two sets from my small square zine comprised of ten pairs of drawings. i wanted to draw in a simple way. black and white, different styles for each visual couplet, no funny business.

posting at 3:37 am. insomnia. i think i can’t sleep and feel so thirsty because i am all dried up from crying so much today! i cried all throughout WAR HORSE (the puppet play, not the shitty looking movie), and then i cried reading THE CHILDREN’S BOOK by a.s. byatt. it’s not even one of her better books! but one character seemed so familiar to me that i hoped he’d make it out of the story alive; of course he didn’t, and of course his mother loved him more in his passing. why does it seem easier to love someone in death than in life? lack of foresight, cowardice, selfishness when it comes to the living? i don’t want to believe that. maybe it is that memories transform under the high pressure of grief. like carbon becoming diamond. you start condensing all your memories into this one hard ball of pain that you keep turning over and over in your mind, rolling it in the palm of your reason, eroding it with your ceaseless handling until all the rough patches you shared together have become a single shiny surface. that is the small part of a person you own. you can’t ever own a whole person, know one entirely in all his infinite facets; but you can hold this gem of a person. and depending on how you hold it: can be a lens or a prism, can cast a shadow, can be a mirror in which you may study and learn about yourself.
i just remember a conversation from long ago.
someone told me about buddhist monks cleansed in fire after death. skin, hair, bones, all gone. but in the ashes are stones. sometimes just one stone, sometimes a few tiny ones, some clear, some colored, some shiny. so i think loved and loving people leave many stones in many individuals’ memories as some monks leave their stones in ash. when i go i will not make any stones, instead i will make a little soil to be food for flowers; that is how i want to go… and that is how i will go to sleep now, imagining myself dreaming in a field of flowers.

wrote a ghost story on post-it-notes tonight on the el train back to gravesend and wished butoh performances were not so rare. so here’s a photographic memento of the night i saw hoichi the earless. such a memorable performance, the stark stage occupied by a lute player, a singer with her biwa, and one dancer. i could’ve done without the lute player, because the minimalism was compelling, superior to the spectacle of opera (though i enjoy opera). a good story requires only a strong voice to sustain it. embellishments and special effects are easily dismissed as vanity and gimmicks.

i’m always wishing for foggy nights like this. love the way the water molecules transmit (transmute? translate?) the light, expanding the fields of color. definitely thought of dan flavin’s work (his atmospheric sketches + neon installations = atmospheric fog + neon street lights) as a study in meteorology and light. but i’ve been thinking about flavin a lot since i saw an exhibition of his drawings at the morgan library. it was the most thoughtfully curated and surprising show i’ve seen in ages. i expected his clean, simple lighting plans, but his loose sketching style? nope. the way he rendered an architectural or human form in a few wild smudges? nope. but then i thought i should not be so surprised since it’s apparent in both his installations and his sketches: he was a man who understands the value of a mark. no wonder that calligrams and the works of hokusai interested him.

(or maybe it’s because hokusai is the only “old” asian artist westerners seem to know… kind of strange since hokusai was inspired by western art himself? rinse, recycle, repeat?)

anyway i can only dream of drawing like that. and here are my drawings to end the post. charcoal sketches drawn from dioramas at amnh… including my failed moose battle drawing, i’m forever bitter at my failure. the last three sketches are exercises in “dressing” skeletons. i love sketching from skeletons! better than drawing from bloated furballs. loving the mechanical and somehow musical structure, i can’t help but perceive the skeleton as visualization of piano music… maybe something to do with the ivory keys and the way the joints are like high notes? i have no idea. or i have ideas but they make no sense.