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Tag: artiste

“Can you at least look at me when I’m trying to talk to you…

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Scott. Put down the controller, take off the head set, and talk to me. God. You’re a big fucking man child. No! No, don’t you dare put that head set back on. Fuck you Scott, Fuck. You.” I’m standing in the doorway to the den, the walls to this windowless room are covered in old creased band posters, and framed sports memorabilia. The room is cluttered with comic books, action figures and empty beer cans. It smells like a gym sock, mixed with a cheap dive bar. I’m surprised there’s no stripper pole in there. The vents are always shut, and he can never be bothered to vacuum. The old dull grey carpet feels gritty underfoot.

“Huh? What’s that? Oh, oh, hey hold up. Sorry fellas…” he’s so calm, talking to his buddies through his head set, getting off the line, logging out as slowly as fucking possible. I can feel my pulse begin to rise. “Baby, babe! Yo… you ok, what’s goin’ on now?” He’s trying me, good god, lord above he’s trying out his, Hi I’m this super charming guy, voice on me. I could just slap him. My blood is pumping, and I’m not in the mood for this frat boy, laid back bullshit. “You know damn well what’s up. You man child! You fucking man baby! Look at all this shit, toys?, Scott really?, you got children’s toys in here. Comic books, toys, video games and fucking model kits. What. The. Fuck!” I clap my hands to punctuate each word. I turn from the doorway, and storm down the hall. It’s the longest stretch of our apartment, it makes for wonderful dramatic effect. I know he’s watching my ass as I storm away. I know it, and I’ll use it against him.

“This again, christ all mighty baby, you gonna do me like that, here? now!” He’s storming down the hall behind me, all one hundred eighty five pounds of him, he is chiseled like marble. He stops outside of arms reach. I can hear his breath coming faster. I can see spittle flecked on his lips as he gets going. “No, no Cheryl, not here. I told you I have to keep things stress free here. You know how bad work gets! You know. You KNOW!” His voice is quavering, and starts to take on a pleading tone. “No, you know what baby, you don’t know. No, don’t shake your finger at me. You want to know what I did yesterday. Do you, do you want to know?” He steps in close to me, I can see it in the whites of his hazel brown eyes, he ain’t going to hold back, he’s going to drop some hot scathing truth in my lap, and I’ll feel both intense love for him for it, and I’ll absolutely hate that I can’t even comprehend it. “Do you want to know what I came across yesterday, at werk!… I came across a mini van, with three kids in the back with their heads cut off at the base of the jaw…”. “Baby, God no, no… don’t say it Honey… please.” I’m pulled into his arms but the dam has broken and he’s not going to stop until it’s burned permanently into my heart. Like surgery done with an ice pick and a blow torch. “Seems the parents were junkies, love doing smack. But what they don’t know is, is that shit got fentanyl in it. Wife was driving, she’s dead as soon as the plunger drops the load in her veins, hot and thick. She couldn’t even pull off the road she was so hot for a quick taste. Crosses through the median, under an oncoming truck full of steel pipes. BAM. bitch, cut those sweet little Angel’s heads right off they necks… they wasn’t even in fucking car seats. Those kids was loose. LOOSE!” I can feel the room start to spin around us. He’s holding onto me just as hard as I hold onto him for support. We collapse together, a puddle of anger, loathing and despair. I think the floor might open up and swallow us whole. Before I can even lean in to stroke his hair, his pager is buzzing on the kitchen counter. Like a shot, he’s up and out the door. I hear something, but it is muffled by the closing door. I can’t make out what it was.

“Well, Cheryl I’m so sorry to hear of your husband’s passing. At least you told him you love him as he left for work that day. Few of us get the chance. It’s not like you two had a fight that day. I mean jesus, could you imagine?” She leans in towards me. “I hear Janis and Robert had a real banger the day he died. It’s eating her alive. But not us. No, we spent the last moments with our noble hunks in the throes of passion.” She’s smiling at me over her wine glass. The red wine must be good, it leaves a slight film on the glass every time she gesticulates with her hands. She smells of flowery perfume, and cigarette smoke. I look through her, to the open bay window beyond. Outside children can be heard playing. They’re laughing, and giggling. “Yeah… at least I have that.”

