But that has absolutely nothing to do with this story.

So, I was planning to put some money into a card, as one does, when I thought that at the very least I could make a pretty little card. Mulling this over, my eyes fell on an object I had picked up the day before, at a rummage sale.  It was a silly thing that I will probably never use, but for some reason, I couldn’t resist.  Actually, it was two related objects.  One was a scraper that scrapes crumbs from your table cloth into the second, which is a small dustpan-type device.  They use them in fancy-schmancy restaurants sometimes, or in restaurants aspiring to be fancy schmancy.

Both parts were silvery and were embossed with images of birds and blossoms.  Perfect! I thought.  I will copy the picture from the dustpan part. Blossoms and birds.  There was a branch with a funky striated pattern that looked like it would be fun to draw.  I would make the whole thing my own as I went along, and it would be a little bit cheesy, but fun and sweet and romantic. Two birds in a tree.  I would write, “Come live with me and be my love,” the first line of the famous poem, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, by Christopher Marlowe.

It was going to be such a lark (ha!) to just re-draw someone else’s picture.  I wouldn’t need to think about composition or research accurate bird or blossom features, I could just play with the drawing.  I thought of how musicians play each other’s songs all the time.  They call it a “cover.”
Back in the 1980’s, the amazing jazz musician Miles Davis recorded a cover of the Cyndi Lauper song, Time after Time.  An acquaintance of mine was appalled that this great innovator was stooping to play a pop song.

“Maybe he just wants to play a pretty song,” I said.  “What’s wrong with that?”

So that’s what I was going to do: Play a pretty song, draw a pretty picture.  “Ode to a Dust Pan.”  Me and Miles.

Then I noticed the third bird.  The two birds on the branch weren’t looking at each other, they were looking at a third bird who was flying toward them.  Now the caption would have to be something like, “Quick!  Hide in the closet!” or, “Don’t look now, but here comes Ethel.”

Not so auspicious for a wedding.

I thought for a few minutes, then I instructed the middle bird to say, “Oh, look here comes your sweetie.  I’ll just be on my way then,” and fly away.

For a moment, there seemed to be a hole in the composition.  But it was nothing a few extra blossoms couldn’t take care of.

He remembered that story about a pottery maker’s apprentice, in China or Korea or someplace like that, who spent years doing the most menial, repetitive tasks before he was allowed to even handle the clay.  There was another one about a kitemaker’s apprentice.  So this could be that part of having a job.  What awesome and noble skill it could lead to remained a mystery.  Dylan had only been hauling and unloading boxes of groceries for  three weeks and it already felt like a lifetime.  He was only a little ways into today’s shift, and the remaining hours stretched before him, an endless desert.  With a little lunch oasis.  The lame music oozing out of the speakers was slowly turning him into an automaton.  He didn’t realize he had come to a complete standstill until an older lady pushed her cart into his aisle.  Not knowing how long he had been standing there, he turned and busied himself with the closest thing to hand.  He diligently moved the Uncle Ben’s Rice boxes forward and backward by fractions of inches so they all lined up.  Focusing intently, as if it mattered.  He became the shelf-stocker’s apprentice, displaying his craft.

“Don’t worry,” the lady said.  “You’re not busted.  I just need some tomato paste.”

“It’s right there,” said Dylan, pointing, in another impressive show of expertise.

“I know,” she smiled.  “But thanks.”

She took a couple of cans, put them in her cart and moved on.  He looked down at his sneakers to remind himself that he had a life.  Then he started in on the soup shelf.

(Let me interrupt my story here to tell you that drawing these little pictures of Lucky created in me a mad urge to drop everything I am doing and make a little animated movie of Lucky walking.  This would be a lot of fun, I think.  It would also be the opposite of what I am trying to do in this blog, which is to try things out in a relatively short-term way, since I would have to learn some new animation skills.  Which I do want to do. But not today.)

