Romans Drawing

This is the second part of where I talk about my thesis drawing from college. If you will recall, it was an allegory of the the New Testament book of Romans. I'll be brief here because many books have been written about Romans and I don't want to add another one. Besides, drawings are not books!

I spent about two months on this piece working about 40 hours a week. (As a lengthy aside, when will I ever have time like that again? Probably never. I was told in high school that it doesn't get any easier than this. I thought the people saying that were nuts; then I got to college and realized they were right. But then I was told by my professors that I would never have the kind of time I had at that point to work on my artwork. I thought they were nuts. Then I had children... I've never had it as easy as I did in college! College is a weird place that tempts one to become very, very selfish. Nowhere on earth is a person so encouraged to follow his own, stupid little whims as he is in college. It's like a seedbed of narcissistic solipsists. I'll stop here since I seem to be veering down some strange road that will dead end in a rant.)

As I was saying, I spent about 40 hours a week for two months on this drawing. The medium is charcoal with ink on a roll of Rives BFK paper. I used myself as a model, my wife, various students, folks from my imagination, characters from art history.

The portion of Romans covered in these sections of the drawing is chapters 1-4. St. Paul talks a lot about universal condemnation, grace, and a covenant through Abraham.

Look for Tio Paquete as I lifted him straight from Goya. Also, there is more robbery of Goya here!

This is a anthropomorphized lamb, am I right?

The action moves along from Adam and Eve way in the background and snakes its way up to the foreground through Moses and along to Abraham as he has a vision of his offspring. The falling fireballs are a convention that I took from Albrecht Durer and his Apocalypse woodcuts. I won't say much more than that. Read it here. Or read it at your house, you have a bible at home, right?

Nostaglia

I am feeling what an old student of mine called "nostaglia". This is because, of course, I JUST FINISHED MY DRAWING BOOK, Dreams and Visions! I have been working on this slowly since October of 2013. The key word here is slowly. All of my drawing books take some time to finish, but, increasingly, they are taking longer and longer.

With my new drawing book, I want to try something... old. Natural History was my first hand bound book and I finished it up something like 14 or 15 years ago. It has a ton of pages, but I was flying through them. I think it was because I hadn't really conceived of my drawing books as actual "artwork" at the time. It was somewhere towards the middle of that book that I realized I was making good drawings and that this could be more than a "sketchbook", it could be an Artist's Book. (If that doesn't sound asinine and pretentious, then I don't know the meaning of the words.) Whatever terminology you want to apply to the book, the fact is, I started poring over my books – sometimes taking years to finish one. I don't want to do that with this new book. But I say that with every new book I start and... well, stuff happens.

So, on to the nostalgia part of this post. I want to give something of a brief overview of my books. I have no idea if that is of any interest to you, but it is to me, and since I am doing all the writing here, I'll just indulge myself. Probably one or two of you will remember that I have already written about my drawing books in the past. That's true, but I want to deal with each of the books in a little more individual detail.

Natural History is not the first book of drawings that I made, but it is my first hand bound book. About half way through I started to think of it as a body of related drawings. Not that that changed what I was doing, it just helped me to have a way of thinking about the book as I was making it.

This is the first image in the book. An introduction.

There is a lot of collage in this book along with a fair amount of animal parts. There are a couple of praying mantis legs in there if you take a good look!

Monsters and anatomy. I'm sure this is a surprise to you.

Bugs, bones and printmaking and even a little bit of pro to-gyotaku before I knew what that was! The tiny little fish is real. It's been there for about 15 years, so I'm not too worried about it decomposing.

Fish, printmaking, and the internal anatomy of humilobites. At least I'm consistent. 

Again with the collage!

