Notes from the Past-Present-Pre-Resurrection

Autumn Snapshots 1

Sketchbook Pages

This small pocket sketchbook was started back before my residency at Azule in 2019. My sketchbook practice usually involves several sketchbooks and journals at once. This particular sketchbook was completed while at Twelve Oaks this year, and served as a sketchbook and journal together, so many ideas surging and bucking at once during that inspirational period. While digging through sketchbooks mining for ideas, i unearthed this one and it seemed like it might be interesting to share it with y’all.

Sketchbook Pages

Sketchbook Pages

Sketchbook Pages

Whenever i get stuck, and increasingly now before i begin really painting during the day, i’ll start sketching. It helps explore ideas and techniques before they become paintings. It also helps me loosen up and get more confidence in the mules i want to paint that day, it takes fewer mistakes if it begins in the sketchbook.

This year i’ve begun using water colors more often, and acrylic on paper instead of only on wood or canvas. India ink has always been a part of the sketchbook process. Growing up, these were the tools i used when playing in my sketchbook. Full-fledged paintings weren’t really something i did, instead it was mostly sketchbook sized and i was really increasingly more interested in photography.

It’s been joyfull and playful to be back working in the sketchbook this way. Hoping to one day rebuild the bridge to the creativity and imagination i took for granted growing up.

These have for the most part all been made in June or July. When i sell work, i usually try to include a lot of lagniappe, including sketchbook pages. Sketchbooks represent periods of time in an artist’s practice, examining what they were interested in at a certain time, what themes and colors and compositions were being explored. When i send the pages away, that work goes with it, which sort of signals a moving on and a full circle, or completion. But it’s good to be able to look back on the past to see what will inform the future, so i’ve begun scanning as much “good work” as i am able to - hopefully that means keeping up with it and sharing more on here.

Ekphrastic 3

(Bayou Baptism)
By Annie Ferguson Muscato

Memory plays the fiddle
a sad dancin’ tune
take me to church
under a blue wearin’ moon.

Where cicadas sing the chorus
hymns ‘bout comin’ home again
preacher croaks the sermon
and hoot owls call amen.

Holy moss in the collection plate
cypress gather ‘round to pray
anoint me with muddy water
wash my sins away.

Faulkner Sketchbook Mining 4

The sketches are from “Flags in the Dust,” the latest novel i’ve read by Faulkner. Time for a Faulkner break, i think. Some of these drawings have already transitioned into full paintings that i hope to share soon.

Faulkner Sketchbook Mining 3

These sketches are mostly in india ink and mostly from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

Copy of Aint Got No Wings

Copy of Gettin Place Owl

Copy of Cant You Hush

Copy of Shattered With Bloom

Copy of Beller

Faulkner Sketchbook Mining 1

It stars just by reading. Open up one of my Faulkner novels (will never lend one to you, too embarrassed) and you will see notes in the margins, pencil and pen underlining, an occasional doodle or silly commentary. These are some of the mining sketches i did during my residency in Elijay, Georgia, in 2018. Many of these became full fledged paintings, but something about the little miners is sometimes more successful.

This is generally the idea behind sketchbooks, i suppose. Taking ideas and compiling them and giving room to those things that keep nagging at you for one reason or another. This particular book-to-sketchbook thing was new to me, but surely not a new thing for many fellow makers.

I’ll be sharing a few of these, because Faulkner has been a huge force in my work over the past few months, mostly in this form. It’s led to a general loosening and a rooting, too.

Almighty Mule Movers - 2 - William Faulkner

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.” 
― William C. Faulkner

We read As I Lay Dying in high school. It was an annoying and seemingly Beckett trek through nonsense and ridiculous southern jargon. It was set in a place i did not care for, and the characters were awful folks, each one. We joked about the chapter that simply read, “My mother is a fish.” Eye roll after eye roll, and a dozen pained sighs. May have read The Sound and the Fury also, but don’t remember getting too far into it, it was like climbing through word briers in the dark.

We read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, too, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Never would have expected to ever re-read that annoying symbol-filled nonsense. Yet, in college, i went back in. Turns out Chopin’s Edna was not a horrible selfish mother. Turns out Hurston’s Janie was not an equally selfish rambling woman. So what about Faulkner?

It began with a friend’s copy of Light in August, then Go Down Moses, and The Wild Palms. With time, i thought maybe i understood. In the cold Kentucky winter, it felt like the heat back home. The dust came off the road and the humidity wrapped around me. People talked in a way that reminded me of folks. That was it, i was gone.

The mining of his work began in 2018 at my artist residency, underlining old sayings or particular phrasing that was black-snake vivid home-past-speak. His intensity, his preference for drinking, his scribbling on his walls, his anger, his need to create. They all got me, i imagined i could identify with this ghost. With all of my heroes, i don’t want to ever learn too much - i don’t want my glass castles pebbled down.

His bio can be found here. He lived in New Orleans for a time, he reached modest acclaim, he created his own county, his own people. He hated air-condition, and liked a good drink. He died a little mysteriously, he wrote his most famous book in six weeks, he was 5 1/2 feet tall. He raised mules.

It is worth saying that his language at times, and perspective - obviously - can be thought of as outdated. Having just finished Flags in the Dust, the way Faulkner broaches old southern pride via his chacters to the point of buffoonery says all i could say about it.

So, i’ll leave you with that, now. These photos are from a long ago trip to Oxford and Rowan Oak. In my next two posts i’ll share some of my Faulkner-driven sketchbook pages and a particular passage that is an ode to the southern mule.

“Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.” 
― William Faulkner

A room inside Rowan Oak, where Faulkner had begun to scrawl the timeline of a book he was working on upon his walls.

Faulkner’s grave in Oxford, a pilgrimage spot for writers, artists and southern gothic fans.

Excerpt

Grant Wood Study

Excerpts

Like most artists and writers, and folks that like to keep track of time with words and images, i have drawerfuls of sketchbooks. I am mighty bad at planning paintings, and worse at following through. Whenever i get in a rough spot for inspiration, i turn to that drawerful and see what keeps coming up. Those pages get pinned to the wall so i have to look at them and think about them, and hopefully carry them on through. When the painting gets made, and when you get that painting, you get the sketchbook page, too. It’s a full circle thing. It would be strange if the idea got left hanging without it’s fruit. Anyway. Here’s the first of many sketchbook page posts. Excerpts.