The Terrible Mistake

The Terrible Mistake

On the Seventh Day, 

when the Almighty should have been napping,

He paced the glassy surface of new poured sea 

wringing his sculptor's hands in celestial anxiety.
A nagging tug, a vexing doubt about creation, 

something about creation -something obvious 

and overlooked. a single lively thread, woven
in his own image in a split second of pride. 

One thread, twisting in the solar winds
unraveling slowly down the eons....

Selecting a worry list for the Zombie Apocalypse

Interstitial Connections, oil on canvas board

Never. That's when I thought I'd see the unfolding of events as they are tumbling into chaotic existence this year. And look it's only July. And I fear much is unfolding unseen.  I don’t know what to worry about anymore - there are so MANY choices!! 

All the countries that used to be our friends and allies, but have stopped calling. 

And all the people who’ve died because certain international agencies that dispensed food and medical aid have suddenly turned on a dime and disappeared - absorbed by the so-called state department.

Will we ever have vaccine recommendations we can trust again? (Hmmm try the AMA  - they still believe in science.) What happens during the next pandemic when research funding has been axed?

Will NOAA be trustable after all the climate experts have been banished? What will happen to the coast as things melt on - will AMOC stop?  Will we bake in the oven of our folly?  Or will a new ice age suddenly arise and make Popsicles of us all?

So many floods,  epic rain and wind events in recent years! And Think of all those campers and RV-ers  swept away in the night as they slept - heartbreaking. They are still searching, many finding the sudden darkness of grief....

 

What about all the forest fires creating swaths of charcoal out of  the animate and inanimate alike?  Will 47 have everyone sweeping the forest floor, and pull all the national guard fire details to help ICE?  Speaking of ICE what happens to all those folks snatched and deported leaving families and jobs dumped in countries they’ve never been to  or incarcerated incognito?  What of Due Process? Rule of Law?  Will Miller reduce the US population by jailing half of us in various Alligator Alcatraz iterations? 

And if there is a "Big One" along the Cascadia Subduction Zone - how will we recover?  I don't think we will really. California is the engine for a large chunk of our national economy. By then, FEMA may be a memory, missed more and more as the months pass. As stodgy and rule bound as they were - they helped many.

And what of democracy? Of Technocrats, cryptologists and accelerationists trying to  burn down the world.....

Speaking of technocrats - think of  all the various AI iterations preparing to take our jobs, hallucinate new law cases and other nonfacts, run and analyze all those surveillance cams and drone-swarms, acquire human targets for.... ummm, never mind. 

The only thing I can think to do is turn off Siri and never ask ChatGPT. MetaAI, Claude or Gemini etc any questions. Those other iterations, many with industrial or military purpose or having secret code names --- are too frightening to contemplate.  And Grok - why don’t people realize Grok is named for a sci-fi verb “to grok” which means 'communing with your dead friends by eating them'?

             Zombie apocalypse indeed.

Conversation Styles Differ

Hot Air

Conversation Styles Differ .... Well that's an understatement. For some, conversation is a stream-of-thought run-on-sentence without punctuation or paragraph marks. Do you talk incessantly in ever widening circles as a way of thinking out loud? As a self-soothing smoke screen to fill up the space between you and another person? If so, this is written for you.

Some other people (including me), need to breathe and have silences in a conversation. We need a meaningful deep pause to collect our thoughts and share or to respond to a speaker. If there are no silences then we will just let the speaker go on and on.

I am listening, but I might be four sentences behind your rapid speech, thinking that what you said doesn't make any sense, seems out of proportion, relies on circular reasoning or a 'straw-man' argument, or that there are facts you mentioned which were improvised out of thin air. Or that this is the 3rd time you said the same thing. Sometimes I see an assumption you have made about me which is upsetting.

But you are six or seven paragraphs ahead of me now, chatting on all by yourself, making more statements that make no sense. So I think - there are so many disparities in this that it's pointless to bring it up any of them - so I let you go on and on and on even though I am beginning to feel beleaguered, buried under all the words.

