MoreCats:OTI::pics,notes:::12/31/20

Open To Interpretation

'Cats Suggested as The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō

Kuniyoshi

wikicommons

Notes:

In searching up cat references, I happened on the Cats of Japan...Buddhists brought them from China, and the Japanese went crazy for them...and too the Japanese artists...a tradition in Japan is for artist to do things in series...a Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, or some such...and they did Cat series...this particular one celebrates the rest stations along a coastal road, the stations each have a distinctive characteristic, and the Cats illustrate this in their activities...sorta like Route 66 tourist maps...it was a tourist thing, maybe religious too...shrines along the route...a pilgrimage?...like St. James' in Spain?...an odd story that...from reading Kipling's Kim, I found such journies on India's roads too...travel, tourism, not a new thing-see Pausanias!...lol...anyway, tomorrow kicks off another Strada Easel challenge month...will try for 31 ways of seeing the Pacific Coast Hwy...on top of that is a twenty day challenge by the Southern California Plein Air Association...lured into getting membership by members I met in September; and Laguna Plein Air Association membership too!...modest fees...beats bowling...

:)

DavidDavid

Dogleg:OTI::pics,comment,notes:12/30/20

Open To Interpretaion

Dog Leg

comment to youtube

Watch "The Reference Sandwich - A Better Way to Use Reference Photos" on YouTube

https://youtu.be/dfk9BlggPkI

Twisted Cat
Too, I was working up a post to my blog about "reference"...I can draw from reference, amateur I am, but find it very hard from imagination...now, thinking on this just this morning waiting in traffic, I was "air drawing" the car grill fronts across the intersection waiting like me...I can remember just so much of a reference...like map directions...good for a snippet, but not the whole map!...so, soh, here I happen on a take that begins with a motorcycle "grill"...lol...go figure!...from photos I took, my reference, I have five frames of a cartoon/comic...1. Squirrel in tree, in the "Y" crotch, espying two cats...2. Squirrel half way down tree trunk still looking...3. Two cats at the edge corner of a brick planter seeing a sudden the squirrel...left one is twisted looking back and up...right, straight on full length same look..4. Squirrell from behind tail up running away across street...5. one cat sitting a tree's base, looking at the runaway squirrel...that's it!...illustration from imagination is something I'd like to learn, or adapt from my writing, where I can...oh, I want to illustrate my stories...anyway, I set aside my photo references, and focused just on the twisted cat...head upward looking in profile...one front leg planted...one back leg stretched way back...and cat's tail end on the ground in front...now and then for days now I do little sketches, just from memory...the little bit of the map I have is just the two ears...the angle of one in front of the other...the rest a blur!...my sketches all off...with six cats running around how can this be?...well, I dont have enough "cat" committed to map memory...the task is on going,  I havent revisited the photos, but I am watching the cats, and filling in the blurred cat map...like the straightness and length of the lower back leg...I didn't have that...but, just for fun, I thought to google search "twisted cat" images...hmmph...a common deformity in cats is crippled twisted legs- the tendons cinch up...too many sad cat pics!...such the hazard of images references!...a curio is the name for a fishing gear maker, Twisted Cat, their ad image a Catfish making a twisted turn for a baited hook!...lol...the same conceit of my little cartoon...I'm at moment binge watching on youtube The Unsung Heroes Of Illustration...and too how to vlogs...much to learn, and find amusement in...that 3D-drawing, and then the figurine, I'd never seen that done before...props!...I live in a cave...😃😃😃
🐡

Notes: As with many things, something simple can become complicated in a hurry...such was, is, my effort to draw Twisted Cat...TC is one frame of a five frame comic strip...explained in the sketches and comment...I did a google image search Twisted Cat, and quickly found the poor crippled cats...well, as it happens, one of our six, seven, not sure anymore, cats has a crippled back leg, but Autumn hobbles about just fine...that an aside....aside too is there is a fishing gear product that has for a logo a catfish twisting around to grab a hook...the self same Little, or Tucker, was doing to look at the Brown Squirrel in the Jacaranda...it's in the sketch notes...these messy notes are no less than what cartoonists and animators and video game designers do to come up with stuff...concept art...there are concept artists that all they do is this...come up with sketches that prompt the staff...famously Disney did this for his staff...they were stuck, not knowing where to go with the story of Snow White...so Disney got them together, and acted out in person all the characters and the story...and off they went...being 'stuck' is a common plight...one has a notion but not a clue how to go about it...there are talented geniuses who can get over such obstacles, and have dragged humanity along since the beginning!...Wot!, DavidDavid???...patience, I'll get there, somehow...this is going to be long...so, soh, I took photos of the cats, and it would be simple to draw out the five scenes from the photos...I began to do that, but the camera battery died, so I couldn't upload them...thought is to draw from my big screen lcd tv...so I put things off to next day, but then while listening to the radio and snacking on the driveway in Silver, my Jeep, I thought to sketch out the scenes from memory...and thought long on drawing from memory, from imagination...I know a little bit of human and animal anatomy, bones and muscles...but my grasp isn't photographic...I gather it can be if I practice-the ten thousand thing...but then what?...I can do photo realism, and lost, left behind, would be naivete...hard to explain naive art...stuff children do...stuff people do with no art training...art has an adulthood...nowadays a professionalism...anyway, I set myself the task of drawing the scenes from memory, hoping for a kind of blend of my naivenss and knowledge...most folk read cartoons in a moment and a glance...amongst illustrators though, they study one another's works obsessively...see Beard, The Unsung Heroes of Illustration on youtube...so, soh, this long take is of that obsession!...I couldn't get the stretched out back leg right...and with that problem in the forefront of my thoughts, for days, those sketch pages above just a few of many, I began taking note of back legs...now, I've drawn back legs before...at Lunch in the Valley, I would copy from Loomis' Animal Illustration book...but one doesn't know what one has, until swimming about without a reference!...I'd totally lost what animal back legs look like, and kinda sunk in gloom that I could be so stupid...but browsing, I happened on a story, an illustrated story, in the New Yorker, about the difficulty of drawing horses...brb...

