Drawing with Autodesk Sketchpad for iPod

Over the past few weeks I’ve set for myself the task of making a minimum of three paintings a day on my iPod.  Sometimes in the evening, I’ll make as many as 15 – though usually I prefer to keep it down to a handful, before moving into Photoshop on my laptop to do more involved work.
The iPod images have been more of a creative generator than anything else.  I remembered a series of paintings I did several decades ago inspired by the stone figure known as “Venus of Willendorf”.  For the iPod images, I’ve been using Venus. and a Priapic figure (man with erect member) as the guidelines for the images.  Beyond that, they are colorful and playful, not great art perhaps, but interesting
I’ve been working for a long time with automatic images and writing – that is, not having any fixed ideas when I begin an image or a poem – as a way of tapping in to my subconscious, and learning to play with my mind a bit.  The Autodesk Sketchpad app on my iPod is uniquely suited towards automata.
First, it is very easy to use, and furnishes a myriad of excellent brushes, flexible color palettes, and a direct drawing surface.  I bought a cheap combination touch stylus and ball point pen – and with it, drawing on the iPod Touch is just like drawing or painting on paper. 
Today I’m celebrating my 200th iPod/Sketchpad painting since the beginning of 2012.  Hopefully sometime this year I’ll be able to by a larger tablet (both iPads and Kindle Fires have versions of SketchPad – ) so that I can work on slightly more involved images.  For now, I’m enjoying doing the work on my tiny touchscreen, and making images that are the size of postcards.
Its an interesting corollary to the work I’m doing on my MAWMAP project.  There is a lot of flexibility in the digital imaging that I don’t have when I paint with gouache or watercolor. 
Its also been a great boost to my productivity in the manuscript though, because working with digital tools has allowed me to really expand and improve my drawing and painting skills.  I can try things out on my laptop, desktop, or iPod, and then work up the initial studies into fully painted or inked versions in the manuscript. 
Conversely, I’ve been enjoying the face that I can use digital scanning and character recognition to transfer my hand-written entries in the manuscript into Word or Pages documents with moveable type, so that after the initial automatic writing is finished, I can digitize and begin to edit the raw material into finished poems, stories, essays, or meditations, and then rewrite the finished work into the manuscript.  I’m thinking that the next volume will be a lot of images that were worked up in the digital format transferred into hand techniques. 