We were nearly there when I saw, in the alley ahead of us, a cactus in a metal half-barrel on wheels.  There was another tub on wheels, too, with another kind of plant, a lavender.  But this is northern Michigan.  We have lavender.  The cactus was the intriguing one.  It was not one of those tiny ones you get in a souvenir shop.  It was sizeable.  The two tubs were just outside the open doors of a big garage.  We stopped to look, and their owner came out of the garage.

“Do you like my cactus?” he asked.  He told us it was a “something-something cactus.” (Actually, he said “Nopales.” I didn’t quite catch it at the time, but I looked it up later.)  He said it was the kind of cactus they make cactus tacos out of.

“I didn’t know they made cactus tacos!” I said.

He said they also make CACTUS SMOOTHIES.  Is that an oxymoron, or a paradox, or what?!

Here are two pictures:

The first has just the cactus and the lavender in their tubs.  The second has Lucky in the foreground, looking at the cactus with interest.  When you put something, a figure or an object, in the foreground of a picture this way, it is called “repoussoir.” It’s from a French word that means “to push;” putting this thing in the foreground pushes back the rest of the picture and makes us experience the space in a different way.  If it is a person (or a dog), it also can create a little bit of a story.  And if we follow the line of sight of the dog, which we do without realizing it, that leads us into the heart of the action.

Aside from French words about the composition of pictures, my husband, Bill, says, “Pictures are always more interesting if there is a person (or a dog) in them.”  What do you think?

And one more picture:  I don’t think this is what cactus tacos really look like. But it’s the picture that popped into my mind when Nick said it.

"deus"

"machina"

Long, long ago, on one of our first dates, Bill drove me to the dead end of a dirt road to show me a parcel of land he had just purchased.  For the same monthly payments that rented me one-third of an apartment in Boston, he was buying twenty-five acres of rural northern Michigan.  He was going to grow Christmas trees there.  The hills all around wore the first green fuzz of early spring and birds chirped. We hiked up the hill in the middle and talked about whether a house should go there, or down by the road.

It started to rain.  Then it started to pour.  We scrambled down the hillside and bolted across the field to the van and got inside.  As the rain settled into an all day soaker, we decided to leave.  But we couldn’t.  The ground must have been close to saturation when we drove onto it, and now our tires went spinning in the mud.

There was a shovel, and there were some boards, in the back of the van.  We tried shoveling and jamming the boards behind the tires.  Several times.  To no avail.  We tried to pull forward, but we only spun deeper, right up to the axles.  Along with the rain, the chilly day crossed over into cold.  We were wet.  We were far away from anywhere, and cell phones hadn’t been invented yet. We sat in the van and wondered what to do next.  We decided to try once more.  Stepping out of the van, we heard the rumble of an engine.  It seemed to be coming closer.  Who could it be, at the end of this long, dead end road?

“Maybe it’s God,” I joked.  Half hoping it might be.

A county road commission truck came down over the hill.  The driver was a salt-of-the-earth type man with very thick glasses.  We waved him down.  He hooked a chain to our van and pulled us out of the mud.

“Deus ex machina” is a term for a plot device that solves an unsolvable problem by bringing some completely new event or character out of nowhere to save the day.  The phrase means “god out of the machine,” and goes back to Greek tragedies when gods would be lowered onto the stage from a crane, or raised up through a trap door, to set things right and end the play.  It’s considered (by some? by everyone? I don’t really know) a sloppy storytelling technique.

But sometimes, it’s exactly how things happen.  Our “deus” was an old Polish guy, and the “machina” was a big orange truck.

While we were away, two feet of heavy wet spring snow had fallen.  The power had been knocked out; the whole town was in darkness.  Except that a three-quarter moon shone down from the cold clear sky and the snow-whomped earth shone back, the way it must have in days of old, before we got electrified.  The snow-laden branches formed lumpy, dimly sparkling walls of white. It was pretty magical.

I shivered in my thin jacket.  My sneakers got soaked and my toes got cold.  Which made me think (while my thoughts were in those olden days) of Valley Forge.  All those men in too-thin coats and inadequate footwear.  For just a moment I thought I could imagine, if I multiplied the thinness of my jacket, the coldness and wetness of my feet, and the duration of my walk by a billion or so, what that was like.

