Puppets in the pipe. I added a spoon too. This connects with the newer pieces (to which Neil refers as '2 and 1/2 dimension sculpture). It makes the piece just a bit darker in meaning and, for me, adds another layer of story. 

Little One in place . The copper has to dry for hours, so I'll stop for now and get started adding some color tomorrow. 

I worked on the Neil sculpture today, and did many other things and am way too tired for photography or writing. So, you get a pretty---sort of---picture instead. This is a pencil drawing called "The Art of Indiscretion" taken from a sculpture called "Resonant Kiss" for which Neil wrote a story . 

This is the second sculpture, actually. The first is a one-of-a-kind from about ten years ago. The story is called "Every Good Boy Deserves Favors". It was written for Overstreet's FAN magazine forever ago and I think it may be in another collection. (It's a good story, of course.) Possibly I have photos of the original in the dusty boxes of photos on shelves that should only be reached by ladder, but which I sometimes visit by balancing on tiptoe atop wobbly studio stools. Does anyone remember life before digital photography?
Soon I'll finish work on "Luck Be Nimble...." and deliver it. This is a good thing. We need some new stories.

Sponge Bob Tired Pants

Well, this isn’t the weirdness I had planned to write tonight. Sometimes things just go wonky. It all started, I think, with the Oreo I gave Orion after lunch. I used to peel the sugar filling off and give him only the cookie. He was perfectly content with that until he got wise to the filling. I was busy, so succumbed to the whining and gave him the whole thing.
Needless to say, his afternoon naptime was spent climbing over the sofa and caroming down the halls at full tilt on his trike.
He passed out mid-climb at about eight-thirty in the evening. By ten, I figured he was out for the night and carried him to his bed.
Now it’s 1:20 AM, he’s wide awake and insisting that it’s morning, no matter that I pointed out the unwavering shade of pitch black outside every window.
So here we are, watching Sponge Bob episodes on DVD. I made him scrambled eggs with cheese, hoping the full tummy would help him settle down again. He refuses to touch them. They’re sure doing the job for me.
Patrick just taunted, “Liar, liar, plants for hire.”
For pure silliness and fun, you just can’t beat Sponge Bob.
I’ve been busy. I watch The Daily Show, Real Time / Bill Maher, SpongeBob and up until last Sunday, Carnivale. I don’t think I’ve watched a series since Firefly. The ones I like usually get fucking canceled.
That damned Clancy Brown. If there’s anything I can’t resist, it’s an evil, good-looking man in a cassock and collar. But then I hear, in my head, “Ohhhhh! Who lives in a pineapple under the sea….” Hey, the guy works. Good on ‘im.
I’m a little concerned after seeing the season finale. In the universe in my head, this last episode would have ended the story and resolved everything. Fin. Or, if there had to be a next season, let it be another carnival troupe, in another time period, another place, e.g. medieval England, or some future setting--- entirely new story.
I may be still affected by the assault on my brain by The Ring II. I really despise seeing something of quality dirtied by greedy milking of an idea that should have been left the hell alone. Practically every sequel ever made qualifies for this hate.
I’ll work on the Neil sculpture on Monday. I told him I would, so I will.
I’m rambling now. Time to stop typing. Orion just put his head down. Sponge Bob is even funnier when viewed sideways, apparently.
Pete just came home in his show blacks, looking like he has a story to tell. He does, something involving Three Tenors and a kabuki. This might be good.
I’m exhausted. Perhaps I should have an Oreo.
G’night

More on Threes

Jane posted some really interesting and thought-provoking (my favorite---we loves to massage the brains) comments about
Threes are Massing.

If you have questions for Dagmara, please post them in comments. I'll be sure she gets them so she can answer them for you.

'see you later tonight, with a bit of weirdness

Dagmara Matuszak

For the holidays, Neil sent a copy of Melinda, the book he wrote, which was illustrated by Dagmara Matuszak. I was really taken with it and, after some correspondence, with her.
You've been cool enough to read the rantings and ravings behind my art and I'm ever so grateful you have. I thought it might be nice to give us both a break, and enjoy a glimpse into another artist's head.
Neil Gaiman & Dagmara Matuszak Melinda Reviewed by Rick Kleffel

If you haven't seen this book yet, check it out. It's dark and beautiful. It's a very limited edition , though a bit expensive. Still, if you're a collector of Neil's work you'll likely want to get one.
Ordering information
I asked Dagmara some questions and she answered them. There are some images of some of her other work below as well.

