"Beard"

Do you remember the days when all men were clean-shaven?  It was kind of big thing for my dad to grow a mustache in the 70s.  It was really red, and I thought it was unnecessary, or sometimes I thought that it was like having cup but no saucer from a set of china.  I wasn’t too fussed about it since it was his face, but I was started wishing men would just stick with the standard bare face that I was used to.

It was a loopy time for men from my perspective.  I mean really – leisure suits?  Dad had one in powder blue polyester.  I liked the way the suit made his eyes blue and at least he didn’t get his hair done in a permanent.  That had to be clearly the stupidest style I’ve ever seen.  I’m all for curls when they happen in a regular way, but perfect rows of chemically-induced curls isn’t manly, I don’t care what they said about it at the time.

I was observing men going wild with a suspicious and mistrustful eye.  Dad bought a red motorcycle.  I was happy when he and Mom went away for weekend camping with other misbehaving adults, but as a child of the 60s I wasn’t all that far from white gloves at church.  It was all well and good for college kids to smoke pot and go to Grateful Dead concerts and protest wars, but I was in the first generation of kids to watch so many parents divorce and I didn’t approve – it was the destabilization of the world as I knew it.

While my parents stayed married, divorce was going on all around me.  My friends’ worlds crumbled, and nobody knew we were supposed to say stuff like “it’s not your fault”.  I said stupid stuff like “isn’t it better that your mom moved out because now there’s less yelling?”  I don’t suppose I racked up any points for appropriate sympathy.

I think it’s pretty safe to blame facial hair for all of it.  After all, look at those hippies and all the chaos they created.  It was only a matter of time before parents started copying the very people they criticized for sloppiness.  Women had the pill and didn’t have to have endless babies.  They could get out and party.  If their husbands didn’t want to play, then they could go out without them.  Women could work too, and with their own money, did they even need a husband?

Then again, the husbands were thinking that a lot of their wives weren’t any fun to go home to.  They needed male bonding at the bars, and if there were willing females there, so much the better.

I’m currently older than my dad ever was in this lifetime.  Sometimes that surprises me because how can we ever get older than a parent?  My perspective of Dad is child to adult, not adult to adult, or even older adult to younger adult.  If years create wisdom, I’m wiser now than he ever got to be, but I don't know if I feel all that wise.

AND, I'm not smart enough to figure out why comments are disappearing with Blogger lately.  Does anybody know how to fix this?  You can write me here if you've got answers.  Thanks!

I posted this art a couple years ago but it's just so obvious for "beard" I felt like I had to post it again.  For the record, I don't have a strong feeling pro or against beards.  Whatever suits the man best, but that in between stage is painful to my tender cheek :)

"Summer"

I went to Michigan last weekend.  I had multiple reasons for going, and on that list was the Detroit Institute of Art.  I've been hearing about how politicians want to sell the art to bail the city out of its financial distress, and I needed to see that art before they get a chance to do it.  The museum is wonderful and I recommend it to anyone who can make it there. 

It's a medium-sized museum that's pretty easy to get around in.  The art is organized in a rational way, except I wandered around a lot to find one of the paintings that I especially wanted to see.  And then... I had a moment.  I started mentally hyperventilating over a painting I practically saw by accident as I was stomping around trying to find that other painting.  This is a terribly crappy photo of the Titian painting that gave me palpitations.  It doesn't even show the red stroke of paint that flopped over itself in such an expressive, Impressionist-inspiring way.

I studied Titian in college.  Yawn.  I knew he's listed amongst the greats, but you just don't get that feeling when you're subjected to endless slides of stuff to memorize in college.  I felt a similar rush of understanding the first time I saw Van Gogh paintings in person.  (Which they also have in Detroit.)  I also saw a room entirely painted by Diego Rivera whom I had also underestimated in those endless slides of stuff I'm supposed to care about.  I didn't get all jelly-legged in the Rivera room, but I do appreciate him more now.  I've been reading about Rodin lately, and Detroit has a lot of his sculptures, including The Thinker...

And so on.  I could rhapsodize about art a lot more, but I had people to see and places to go since I made the grand journey to another state.  I was given the desolation tour after going to the museum.  "Look, nice houses!"  One block over, "Look!  Destruction!"  Back to nice houses, then over a block to see all the empty lots where houses used to be.  My tour guide was funny and I had a hard time thinking that the revegetation of Detroit is all bad.  They're even talking about bringing in goats as lawnmowers for all those empty lots.  Who doesn't love goats?

Michigan people are very nice, and I got some pleasure out of the fact that my new car got a little attention.  One guy asked me to pop the hood so he could look at the engine.  I'm told this isn't that unusual in Detroit, but it was new for me.  I bragged about my hybrid's gas mileage.  My car tells me my mpg every time I turn it off.  I've been averaging about 38-55, but so far my all time high is 104.9 miles per gallon :)

So with that kind of gas mileage, why not drive across the state and see Lake Michigan?  Which looks just like Lake Erie except the sun sets wrong.  I managed to cope by making sand animals.  Okay, this isn't quite illustration, and I've been meaning to apply myself more for Illustration Friday, but I did make art of a sort.  I also started a painting this week.  If it works out I'll post it here so you can see how Michigan can inspire creativity.

