ART and the SECOND GRADE
When I was 7, I wanted to be a cartoonist. Somehow I lost my way, straggling off from art into writing and music. Maybe when I got glasses. Maybe when my second-grade teacher, Miss McElree, put a poem I wrote (along with a fired clay monster I had sculpted) in a hallway display case for public consumption. (“Hmm,” I guess my always-plotting 7-year-old mind thought, “maybe I can make a million dollars as a grammar-school Shelley.”)
GEORGE SEURAT, C’EST MOI
I have never, though years passed like a rush-hour stream of rattletrap pick-ups, stopped thinking up art projects, however. Finally, about 10 or 15 years ago, I said to hell with this. My original dream was to stand on a ladder next to a huge canvas, like Georges Seurat, only doodling away instead of dabbing away.
I also imagined my huge canvas up on blocks and me rolling around underneath it on an old-fashioned, wooden mechanic’s creeper, doodling away, like Michaelangelo on his back splashing on the Sistine ceiling.
The art of the dOODLE
I soon discovered that a regular old sheet of 18 x 24 coldpress and a sagging barcalounger was plenty enough and then some. Oddly, I found the work singularly relaxing, a welcome diversion, almost therapeutic. Even when I erased and re-drew a doodle a hundred times to get it right. Writing was, is, a challenge, difficult, frustrating, requiring intense, narrowly-zeroed-in attention. Musical practice, like drawing, can be relaxing, but composing, like writing, requires intellect, application. With art, however, I can just doodle away while my mind floats unmoored through all the tangled, ancient driftwood clattering around my brain-pool.
At present, for instance, I am working on transforming a scan of the hand-drawn Rabbit Dreams into a digital drawing. The work is laborious and very slow. Intently, slowly tracing a line with a mouse, my mind will faithfully dredge up a muddled gallimaufry of the strangest, most unexpected memories from out of the long-lost lagoon of my past.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE (AN OUTSIDER)
I think of my art as outsider art: I certainly don’t know nothin’ ’bout no art. But can you really be an outsider artist without being illiterate and raised by a horny toad in some backwoods West Virginia holler? This, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is a question for the ages.