And you wont find out for weeks that that my ex-husband is dead, or that I locked myself out last night at midnight and had to climb in through the window. At some point I might seem to be getting tense. I might quite suddenly say - "let's change the subject." or "I have to go now." I might quite suddenly, vigorously object to the last thing you said -- but the arc of it is this:

You have created a lengthy machine gun attack of words, and I have finally responded by running into an underground bunker and closing the door.

DRAWING: from a writing exercise

I once belonged to a poetry writing group or two. This side-long looking doodle is what resulted while words for a writing exercise were being chosen. Yes, she is quite asymmetrical with hair askew -- and I don't care..... Though I often digitally clean up these little drawings, this one is just as exists in my little book of paper.

Originally posted (and in the present tense) on 8/15/2010

A certain lack of something

This was how I felt before I adopted my three kitties.

Weathered,
patched with odd bits,
a jumbled collection
re-assembled without instructions,
left outside everything to rust away.

I carry on though. Not so sure. Positive but aware of reality. Carrying memories. And a tiny spark of hope.


originally posted 8/16/2016

Art: where the broken wings fly after all

Originally posted April 4, 2008. Thought I'd haul it up here again and update it a bit to remind me.

Every person has beauty and value. Some have other unsavory aspects which obscure the beauty and value, but it's there.

Some of us are eccentric, obviously old, ridiculously odd, too fat, too thin or perhaps misshapen or unpleasant or unreliable. Some folks, though beautiful, are misshapen in ways more difficult to see - disfigurement by the constant prejudgement of others, where every word was twisted, shaded, weighted and measured against some mythical standard of perfection. Or by constant criticism during childhood where every flaw was carved up like a roast repeatedly. Or by constant underserved praise and by life passages bought and paid for by blood money rather than earned. This unhappy learning is latter replayed on others.

Sometimes people find it really difficult to get past it all. Some are like moths that have emerged from the cocoon in a jar that was too small. (See my pencil drawing above) Their wings unfolded only midway and are forever bent. Yet even in this there can be value.

Like many other resources, the past can be transformed. Rather than repeat it, and live it out again and again, rather than turn the bitter criticism or the too clever manipulation on others or measuring them against an imagined perfection, or insulting them for dramatic effect (sounds familiar in the current political scene) -- the best use of the past is to render it down into art. (Not the so called Art of the Deal,  but art in the expansive sense - whether literary, musical, visual, theatrical etc.) In that way it is an offering, and something is given to world.

It doesn't even matter if the world accepts it. It is the making of it, and perhaps the offering of it, that heals in a way that golden toilet seats and hair implants never can.

- Mar  Walker

Busy No 2 at SCAN this week

Busy No 2: (on the bottom right) is on display at SCAN this week at the library. Here it is nicely grouped with two other works. I am thrilled they took it. It has never actually been shown before....

First Layer: Chromebook as canvas

This is the first layer of a new painting I've started -  just a doodle so far really, and it's just black and white, though that will change. The canvas is the white cover on my Chromebook. Okay I am nuts. I was admiring some of the laptop covers I saw which are sold on various sites around the web. They seemed too pricey though - I thought it would be easier and cheaper just to paint the thing itself. Call me crazy, (or reclusive, awkwardly antisocial in many cases. )

I used an inexpensive acrylic paint in a squeeze bottle. I only have black  right now, so when I get more colors I will add new layers and post a photo of each as I go along.

More drawings, this time a life drawing

This is quite a few years old - something on paper. It might even be from a drawing class at Western Ct State U.  That was several decades ago. Life drawing is term used for drawing from a live model. If you have never tried it - it's really not what you might think. While working you find you are following the relation of line, form, volume, and contours receding into other contours. Really, the model becomes a human landscape or a still-life.

Since that time I've also done clay sculpture from a model during classes with Janice Mauro and with Alexander Shundi, among others.