Very bad, no good, awful poetry : Series 3

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The best part about doing this series of early poetry written by myself as a teen, is that it has garnered exactly zero attention, and thus has gained no traction online, so while I have the catharsis of sharing it, I know deep down it will remain just as hidden to the outside world as it would had I left it untouched in my note book, on the shelf in my office, where it has sat since late 2009. Oh the unbridled joy of on line anonymity. Plus I’m a straight, white male, so not a whole lot of flack comes at me, unless I were to go out of my way to be a huge asshole. And I save that sort of thing for snide remarks at a movies expense while at the theater. So Boo.

If you’re just joining us now, or me, now, a few things you’ll come to understand. I’m not a professional writer, though at one point in my formative years I had ambitions for becoming a comic book creator / writer. I did give serious thought to Journalism school at Sheridan College, but did art instead. Probably money well spent given the caliber of the work if you look across the length and breadth of my old written pieces. Yikes. So feel free to curl up and have a good chuckle at my expense. From what I’m seeing as I revisit these old works, is they aren’t terribly offensive, except in that they are just awful. Low grade, faux depth, pretentious gobbledegook. Another three hot, steaming turds for your viewing delight.

1.) The sky at night Circa 1999

A lone ball of flame. Gas from an unknown region. Source of light in an uncaring life. A wonder. All ablaze, separated by nothingness and the cold distance between us. I can see you there, hovering, seemingly still, yet you twinkle. Do I dare dream on you tonight, what a wish, what wish, my wish, my right.

What I think is going on here, is like a version of wish upon a star, but kind of mopey and murky. I don’t think I had started to work nights yet, as a high schooler. I did work one semester for a place called Norkim Distributions in Brampton, a job I got because of a former girlfriends parents. I was lucky enough that they drove me to work and picked me up for the 90% of the time I worked there for a semester out of high school. I remember not being able to talk to anyone for most of the day, then as I got home, tired, I’d just natter away until I made my parents angry and they told me to just shut up. I get it now. I’m not a big fan on inane nattering. It was more as a way of dealing with being virtually silent the whole day, and feeling like I might explode if I didn’t just get a days worth of talking out once I got home. It definitely felt solitary. Doesn’t make the poetry any better though now does it. And they say that pain and sorrow create great art, no!, Talent, talent creates great art. Not merely being a morose mother fucker.

2.) Gripe : Twice daily Circa 1999

Whatever I mean, whatever I’ve said, it won’t matter much if I can’t get out of bed. Whoever I am, whomsoever I was, it doesn’t mean anything, and it didn’t mean much. Wherever I was, wherever I go, I won’t do anything, if I go it alone. With, without, what can I say.

Some of these I remember writing, even if vaguely. But this one eludes me, almost completely. I think I am really absorbing a lot of Temple of the Dog at this point, and trying to skirt the notion of completely ripping of Chris Cornell and the Mother Love Bone guys. It doesn’t flow together at all. The rhythm is off, and it sort of just fades away. Like I was trying to be prophetic, and found pathetic instead. On a second reading I guess, I wanted to be told I had something to say, but there really is no “there” there. It’s just pure, unadulterated cheese, “Fromage” for the old school Much Music Ed the Sock crowd.

3.) The fix is in Circa 2000

Sure, I still feel miserable three months down that road. A long hard journey through the vast unknown. But what’s to worry, because when I’m dead and gone, all those years from then, what will it matter, if I was a little mixed up inside my head. Time off, time alone, time apart. It’s all a healing process taken for a broken heart.

Whoo, that ones a bit of a floater. But I will say this, it follows a through line, and doesn’t get too heady. No major calling cards of a bloated sense of writing skill. Fairly layman in execution. No changing places with the man in the mirror. A break up poem if ever I wrote one. That’s it for this installment of terrible, awful poetry. If this does anything at all for you, feel free to post any of your own, miserable teen angst prone writing. Be free of your poor choice of prose! let the wicked underbelly of flatulent poetry free. Blast it into the ether! Fill the void with your own stinky mass of blind ambition.