quote

How to Draw a Horse | The New Yorker

May 30, 2019 — To learn to draw horses, you can't just want to draw them; you must NEED to draw them.

unquote

it's behind their paywall, but before the "curtain" closed, I noted how the back leg of a horse looks...the back of it is a graceful semicircle, that curls back, then ends in a sharp point, and from there the narrow foreleg angles forward to the hoof...looking about, I found that this is how all four legged animal back legs look...aha!...a motif!!!!...a sudden, all my studies of ancient motifs transferred, adapted, to learning to draw...I can just sift things out by seeing individual motifs, and as I draw, just sort of put them together...looking long at the horse's back leg, now my Twisted Cat's back leg too,  I realized it not only can be thought of as a motif, it IS an ancient motif...the Bull's back leg, the Big Dipper/North Star/Polaris...it's in the center of the Egyptian Zodiac of Dendera...the Pre-Columbian Americans noted the Big Dipper, it's said, as the Twisted Gourd...the Step Fret...every culture saw different things in the Stars, and made their constellations...the Egyptians saw the Dipper as a Bull's Leg...we see it as a Dipper!...with it's companion Little Dipper...Ursula Major, Ursula Minor, Big Bear, Little Bear...I hesitate to learn the Constellations, least my Stars become "their' Stars...astronomers are a menace...anyway...brb...

quote

https://www.livescience.com/ancient-egyptian-star-constellations.html

unquote 

they just found that image...the leg sometimes combines with the bull's head/horns....so, I have this little transition, from drawing the leg from memory, which was near right, to having seen the curves and straight lines...a bit like learning a letter of the alphabet...all along, I'm keeping in mind the old rock artists...they were doing what I am doing...seeing the everyday, then trying, on a cave wall or such, no less than to draw what they were familiar with...I've been going back through history trying to find where the 'dog leg' first appears!...it's really old...the clay 13,000 year old Bisons in the the cave in France...I've been going around to caves and ruins with the Dog Leg motif in mind...the artists who make it had to bridge like I did from just drawing a kind of stick figure, to the more animated and correct Dog Leg...been meaning to look at Andean Pre-Columbian art...do they 'see' it?...brb...

quote

 

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-americas/south-america-early/inca-art/a/inka-an-introduction

unquote

I cant say that artist didn't know the 'dog leg'...but those straight legs are what I would expect, the naivenss before learning the dog leg shape...from Loomis, I remember the 'tip' that in animals, concave curves have opposite convex curves...sorta...the top of my finger is flat, straight...the underside like three soft concave curves...here I'm thinking 'motifs' for drawing are like 'tips'...the bouncy look of Disney cartoons is a collection of such 'tips'...in sketches above one can see me puzzling over where there's fat skin, or just skin and bone!...the soft skin areas of our face, the muscles, make our expressions...one can just use one's self as a drawing manneken/model, and curious the ancient cave artists were very close to doing just that with their handprints!...I dunno!...

quote

This a post-Columbian artist, not long after the Conquest in Peru...the artist knew the dog leg...and likely influenced by the European art they saw...I think...brb...

quote

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Moche-Representation-of-a-Camelid-Drawing-by-Donna-McClelland-2007_fig17_320387359

unquote

I'm guessing this modern rendering is true to the vase painting...the Moche had the dog leg...very apparent in their Deer drawings....and they pre-dated the Inca...I dont know what that drawing is a part of, but I took note of the Strombus shells...spiral shells like this, the cut in half profile, said to be the origin of the step fret, twisted gourd...too much to recap!...see previous posts...thinking on this similarity of the dog leg to the gourd, I did a step fret search...hadn't done one in awhile...search twisted gourd...brb..

quote

 In that sense the cosmology of a new social order worked much like a morphological change in a population that moved it from stasis to cladogenesis. 

https://thetinkuy.wordpress.com/2020/05/22/twisted-gourd-xicalcoliuhqui-the-symbolic-language-of-the-pre-columbian-rainmakers-a-cosmovision-of-divine-rule-of-a-triadic-universe-2/

unquote

well, I first read that on my tablet, it's a new entry, I think, to that blog, which I have referenced before...this a few days back, and I wanted to copy paste a bit, but the tablet memory was full, and I thought, I'll get back to it...what the author was on about, is that legendary figures like Kulkukan, who brought gifts to mankind like agriculture, irrigation, reading, writing, and such, have a modern counterpart in geniuses like Tesla and Edison...these individuals have an almost, or maybe it is, supernatural ability to bridge from one thing, a stasis, to another, a cladogenesis...now, hereabout I have to go look up cladogenesis...lol!...brb...well, it's a biological evolutionary term...a species changing into another...which has obviously happened, but no one certain how...well, a kid nowadays with a cell phone connected to the web is a far cry from some ancient child of Greece, Egypt, Mesoamerica...there's been some changes...a succession of inventions...and in a blink of time...the article connects the step fret with the American Southwest all the way down to Peru...and my own browsing of the web, affirms this...my latest annotation is a bit of textile they found on one of the child sacrifice mummies atop an Andean peak...it has the step fret and chacana motifs...the blog author refers to what connected the Cointinents as like a Silk Road...oh, maybe I can word search the article-silk...that would locate what I wanted to quote...brb...

quote

And why did it start with a mercantile cult? I can think of nothing else but a pan-Amerindian version of Asia’s Silk Road along which merchants traveled and a river of ideas flowed that could account for the facts of  a multilingual Puebloan culture with a touch of the Huichol’s rainbow deer here, a bit of Puuc-style core-and-veneer masonry there, a Veracruz-type cranial modification associated with traders, and a pinch of Palenque’s interest in polydactly as a sign of a snake-jaguar, “all directions”  Centerplace ruler. All all of these ideas were reflected in the Anasazi culture that developed at the periphery of Mesoamerican influence in the northern Southwest. The thread that ran from South America to North America and shaped a new world religion that embraced these ideas was Twisted Gourd symbolism. 

unquote

lol...and I'll leave off with that...

