American Management Styles:

This old pencil sketch is from a series I made years ago, called American Management Styles. Wish I could find the rest of them.....

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

Curious encounters with nature

This is an old smudgy pencil sketch of mine. Not sure an actual horse would react as calmly to the half-man half-butterfly thingie in its meadow - which probably, being self-aware of its halves is having doubts of its own. Once the wings were moving I think there would be a hasty, slightly hysterical horse retreat....




I'm kind of low energy these days as you can see by this kind of sad poem.

Doldrums

A tickle really, a night breeze passes, barely touching
In darkness I orbit the neighborhood's circle,
pass the same facades repeatedly.
Anchored by the hum of the highway,
maybe a celestial dipper or two rising
or a flock of little porch lights 
where a few someones live, 
I appreciate their seeming elemental persistence.
Even now I point a bobbling flashlight to ward away shadows, 
though I have nothing to say to shadows these days.
No one minds my silence.

I originally put his up at https://april30poems.blogspot.com/2016/08/unusual-encounters-with-nature.html?showComment=1472256583013#c7537839509355428630 and added it here also...

Hug them close whoever they are....

This is oil pastel on card stock. It's rather old. It's also cut out and ready to collage into something else. I do like it all by itself as well.

Had a scare today. Something about a large pickup blocking the view of a crosswalk. Not using that location again, neither for walking or driving.....  Things could have gone differently. Tragically. So glad the outcome was the status quo. 

The Angry Surprise.....

Didn't make this ink drawing for BREXIT but my oh my, we have seen some similar expressions in the news on Brits expressing their dismay!!!!

Tail of two cats.....

Just can't seem to be content without a cat. Right now I have two for the first time in years. Both are antique - one 15 years old, and one 16 years old. Both are fairly spry considering.

I'm waiting until they know each other better & hoping for a photo of them together which is not possible as yet. So instead here is a stylized pencil kitty I recently tweeted:

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.

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....

Poem: Unmask (from Inverse Origami)

Unmask

the fall of your soft eyes,
so suddenly slumped and weary.

This weight,
a whisper,
a formless something
hinted at.

I have stepped
unthinking around it,
my words,
waxed brick
brittle and waterproof.

Unmask,
gather your chaos
and conjure the thing itself by alchemy:

sweetness
from the tin-acid taste of emptiness.

------------------------

I just realized I still have a lot of work left to do as I have only half of my chapbook, Inverse Origami online. This this is the 13th poem in the book and it appears on page 19. After this one, I have 17 more to put online.

from Inverse Origami -  the art of unfolding
by Mar  (Mistryel) Walker
Puzzled Dragon Press, 1998

the drawing was not a part of my book. 

Drawing with markers: An odd little sheep

Okay I admit this cross-eyed sheep is slightly silly, though it's fun. It's something I drew with markers when I was in college. Of course that was in the stone age!  HAHAHA, I used it recently on an All rights reserved notice on my Picasa web slideshows. More on that later.  

I think it represents me - sort of odd but colorful in a squirrelly kind of way! hahaha!  though these days I am no sheep to be herded. I am more the puzzled dragon, fire contained within, ready when the situation calls for it. Or a feckless flea - hopping around pointlessly. Depends on the day.

Drawing: the groper

This is an old sketch. I like it though. He is surely a groper - but she doesn't seem to mind and clings to him as they slide. I made the jacket rather too splashy and check out the blue suede shoes! Have always had a visual fascination for dancers of various kinds. There are quite a few sketches of bodies in motion here on the blog.

I was bummed earlier because someone was on the blog looking at the drawing category and I realize only 5 old drawings were properly categorized. There are actually 24 plus drawings on this blog...  I have fixed it and the drawing category now calls up everything it should.

three sisters dance

Though this is based on a family of sisters I know - today, right now, this is how I feel. No matter what I do, I am hemmed in by some imagined necessity.. No matter how I dance I am not doing the right step and meeting with disapproval on every side.

There is a ton of paperwork I am behind on and somehow, despite my efforts and worry I can't seem to do it right.  I forget things. Am beleaguered beyond reality today.

This sketch started in pencil then other odds and ends were used to add color.

DRAWING: Fingers of the Sun

This is a pen and ink from quite a few decades ago. It's first life was black and white only. Then I got the itch to alter and out came the crayons. I like the sense that everything is in motion, very busy, frantic motion. I think life felt like that to me back then.

A Bic pic – doodling again….

This pair of characters is now pinned to my bulletin board. It's drawing with a Bic on a little scrap of blue paper. I digitally eliminated the color.

The man seems to be studying something in the distance, the woman is evaluating her next move.Or perhaps they have just returned to their car to find it has been vandalized and are looking around to see who might be on the scene.

Or that is the story I tell myself about them. So much of our relations are like that.  Someone who hardly knows you is looking at you, telling themselves a story about you, piecing together your motives, your history, or pretending to someone else that they see you clearly.. It may or may not have any relation to reality, and may also be diametrically opposed  to the story you are telling yourself which also might have little reality to it.

"Alas poor Yorick -I  knew him well" - but did you? Hamlet gets away with saying that because he is speaking to a skull.....

Drawings: two dancers in motion

The figure in motion - that's one thing I am always interested in catching in a drawing... I envisioned these as a matched pair, and lines do seem to go well together.

DRAWING: Face #16

This is another sketch while at a poetry event.

 Usually I am not drawing anyone in particular, just reacting to what is being read. Sometimes it's faces, sometimes just forms. This is a digital cut from a page in one of the little writing books I sometimes bring with me to those events. I