freewriting

write draw paint dream have a pee walk the sidewalk hike the mountains you look mahvellous into white this time maybe this time is the winner she dreams and the door opens flies scurry in outside the cutting of grass the moving of stones a truck drives by a truck rumbles loudly shakes the foundation a dog barks the page turns the book falls to the floor a dog barks again this toe this thought the miners in the well the symbol of fate the tripod the bunyon looking at trees what if god mocks us what if who is the pope anyway a man a demigod who knows who cares but they say that he travels in a bulletproof vehicle so how divine can he be the dalai lama now there is a religious leader walks around sometimes with an entourage sometimes not we met once he and I and he told me we knew each other in another life there was a door that opened then just for a moment and I had a dream thought that perhaps he was right so long ago no drifting intrusive beliefs about transmigration now no beliefs really but ideas images thoughts in the head that dazzle like thick music that take me places even as I sit still that cause the world to both grow and diminish that let in the world and shut it out that milling sound in the distance what is that a lathe perhaps in the shop next door or a motor running idling in some rude neighbor’s yard perhaps I was thinking just then of the value of the dollar then and now back when you could buy a whole full meal for a dollar or two when a record album was three dollars and a ticket to a movie was fifty cents back when the illusion of time was in place before the reality of time came in and we were in the symphony hall when the singer sang here time becomes space and it was like a magical phrase because we both joined hands and were somehow distanced from time somehow bound together so that even now with you so far away you intrude into this typewritten memory and if there is a small thought of food and if there is a will to power off on a comet they say the time is an element they say that god and time are somehow in cahoots they say that doctrine is firm and unchanging the don’t know that the map is not the territory and when I think the thoughts are fleeting like butterflies they dart in tickle stealing nectar dart out spurious untrustworthy but gentle and fulfilling just the same and you can look there is a place that is full of roses I can’t remember where it is but it was there when I was young and they kept it cool in there so the roses wouldn’t fade to fast in the cool air you could smell them the air so thick with the perfume johnny sometimes stole one for his ladyfriend it think it was ruthie yes that was it we called her crazy ruthie and I hated that she dated him I wanted to date her myself but you didn’t do that to a friend you couldn’t touch a girl if a buddy had aims on her you just didn’t in the city the castle dominated the hill and everything seemed an extension of it but the bridge I can’t remember which was older the bridge that was made by ancient romans without mortar to hold it sheer brilliant masonry a kind of magic sure sure but the cobbles on the city streets and the dinging of the trolleys ding ding a trying to stay abreast of the hippies who terrified us all of them druggies papa said all of them looking to steal an edge from you all of them cole banged on the door he had the knock just two fast raps tap tap you knew it was him and he’d always bound up the steps knock without hesitating first his hand just fell on the door like that back in jersey the door was outside not this stairwell door and the windowed stairwell you could see out but the apartment oh it was not a giant place but it was sufficient you could sleep in your own room and there was that ancient huge porcelain bathtub fill it up dip into it sink in right up to your nose if you wanted to oops dropped the book and had to set it in the sun three days later it was still damp it was a library book too the hobbit that juanita special ordered for me from the USAREUR central library in frankfurt and that was nearly an hour away it was an endless drive in those day that long long hour but thankfully we rarely went there but the time when glenn drove us in the mercedes to see emerson lake and palmer and I got stuck dead center where the lights mirrored blinding me off of palmer’s bass drum but the music so big and travelling I’m saying oh I didn’t know that one was theirs when I heard tarkus and after for the next few weeks scouring the record stores to find the songs we’d heard so we could deconstruct them learn their lessons like that I was thinking as we drove home that there was an undefineable feeling created by the amber-lit towns and villages we sped past at 100 km but it was an intense feeling and wondering what it was the sounds of other cars hissing by us passing as if we were standing still and the endless smooth beauty of the pitch black autobahn no stones no gravel nothing on the road to impede the drive a bit of perfection a bit of precision finally back to heidelberg and phv and san juan hill into my room to sleep and sleep thankfully tomorrow was sunday no school once we all took a bus there to frankfurt to see Eric Clapton another dream of a show evonne elliman standing on the apron of the stage looking like a beam from god’s own light and at the end all the men rushing forward in hope of touching her and she backing away away no I can’t I just can’t and finally the security men guiding her backwards and forcing the would be suitors away clapton who we’d all thought was dead of heroin years ago now he was there again this time to stay blues and reggae I shot the sherrif ringing out tho none of us had ever heard of bob marley yet that came later there was susie who never talked to me but in the teen club always wanted to slow dance with me the day I graduated she came up and kissed me once on the mouth her lips smooth soft and very warm she said good bye that way  two years later I saw her in sierra vista but she pretended she didn’t know me because her husband would beat her otherwise in those days you walked away and didn’t say anything it was their life after all I saw the ghost of heidelberg in that restaurant in chicago but even though I went in and looked at murals of the castle I never did eat there because it cost too much the day I arrived in waukesha it was cold as cold can be now that is the winter break arrival I was dropped by the bus near the dutchland dairy place with my enormous suitcase and I walked to campus by the back way seemed to take a year my fingers frostbitten I had to keep setting the suitcase down because it was too heavy and I had to warm my hands under my coat in the dark arriving at swarthout just as the first flurries of snow began realizing how lucky I was because an hour later we were in the midst of a blizzard but there I was sitting the television lounge barefoot on the headed floor and I think her name was nikki the girl who transferred from another college nestled against me we were all waiting to see who the last couple would be because they’d get to neck there in the lounge and it ended up being me and nikki I was so tired in the morning because we’d stayed all night because she shown me a new thing something with her mouth and I was still dreaming of it and in the morning I could still smell her on my hands and I didn’t want to wash them but feared embarrassment if anyone else smelled it on me who were you with they’d ask and taunt me when I told them because nikki was a scholarship girl they didn’t know that I was a scholarship guy even though I was always shabby clothed even though I didn’t have a car and couldn’t even afford a barber once a week because everyone effected the hippy look back then it was after all 1975 and the war was over none of us had to register for the draft anymore there was no rotc on campus and everyone was vocal in their love of peace and nixon had resigned everything was good nobody knew that reagan was right around the corner we hadn’t had the hostage crisis yet chevy chase every saturday night aping president ford we laughed so hard we pissed ourselves emily latella boy the nose on the gretal said tony I’d like to take her down but that nose is just too be but I had eyes only for magda she was my daydream once I’d pointed her out to tony and said that she was really cute he said no she isn’t so I assumed that he’d tried to lay her but not succeeded piss on what you can’t have he was that kind of guy although we were friends I could never say that he was nice all those people I can see them if I thnk of them clear as if we’d only parted yesterday but I have to summon the memory have to call it up its like that sometimes and the calling is difficult but once I’ve done it there they are clear as if they’d been with me an hour ago there were nights of such cold air you step outside and if you breathe through your mouth forget it your teeth will just shatter you look at the surface of the snow and every now and then there is a puff and a smokey cloud rises here or there like magic crystals and this snow has a crust so thick you can walk on it its not surprising that the eskimos have so many words for snow its all the same thing and yet its not blessings everywhere in the snowy night or on the nights when rain began but the cold wind froze it into glass coating everything so the ground is slick and we can’t walk safely it took nearly an hour to get from swarthout to old main.