On Neil's sculpture, "Luck Be Nimble, Fate Be Quick", please forgive me--I'll be back at work on it Monday. For some 'before' pics, go here: Neil's sculpture
And, if you have quetions for Dag, please post them in 'comments' and I'll be sure she gets them.
Enjoy!!

Lisa: When did you first realize that you were an artist?
Dagmara: I do not often consider myself an artist. I feel compelled to create, and to complete the creation in the best way I can, but that applies to every craftsman, I suppose, and it’s ruling my everyday life as well. I started drawing as a very small child and continued to do it my whole life, and, since I can remember, the world always was offering something beautiful to look at and feed upon. So, in terms of creativity and sensibility, I may always have been an artist. I’m not sure if that’s a distinction, though. “Art” is a word whose meaning gets more and more obfuscated, and my personal interests and definitions shift every few years. In general, I would demand from an artist an utter and complete devotion to his work and a fully developed artistic consciousness, a knowledge of what he or she is doing, why is he doing it and what impact will it have upon a spectator. Sometimes I rise up to these conditions. Sometimes I don’t.

Lisa: Are there any creative people in your family, or family history?
Dagmara: My father is an actor, and my mother, a nurse at a mental hospital, is at home a very skilled interior designer. So I grew up in beautiful (yet different every year, as we moved a lot) apartments in ugly Eastern European cities, and I grew up in the theater, and that most certainly has had a massive influence upon my imagination. Even today, as I joyfully agree to see art as a show based upon arbitrary created rules.

Lisa: How would you describe your creativity? For instance, does it come in any sort of cycle or season?
Dagmara: My creativity strongly depends on the input, and it stays in a strict relation with the artistic freedom I’m granted. (On the other hand, I often tend to succumb to self-created restrictions.) Daylight is important, so it’s more difficult to be creative in winter… There are sudden outbursts of creativity that surprise myself. But on the whole, I’m a lazy one, and most of the process takes place in my mind. I’d go pregnant with an idea, so to speak. The results are better, when I allow it to ripen, feeding it with a variety of things.

Lisa: What is your favorite medium, and why?
Dagmara: It changes constantly. Computer and oil, I’d say now, though sometimes I find it a bit to easy to consider it work. Drawing is hard. Painting with acrylics and watercolours is hard. They’re a challenge, and I’m still struggling to find the ultimate method. You can’t take a shortcut that would eliminate the necessary manual skills. I guess that’s why I enjoy graphic design so much – it happens almost entirely in your mind. Encoding web sites is fun, it comes in mathematical terms and clear rules have to be followed in order to create. It’s very relaxing. And oil painting, on canvas, is pure pleasure. I can spend weeks with an oil painting and don’t get impatient. Come to think now, it might be the most important part of my creative work. The one that comes closest to art as defined above. I only do a few oil paintings a year.

Lisa: If you were given a commission to create a work on a blank wall, with no restrictions, how would you approach such a project?
Dagmara: I have so many ideas for a painting – pictures in my head – it wouldn’t take long. Maybe I would consider which room said wall is in and who will look at the painting, but most likely not.

Lisa: What 'feeds' your muse? What stimulates your creativity. Do books, music or places influence you?
Dagmara: Music is good to stimulate the creative process which is already underway. I usually like to listen to music corresponding with the piece I’m working on. I listen to medieval or renaissance music when painting a cover for a fantasy book. Melinda was accompanied by Sisters Of Mercy covers, Bowie’s 1. Outside and such. Whereas for the cover painting – other than the inlaid illustrations, it’s a big oil-on-canvas piece -, it took Tom Barman, Nino Rotta’s soundtrack for Casanova and a German band called Samsas Traum.

Physical exercise does well – I did some of my best drawings after spending three or four hours on horseback. I was then training horses for endurance racing, so I often came home rather exhausted. Huge parts of Melinda were created in a similar way – I did the drawings in the afternoons after working with my three-year-old mare. It seems I’m getting along quite well with physical work to do and a deadline dangerously close. Some tension helps.