:)

DavidDavid

OTI:14poems,2comments,notes::12/13/20

Open To Interpretation

Remember The Panay

14 Poems

2 Comments

Schooling

Seven touching petals to my blossom-
So I'm in a crowded lightless room
Blind alike alike flowers as eveyone together
Nudged packaged closest surrounding-
Candy boxed in schools
Startled and shaped this way that.
Raptors in the rooms.

Dream Notes

First digital film movie.

Snow hemesphere skiing and surfing

Down close together stones.

Pretty

"Stay Pretty"!
A salutation to the roadside flowers
We paused to see
As off we go in a melancholy roar.
Goodbyes always so sad.



Covid

The red flag is up,
 And that crowd is aswim without flippers.

Undertow

Someone dies in the bed beside yours,
"Like drowning!" it's said,
And a burly sort arrives-
Bagged and over their shoulder that someone goes,
Victim of the undertow.

Book Worms

Oh, you crowd of ghosts
Gathered about me
Is scaring everyone away.

Laces

The stone scratchers
The red ochre painters
Pectographers pictographers
Were copy cats
Monkey see monkey dos
Like stuck phonograph records for centuries
Until on occasion some mad genious
Glorius advanced the artworld.
And so now too
Its not the what or why or who,
But the how
Like tying a shoe
Now this way then that way tightened.
It's been a long walk
And still bare footprints along the beaches.

Appearance

Sit down with me!
Your black, my white,
Brown, Red...avatar blue!
It's the matter of choice...
To look in the mirror and be able to say,
That's not me...
That's not you.

Luck

You have all your parts!
An embarassement in your presents.
Psshaw...I've lost this and that
And look forward to renewal.
Such is luck.
Such is fucked!

Skill Set

So, what are you...?
I dunno...tools in a box
And a modest set of skills?
Ah, so what will you make?
Oh, that's easy,
You, and me.

Bridge of Insults

I was on that bridge a long time...
Oh, now you tell me!  Lol, I'm still there...
True enough, my hooded dreams bedevil...
So stranded I am, to be said,
On the way to Eleusis, the Mysterey
No one relates, foreswarn to secrecy.
No secret this cacophony between here and there.

Wonders

You look to me for wonders you havent seen?
That's hilarious, I havent been out of the house for months...

Paragons

Simultaneously we've arrived at the end of things,
And find we can hold the family album
In one hand, reminisce,
Everyone therein complete, then to interminable now,
Except the inditerminate children that didnt make it far
Enough to be more than paragons
In the memories of their play.


Out And Backs

Before the "out"
Of an "out and back"
I measure...
And, and sometimes just stay home,
Leave the Moon to the Cow.

Two Comments

Lol...was searching up the textiles, but just came from a search of red hair, where in the world it is most prevalent...it's hard to refute the supremacists...and genetics is a problem...hapsburgh jaw, ankanaton's/tut's elongated heads...royal family intermarriage may have been an Andean thing too...the long head deformity becoming popular thing to mimic royalty amongst the general population, hence the techniques applied to deform children's heads...it's easy to fix inbreeding, outbreed...trouble is, royalties have harems, and such, so a genetic flaw would spread into the general populace...this, while the royals themselves worsen through their inbreeding...I dont know if anyone considers this harem problem...one royal male with a pass along genetic flaw would wreck havoc...see Queen Victoria and hemophilia!...to get a grip on all this maybe consider breeds of dogs...I mean, that's what the supremists go on about-breeding...to be well bred in genetic sense...well, that's obvious, it's being pretty, talented, all that...what in the sports world is called "having good genes"...a world divided into racial "white"and "mud", the idea is silly, yet it is held without foundation...there's no racial division, humanity is one race, one species...now, as to breeds, as with dogs, there are all kinds of human breeds, both physical and cultural...some big some small, some short some tall...a no brainer...now, as to the "red headed" breed...red hair is everywhere, like, what, 4 per cent?...comes to mind north american brown bears...some are cinamon, even blond...and black...hmmph...odd that the pure white fur of cats and dogs...???...age in humans!..anyway, lol, if there ever was a "master breed" that informed civilization all over the world, I have its souce the Crimean Peninsula at Sebastopol, location of the highest incidence of red heads!...I have no command of genetic data, and anytime I see "data" I suspect it's "cooked"...there's data ledgers true, and data ledgers false, the true hidden behind the false by the nefarius...like falsifying income to cheat on taxes...royals posturing as being high born, superior, has always everwhere been a kind of cheat when they try to maintain that status generation to generation through inbreeding, and politics...such the supremacist's world...history has examples of attempts to breed for traits...any dog show shows such off...what they dont show is the narrow breeding to get this or that  trait or traits is a trade off, and many rejected out of hand for not meeting a standard, along with "purebreds" having problematic temperments, and weaknesses...John Muir noted this about domestic animals...they're not robust as the wild originals...