Last summer was a blur for me.  I worked non-stop and I'm determined not to waste another summer like that.  Summer is time for trips and fun!

"Mask"

We all wear masks so thoroughly, we think our masks are who we actually are.  It takes an internal honesty to really look beneath the masks, and let's face it, most of us aren't that brave.

Last week I wrote about taking care of my little brothers.  I love my brothers, and all the good things I said were true, but I was young.  I resented the inflexibility of my responsibilities, but my caretaker role became so much of what I presented to the world I couldn't separate what I wanted from who I was.  I got positive feedback from older people for being "good", and I presented myself that way until it became part of me.

Some people cover tender feelings with anger, I covered my anger with nice.  Nobody wanted to see my anger because it's ugly.  So I spent time being "good", then indulged in "bad" because there had to be an outlet for all of my less socially acceptable feelings.

Perhaps my situation was unusual because of my age, but many parents have written about similar feelings about their own children, but we don't like to talk about that stuff.  Parents brag about their kids' accomplishments and show photos of the smiling little darlings.  We have a societal image of what parents should be, and most parents wear the masks they've been assigned and/or assumed.

And that's just one of the masks people wear.  We present ourselves in the most positive ways because we want others to like us, respect us, or have some other positive response.  The "me" under all those masks hide from ourselves and anesthetize ourselves with chocolate, reality tv, road rage, affairs, and other coping techniques.  We stuff feelings for a happy world, but that means that the less pretty feelings never get expressed or dealt with until people go to a psychologist to help untangle it or shoot themselves.

"To thine own self be true" is difficult and rewarding, but it takes some bravery to look in the mirror without the masks.  I don't want to imply that I've mastered it either.  I just think it's something to work at.  I just let the words in the picture above come out in a random way, thinking about other people's masks, then had to look at these things again and see how many of them are in my own self image -- which isn't really the mask that I want to sell to myself.

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” ― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.” ― André Berthiaume

“Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?” ― Jeanette Winterson

“Like icebergs, people normally expose only a small part of themselves, and generally just the part they wish to show.” ― Nikki Sex, Fate

“And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself.  But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed roles...” ― Simona Panova, Nightmarish Sacrifice

“It comes down to this: If you want to be seen, heard and understood in the most genuine way possible, be open to the possibility of vulnerability. Allow yourself to be open. I know it’s a scary place, a place very few people dare to venture, but just try it. Try moving the masks away and really looking at a person the next time they engaged in conversation with you.” ― Leigh Hershkovich

"Contraption"

I took care of my brothers a lot when they were young.  Mom worked 2nd shift, my sisters had lives, and I was next in line.  I changed a lot of diapers and whatever else needed done.  After they were housebroken I went off to college, but when I came back to town I usually took the twins for the weekends.  I was like a weekend dad without the budget.

We settled into our routine after I bought a house.  The twins would come over Friday night and we'd eat pizza and watch Disney movies.  In the morning we walked to Denny's and they had smiley face breakfasts, then we went home and contemplated our next project.

We had projects every weekend.  One day I decided a giant azalea bush would be better next to the garage instead of where I planned to put a fence.  Digging around the roots was simple enough until we ended up with a beautiful root ball in the bottom of a deep hole with the dawning realization that one woman and 2 little boys didn't have the physical strength to move a 1,000 pound ball of dirt.

This brought us to the happiest times of projects -- the discussion.  We were equally ignorant about how to reach our objective, but we brainstormed until we had a solution.  It also gave us the chance to discuss physics over PB&Js.

In the end, I backed up my car and we used lever, fulcrum, and everything else we could think up to get the azalea out of the hole, with a whole lot of warnings about recoil, plus a whole lot of nifty inventions to hook up the mess to the car.  We successfully planted the azalea in the new spot where it died a slow, painful death within a couple of years.

We also went to garage sales.  We bought tools, and sometimes we met old men who told us what to do with them.  I should probably say that the boys were super cute and everybody loved them.

I was thinking about this happy time when I stopped at a garage sale this weekend and bought a pile of flooring for $10.  After a whole lot of effort the beat up floor to my sunroom/back porch looks beautiful.  I'm feeling very pleased that I sized up that pile of boards perfectly and only have 3 to spare.  I also hauled a bunch of stuff to my girlfriend's house and helped with her garage sale.  I'm beyond exhausted, but it's a good kind of exhausted.  It's the same kind of tired I felt when the twins and I used to collapse on the couch and watch more Disney movies and eat leftover pizza.

The twins are older, still cute, and still like projects.  I still enjoy "discussions" with them and figuring out the cheapest/best way to do things.  They can fix anything, build anything, and now that they're grown up they can even do stuff the right way sometimes without having to back up the car to a bush.

This whole string of thoughts was the result of seeing "contraption" and thinking about how Chris fixed a tractor with the spring from a ballpoint pen.  I'm still impressed.  I'd like to think I contributed to his inventiveness.

 

I don't think the wind chimes I made exactly counts as an illustration, but it does seem like a contraption, and they make a really nice tinkling sound.  I did paint them, but for the purists I included a leaf drawing for Illustration Friday.