Poetry is always inspiring. Sometimes, so are computer games.

One thing that gets more and more important the older I get, is to eliminate the noise. Acoustic, visual, whatever. I do not want any piece of information that I consider unnecessary to come through.

Lisa: Tell us about Melinda, and what you'll be working on next.
Dagmara: Melinda was both challenge and pleasure. While it started out as an exercise to get me into comics (Neil’s own words), it soon turned out to be something much more complex and promising, yet it still kept the educational qualities of an exercise – I learned a lot while working on this book. In order to create Melinda’s city, I visited places I didn’t even think they existed, and I mean it literally. On the other hand, a lot of it was just giving shape to things that slumbered somewhere in my mind.

I think the most appealing thing about Melinda is that the poem, with a few words only, calls into existence a world that is as complex as it is ambiguous. I tried to follow Neil’s way and not to get too literal in the pictures, while showing some possible keys to interpret the story. I’ve developed a truly intimate relationship with that book. And I’ve had some of those intense, lucid moments I think of when I say “art”.
I do a lot of small, scattered things now – a book cover here, a CD cover there – gathering strength for something bigger. Another book, maybe, or some oil paintings. I’ll have two big exhibitions this year, so it would be nice to show some new stuff. I have so many ideas – the only thing that I lack is time.


Lisa: Dagmara's webpage will be up in a few weeks. I look forward to posting a link to it. Be sure to check it out.
G'night

The Church of the Desert 

Sacred Sand

I have attended a number of churches in my lifetime. The first experiences happened during my tender, formative years so, naturally, they are imprinted upon my brain forever, amen. They all happened at a Southern Baptist church in very Southern Baptist South Carolina. To be fair, there were Holiness churches in our neighborhood too. My mother wouldn't let me visit one of those because, she said, those folk were primitive and spoke in 'tongues'. I think it was because the women didn't wear cosmetics but I didn't dare say that because this kind of remark could put her right in the mood to twist my unerringly straight hair into exceedingly tight coils and pin them to my scalp with an “x” of “bobby” pins. Some of the pins were missing the little gobbet of plastic on the ends. A special little hell for special little girls...

I left my childhood church somewhat interestingly. I was fifteen, had taken tests and skipped a couple of grades (3 and 11) and had just started work on my higher education at the local college. I was keenly feeling the salty burn between the raw freedom of college and the itchy rash of my glaring 'minor' status. I was looking for a way to ease into rebellion when it waltzed right in and curtsied.

There was to be a special Wednesday night prayer meeting.

The deacons (somebody help me come up with a good anagram for this term) who were the 'ruling body' of the church, and my father (who was not allowed to be a deacon because he was married to my mother who had been married before), who was instead the church trustee (they liked the guy) had decided to try to resolve a congregational issue by applying Democracy. The issue had nearly divided the congregation in half. Tempers were getting hot. The offering plates were getting light. Democracy was the last resort.

The congregation in attendance this Wednesday night would vote, by silent ballot, on this world-shattering issue; whether or not the women in the church would be allowed to wear 'slacks' to Wednesday night services. The astounding thing is that this was the seventies. You have to understand that almost universally, the Deep South had decided to ignore the sixties and seventies and proceed cautiously to the eighties in 1996. It wasn't that hard. There was no Internet. There was no cable. I left in 1997 so can't say when they are now.

When the floor opened for comments I approached the 'casual pulpit' on the floor below the dais that held the important one. I walked up wearing my favorite 'hippie' drawstring skirt and said my piece, which included the words "throw-backs", "moronic", "narrow-minded" and "exclusive.” When I was done, I walked from behind the podium amid gasps of horror in my favorite frayed, faded straight legged Levis and flip flops, having left my skirt on the floor behind the pulpit. I very clearly remember walking to the doors in the back, fighting the urge to run, in an absence of sound that could only be called a sonic vacuum. The massive double doors of my previous life swung closed behind me with an unceremonial hiss.
Other details have escaped me because, two weeks before that service, I had visited the Church of Mary Jane.
Now I was ready to join and did. Needless to say, many of the details are lost, having not occurred in my tender formative years and having been gathered during an altar-ed sorry state. But one thing I do remember is thinking a lot about what I believed in.
Later I attended the Episcopal Church. That year was largely unremarkable, except that it’s where I became interested in learning about religions in general, and found that a pastor could conceivably accept me as a human being even if I didn’t buy into the program. Thank you, Reverend Paul.

