New from several months ago

September 14th

Sept 8th

July 25th

May 24th

May 22nd

The phrase "strangely populated tracts" does not refer mostly to non-white racial groups, nor to foreign-country ethnic groups; my intention is that most people are strange, therefore any city is strangely populated, including Los Angeles. So at the risk of being misunderstood I display this work unmodified. Race is not the main thing I'm thinking of when I mean strange. Nor should it be taken as an offense if I find someone strange...I find most people to be strange. I like the racial/ethnic/cultural diversity of Los Angeles: if I didn't, I would have moved away. I like strangeness as well, hence Surreal art is one of my favorite kinds of art.

Anomalous rainfall

A Fortean phenomenon of the funkier kind.

New work from a few days ago

Nude study, 2017

I drew this with a thick fatty black colored pencil/crayon and I placed a piece of wood underneath to create those wood patterns and textures seen. This one is from 2017, but first published today. Her right forearm is a little too long, but I consider it artistic license/expressionism: it would be difficult to fix that now in any case, because this type of crayon is not much eraseable. I like her ass, her body, and that one breast that can be seen as well. I like how this piece came out.

Nude study

This one's not supposed to be so realistic, it's stylized: if I wanted it more realistic, I would have used a reference till the area where her hips connect to her torso came out anatomically exact, but instead it's a quick freestyle. Note that the camera has caused her to look more short-proportioned than she is in the actual drawing. That's because the paper is long and her lower legs curve away from the camera. To overcome that, I will revise this drawing a bit by increasing the length of her lower legs (beneath the knees), and I may make her left hip (the one on the right in relation to the viewer) more realistic too.

Nude woman study

a new female nude drawing, it's been years since I've posted one: not everybody searches further back on my blog, so I want a new visitor to see at least one of my many nude women. I encourage visitors to search further through my blog though, because I've removed those city-street photographs that were a distraction from my art, and I've also replaced some old artwork pieces of mine with other pieces of mine (new or just not previously posted) that I feel are better

3

May 11th +1

I particularly like this work which, like many, came about by accident: but this time, unusually, I was doodling with a pen on cardboard. Totally original once again because I haven't seen a work like this.

May 11th

This is a work that I did directly in ink in 2019. On May 11th, 2022, I added the sky-blue color touches with a highlighter marker.

Begun in Feb, completed in May

Drawn in February, except for the bouncing rock character, which was added May 8th or May 9th. The bouncing die and jumping jacks were drawn in February, as were the other figures.

Begun in Feb, completed in May

"Wat-baba-loobop", instead of "Wop-baba-loobop". I didn't feel like using the ethnic slur "wop". And I like how "Wat" suggests "What?", a question often asked when thinking about what happened to the world of today.

Drawn in Feb, displayed in May

This one was begun in Feb, then finished in May

This one was begun in February, then I wasn't sure how to complete it, so I left it alone for awhile, and finally returned to it yesterday, May 8th, and completed it.

Also drawn in Feb, displayed in May

This one was also drawn in Feb, and now displayed in May.

Drawn in Feb, displayed in May

This is one of many works I drew in February of 2022. I may ink and color it soon).

Feb 10th and 11th

*************~Some explications, but the work must keep its mysteries intact~*****

I will not fully explain the meaning behind my inclusion of the word "mimosa" in the composition shown above, but primarily/mostly it has to do with the etymological root-meaning of the word, and secondarily as a reference to the plant known as mimosa, a plant whose leaflets fold up closed when they're touched. There is no reference to the drink known as "mimosa" intended, but one may add that if one wishes.

In the newer version, I replaced the place-name/wine-name "Chardonnay" with the Romanian word "vin" meaning "wine", which has the identical form ("vin") in French, both words independently inherited from Latin "vinum" (="wine"). I removed "Chardonnay", a French name for a specific wine, because it sounded too fancy for my intention: it was therefore not usable for this work. I had mentioned "Chardonnay" because I was drinking bottles of Chardonnay wine in February 2022. Fun fact: Chardonnay wine is named after a village called Chardonnay in France, and the village was named so because a lot of thistle grew there: "chardon" is the French word for "thistle", deriving from a Latin word "cardo"/"cardonis"="thistle".

