Album: 70's Style

Cover art:
concept-driven,
playful, somewhat mysterious,
often literary.

Interior art:
the artist's portrait,
informal and yet pensive,
often black-and-white.


Looking back, the sheer sameness, the simple paradigm, the artifice meant to signal sincerity, well, it's all so much easier to see with a bit of perspective.  Time the Leveler.  The struggle to represent a vision, to play it cool without seeming to try too hard, and to have a bit of fun as well . . . .  

Copper Quixote

Rocinante by any other name . . . .


(All appreciation to Gustave Dore and his artwork.)

"Though Whether Those Feet"

"The heels of Milgrim's Tanky and Tojo brogues, as he sat astride the high, raked pillion of Benny's Yamaha, didn't quite touch the cobbles of this tiny square.  Something about the angle of his feet recalled some childhood line-drawing from Don Quixote, though whether those feet had been the knight's or Sancho Panza's, he didn't know."

--William Gibson, Zero History

Pipe Dream

Reprise: Dona Quixote

Reprise: "And If I Laugh At Any Mortal Thing"

I
Nothing so difficult as a beginning 
In poesy, unless perhaps the end; 
For oftentimes when Pegasus seems winning 
The race, he sprains a wing, and down we tend, 
Like Lucifer when hurl'd from heaven for sinning; 
Our sin the same, and hard as his to mend, 
Being pride, which leads the mind to soar too far, 
Till our own weakness shows us what we are. 

II
But Time, which brings all beings to their level, 
And sharp Adversity, will teach at last 
Man, -- and, as we would hope, -- perhaps the devil, 
That neither of their intellects are vast: 
While youth's hot wishes in our red veins revel, 
We know not this -- the blood flows on too fast; 
But as the torrent widens towards the ocean, 
We ponder deeply on each past emotion. 

III
As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow, 
And wish'd that others held the same opinion; 
They took it up when my days grew more mellow, 
And other minds acknowledged my dominion: 
Now my sere fancy "falls into the yellow 
Leaf," and Imagination droops her pinion, 
And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk 
Turns what was once romantic to burlesque. 

IV
And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 
'Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep, 
'Tis that our nature cannot always bring 
Itself to apathy, for we must steep 
Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe's spring, 
Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep: 
Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx; 
A mortal mother would on Lethe fix. 

V
Some have accused me of a strange design
Against the creed and morals of the land, 
And trace it in this poem every line: 
I don't pretend that I quite understand 
My own meaning when I would be very fine; 
But the fact is that I have nothing plann'd, 
Unless it were to be a moment merry, 
A novel word in my vocabulary. 

VI
To the kind reader of our sober clime 
This way of writing will appear exotic; 
Pulci was sire of the half-serious rhyme, 
Who sang when chivalry was more Quixotic, 
And revell'd in the fancies of the time, 
True knights, chaste dames, huge giants, kings despotic: 
But all these, save the last, being obsolete, 
I chose a modern subject as more meet. 

VII
How I have treated it, I do not know; 
Perhaps no better than they have treated me 
Who have imputed such designs as show 
Not what they saw, but what they wish'd to see: 
But if it gives them pleasure, be it so; 
This is a liberal age, and thoughts are free: 
Meantime Apollo plucks me by the ear, 
And tells me to resume my story here. 

--Lord Byron,
the opening stanzas of the fourth canto of Don Juan

I've posted these lines before, but that's fine.  That's what reprise is for.

Fall Begins

 Tumbler (Pictish): sculpture mix; pit-fired
. . . years and years ago on Ocean Beach.

Live model: 20-minute gestural exercise.

Pit-Fired

Don Quixote?

Figure from model: two 20-minute gestural sessions.

The instructor often pointed out how I tend to make everybody taller, longer, thinner; some of the models appreciated that tendency . . . but she felt I needed to rein in my stretching of the truth. Though, less often, she'd also tell me to run with this style, if it served my goals, if it felt right. (The latter phrase would come forth in response to my gasp: "Goals?")

I see a bit of the Don Q here, bound, hampered from pursuing his passion, his ideals, and appropriately, perhaps lugubriously pensive. Yeah, that's reading a lot into the figure. Too much?

Sculpture mix; copper wire; misc. chemicals and kelp.

Pit-fired on Ocean Beach, CA, years and years ago.

Gymnast: Dona Quixote

Garage art; unfinished.

Don Quixote's Mirror

Approaching 50, I like to keep track. And the tracks are there to see.

They say, the lines on your face are the expression of spirit and experience, of choice and circumstance, whether of bliss or blunder--pluck or plunder--love, luck, or lucre. Perhaps, the etchings of duck-and-cover versus what-and-wonder. (Like Hamlet, "when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw"; I wonder which way the wind's blowing now.) I hope you can see that I smile a lot, usually; I feel lucky that way.

In what's probably my favorite novel--John Fowles' Daniel Martin--the main character keeps many, many mirrors on the walls of his Oxford bed-sit. The narrator offers two interpretations, not wholly mutually exclusive: first, the signs of vanity, invocations of Narcissus, the celebration of self; and, second, attempts to move from the first person to the third, from mere subjectivity to heightened objectivity. When I reflect on the many, many "profile pics" I'm accumulating, I prefer to think I'm echoing that latter impulse. I think this photo works, showing me as I am: a man of 49 and a bit more, still smiling, still exploring, still willing to tilt at a windmill or two.

Self-Portrait #49. With beret.