Watch "The Brion McClanahan Show Episode 387: Texas Files a Bad Lawsuit" on YouTube
https://youtu.be/AZaPdtCeGNU

Oh, the take I see  by Texas is they're offended Penn. didn't follow Penn's. own procedures, sort of like a rule of order complaint-this happened in my basketball ref unit...the president didnt follow a procedure-a board candidate had to win by fifty percent-two of three canidates declared winners  with less by our president-unit arms akimbo in protest, so, soh, we all voted again...I relate this poorly, but Texas is saying Penn didnt abide by Penns own rules, so devalueing the entire election, leastwise for Penn, and the other three too?...something vague in it all...I get it Penn judges okayed the mail ins because of covid, and I think that refers to the three day grace period after the 3rd, and sending everyone ballots...and the wrinkle is the Penn legislaters didnt pass law about this...did the other states do this too?...the Supreme court has turned their attention to this...Thursday 3pm briefs to be submitted stating what they oppose in Texas' complaint...which specifically lays out this pocedure rule of order gaff?...if Texas is right, then all through the states, the state legisators have to pass laws for the voting,-the courts cant...Penn courts said mail in okay, gave a review period that came and went, and Penn is content...they're not sueing themselves, hmm?...Texas could, I guess, sue for any kind of irregularity, present the 'truckload' tale, and such...but those tales havent flown...so, soh, if the Supreme court decides Texas is right, then Penn legislater convenes, passes law for mail ins like the courts approved, and they all vote again...all of us vote again...as, like explained, a national decree now made, and a national procedure put in place...federal rulings cant be distributed piecemeal, and for that matter, this would need congress to pass the law...courts administer, congress/legislaters make...so, if Texas wins, congress makes national law regarding mail ins, and we vote again...but wait...a big chunk of congress has just been voted in, or out, by the self same disputed mail in  votes!...Jan 6 their innagurations...all the red state republican governors will goad their respective attorney generals to hop on Texas' wagon...a class action suit...this happening as I write...meanwhile, the political parties, both of them, will see fit to sue government at all levels...the Dems quiet now, but if Texas wins...if Texas wins its a slippery slope to Hobbes Leviathan, even slippier to Himmlers National Police/Gestapo...the Stormers got their skis on...😃😃😃

Notes: Goya's lantern, previous post, was lifted and changed into an electric light bulb by Picasso in his famous painting, Guernica, which was about a small Spanish town in 1937 being bombed...I was going to work these lanterns and lightbulbs up...oh, I just learned a word that may explain..."mannerism"...mannerist paintings tell stories through symbolisms(edit: I have this detail wrong, "mannerism" a painterly technique?...I dunno...lol!)..another notion I just found is "problem pictures"...these are paintings that are deliberately puzzling, made up scenes from some imaginary story that the audience is invited to guess about-there were contests...dont know but current news isnt "mannerist", "problematic"...anyway, Picasso and Goya were in the mannerist tradition, as, I've learned watching the youtube art vlogs, were the Pre-Raphelites...before the artist Rapheal was the very symbolist medeival art, often anonymously made, and this the Pre-Raphealites tried to revive...one of their paintings, The Light of the World, a Christ like crowned figure holding a lantern, was enormously popular in the 19th Century...it was on a huge canvas, and shown all over the British Empire, America too, I think...this was done with paintings back then...and to set them off when being shown, they would be in a dark room, and lit with a gaslight-a new bright light...where the term gaslighting came from...1937, 12/12/37, was the time of the sinking of the USS Panay...I usually do a post on 12/12...Remember the Panay...bit late to post, but it was in my thoughts...times it seems "too much" to post my thoughts!...the poems: Schooling...from murmaration, what Starlings do, flocking in cloud shapes...each Starling is in contact with seven surrounding Starlings...when one moves they all move...a mannerism!...even a kind of lantern, the transmission light like...Dream Notes...I dreamed a take on the first digital movie was on film...how?...the film didnt advance while the shutter rapidly fired, and the flight of a bee landing on a flower animation recorded in one frame...lol...I'm making this up, a take on the dream which was like that...I wondered if I had seen such on the web!...I dreamed of stand up surfing/skiing over snow covered rocks on one of those round sit on snow sleds...Stay Pretty from OnHerBike...along African road Kinga was flower visiting...this certainly a mannerist moment...search: roadside flowers poem...too, painting...yet to try that...just searching "poetry" on the web doesnt cut it...like just searching 'news"...one needs to add a second, or more, search term, then things open up...the two long comments I posted to youtube vlog comment sections, then deleted them...too much...but here I include them...and likely too much too!...

:)

DavidDavid

AgainstTheWall:OTI::one poem,notes:::12/4/20

Open To Interpretation

Against The Wall

Oh, Goya, what was that on and on about the Third of May....?
Those square lantern lit people...?
Oh, it was a follow on and on from the Second of May,
When the  cannons scattered the columns,
That made that midnight alight with sound-
The French needed lanterns to see the Spanish
Against the wall.

Dolphinwords

Notes: the notion for a poem with notes about Goya's painting has been "about" in my head for weeks...after yesterday's Sebastopol, I thought to attend to Goya, and looked again at his famous painting The Third of May, and, and saw the lantern!...actually, I collected the painting for its use of dark and light, that dark band thing-see Edgar Payne/Maynard Dixon post, darklight, back aways...thought is to to write more about the dark band, as I keep seeing it, no where more so than Goya's painting!...for sometime...the dust up between the French and Spanish on May Second has to be close studied!..."on and on" is the refrain from Journey's song, "Dont Stop Believing"..."on and on like a movie"...I wanted that for the poem, on from the 2nd to the 3rd, then saw the lantern, and thought, wth, there's the "street light people" too...hmmph!