I am quite behind on my posting.

Gee, I wonder if my blog will get a PG rating now... hmmm.  Looks like a human being. Of course human beings do need parental guidance. At least for a while.... haha.

Cubist-like, flattened? Man with a dog, bone, & cigarette

I was shooting for flatness, lines with no heft, or volume, depiction in two dimensions without the illusion of mass, when I drew this little shot - quite a few years ago. A reclining man is  smoking a cigarette, while making a dog jump up for a bone.  It seems like a summertime drawing, maybe after a picnic. I really like the feel of the chair but that may be because it is the only thing with any discernible three dimensional form.  I had been looking at a lot of Picasso but certainly this is not quite that either. The actual drawing has a crease down the middle. You can still see it a bit.

Sketch: an extended doodle

Sometimes the hands are busy and the mind is doing something else. Not sure who these folks are, or what kind of odd fairy tale scenario is going on here. I guess its a visual dream sequence. I was watching the idiot box, while doodling with a mechanical pencil and a black bic pen on an 8x11 sheet of light grey card stock. I digitally faded the grey to white.  I kind of like the result. It might be the plan for a painting.

Abstract made in web-based browser programs

It's Xmas eve and the days are moving fast toward years end.
This picture was begun while sitting at Molten Java in Bethel this past Wednesday night. I connected to the web over the wifi and usedg Deviant Art Muro to make a few sketches. This was further processed later in Picnik

POEM with artwork - after Jay Defeo's The Rose

Cosmic Super Nova, Mountain, Flower, Nirvana

on Jay Defeo's the Rose 

 

On top: The Rose, Bottom:
my response to it

At the start was a vague idea

 about climbing mountains, the forms,

 the form   of mountains

It became   a mountain of paint

a canvas 11 feet high,
8 feet wide, 11 inches deep

A mountain eight years long.

There were brushes for painting it up, 

slathering on the peaks

Knives for carving down the crevasses

making symmetric straits and canyons of implosion

hacking away material

to get down into the mythical center

of this inverse starburst..

Cleaning the brushes

sharpening the knives

day after day, month after month

year on year, the daily wrestling

the readiness to cascade to the center 

of toil her commitment leading deep, 

and growing deeper though glistening white

Like the expansion and contraction 

of a universe And those opposing planetary forces

the building up and the wearing away, 

 the building up the carving down into 

 the building up despite the erosion of sharpened steel 

 in her own two hands she shaped it with 2300 pounds of oil paint.

And when it was done it lurked behind a wall

like a dormant volcano 

or a lover you no longer want as a roommate

and she refused to paint for years

Later she painted smaller-sized botanicals, 

little but weighty abstracts as if the literal enormity 

had gone out of her.

Eventually the mountain went down the fire escape 

They took out the window took out the wall 

to get it out of the Filmore Street studio

to let it unfold in public view 

let it flower, this endless road

this journey of making

the name came late,

The Rose, 

a concentric flower

petals, arrayed around a center
of daily sweat followed by stillness

its silvery shimmering a monument 

of whites of lights and highs accented 

by shadowed abyss, this human reaching 

for meaning reaching and collapsing

 into the event horizon of art

c MM Walker  2011
written for a Free Poets Collective reading  celebrating the Women Beat-ear poets, writers and artists, held at Broad Street Books in Middletown

Update: It's on display at the Whitney currently http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/JayDeFeo

Made with web-based browser programs

This new abstract was made completely with web-based browser loading programs on a Chromebook with a Chrome operating system/Chrome browser. These programs are web/browser-based and completely free.  If you have raged that illustrator or painter cost so much. Give them a try. DeviantArt Muro,  Pixlr and Picnik and others.

Obsolete tech devices as canvas and frame

I painted this abstract (above) in an odd place - inside a dead Sharp Personal Organizer, "512K" which, for a short  time many years ago, was invaluable. (Click on the picture to see it even larger - I think it makes the size-transition well) Of course, every darling is brief in the tech world and the planet is littered with abandoned, non-functioning gizmos. Painters - recycle! Below you can see it insituo - in the frame and substrate.

