Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl

Art

Not What I Expected Part 3

November 5, 2019by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

Every morning I get up before anyone else, turn on the coffee, turn on the light and play a brutal round of massacre the cockroaches. They come in three sizes and three speeds. The babies, which are like ants but grosser, I can squash with my bear hands and while not slow, it’s easy to get em. The adolescents require a tissue and more focus. The adults used to require a shoe but I can use a tissue now. They are fast as fuck and damn if they aren’t as intelligent as we are. I have found a hand broom useful to sweep them unto the floor which provides a larger field of opportunity for chasing, stomping and squashing. They are not delicate. It’s hard to kill them. I kind of have to go berserk. But every roach killed is a roach that can’t breed. I have come to feel an urgent overwhelming desire to decimate them all and as I get better at killing them I can’t help but wonder who I am becoming.

I know myself as a person who will trap a spider in a plastic cup and free them outside the house. I picked up a june bug wandering over my keyboard with my bare hands and released him on the balcony just a few days ago while in an editing session with a client. I much prefer to live and let live. I respect and revere life. I don’t want to be a killer.

But the roaches totally took over our silverware drawer. They annexed it like Russia annexed Crimea. What happened was we had spotted one too many roaches crawling over the silverware. In your world how many is one too many? It doesn’t have to happen a lot now does it? But, there is also the problem of a small kitchen and few silverware placement options. We only have 3 freaking drawers. The second one is crammed with measuring cups, garlic presses and wine openers. The third has a hand mixer and 500 cookie cutters.

A few years ago I bought myself a nice bamboo silver wear holder. No more beige plastic settling for less for me. Its the little things that make my day and this bamboo organizer really made me happy every time I saw it. The drawer was nice and neat, everything in it’s place and looking sharp. That’s a small but consistent hit of dopamine right there because you get silverware out three or more times a day. So simple and yet so effective.

But not so much with the addition of roaches.

We did all the things. Boric acid everywhere, roach traps, foaming up holes in the wall, sprays, essential oils. Nothing slowed those fuckers down. And ground zero for them was the silverware drawer. That was their hot spot. I did some googling and read about pheromone deposits on wood, gross! I immeditaely washed the heck out of the bamboo (a wood product), the drawer (wooden) and the silverware. But come on, there are only so many times in a row that you will have the motivation to wash all your clean unused silverware and two slow drying wood items. Three times in three days was it for me. Life is too short.

So even though it made me really mad, I let go of the bamboo and replaced it with a horrible grey plastic organizer from Ikea. It had two less compartments and there goes the dopamine releasing tidiness. Oh well! At least we could still have guests over without shame.

Au contraire, mon frère!

That didn’t have one iota of effect. Next steps; Husband took the drawer out, washed and painted it and put a big roach trap smack in the center. Silverware was put into two upright plastic holders like you see at some cafes. It was supposed to be temporary. We waited. Surely that was the end of that, right? No! We are just getting started.

This beautiful clean empty painted drawer became the scene of a macabre and inexplicable cockroach ritual. For reasons that may forever be unknown, roaches would travel far and wide to come here and deposit a limb. Over the course of a month, the drawer filled with roach legs. I kid you not. Not roach corpses, but limbs. I mean, how does that work? WTF?!

In good news, we never see them on the kitchen table where the silverware now lives. More drastic measures are being taken. It’s getting handled. But one part of the mission is my morning massacre.

Not what I expected. But what I got.

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4 1/2 years ago I wrote a blogpost called Not What I Expected. My next post will explain how it is that this essay, Part 3, got published before Part 2 which is still in draft form. So stay tuned for that bit of intrigue!

https://eaglecrowowl.com/2015/03/31/not-what-i-expected/

Art, Creative Process

Waiting For It

September 24, 2019by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

Any given artwork is made over a period of time. The gestation period is inherently uncertain, a series of conscious decisions by the artist and other contributing factors outside the artist’s intentions. A marker could be losing ink and create a more textured line than intended, the artist finds them self either annoyed and starting over or pleasantly surprised and continuing. At each moment, an outcome and a reaction, a constant stream of decisions. The more chaos in the process, the less certain the outcome. If you paint in oil, make lots of preliminary sketches and perfect a technique, you may get a painting pretty close to the one imagined before the process began. But even then happy and sad deviations will occur. We don’t have the power to make our thoughts material in an instant with no mechanical intervention.

As someone who has very few concrete ideas of what I want before I start, I don’t aim for an outcome. I am much more interested in the moment by moment reaction to each new iteration. A very fast series of yes(es) and no(s) to the most recent addition. My whole goal is to not know what I will get, to work so fast and with so much randomness that I can’t possibly guess what the result will be. It’s not magic but a very good approximation, I think, and feels exciting.

The process of making a sidewalk face ranges from 5 to 15 minutes, about the time it takes for Decaf’s whimper to start getting annoying. So the evolution of the face is fast. Occasionally, sensing I could do better or needing supplies not locatable in the immediate vicinity, I go back to a spot and do a second version, my way of sketching and perfecting.

Most faces dissipate before I encounter them again. Wind or feet knock all the elements out of alignment and the character devolves back to a gunky stain or evaporates or decomposes or whatever.

But! There is one type of Sidewalk Face that does take time to fully develop, the faces I make in living matter. Aliveness and growth are additional chaos elements. I start the ball rolling and then wait to see the result, natural biological forces take over the creative process. It’s a collab with mother nature. How can it get more fun that that?!

Want to see what happened to him after he fell off? Check it out!

Art, Creative Process

When Grossness Is Your Medium You Can Make Art Anywhere

August 28, 2019by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

Over the past 3 years that I’ve been making faces in my neighborhood, I’ve learned a lot of very specific stuff. I learn it the same way wild animals learn stuff, I just walk around a lot and notice everything. So here’s a thing I’ve learned, the grossest things are in the the alley. Furthermore, the alley just south of Melrose is considerably grosser than the one just north of Beverly. Aren’t you glad you know that?

Most likely if you were to utilize this piece of intel, you would use it avoid them. What are they good for anyway? For me, needing to find and harvest all my art supplies, they are treasure troves. So much crap deposited densely in all directions. They are also wide and not well traveled. It’s nice to have some space.

Somebody recently hauled their refrigerator here and left it. It can’t have been easy to move, was its former residence the room behind that barred up window?

It’s nasty for sure buy not spectacularly so. Both the dogs and I had to check it out.

There is a not inconsiderable amount of gunk at the bottom. What’s it from? We can speculate but luckily we can’t know. I know you were wondering, is it still sticky and pliable or calcified into a permanent crust. It’s sticky. Time to grab a makeshift drawing implement (rusted nail, paper clip, bobby pin, thin but dense stick). Let’s do this!

Looks like we also need some white stuff and some eyeball definers. No prob. Here are two thin seed pods and a funky leaf. Good to go captain.

As much as possible I like to work with what is already happening such as that adorable left cheek and inquisitive mouth. It’s easy to know where to start. There is always something more something than something else.

I have learned that I can make art anywhere and I don’t have to know a thing about it before I start. It’s always a surprise. In a world that often makes me worry and fret, I like a nice surprise. Especially ones that upend my preconceived notions. Gunk is not just the result of past mistakes, it also has a future.

See Mr. Gunk Face in motion below. The dogs really dig the alley.