Looking back, I’ve come to better understand some of the similarities and differences in the churches of my experience.
For instance, in the typical SBC, the pews were wooden, and treated with polish specially formulated to stick to the legs of children and amplify Satan-induced farts.
In the EC, the pews were darker wood with padded kneeling benches (Southern Baptists are loathed to bend their knees in public) and padded seats. The Episcopalians seemed to believe farts were gas-induced and generally didn’t hate their children.
The pews of the church of MJ were generally lawn chairs, but during prayer the pews were earth and the pulpit the sky. Farts were neither revered nor condemned. Our children existed far in our futures, with names like Butterfly Rainbow, Karma Nirvana and Krispy Kreme.

The organist was generally Rick Wakeman and played like a god.

At the SB church the men who smoked hung around outside by the shrubbery prior to the service, avoid glares of their wives. The organist of the SB church was generally a kind-hearted volunteer who played her own arrangements of favorites from the Hymnal like, "What a Friend we have in Jesus" or if she were the young alternate organist, a carefully camouflaged arrangement of 'Hey Jude".
The Episcopal Church organist was generally paid and played Bach. Or, if he were the young alternate, played a carefully camouflaged rendition of a Gershwin tune. At the Episcopal Church the men and women smoked openly at covered-dish dinners. (Hence my mother’s comment that if I were going to attend the EC, I may as well not bother.) At the church of MJ, the smoking was part of the service, which consisted of the shared smoking, deep discussions of various topics, silent contemplation of the sky, with a post-service pizza.

From the three, I gleaned many truths, but my favorite was taught only in the church of MJ and it is this:
You are not where you live, what you wear, your dress size, or your skin color.
You are what you think. You are what you say. You are what you do.
These three things have consequences, for which you are solely responsible.

The church of MJ was the only one that insisted that the state of the world was up to us and that we could change things. Boy, were we ever young.


There were more churches, though shorter-lived after the first three. They included "A Course in Miracles" (loved the text hated the people), the Church of Life Experience (hated the people), The Church of Me (hated the people), The Church of Antidepressants (hated the numbness), The Church of Art (works better as a philosophy) Just a brush with the Church of the Subgenius (Jesus-on-a-stick whatabunchofslackerbullshit but killer quotes) and the winner, No Church At All.
I have maintained academic interest in all.

Just lately I've felt a new twinge. The Church of the Desert has called me. Twice I've felt a subcutaneous tug. The desert has its own language, is generous with its inspiration and asks little in return.
But I'm safe. I'll explore it, but I will not join. I know too much to buy into any program; no matter how comfy a blanket it might offer to wrap me in.

Still, I can visit, once in a while, just to see what’s new.

G’night

I didn't write about Easter. I said pretty much everything I wanted to say on the subject on Valentines' Day. But I saw this guy on the highway Friday and had decided if I were pressed to do an Easter post, he would be it. 

It's windy as Hell tonight. Someone told me that this area was the second most windy place in the country. I don't know that this is true, or even what the most windy place in the country is. I suppose a night like this, when palm debris, pool toys, the occasional lawn furniture and once, the Wicked Witch of the West fly past the office window, I might consider doing a web search to see if I could find out. Maybe later. For now, Orion is fussy and I must go cuddle for a bit. So I'll leave you with thanks for your comments. If I'm inspiring some of you to be creative I feel good about it. And I'll show you my highly cherished Batman Begins movie poster someone dear snagged for me. The movie had better be good, because I'm liking the way this looks over our reading corner. The angel sketches are by the very talented Ron Brown.

Neil [Gaiman] sometimes travels to SoCal by train. Sometimes he phones to tell me he's passing through the windmills, or just did. 

I thought you might like to see them too, so I stopped yesterday and took a few photos.