“He looks so jolly,” I said to my mom.  We were looking through a small heap of old photos that I hadn’t seen before.

“I was always a little afraid of him,” I said.

“He seemed so . . . gruff.”

I was seven years old, still a little girl, when my grandfather died.  He had battled emphysema. That would probably make anyone gruff.

“He was funny as all heck,” my mother said.

We came across a letter he had written to his brother Fred when both of them were ill.  Ten days after writing the letter, my grandfather died. Six weeks more and his brother followed him.

Still, the letter was funny.

My mom had almost thrown it away.  It had been ripped into pieces, then taped back together.

My grandfather wrote that he had lost twenty-five pounds.  “I have a lot of unemployed skin,” he said.  “Some days I look in the mirror and think I am shaving the Holy Ghost.”

“The tune I have been humming is, ‘Yes sir, asthma baby!’”

And so on.

I had heard stories about my grandfather’s principles, his self-discipline, his inventiveness.  But I didn’t know about this side of him.

A couple of pictures and a handful of words.  That’s all it takes to change an idea.  It may be that my idea of who my grandfather was, of where and who I came from, is no more accurate than the one I had before.  I have a tendency to make things up.  But I feel like I just met someone I like, and – bonus — he’s related to me.

(I felt the same way about these two ladies: two of my great-grandmothers.)

And yet, here I am, writing and illustrating books when my formal training is in fine arts: drawing and printmaking.  Related, but not identical.  There are plenty of times when I think I need to go back to school, to learn all that stuff I missed, the stuff everyone else in my field already knows.

So last November, when I came across a small book called Cartooning, Philosophy and Practice, by the cartoon artist Ivan Brunetti, I snapped it up.  It turned out to be a “classroom in a book,” a 15-week course in telling stories with pictures.

I calculated that I would work my way through the book and have lots of new skills by February 24.  Which is tomorrow.

So far, I have done 2 of the exercises.  I got distracted.  By good stuff: I am in the middle of writing 2 stories.  And those first exercises, which involve drawing a series of subjects in time periods from 3-4 minutes down to 5 seconds, and then a whole series of 5-10 second drawings, led indirectly to this blog, where I am going to try to regularly share drawings that I complete in 1-2 hours.  For me, that is superfast.  I think it will be challenging, stimulating and fun.

To quote Mr. Brunetti out of context, “. . . when we really have too little time to think about the drawing, we get closer to the ‘idea’ or essence of the thing being drawn.”

How the moon looked that night

Will I get back to the 15-week course?  I don’t know yet.  I kind of hope so.  Maybe it will be the diploma from the Wizard of Oz that I have been missing.

At one point, a friendly local bookstore owner suggested that setting up an easel and drawing was a tried-and-true approach.

“Oh, I can’t do that,” I said.  “I’m way too slow.”

Which is generally true.  A drawing like this (my grandmother planting beans) can take me about an hour.

But I think speed isn’t really the issue.  A staple of figure-drawing classes is the “gesture drawing,” where students try to connect with the essence of a pose in as little as 5 seconds.  I always loved doing this.  I remember vaguely (and inaccurately?) hearing that a good draftsman can draw a man falling from a building before he hits the ground. And sometimes I find that a scribble I put down has a satisfying rightness to it.

I have watched Chris Raschka (recently announced winner of this year’s Caldecott Medal) draw for an audience. His drawings were quick, fluid and wonderful, and he was very funny, telling a story as he drew. I think this is a specific genre and skill: Performance Drawing. I think its opposite isn’t necessarily Slow Drawing, but instead, Exploratory Drawing. Which I’m sure Chris R. does plenty of, too.

I don’t have a desire to Performance Draw.

But I do think I could stand to shake myself up a little.  Which might mean picking up some speed.

More on this topic to come. . .

Experimental Forest

Linear State Park

I don’t even want to try to draw the pictures that begin to form in my mind.  I like to keep the possibilities open.