:)

DavidDavid

Sebastapol:OTI::one poem, notes:::12/3/20

Open to Interpretation

Sebastopol

Theseus?  Not so, Artemis Tauric wouldnt have it,
A replica Temple in Thesian style,
Nor the Russians who bombarded it
Least the British, Turks, French,
Enjoy it.
Too, the Germans and Romanians
Scuttled away under such:
Such Iphiginian rites
More than a scratch and a drop of blood.

DolphinWords

Temple of Hephaestus - Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Hephaestus

http://www.londonancestor.com/iln/sebastopol.htm


Notes: oh, in copy pasting, I lost the first version of this...such is the hazard of computer writing...I cast about online for a wordprocessing dedicated handheld computer, like my samsung's tablet memo pad, but more, like full on microsoft office...composing on the note pad began with my iphone's...thought is to just use old disconnected cell phones' memos...I one finger type on the on screen keyboard...that has a slow pace, a fit with composing...anyway, problem is getting things into the formats...the samsung tablet's weird...today, I thought to just go online and use google's blogger-dedicate a new blog to drafting...from there to microsoft word with the lap top...but, but I'd rather not have to be online...the storage on the samsung fills up from browsing, maybe a virus, some glich...but it's really great for using "share" while online to note links and quotes, unless the storage is full, then I'm stuck...an aside...how did it go...Theseus? Not so, a replica Temple in the style of Theseus..........Artemis Tauric....not so for the Russians too who bombarded it too, least the British, Turks, French, enjoy it.  The Germans and Romanians scuttled away under such.  Such Iphiginian rites more than a scratch and a drop of blood....got some of it back...

Sebastopol

Theseus? Not so, A replica Temple in the style of Theseus...
Artemis Tauric wouldnt have it,
Not so the Russians too,
Who bombarded the occupying British, Turks, French,
Least they enjoy it.
The Germans and Romanians
Scuttled away under such:
Such Iphiginian rites
More than a scratch and a drop of blood.

Well, that one's not the lost first one either...it wasnt the sense or conceit lost, just some tear duct rending sound to the words...hmmph...a Light Brigade trumpeter repeated his challenge for the new recording machines, and before finding that, I came to dwell on the tale on seeing youtube thumbnail, "first war photographs"-from there to Crimean War parts 1,2,3,...in the old pics was the Temple...curious to know if it was original, I close studied, discovered Euripedes' tale of Iphigena, his take...old Greeks took liberties with their tales!...and so found myself in contemplation of the Black Sea...I thought the Valley of Death was somewhere over by the Khyber Pass...not so!
edit: I keep changing it...question mark after Theseus...And not so the Russians...this is even more of a linking tale than I thought!...at Artemis' shrine was a fetish, a relic (such shrines today are wannabe art museums!), this in the first Greek town on the Crimean peninsula long before Sebastopol, a fallen meteor maybe, and Iphegena and Orestes stole it and ended up at Lake Nemi in Italy, and there the famous legend of the Oak King taken up by James Frazer in the Golden Bough, where there then another shrine made to Artemis...the Golden Fleece was lifted from the east shore of the Black Sea, Jason and the Argonauts tale...Iphigena, Agememnon's daughter, as a youth, was to be sacrificed so winds would come and take the Greeks to the war with the Trojans, and indeed in that tale, she was, which brought grief to King Agememnon on his return-Iphegina's death revenged with his murder by his wife, or some such...my myth lore is undisciplined, as all!...but Euripedes told the tale that Artemis saved Iphegina, replaced her with a sacrficial deer, and Iphegina became the priestess of Artemis Tauric, Artemis in Crimea...the Romans copied the Greeks, but thought themselves descended from the Trojans, a kind of fit...Theseus was a fug head, never to be forgiven for abandoning Ariadne...see my Black Deck Tales!...lol...the Renaissance painters knew all these old stories, mixed them together with the Bibles', and the lore preserved by the patronage of the elites...modern art tries to sweep it all away, making fetishes for the modern gallery/museum shrines, making themselves into reliquaries to be worshipped by the auction houses, or some such...the old myths show through...the Russians booted the Ukranians too from Sebastopol!

:)

DavidDavid

SquareWave:OTI::pics,notes:::12/2/20

Open To Interpretation

From Colombia, Amazon Rock Art

pic from blog post July 30, 2018

Notes: welp, they are about to obsolete the radio telescope in Puerto Rico...hurricane damage and neglect being such...a lament has gone up, and effort to rehab it...I got to thinking, a whimsy, once, to make a reflective telescope lens...I'd put a pendulum out in the back yard, kinda like the Pit and the Pendulum!, and the blade would carve out the concave shape, or at least a measure of how dig to deep here and there...trouble was the lens would be rooted to the ground (to say nothing of how I was to cast the lens in the concave hole!), and could just see small sections of the night sky overhead passing over the telescope...charm of the whimsy was that the lens could be really really big...looking about, the history of lens making, I happened on the Puerto Rico telescope-watched the James Bond flic with it, and, and, 'nothing new', my idea has been done, my thought...still a neat idea...anyway, anyway, in the news yesterday was the story of the Rock Art in the Amazon, in a remote, and dangerous, area of Columbia...motif hounds saw this Rock Art and noted this, and that, and that, and this..."Ambiguity" the word from a browse of an artist glossary of terms...yep...motifs are first and foremost ambiguous...the handprints are everywhere in the ice age caves and such...what to think of those?...among the north American Indians, they would put handprints on their ponies-mementos of combats and hunts...and, and horses were about in the Americas during the Ice Age, but no one seems to have ridden them...maybe like Zebras they were too wild...I dunno...and, and then there's the border motifs...these I see often on the old mosaics...and on things in the Old and New Worlds...a bunch of on and ons in the posts...and as it happens these borders resemble oscilloscope patterns...radio waves...were the Amazonians in their dream journeys seeing radio waves?!...geometric patterns a common report from the alternate realities...even just everyday experience can see such...sunlight on water does all kinds of things...wind waves too...see if I can snag a pic of the Amazon Rock Art...no luck...they're there...just do a google image search amazon colombia rock art...said to be eight miles of them...the "square wave" is among them...that's like just a smidgen away from greek keys and step frets...in fact, that exact motif is on a lot of Greek and Roman things...browsing other things, I happened on such a border in the Vatican's "basement"...no luck snagging that one either..."luck" being copyright free...the block wave, the radio name; in architecture, and mosaic borders, and such, it is called 'dentil'...as in teeth...which to think of it, is what it looks like, upper and lower teeth...Indians thought the Yosemite monoliths looked like teeth...maybe that was what the "ambiguity" was 12,000 years ago in the Amazon!...link to earlier blog post:

http://treeinthedoorvideo.blogspot.com/2018/07/oti73018.html

:)

DavidDavid

Thanksgiving:OTI::pic, notes:::11/26/20

Open To Interpretation

Orange Crate Labels

from search orange crate label thanksgiving

Notes: Early on, I was so taken with Orange Crate Labels, that I thought to use them for my poetry zine Oranges...this 1987 about...I studied them, bought a few, read McPhee's Oranges, and somewhere I gathered in the the 'why' of the whimsical names, words, on the labels...not all of them had these, but the ones that do have the a charm...and my zine covers were to be like that...Mariposa Brand Oranges Poetry...the idea hasn't gone away...the zine morphed into my blogs...I've lost the why of the whimsy, but looking about at labels, I thought, oh, they are like the prompts for Inktober...artists 'brand' their inks with the prompts...see October's posts!...anyway, I'm working on a post about composition, to include the labels, and some other stuff...hmmph...somewhere someone has the whimsy explained...when I find it, I'll update...Happy Thanksgiving!

from etsy

:)

DavidDavid

DarkandLight:OTI::one pic, notes:::11/22/20

Open To Interpretation

Tukut's Lair

Horseman and Desert Buttes

Notes: When I did the fog bank plein air at Aliso Beach, the fog was lit up by the morning sun, and the ocean there about too;  the distant white caps were catching the sun light, as well as the Palm tree tops at the Palace atop the bluff...the Palace, bluff face, and beach, waves, in the foreground were all in shade...the fog was in the distance beyond the bluff, glowing with the sun...this description not met with the painting!...and, and I thought, 'oh, that's that trick I often see, a dark foreground and bright light back ground"...hard to explain...when I put the dark band at the bottom of the seashell paintings, strada easel September 2019, turning the 8x10s into 8x8s, it was a hark to the Andean Tocapus-squares as they are...but I noticed how the black band effected the paintings...hard to explain!...so, soh, I happened on Maynard Dixon's paintings...I've skip read so many art books, all my life, so no telling who I've seen before...Dixon in the mix with Russel and Remington and, who was the third of that trio?...anyway, close looking at Dixon on youtube, I thought, I best leave off, his style is contagious...related to Orange Crate style, my favorite...both derived from Lithography of the time...the fewer the colors the easier to reproduce...Dixon's painting ended up on a lot of magazine covers...he obliged his market...and, and he often has a dark band foreground, horsemen and silhouettes and such...maybe wiki has a copyright ok example...brb...

quote

  

Maynard Dixon

unquote

so, soh, Dixon has been a contemplation of late, as that simple color use lends itself to acrylics, which are notoriously difficult to blend...I like acrylics, but I can't blend them!...and, this morning I'm browsing painters the youtube algo librarian is providing thumbnails for, these thumbnails of all things under the Sun a new addictive pastime, I dove into 500 paintings by someone...must be Dixon, I thought, but no, another Western Artist...some of these Western Artists live big, large...they  become rich and famous in the their lifetimes...and the artist is Edgar Payne...and he can't get enough of using the dark band...maybe wiki...brb...

quote

Edgar Payne

unquote

pics from wiki commons

lol...the band in that one nearly makes a 'tocapu square'...in two dimensional design class, a weeks long project was to grid an 8x10 paper into little "8x10"s. and with just two shapes, then three shapes, make arrangements, compositions, thumbnails...square and circle, square. circle, triangle...some famous Swedish designer came up with this exercise...well, wait, doing thumbnails is kinda universal, and, looking about, I find Edgar Payne's noting of this!...go figure....

quote

 

Edgar Payne wrote a book called 'Composition of Outdoor Painting' which is considered a classic. I have to confess that I've never been able to read the whole thing, as I find his writing style to be incredibly ponderous and dull. However, the redeeming strength of his book are the numerous thumbnail compositional studies and examples that describe his ideas, analysis, and advice in a very clear and succinct
fashion. 

http://billcone.blogspot.com/2012/03/edgar-payne-show.html

unquote

anyway, I struggled through that assignment, still have them somewhere, and, don't have much truck with thumbnails!...another curio about Payne, is that early on, as an artist vagabond, he landed in Laguna Beach...one of the Plein Air Founders...and from travels about California, discovered the Sierra Nevada...a fellow somewhere between "John Muir" and "Ansel Adams" his  wiki bio has it...hmmph...been there been that...lol...I'll try to work up my charcoal sketch into a 'dark and light' painting in the style of Dixon and Payne, which is of course what AA was on about too!...brb...

quote

Ansel Adams from wiki commons

unquote

AA was friends with Dixon, with Payne too?...brb...too old, maybe before Ansel went into the backcountry...Payne spent much time there, and  out and about all over the world...such the benefit of an artist that can live large...like Muir and AA, he began with next to nothing...and he lived and worked often in Laguna, but I can't find any distinctive ones of his of a Laguna Icon...lot of surf and rocks, but I can't distinguish the locations...bb...well, for sometime...google image searches can be a marvel, or a shrug and wth...try a search:.."landscape composition dark foreground"...brb...lol...it has a name..."door jam view"...