I have always understood my interest in the natural world. So that was a given for me as I started making this book. But I have always had an interest in the para-natural world as well. (I just made that word up, feel free to use it in your everyday life, but make sure you point people back to me. I'm getting in touch with the proper authorities to trademark it as I type this.) So the old category of "natural history" fit well for me. Way back in the olden days, back when things like cabinets of curiosities were in vogue, plants, animals, shells, oddities, "monsters", creepy pickled fruits. Anything that caught the eye was a go and it all fell under the same quasi-category. And that's where I found the work in this book.

An Oldie. A Very, Very Oldie

In recent weeks I have had a couple of requests to dig up an old drawing. It's a drawing I did about 13 years ago for my MFA thesis project. The title of this behemoth is Romans: An Allegory of the Gospel According to Paul. It is, as you may have guessed, an allegory. Of Romans.

To say that this is a large piece that is difficult to get photographed and on this blog doesn't give you the full feeling for the situation. This drawing is 42" tall by something like 36' long. You'll notice that I wrote a ' and not a " behind that number 36. That means feet. So the drawing is 42 inches tall by 36 feet long. This is like that scene in Spinal Tap where the guys want a giant model of Stonehenge on stage but they get a tiny little model instead. Whoever came up with the plans used " instead of ' when they made their drawings. Funny stuff, watch it and be amused.

There are a great many things that I would do differently if I were to make this drawing again today. For starters, I would retitle it to read something like Romans: The Gospel According to St. Paul. Not much of a difference you say? Maybe not, but I have grown to dislike allegories and I certainly am not on a first name basis with St. Paul. If anyone was a saint, he was. And if you're uncomfortable calling him Saint, maybe you could at least call him Mr. Paul?

As a sort of teaser for what's to come, here's the postcard that I sent out for the show.

It's B&W not because I was a cheapskate, but because the original is B&W! I
mean, I AM a cheapskate, but that's not what was going on here.

Over the next few weeks on Mondays, I'll write more about this piece and what it means and what it has meant for me. So that means you still have the normal, random results of my wandering pencil to look forward to on Thursdays, so don't panic! Stay with me here!

Saints and Martyrs

Flannery O'Connor is a wonderful writer and I heartily recommend that you read everything the woman ever wrote. One story, in particular, had me thinking a few weeks back: A Temple of the Holy Ghost. In it she describes the paintings seen at the fair where one could see "faded looking pictures on the canvas of people in tights, with stiff stretched composed faces like the faces of martyrs waiting to have their tongues cut out by the Roman soldier." What I was thinking about was the classic circus freaks and how she was right, they are a kind of martyr. 

I mean martyr in the sense of witness. Hear what God tells Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 4, "And the LORD said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the LORD?"

It occurs to me that these people are witnesses to God simply by being. I don't know that I've worked it out much further than that, but God tells us many times in Scripture that his strength is made perfect in weakness and that his glory bursts through by means of very small things.

The End

Did your heart skip a beat? Did you get a panicky feeling as your throat seized up a little? Did you think the title to this post meat I was done with writing for the interwebs? Climb down off the ceiling and relax. All I meant was I have finished my current drawing book. Well, mostly.

You see, in the grand tradition of putting carts before horses, I have finished the last two pages of my book before I have finished several of the preceding pages. Why have I adopted this devil-may-care attitude and thrown caution to the wind? Why am I mixing my metaphors? Because I thought of a pun and I couldn't wait to get it down on paper.

You know how sometimes you think of a pun, and then think everyone else will find it equally as clever as you do? And how they don't because, I guess, everyone else is dumb? Well, that's where I'm sitting right now. The smiles on my face and in my head speak to something insanely clever, funny even. Something along these lines:

There was a guy who sent ten different puns to friends in the hopes that at least some of them would make his pals laugh. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

But funnier!

I've teased enough. Here's the image:

Get it?! Huh? Do you get it?!

I assume since you've persevered this long, you'll want to know the medium here. This is a relief rolled collagraph with white ink and a collage of watercolored paper and decorative paper scraps.

And all you sharp eyed devils out there will recognize this fish as a version of the collagraph that I wrote about on January 12th.