More Of That Terrible Poetry : Series 2

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Back faster than I initially imagined. I had a good talk with a friend, and we thought it was a good idea to revisit the terrible mush that we all produced as angsty teens. It’s all in good fun, and a hearty laugh at my own terrible ambitions to be a comic book creator/writer. Plus some of this tripe is absolute dog shit, so I need to loosen up and let the pretentious blatherings of my youth out into the great wide open for mockery. Can’t always post your best self. I also recollect that some of these were to be song lyrics, given how I have them laid out in my note book. But I’m not really able to replicate that here, so they instead read as longer form sentences, rather than curt sentence chunks. Anyway, on wards and upwards.

Grab a drink, and a warm blanket and get ready to retch:

1.) Thirst Circa 1995

I’m so thirsty that if i drink in your love I just might drown. Pulled down into the icy bleakness of your heart, so cold it fills up my head. Breathless voices, dance at the edge of my vision, like heavenly bodies glimpsed in the inky night sky. I’m just so thirsty. I want to drown in it. I want to breath it all in, cold choking my lungs. Pulled to the center of the void, where I’ll find you. I’m so thirsty, I’ll lay myself down. I want the darkness to expand into my everything, explore the corners of nothingness that I have never seen before. You’ve leached into my every pore, weighing me down, thirsting for my touch. To you, thirst is life, now I’m soaking wet and the waters all around me, pulling me down.

This one is a tad more cohesive, but still not exactly stellar. But I think I was trying to get over a breakup at this point, if my memory of the time is right, or maybe not. I thought the first big break up was around or some where near 1998. Not sure, could have been the medication I was on making me feel a bit, tweaked. On the bright side, it all seems to work as far as using drowning as a metaphor. Also that it feels like some one else’s personal darkness was having both an inward and outward effect on me. I will state, clearly, that in 1995 “Thirsty” did not mean horny, sexually affected, or have any kind of romantic connotations.

2.) You can’t call home? Circa 1995

Times a wasting, I’m heading home, late for dinner and I didn’t phone. Can’t call now, eleven’s long gone. I’ll say ciao and be home before long. Light of dawn is breaking, chills of the night, suns coming up as I run, temperature rising and I’m just too tired to fight. Last night was a blur, but now that I’m home I’m sure I’ll never go out again, not while I’m so immature.

A quick little ditty about how I usually ended up getting grounded in my teens. Staying out far too late, and not calling. But in my defense, we weren’t drinking, or smoking or doing drugs, and at that age I sure as hell wasn’t having sex. So being tardy (late) and not bothering to call home, was sort of my jam as a teen. Disrespectful, sure, but odds are we were playing our instruments, jamming and having Street fighter tournaments with Zero chance any girls were present, unless one friend or another had a younger sister.

I’m not sure why, but there is a significant time jump in my notes, as though I didn’t write anything down here between the tail end of 1994 and some time in 1998. Maybe the notebook got misplaced or packed away during a move or a bedroom remodel.

3.) When death had eyes Circa 1998

Stand back and watch the parade of clowns walk by. Teary eyed and wavy haired, marching single file in despair. For a candle has gone out and we’ve laid you down to rest. High above the clouds, the empty earth your bed, you will rest for eternity. When we call, if we call at all, I’ll name you – beautiful. You cannot turn back the hands of time, for they’ve been set, not to be touched – cold. The flame has flickered out, and we had to put you down to rest. With you, our hearts got buried in the ground. Sending up your soul, so high, drifting on the sound of our lonely weeping. A string of silly shoes, marching in single file, sad eyed clowns, calling out your name, songs for the void on their lips.

