Encouraging a Lover in Every Possible Way

 

 

 

 

 

The text in this work is a poem by Carla Nappi from Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato, by Carrie Jenkins and Carla Nappi. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. 2020. These drawings are my contribution to The Uninvited Project, a collection of artworks curated by the authors, Carrie Jenkins and Carla Nappi, made in response to the book. Visit the Uninvited Project site for more information and great work by a variety of other artists. https://www.uninvitedproject.com/.

 

Staged

More of these things: drawing motivated by scene descriptions in early modern plays. These come from The Betrothal, by Maurice Maeterlinck: something about a curtain, a door with a "formidable lock," and caverns leading to a miser's den. These pages are part of a work in progress. Will I ever include text from these plays? I'm not sure about that yet.

More Directives

 

 

 

Drawn after Maurice Maeterlinck's The Bluebird

 

Directives

 

 Sketchbook with text from August Strindberg. Drawings distracted observations from our front porch.
 

Commonplace Highlights: Mary Ann Caws, Apollinaire

 

 

 

Caws, Mary Ann. Metapoetics of the Passage: Architextures in Surrealism and After. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Commonplace Highlights: Jean Luc Nancy

 

Steve Stelling, Commonplace Highlights (Nancy’s Monstrous Openings)

 

A few years ago I put together a commonplace book.  The quotations and excerpts I collected are unified around my interests in critical theory (so-called!) and perception. So there’s that. I’ve also got a surplus of orphaned drawings that haven’t been adopted by any of my own words. Pages like theseare the results of grafting these things together with an eye toward their associative potential.  In a way, I suppose these are my “process” drawings; this is my thought process. If I were to make an aesthetics textbook, this is how I'd want it to look.

Louvered hideaways

Fraught with What's Wrought

Grates Mark the Spot

Buried Treasure: Call Before You Dig

The Shelf Holds My Interests

These are drawings I made between a few trips I made this past year to help my parents move and sell the house I grew up in. I salvaged a few forgotten belongings but these indecipherable scrawlings are largely devoted to reflections on a handful of objects that I've been carting around since childhood. Bidding this home farewell, put me into meditative high gear. That's what's happening here.

What's there to know about it? Wood, wrought iron, joinery, reappropriation of salvaged building materials: those materials and compulsions were synthesized into an idiosyncratic stew by the men in my family: my dad especially--but my grandfather and brother too, no doubt.

Work Gloves Work

Know It When You Hear It

A Simple Ass

Omaha Bodies, Rub the Lamp

The Wayback Machine Is Hollow

Lies Safe and Sound

I'm posting a number of drawings from a booklet I made a few years ago titled The Airwaves Goodbye.  It contains a number of short works that orbit around the production and reception of recorded music. Those themes are the veneer, anyway. It is probably more accurate to say they're surrogates for reflecting on the differences between having one's head in the studio and having it elsewhere, out in the open. If that's too abstract, I'm happy to consider these as a collection of poems for roadies, and sound engineers. Rock and Roll's support staff need poems just like everyone else.

Thick Skin for Thin Crowds

Soft Rock for Wood

Traveler and His Shadow

"Traveler and His Shadow" taken from Roof Slates and Other Poems of Pierre Reverdy, translated by Mary Ann Caws. Boston: Northeastern University Press (1981).