Protomartyrs

Some time back, I wrote about a "protomartyr" and what that means. I also said that that word made me think of cavemen. So, I decided to go for the caveman angle and make a drawing of St. Thülaak, Protomartyr of the Pleistocene. Obviously, the name is made up, but I thought it had a nice prehistoric ring to it and it sounds better than "Thag" or something ridiculous like that.

But the larger question of a Pleistocene martyr is before us. I don't want to say too much because I am still working on the details with a couple of friends of mine, but what would the circumstances be that would make a caveman martyr possible? I have become interested in the idea of a couple of species of humans alive together, one of them fallen, the other not. How would they interact? What kind of stories could be told? Would it make for a fun graphic novel?

Perhaps this is late...?

This is an image I did in collaboration with my colleague where I teach. She did the calligraphy and background and I did the image of the Virgin and Child. I really, really like this painting. However, collaborations are hard for me because it is difficult for me to cede control over an image to someone else's creative process. I have absolutely no issue with allowing randomness into my image-making (as a printmaker, it makes life much less stressful). But to allow someone else to say what they think is best in what I think of as my artwork? That is hard on my pride.

It's not just collaborations that I have trouble with. It's illustrations for publication. It seems that I will absolutely nail a drawing or a painting, send it off and then... see how it gets cropped and flooded with someone else's text. It absolutely drives me up the wall.  Of course, that's assuming the image is accepted as-is. A lot of times I get it back with "corrections". Rrrr. 

But perhaps all of this is a part of killing my pride and works in moving along my creeping sanctification. Or maybe everyone else is just wrong.

Bones

I had a real thing for bones in college. I mean a real thing. My patient wife would put up with me scouting the woods for old skeletons, making trips to taxidermy shops for leftovers, ditto for petshops (before you get all mad at me, they were already dead), even the occasional roadkill pick up. As a result I have quite a respectable skull and skeleton collection.

The question is, however, why? I think my fascination with bones goes back to my love of dinosaurs. The funny thing about dinosaurs is that we know them more by their skeletons than by what they looked like in life. I thought about what the reverse of that would be. What do living animals look like under their skin? A triceratops skeleton looks normal while a dog skeleton looks bizarre.

So I decided to look for skeletons of extant animals. While a living raccoon is familiar, its skeleton looks alien. For your enjoyment, I have here a small drawing of a skull that my kids found. It looks very strange until you realize it is probably the remains of a pug.

Ooohh, weird.

Collagraph

I have a brief history with collagraphs that is fraught with tension. On the one hand, the collagraph is an awesome side branch of printmaking. And I loves me some printmaking. On the other hand, it is a natural medium for generating beautiful, unexpected textures in your artwork. But on the third hand, almost all of my experiments with it have been disasters.

That said, I have embarked on another adventure in collagraphs. This time, I'm using an earlier gyotaku print that I wrote about here. I made a few photocopies at 50% size and proceeded to cut them up, slather them with modeling paste and gel medium. Here's the result:

Midway through collagraph's journey

 I printed it this afternoon and I'm... not completely disappointed. I think it's a good start, but that it needs a lot more... what? Layers? Texture? Background? I'll keep working, you keep reading and I'll let you know how it goes.

The resulting beast.

Hipster Dimetrodon

I promised to explore further the interior lives of ancient animals and that is what I have done here. This is a resident of the early Permian period. The dimetrodon has lost his way and no longer knows how to fulfill his role as a male or even as a member of the larger Paleozoic Era. He seems to have become what one of his older secular synapsid prophets termed "the last dimetrodons". He has become rather solipsistic in his personal philosophy (although he would never say it that way) and finds it almost impossible to see the world around him without irony. He is melancholy.

Hipster Dimetrodon is hip.

I am glad you are not tired of looking at my dimetrodon drawings. I know I'm not! You can see more here, here, here, here, and here.