I can’t honestly tell if I wrote this after the passing of a family friend, of if I had just gotten into Temple of the Dog, and was trying to be deep, where I have no depth to speak of. At least by eighteen. Nothing much of anything had happened. I have such a bad memory, I can’t tell if a grand parent had died that year, or what. Certainly had a thing for death or dying. Makes all those “wish I were dead” memes you see on Imgur make far more sense, in context of having been a moody teen myself. Here I was thinking I was actually a pretty chipper fellow. I’ll have to ask some childhood friends what their honest opinion of me at the time was. I distinctly remember my favourite pass time being adding dirty lyrics to songs on the radio, as they came on, like an impromptu improve session with friends when driving anywhere.

Either way, this was series two of terrible, bad, awful poetry from my youth.

The time is now for some terrible poetry

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I’ll take the lead here and showcase various terrible poems that I’ve written since 1994. Expect some lazy tropes, teenage angst, lots of crossed analogies that don’t really add anything substantive to the narrative. I will do my best to publish them as is without any major edits. I will correct spelling if I stumble across anything really egregious. Prepare yourselves for a round of terrible poetry.

Actually now that I think of it, this could be a monthly serial of all of my needless poetry. I’m dead certain I have enough for a few lengthy entries here. I should place a caveat here, that in my hey day, my hand writing was minuscule and sort of atrocious. So I can not guarantee that the original thought or intent will remain intact. Might have to guess at a word or two, seeing as I’m now twenty five almost twenty six years older than when I wrote these “poems“.

Buckle up folks, an auteur I am not:

1.) Soulless Man Circa 1994

Standing all alone, sits a man on his throne, gazing at a town he once called his home. Never to return to his village of peace, destined to roam, for fear this soul shall cease. Once he was a boy of paradise and joy. Gone, stripped of his city of love. He is led to destroy on the wings of a dove. Cold windy nights spent with heavenly lights, teary eyed fights with only blood in sight, stood he, all alone. Frozen tears are his throne, his old home, now ashes and blackened stone. Shadows cast down, pale whispers, no sound. An empty man, blood of a boy, stains of a memory torn, a life destroyed. Cold and barren is this man, as he stands all alone.

Oh boy, that is some dog shit right there. This is tough. May not have been as good an idea for a writing prompt as I originally thought. This is well before Game of Thrones, or anything of that sort coming into my life, so I guess I was trying to be brooding and moody? On to the next few then, with haste my friends…

2.) None too clear Circa 1994

I looked into the mirror the other day and what I saw shocked me. My reflection pointed to me and said ” You’re skinny, weak and would be better off dead.” I didn’t take too well to my reflection so I pulled the mirror down off the wall, broke off all of the pieces of frame, and shattered the silver backed glass. The next morning I awoke to find the old mirror back upon the wall as if nothing had happened. I stood before my mirror, and starred deeply into my reflection. Our eyes met, but I noticed something strange, for the world was turned around and it wasn’t me but my reflection starring back.

I get what I was going for here, like the old switch aroo, between the real me and the reflection all of a sudden passing through into this plane, and me drawn into the other, but it’s kind of hazy, and not well executed. I have a feeling with the more of these I read, the more certain it will become that I was depressed, or at least morose as an early teen. let’s dig in for another one or two, and then we’ll call it a day for the first of what could be many trips into terrible poetry territory. And no, I am not posting all of them, same are just too awful to share. So think about how bad these are and imagine something either too bizarre, saccharine or melancholy even for me to post twenty fives years later.

3.) Shattered Circa 1994

Shatter the mirrors that look back with distaste. Close up their shutters, so they no longer expose our inner horrors. Nail shut the eyes that glisten, wet and painful. Feel these fragments scatter, lost to the wind, mixed with the clouds, and buried by the dust. See your faces gazing back, held between the mirrors cracks, the glass will shower your soul with tiny pieces of memory, like sand kicked up by a storm. I’m not ready for you to expose me as only a shattered mirror could.

Looks as though I had a thing going regarding mirrors at this point. May’haps it was due to being six feet tall and something like one hundred and ten pounds. Lank greasy hair, and sore limbs. Could be an educated guess, but I’d have to see some photos from that time to really know. Oh, we had also moved that year from a medium town to a small village in rural Ontario, and I’d lost all of my friends to distance and lack of mobility between destinations.

