswriter;
and
Robert Walton, from Shelley's Frankenstein.

Playing with Clay

Wyrd Oft Nereth: Two Views

Body By The Numbers

Clay: Figures of Speech

Exercises with models: 2008 or 2009, I believe.

Crossley-Holland: Do You Ken?

SALT- COMPOUNDS

salt-scythe
sweeps onshore, corrosive and hissing; pins back
ears; rifles each stay, shroud and halyard.

creek-wood
the old ones, clinker-built and always thirsty;
noses blunt and bottoms glaucous; still quivering.

sea-garment
roseate spinnaker, light-breasted; no less
stiff canvas, often split and mended, grey with salt.

herring-haunt
see-through escarpments toppling and barking
as they dive through themselves into ghosts of flint.

mauve-mist
delicate as breath suspended over marsh grass;
summer carpet, wiry and tide-beaten, knotted in mud.

wave-arms
without joints, creaking and groaning; like wings
their strange spade hands salute and dip and rise.

mud-runes
ribbon-casts, blow-holes, keel-scrapes, anchor-spikes,
darts of the stitchers and strutters and mincers.

--Kevin Crossley-Holland

from his Selected Poems,
London: Enitharmon Press, 2001

Rafting In The Studio

“Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.” 

--Dorothea Tanning

I was tempted to title this entry "Anger Management," which is true to an extent, but art's aid to essential sanity is something that I favor and recommend.  I took my own advice and managed to fit the studio into my day.

Three bowls and some silly little figures: feeling fairly sane right now.

Old Wire

Back in Summer 1996, I was feeling the blues--no teaching gig, dissertation stalled, Dante's "dark wood" looming--so I went out to the garage and started bending chicken wire into shapes.  That's a merman (see his finny back?) to the left and an octopus to the right.  I also made wire masks (crow, fool, deer), human figures, and fish.

I had no plans to do anything with such pieces; I just needed to make things and working with words had gotten far too fraught.  Chicken wire happened to be handy, I guess.  Occasionally, in the years prior, I'd carve goblin faces in buckeyes and, of course, pumpkins, but making these wire pieces was an important step in letting myself play, in letting myself make and not judge, in not over-evaluating the products or the process.

Two or three years later, I started playing with clay for the first time since childhood.

I have had this notion to drape such wire art with kelp . . . .