Note by the Man I Might Have Been

I've been working on a book for about a year now. More correctly, I have been working on a volume in a collection of books. I always have a volume or two in progress, but this one has had a peculiar focus for me. The volume itself is a luxurious, oversized and leather bound book, with hand marbled paper on the cover, and handmade Amalfi paper, slightly off white with a beautiful laid surface that holds both watercolor and ink nicely. The ink never crawls, and there is no bleed through, even when I work the sheets heavily. The pages are entirely hand written, and hand illustrated. Although early volumes of this project were fairly standard journals - accounts of my day to day life. This latest one is a little different. I remember reading an essay by Camus where he discussed the process of writing. "Everything as it comes!" he said. I started writing with that impulse, writing every thought I could capture, no matter how stupid or insignificant it seemed at the time. This new book has some of that. I have several titles for it. One is "Mind at Work, Mind at Play" and that describes the shifts between free writing and more structured things. One of the other titles is "Notes By the Man I Might Have Been" which are elements written like entries in a normal journal, but as if written by myself on a different time line. They are fanciful, and definitely fiction, a fun way to see what alternative choices in my life might have gained or lost me. Would I have been happier had I married that woman? Would I have been better off had I accepted a record deal with Taang? What if I had become a witch, or followed a different path altogether? What if I'd never gone to Germany? Some of these questions are addressed in a journal written by a very different me. Is it profound in any way? I doubt it. Are there valuable thoughts in it? Some. Does it attempt to teach or even reach deep truths? No. Is if fun to work on? Absolutely! And I find it fun to leaf through. This is not a book to be read and explicated, so much as it is an attempt, simply, to share thoughts. Thoughts are nebulous, confusing, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful. Sometimes they engender trust, sometimes they are full of lies, sometimes they are patterned but just as often they are chaotic. Some of the stories are funny. Some are tragic, or very very sad. Some are even truthful, insofar as distant memory can be truthful.
I've been telling people lately that the book is a playground at its essence. I go there to play games with myself. My hope is that some people in leafing through my book will find it entertaining. What do I want the book to do? Well I certainly hope that it will entertain. Some people may like the paintings. Some may find the writing interesting. Hopefully, some will find the exercise interesting enough that they will create their own! I'd love to see thousands of these kinds of books made in the next century, some on paper, some digital, some in formats and media that hasn't been dreamed up yet. But at base, people sharing thoughts. My particular format has been the book - old style is what the kids say about me. I like the look and the feel of a book, particularly ones like this one that are well made. I love to leaf through volumes, looking at thoughts that others have left there for me. I also love how much a book can change with its setting. It appears one way in daylight, a different way in flourescent light, different still by candlelight. Surround it with gold and ornaments and it can set a spiritual tone. Put it plain on the grass in a meadow and it becomes something altogether different. Thoughts are absorbed as they are read, like somebody eating a light snack. Pop it in, swallow it down, digest what is of worth, shit out the rest.

New Endeavors

New endeavors are always good at the beginning of the new year. I've let this one go a bit late, as January is very nearly over but sometimes the intention has to account for something.