Good God there are a whole lot more terrible poems waiting in my archives, so I can always revisit this again another time sooner or later. I don’t have a schedule for writing topics, I’m just trying to keep things fresh and interesting, and to stay off Facebook® more and more.

2019 Sculptures : And a shout out to Olympus built cameras

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All ten bust sculpts from 2019. Some are done in Super Sculpey and some are done in Chavant NSP Hard, and Monster Clay Hard.

I finally got around to putting together a single page spread of last years sculptures, with all of them together, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. I completed less than half as many as I did the year before, but I chose to work the bulk of the years items in super sculpey, so that they could be baked and painted, which is different than the Chavant stuff, which are used to cast and mould items for larger production. I have yet to step into that ring, mainly because it is expensive, smelly and requires knowledge I do not yet have a firm grasp of. Plus I’m not a house hold name, and I’d hate to end up sitting on twenty five pieces of my own artwork for no reason other than hubris, thinking others would like my stuff even half as much as I do in some instances. I chose to add in the crappy sculpts too, because, Hey!, a good portion of creating is putting out garbage until you refine your skills enough to do something you are somewhat proud of. I haven’t put any new clay down yet so far this year, I do have an armature bulked out ready to go, but I’ve been focused on writing, reading, and drinking water until I can’t stand myself any more. I have a couple of ideas for what I will do, I’m just not ready to commit to it yet. I tend to see so many great things over on the Shiflett brothers sculpting forum on facebook, and on instagram, and I squirrel those images and ideas away until I can really get my head around it.

Also I wanted to give a shout out to my Olympus SP-500UZ which I bought in 2006, which is still going strong to this day. I came to turn it on today to get my collage done and it was dark, but with some new batteries, she is up and running and just a great as the day I got it. Although if I’d have had the money, a Pentax film camera would have been my go to, but just out of College/University I chose a point and shoot that had several more options and capabilities. This is pre digital SLR being ubiquitous and cost effective for noobs to own. Although the camera on my phone is really good for this sort of thing too.

One goal I am going to accomplish this year, if to do a full figure again. I started out doing whole people, and then couldn’t do faces and hands and feet. Spent some time with the Ninja Turtles as my muse and could do a passable three fingered hand, and two toed feet and then went to busts to really get to know a face; the eyes, ears, mouths and noses. I have yet to master any other those elements, but I can at least make things look human, or depict the essence of my subject. I think i got fairly close in 2018 with my Thanos, Yondu & Thor busts. Also a big reason I’ve calmed down on my output is that I have limited space in my office/studio for storage, and don’t want to have my rough work scattered throughout the house, or in the basement. We have Nerf® gun fights, and rough house down stairs and I’d get mad if my stuff got injured in the course of us having a family fun Nerf® gun fight. An errant bullet deforming an oil based clay sculpture would not be my favourite thing.

Oh, and another thing, the reason I did 60% of last years sculpting work in Sculpey was because I had ideas about painting them all, and taking the best paint job / best sculpted item to the Markham Fair. You see they don’t really have a sculpting category, but you can enter painted ceramics. Sculpey is ceramic like, but not ceramic. So I can enter to get people to see my work, but it doesn’t qualify for judging or prizing. Just eyeballs, and a chance to show friends and family my work out in public. Which is fun, so I have that going for me.

Searching with my good eye closed…For Inspiration in Design.

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Some days this ingenious song lyric (Chris Cornell via Soundgarden) is how I feel about finding inspiration for new projects. As I have mentioned in previous posts, my day job, and one of my hobby’s is graphic design.