quote

Above: Two paintings by Edgar Payne, where he casts the foreground into shadow. This tool, "the door jamb" causes the viewer to gaze around or over the area at the side or bottom of the painting and into lighter elements in the distance.

https://fineartviews.com/blog/31445/setting-the-stage-with-a-dark-foreground

unquote

oh, the third of the trio...Russell, Reminton, and ?...brb...can't recall...hmmph...maybe it is Dixon...edit: I did a youtube search, Edgar Payne Laguna Beach...and it fetched a take by Laguna Beach Historical Society trying to pinpoint where Payne did his Laguna paintings, and his Sierra paintings too...posted comment...

Watch "2012-09-25 "Edgar Payne" by Eric Jessen" on YouTube
https://youtu.be/vuIQaLYBJx4



I just happened on Payne, and a couple questions came to mind...where are his Yosemite paintings?...answer: "he didn't like crowds", and, where are his paintings of the scenic Laguna Beach bluffs?...I thought that looking at his surf and rock paintings...I dunno...finding where artists/photogs/things like buildings, once stood, a hobby of Yosemite lore fans...Laguna, the whole Orange County coastline, has this feature too...I did a sketch from Shake Shack while snacking at the railing overlooking the umbrellas and rooftops of the preserved Crystal Cove beach cottages, and, and then seeing contestants works of the big plein air contest, like 2016s, noted painting just like my sketch!  😃

🐡

:)

DavidDavid

Scents:OTI::one poem, notes:::11/19/20

 Open To Interpretation

Scents

Oh, Balboa's dogs took his exception
To the natives' gaeity,
Not unlike the delivery of the King's ax,
To the extreme.
So the South Sea revealed to be seen
For Gauguin.
And Picasso read his book,
Noa Noa.
From there the sad news,
The Master at his extremity,
("Master" a deference of Vincent's)
Inspired the drawing,
"Standing Nude, 1903"
Signed Paul Picasso.
Balboa's soldiers made pyramid cairns of stones,
Carved crosses in the trees,
There to mark the view where they first beheld
The Pacific Ocean, Magellan's epithet.

DolphinWords

Notes: thought to look up Balboa, having gone out and back to Balboa of late-see last month's posts...I can binge browse stories of artists nearly 24/7...at Palomar, I found in the library a trove of art books...now youtube the self same...and once upon them, the 'algo librarian' piles more on!...

:)

DavidDavid

DreameDolphins:OTI::pic,seven poems,notes:::11/12/20

 Open To Interpretation

Monsters

Synchronistical ominisities
Synonomously simultaneous
Intoxicating anonynimities
Perpetuating hippopotomous'

Crocodilian claustrophobias;
Monstroniceties improbability:
Conspiratorous commentarius,
Vlogasaureus promptatality.

Oh, the animosity vloggers go
Above and below, wherever a show,
Trailing fans a twitter, an evenglow,
Before the prophecy of one Hippo.

Project Narcissus mirror mirror
Reflections: Echo's echo long horror.

Benthic

Oh, death feeds us, the benthic undercrust,
Corpses slow rain from the luminous zone;
Whales, sharks, sword fish, sun fish, when in rest,
Sink down to be devoured to the last bone.



Artistry

Geezus!
I'm hanging on the walls, y'know,
Here and there, nails suspended,
My down gaze at your up gaze.

Menagerie

Psycological manipulating
Extraordinare innebriations
Tourbullions intoxicating
Neurolinguistic programmatations.

Psychedelica's fantasticalli
Imenagerie beasteariclings:
Jamesjoysounourous wordcoinmintadae
Aroundaboutus timedatathings.

Can one ever stop the swirling high kites?
Dizzines comes and goes with the moon's glow.
That black audience behind the footlights
Laughs and weeps, terrorized by the dumb show.

What can be found from the sea wrack wreakage
But what the wave's curled, held, for an age?.


Laugh And Dance

I'll dance when I can,
And laugh when I can't....

Dust Ups

I'm on the Moon,
What can you expect of me?
It isn't like there's a hell of a lot to see and do;
I take the Mind Detector out,
And it sounds the alarm,
A Mind below the dust,
And the Hounds hurry out,
And dig it up,
Take care of it-
Out of my hands.
A few a day,
If I'm lucky,
Otherwise it's a long Moonday of nothing
But stirring up dust.
Not that the scenery before was much,
The stars, craters, mountains,
Sometimes the Blue Earth.
Now, just clouds of dust.
Who knew?
The Mormons were right
With their "well of souls",
Millions, billions to dig up,
Each saved like a truffle in the Moon dust.

Sins

Oh, after a fashion,
I'm abrim with second hand Hollywood Sins,
Rock and Roll and all,
Though not so far as Las Vegas-
Nocturnes enough nearby...
But, y'know, second hand sins
Dont cut it with St. Peters,
Enough of those in their own overflow.

