Platypus of Truth

I paint my life in bricolage of Autumn Leaves My high school art teacher always told us: "art is with your eye, not with your hand." In other words, Art is a way of seeing the world. It draws our attention to things we don't normally take the time to see -or even know how to see until an expert shows us. Where we grow up and what our life's experiences are color how we see any given piece of art, but it works the other way as well. What pieces of art we've seen color how we see our lives. I've been watching all sorts of autumnal fare this Autumn season and it helps me narrativize my life while also being narrativized by the life experiences I bring to it. That said, I've been feeling lately that if my life could be narrativized in film it would be Over the Garden Wall , followed by Dead Poets' Society , shading into Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House . There are, of course, other ways to spin it, but that's how I feel right now. What about

After finishing Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House , all I can really say is that if you can stomach restrained and artistic horror, watch this series. It did not end the way I thought it would. I could not predict the twists and turns. It is a work of art that transcends its genre. Like Eliot's poetry, there's something so specific about Flannagan's re-interpretation of Jackson's novel that it becomes universal. There are all kinds of things I never experienced depicted in the ten hour series and yet it felt as if it was speaking directly to me. It's about a family that starts in New England and when the parent's dream falls apart, the family moves to California. The eldest son wants to be a writer. Mental illness runs in the family. The youngest sibling has an interracial marriage. There's infertility. Siblings move across country and keep contact by phone -or not. And, of course, the haunting. Those are the similarities I'm willing to commit t

Another illumination doodle, this time from Tolkien's Genesis , the Valaquenta . The book is Christian Neo-Platonism at its finest, and eminently worthy of a much more skilled illuminator than I could ever be. Still, it's fun to try my hand at it and see what I can come up with. The doodle is done in pitt pen on paper and then photocopied and colored in with conte markers (the ones often used for adult coloring books). The lines are pencil and the words are done with my best ballpoint pen (Parker). The background embroidery is from Guatemala (talk about a really skilled artist!).

Here is this week's attempt at beautifying the church bulletin. I like the cosmic feel that the little ring planets add. It makes the diamonds in the lower panel look more like stars hovering over the sea. I've tried some other experiments with calligraphic dragons in pencil, so we'll see if I can turn out one that I really like. If so, I'll post it here. Meanwhile, my grad apps are going forward and should be all in by the end of the month (Princeton, U of Chicago, Stanford, U of Washington Seattle, Indiana U Bloomington). Language study goes forward at the same pace as well as art history and archeology. Right now, however, there's still time to doodle. We'll see what's happening this time next year...

I'm currently in the middle of Netflix's series "The Haunting of Hill House". I've never read the book, but the writers, director, and cast have turned it into a powerful piece of film. This is the kind of thing I wish I could write and can't get close to even on my best days. Like so many of the best Horror pieces, this one isn't about ghosts and ghoulies so much as it is about how families and individuals respond to trauma. The "haunting" is first and foremost a metaphor. The labyrinthine eponymous house is a metaphor for the twists and turns of the human mind. We all have our ghosts. Some of choose to flee into addiction. Some of us build up walls. Others of us choose to role play confidence we don't feel or dependency in the hope that others will solve our problems for us. Of course, we can confront our fears, but that is where the real problem lies. If we go it alone, our horrors can overwhelm us. It is not good for Man to be alone.

Today, I am merging my linguistic and artistic endeavors. Here, we have one of the practice doodles I've been learning how to do with the Septuagint text of Gensis 1:1a. Evidently, I'm also learning how to create textual variants (gotta keep Bart Ehrmann happy somehow) as my text is missing several accent marks and has misplaced the word "was" in lines 5 and 6. At least it's inerrant in the autograph... Which if you got to hear Dr. Gary Rendsburg's paper at the Lanier is a product of a Davidic redaction anyway (now that's interesting!)...

Here's the finished watercolor taken as a picture with my phone. If the scanner loses much of the color, then the phone makes it rather blurry. I'll keep trying. Anyhow, here we have Camilla from Chamber's immortal "The King in Yellow" pace Alan Lee's Tinuviel .

Here we have today's attempt at learning how to use watercolor pencils. The shadow cast by a crystal bowl over the corner of the picture is a happy accident. I also have a new phone, so this doubles as a learning how to use the camera.

Sadly, my scanner isn't good enough to pick up the subtleties, but here's my first attempt at watercolor pencils. The sky is all blue in the original and the vine leaves are all filled in. Maybe my phone camera could do a better job, but I'll wait to try that on a new composition.