Now that’s a pretty big umbrella statement, as (GD) has a multitude of facets, and I am hardly a guru in all of them. Like they say, a jack of all trades is a master of none, so I’ve had to pull back on my desire to learn something useful about every single facet of graphic design and focus instead on a core group of skills that are near and dear to me. But at its heart, (GD) is still about producing artwork, perhaps not “Art” but commercial art nonetheless. No matter how hard I try I don’t ever feel like an artiste. Even though I make 100% of my living off of producing quality images, logos, compositions, type set pages etc etc… To me I don’t feel like an artist. I may well be more artistic than the average bear, but I don’t dress all in black, nor do I walk about covered in paint/ink/chalk, nor do I wear a beret or act particularly bohemian. (I know that is a fairly stereotypical account of what an artiste is, but it’s a hard image to break inside my own head). I’m also a pretty shallow person (in mind set) I’m not all that concerned with symbolism, reading between the lines, undertones or subtext. I’m… for lack of a better turn of phrase; blunt. Like a grey cinderblock. Perhaps because I have eschewed the preposterousness of pretension I feel like I’m not an artist. I also have very little creative control over the substance of what I produce, except for where the item(s) are for myself. Artistic integrity is a luxury I can’t afford at this stage. Not to say that some things don’t rankle my bones, and make me spitting mad, but my job is to produce what others have asked for, in the format they have asked for it. Perhaps those high level agency types know what it is like to be able to walk away from a project over “creative differences” or “artistic integrity”. I don’t quite have the weight to throw around like that just yet.

Back to my main point, which is, searching for and finding inspiration. A real creative spark. I personally have no formula to follow, no checklist to run down in order to find that spark of life which will turn an average idea into something that really gets people talking, or creates a very visceral response. I am not even all that superstitious, so I don’t have the luck to believe that wearing the same socks, or hat or sitting in the same chair will bring that feeling back. So some times that fabulous little spark finds me, and some times I do what I can without it.

So then, what does searching with your good eye closed mean? I don’t actually try to look at stuff with my eyes closed, that’s preposterous… well unless it was a tactile object meant to be experienced, touched, interacted with, rather than just observed… but you hardly close your eyes and touch a poster (scratch & sniff excepted here). It is a whole lot like reading a page while not paying attention to it. Your brain is reading the items, but the words flow in one eye and out the other (I almost said in one eye and out your mother, but that’s another Soundgarden inside joke). You sort of know you read the words but you didn’t take in all in, you just weren’t all that present while you read it. You were on a sort of distracted auto-pilot. Then you have to go back and actually re-read it again (This idea isn’t new, by any means. Any sociology text book or phycology text will have a far better explanation of this than I will ever put down in words.) But what I mean is, there are a whole lot of times when I am searching for inspiration under time constraints, and rather than soak up the nuances of the research materials I’ve gathered for a project, I’m glossing over them and missing that … that, I don’t know, just that “THING” that jumps out at you, akin to a mental domino in your brain that falls against something else and begins to snowball and before you know it your synapses are firing like mad and a picture is forming in your head, and you just start pouring work out onto the page. That excited rush of ideas crashing over you in waves, some of them so fast and furious you don’t even have the time to get them out onto the page before they have slipped out of reach again, but you have flashes of them still, which you cling to and work off of. If I’m lucky a few of those little snippets are enough to bring the idea back into my conscience thought  as a whole idea and I can take it even further. Other times I’m left with parts of a good idea, but have to really work to unify them, or pull them apart and use them piece-meal elsewhere.

In order to be (oh god, I am going to say this, Ugh) “open” to finding inspiration, I need to really take the time to look, and see what is in front of me. Not just view it absently, but really take the precious time to not watch the clock, not be consumed by the deadline, and just look, think and brainstorm. Sounds really hokey, and wishy-washy I’m sure.  But it happens to me, I get so tied up in the technical details that I don’t take the much needed time to really look and see. I have to just keep reminding myself to come back to it with fresh eyes, and positive outlook.

But, you say, even when I have the time and am really aware of myself and my subject matter, there is no guarantee that I will find the inspiration I seek. Yes, sadly that is true. I have no real insight into helping anyone else with this same issue. But perhaps you are taking a breather right now while reading this. That might be all the help you need.

I always feel just a little bit better after putting things down on paper.

-M