DolphinWords

Notes: the Dolphins are from a dream...I have recurring art class dreams...my assignments are late, I've missed too many classes...this one, I had a bunch of ink drawings, Dolphins one on top, and the instuctor asked me if I had my "notes"..."Sure!"...on time for once, and they were like rolled up small carpet, and I put them with everyone elses...and, and I woke up...Monsters and Menagerie grew out of the friction commenting to the youtube Confederacy vlogs...I have a ton of such comments, but since the election, I've left off commenting, or even looking at those vlogs...a sudden, those vloggers have lost their sense of menace, their champion unhorsed, or some such....I dunno...the words in the first two stanzas are five syllables each...the third stanza comes back to reality, sorta...and then the envoy...they're Sonnets...a rebel alliance of Sonneteers the conceit...Dust Ups is remarkable...I learned of the Well of Souls from my Mormon friends....I can't wrap my thoughts around their concepts!...a quibble is how many souls are there!?...Angels on the head of a pin kinda thing...Ray Bradbury story had it deceased book author's ghosts/souls resided on Mars, until their books were no longer read...I moved the whole lot, everybody, to the Moon!...the others are incidentals, kinda beginning things...doing the plein airs in September, the inks in October, like used a different part of my brain, similar to writing, but so different from writing that not much occured to me to write/note, save the vloggers on and ons!...in the Sonnets, it came to me, doing the odd italisized words, and others, what James Joyce may have been up to in his book, Finnigans Wake...I think I have one more five syllable one, but the clutter on my note memo pad hard to search, and I dont recall where this and that is!

:)

DavidDavid

Halloween Sunset:OTI::pics,notes:::10/31/20

Open To Interpretation

#inktober thirty one

Crawl

Balboa Pier, Halloween Sunset

Notes:  out and back to Balboa Pier...was down with doing Seal for Inktober prompt "Crawl"...Seal has been missing from the out and backs, though glimpsed now and then, and this time too on the second out...two outs?...lemee explain: arrived at Balboa early, and fogged in again at the Ocean...I know Seal hangs around the end of Balboa Pier, so, soh, paddled out there and had fish and chips again at Ruby's...Fishermen catching the usual tiny Mackerel...Sun behind the grey fog, just a glow...and no luck for Seal...picked up, disappointed-last Inktober day, and not much to show...on the way back, stopped at Michaels and bought three 18x24 canvases (dont know if three for eleven dollars is the way to go for quality canvas!), and, and, opening my wallet, I didn't have my credit card...left it at the outside table at Ruby's on the end of the Pier...called them up, 'yes, we have it'...much luck, and went back out, the second, to the Pier!...parked, my ticket still good, and up on the Pier I donated five bucks to the homeless fellow who has occupied the South side opposite the Sunset Spot, and continuing on, I sight Seal...and the sky going riot with Halloween oranges!...go figure...trotted to end of the Pier again, this time chasing Seal rather than Dolphin...retrieved the card, much thanks to Ruby's...found Seal diving through the pilings, glimpsed, and gone...hmmph...I then settled in taking Sunset pics...much fun...on the first out, I passed on taking a pic of the Pavilion...regretted this, as it's a good  close to the month of Inktober pics, but here I was again back at the Pier, so got that pic too...and almost got a pic of all the pics, but I miss pressed the shutter...a Mom was walking with her kid, the kid dressed up in a Lobster costume, with eye stalks!...too much...anyway, plan for November is no plan!...except to vote...could have done that today, polling places open early...Vote!...oh, the Surfboard keychain from a favorite souvenir stand...

:)

DavidDavid

Terns:OTI::pics,notes:::10/30/20

Open To Interpretation

#inktober thirty

Ominous

Huntington State Beach, Magnolia

Notes: out and back to Huntington State Beach, Magnolia about...arrived to see things fogged in...hardly anyone about...surf still knee high...sat, and sat...did the sketch...inktober prompt "Ominous"...and, the fog finally receded, and an orange glow on the horizon, but sun down...what to do what to do....and then a mixed flock of Terns, Seagulls, and Sandpipers whirled about and settled in for the evening before and around me...sometimes the Deer would do this in the Valley...I'd be sighting on Owl in Owl Woods, and find myself in the midst of Deer hunkering down...I messed up the claws...supposed to resemble Lobster crackers like one might find in a seafood restaurant...on one screen, the pics are way too dark, like the last one...on my tablet they look like they do on my cameras...and the last one mentionable!...the Moon didn't wash out...a bit of its dark features visible,,,how many times the Moon rising over Half Dome was just too bright for this to happen?!...and the trick for photos like this, is to have the sun setting, highlighting from behind  the foreground,,,there's a moment when everything is okay, brightness balanced-the Moon not just a light bulb!...

:)

DavidDavid

Out,Back:OTI::pics,notes:::10/29/20

Open To Interpretation

#inktober twenty nine

Shoes

Balboa Pier

Notes: out and back to Balboa Pier...few folk about...surf like ankle high...inktober prompt "Shoes"...head down, doing the sketch, I missed two girls walking through the Sun Spotlight with shoes in hand...would have been great pic...'heck' I thought, then the couple took the stage-a consolation...and then the jogger did 'out' and 'back'...lol...is the ocean's color in last pic 'teal'?...I dunno...the sky above deepening blue a show across the sunset lit ocean...

:)

DavidDavid

Dolphins:OTI::pics,notes:::10/28/20

Open To Interpretation

#inktober twenty eight

Float

Balboa Pier, Dolphins

 

Notes: out and back to Balboa Pier...thought to be 'floating' on the Ferry for the Sunset pic...but soon Sun near the horizon, so diverted to the Spot on the Pier...lucky!...Dolphins about, and frolicking...set everything down, and trotted to the end of the Pier, hopeful for leaping Dolphin in the Suntrack...no luck, but that's what paintings are for!...inktober prompt 'float'...our first venture in SCUBA class was to test our water proofness by swimming out to the float at the end of the Pier, dive down, bring up a hand full of sand, and return-this just in swimsuits...but I think this was at Newport Pier, which isn't so deep at its end...anyway, had in mind THE float, which was daunting, having never swam so far in the Ocean...just two faraway and blurry pics of Dolphin leaps...but much fun!...

:)

DavidDavid