A poem on a drawing: Free Space

From the archives:

Free space,

defined by what it's free of...

the grace, the drape, the liquid

air, where shuffling gauze

gives way, writing the bend

of torso, an ambition of words,

of space, of not often enough

exploring, hiding

or not hiding,

the cloth that tells

betrays the careful

covering and uncovering,

the moving and falling,

the piling of layers taken

away, removed as

we find our - silence.

.

-- a poem and drawing by Mar Walker aka Mistryel

This is an extended doodle, and all of the words of the poem appear in the drawing. I drew this during a lecture at a conference on metaphor and the book ta few years ago.  It was done in a little leather book that is very small. The medium is pencil. I have boosted the contrast to make it easier to see.  It is one of a handful of  small works where I have tried to combine drawings with words....

Dancing under a dark sky

From the PuzzledDragon archives: 

This is a picture where music is integral to the subject. You can't dance unless someone or something is piping out a tune...

This work is an oil pastel/water color I did in 1992 while I was in Maine and its lovely hills are visible in the background. The guy in blue with the hair was a very odd fellow named Peter Smith who used to wear fingerless billy idol gloves and who could talk just like homer simpson. Go figure.  The fellow in the brown tee shirt is waving his arms despite his girth. He was based on a rotund neighbor named Rob Puncheon. I tried to create vivacity here with the motion of bodies, stars, sky and grasses. Even the seated figure on the far left seems as though she might jump up and join in.  The only static being here is the pensive onlooker on the right. And the picture is really hinges on her. There is all this joyful motion and one sad bit of pensive melancholy. Ah well.

This was moved from the gallery blog, where it was a Jan. '07 entry

Hairs on Fire - with an oil pastel technique

From the archives:

HAIRS ON FIRE! Not really. This is an oil pastel I did while working in North Conway, New Hampshire.  I often find the faces of people I know creeping into my work. I guess because I have had to look at them and their features are familiar. In my mind there is some facial resemblance to a fellow named Burns who was a planner there. (It's not much of a likeness.)

One of my favorite things to do with oil pastels is to lay down thick color then draw back into it with some handy implement or other. Sometimes the first layer is scraped, then a second color is heavily applied and scraped into revealing some of the first color. When I took a drawing class at Western Connecticut State University, many years ago, I remember learning to draw into  heavy pencil marks with an eraser. This is where I got the idea of removing material as a way to form the picture. 

Post Script 10/19/2011 - One of the reasons I reposted this at this time is, I recently read how Jay Defeo formed The Rose using sharpened knives as much as brushes as she cut back into the layers of paint and scraped and hacked to remove material to form the topography of the painting. Very cool stuff.

Paintings: Spacious No 1 & 2

Though I have put up Spacious No 3 - I had not written about Spacious 1 & 2 yet. With the caveat that the color is a little off in these photos, here they are:

--- Spacious No. 1 ---

....

--- Spacious No. 2 ---

Both of the these paintings had more garish beginnings than is apparent here.  They both hung for years in the house before I finally knew what to do with them...  Spacious No 1 on the left, had green and purple clouds that looked for all the world like intestines. And that is what bothered me about it.  Spacious No 2 had a garish sunset, and I do mean garish.  Ultimately I went for a sense of spaciousness over jumpy colors that I didn't think worked well.....

The link to a post on Spacious No 3: http://puzzleddragon.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/painting-spacious-no-3/

Painting: Anyone

This is my 501th post on this blog. Woohoo!

Humans hold many kinds of commonality - via inheritance as well as history. We are connected over centuries by the tranmission of handed down culture as well as hand me down genes. We have a common animal nature and energy that expresses itself in countless individual ways. We are many and one. Any one.

The materials here are watercolor pencil and gesso on paper.