In a recent conversation I was reminded of the Stanley and Stella Shouting Contest, a special event of the annual Tennessee Williams Festival held in Jackson Square in New Orleans, LA.
This drawing is roughly based on my memory, my imagination, and the YouTube video that follows.
I posted this short video while living in New Orleans in 2009. I invite you to take a look; you just may get a kick out of it.
Why, after all these years, am I thinking of termites? Doesn’t matter, at least now I can laugh about’em! The idea came to me this morning at Office Depot in Chicago, and when we got to our room in Milwaukee, I cranked it out in fewer than 5 minutes, maybe 10 with the coloring and advertising. I’m trying to run with ideas like this, even when I leave my back pack with my iPad in it at our cousin’s house!?! Thanks Ann, for letting me use your iPad.
Last night we had 2 large and 1 small pizzas from Pequod’s Pizza. The large pizzas came with “pizza spacers” (see below). Maybe it was because there were little kids; who knows, but the spacers reminded me of little tables.
One thing’s clear, it’s easier for me to make pizza from scratch than it is for me to draw pizza. I had no photos to refer to this time; although, I found this photo after doing the drawing:
Pizza is hard to draw, I say.
It may be time to take back our commode.
[The toilet is my signature symbol, according to my wife. I’d like to thank my little cousins for inspiring me to add the little stick figures.]
While Ann was getting a massage, I parked myself at a nearby coffee shop and started outlining some of the features in my temporary view shed. After a couple of days of heavy holiday meals, it felt good to sip on something simple and only slightly sweetened. Ah, green tea at the coffee shop on Black Friday with almost an hour to spare.
Time flew. Suddenly, Ann appeared in front of me. We were both energized.
What follows is the same drawing de-colorized by My Sketch, an iPad photo editing app.
So that’s an outline of the outline?
We’re staying with relatives in Chicago, and last night, when I woke up in a strange bed in the wee hours but without a stylus handy, I whipped out my finger and rendered this one. I’m a huge Don Quijote fan. I’ve read it in Spanish with professorial guidance at three different universities. One professor admitted that he viewed his own life in two simple stages, before reading Don Quijote and after. I agree; and I’d add that it’s true each time I reread it.
At any rate, one of Cervantes many universal themes hinges on the relationship between the ways in which things seem to be and the way they actually are…and everything in between.
Hold on to the smoke for a moment, and consider how mirrors are revolving doors between complementary sides. A professor of biblical spirituality once parenthetically stated in a class I was taking that we’d all be much better off approaching sacred texts not so much like answer-providing crystal balls but rather as question-provoking mirrors. Rumi asked: “If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?”
OK, you can exhale now. I toy with mirrors from time to time. This morning I decided to play around with this artifact in Fifty Three Paper.
It’s all practice. I’m not sure what it means if it means anything at all, but it was a study in a new technique and an opportunity to play with the familiar image even though I usually have two mirrors facing one another partially. The colored outlines on the mirror frame were my attempt to loosen it up after the fact; I find the drawing tighter than necessary, and I hope to relax over time. I started with the cigarette because it was the first related image that came to mind. I was searching for an image that could stick out the same way it would stick “in,” you know, kinda’ like a two-handed saw. I went with a cigarette instead. I tried to capitalize on the notion of inside vs outside smoke. Then the ashtray happened; and here’s where I tried something new with the lighting and reflection and variegated coloring, something unusual for me and my black & white, stick-figure imagination.
I’ve done some mirrors in the past. In the above drawing, because of the iPad drawing app and the corresponding techniques at my disposal, I deviated from what had almost become an irreversible pattern, as depicted in these examples:
Check out, https://portfoliolongo.com/2018/06/16/the-bible-crystal-ball-or-mirror/ on this illustroblog, please.
You exhaled, right?
This evening the image of an ordinary spigot came to mind, and I thought It woulld be fun to try drawing one. I searched Google images and found a blue-handled one. I changed the color of the wheel handle from blue to red to correspond to the spigot that I had initially imagined. There is nothing extraordinary about a spigot, except the name, which I’ve always liked for some reason, even before I watched the nervous and newly ordained Fr. Gerald, played by Rowan Atkinson, aka Mr. Bean, in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), utter a blessing in the “Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spigot.” Still, in the end, there is nothing extraordinary about a spigot no matter what color its handle is.
I’m drawn to ordinary things. Recently, I drew the cart used by residents of Whiteline Lofts in Des Moines, Iowa. That there is only this one cart makes it extraordinary in some ways, ways that call my attention; and if I’m not entranced by, let’s say, a spigot or something, then, I offer my undivided attention.
There’s not much that hasn’t already been said about this; in fact, maybe this has already been said:
Here I am in the Firestone waiting room again, and it’s an expensive wait. I brought my iPad and just started drawing one the ideas that I have listed on my Evernote list of drawing ideas. The item on the list was this: an anthropologist saying, I’d like to talk to you about your familiarity. The great Gary Larson has done some funny cartoons about anthropologists in tribal contexts. So, I knew I wanted to underscore the relative absurdity by using a contemporary, family, living room setting.
Half way through the drawing my stylus had a flat. This is, as they say, a whole nother story, this topic of styluses. I’m using some pretty basic styluses, nothing battery operated or fancy. They’re built in such a way that the tip isn’t really a tip; it’s a bulbus nubby kind of tip-ish sort of thing made of some sort of special material and meant to impersonate the finger…a small finger. At any rate, my rounded, bulb of a nub kinda went flat.
Now I know I need to carry a back up, especially when I’m in a waiting room.
Behind the scenes here is the notion of “familiarity.” I’m not knocking anthropologists. Familiarity is a tricky concept. There is something to be said of the unique role that anthropologists play in facilitating the familiarization of familiarity, not unlike the role of a midwife in some respects.
This time, because of the flat stylus, I spent very little digital attention on the faces. I kinda’ like that effect. I’ll try that again on purpose.
portfoliolongo 