I was not drinking expensive Chardonnay in February 2022: it was in fact some inexpensive bottles of Chardonnay from Napa valley in California that we had bought for a party/event (not at my house) for our guests, and there were several left over (I'd rather not say the name of the inexpensive California wine under discussion here; of course, there are many expensive and sought-after wines that come out of California, but these ones were not one of those). For years I didn't want to drink them, because I prefer to drink finer wine; but eventually, I couldn't resist. They weren't good, but not that bad. I mentioned Chardonnay on that page as an example of how alcoholic beverages are one of the staples that most people use to get through the ups and downs of life.

And I had specifically chosen to mention Chardonnay because that's what I was drinking at the time, and because I knew the etymology of the term, and I like how something seemingly fancy (the term "Chardonnay") comes from something as down-to-earth and ordinary as thistle plants (the seeds of thistle plants are preferred by finches, and other birds eat thistle seeds as well). So my inclusion of the name "Chardonnay" is also meant to evoke the thistle plants, and other spiny weeds, as well as the finches who eat the thistle seeds: the French word for "finch" is "chardonneret", and that word is a reference to how they're often eating thistle seeds (chardon=thistle, as noted above; hence, the word "chardonneret" is formed from "chardon").

The English word "chard" (as in "Swiss chard") derives from French "chardon", which as noted above, is from Latin "cardonis"="thistle". Already in Roman times, "cardo/cardonis" referred not just to the common thistle plants of Europe but also to the spiny cardoon/wild artichoke, and from there to the common artichoke, both of which are in the same family as the thistle; and somehow over time (in post-Roman times) the meaning range/semantic range of the carduus/cardo/cardonis words expanded to include the chard plants as well, which are often used in salads and are similar to lettuce. So via "chard", there's a connection between "Chardonnay" and "salată" (seen in the composition above), which is the Romanian word for "salad", and that word salată is also often used as the word for "lettuce" in Romanian, even though the proper word for "lettuce" in Romanian is "laptuca", from Latin "lactuca"="lettuce". The Latin word "lactuca" is also the source of the English word "lettuce", via French.

In this composition I show drops of water/rainwater dropping from a cloud, and I also mention water: though instead of the English word, I use the French word for water ("eau", deriving from Latin "aqua") and the Romanian word for water ("apă", deriving from Latin "aqua"), and I invoke water to stand also for various beverages, including juices and alcoholic beverages, which are mostly water;---if someone would have preferred that I had used the German word for water, "Wasser", or the Italian, or the Russian, or what not: I will remind such people that I chose to include the French and Romanian words for water and a Greek word for water (see the "hydro" in "hydrogen"), because of my history with Romanian and French and Greek: I'm part Romanian, part Greek, part German, part Russian-Ukrainian, plus the DNA tests show that I also have some French and Italian further back; but even though I have more German ancestry than French, I began learning a lot of French in late 1998, and my Mom learned a lot of French before I was born; and other early memories are of finding books on the French language among the numerous books we had in the apartment where we lived back then. Nor do I think that French is over-used: but just in case it is, I'm also using Romanian and English in this composition; nor do I think that I'm striking the wrong note by using the French word "eau", because for me and for many people the word "eau" evokes memories of all those perfume bottles that Mom had lying about, and those were early childhood instances of seeing the word "eau": and that's one of the main things that I want to tap into: those early memories and associations.

I also mention tobacco (in the French and Romanian form "tabac", and I also use a second Romanian term for tobacco: "tutun"), olive oil and garlic, salată (=salad), nitrogen, hydrogen, mercure (=Mercury/mercury), and you can see those as well as more in the image above.

One of the early Schoolyard Battles

Of Azure

a new original page along with a paragraph of new original surrealistic writing. The paragraph says: "electric fur of carbide-eyed cats in the twilight...as the minutes slide into the nitrogen shadows. Tornado of pigeons. Rain from water-towers of pastry, celestial crumbs nibbled by mercurial mice. Cigarettes of azure."

I have titled this post, "Of Azure". The phrase "carbide-eyed cats" refers to carbide lamps and headlights and so on, also called acetylene lamps (acetylene is derived from carbide). Carbide lights were often used in night-hunting, and probably still are. So the phrase "carbide-eyed cats" is not a Dadaist phrase, because it is a logical analogy. "Electric fur" refers to the fast movement of a cat, plus cat fur sometimes activates static electricity.

Drawn Feb 6th

Another new original page

Drawn Feb 3rd

another original page

Drawn Feb 2nd

another original page

The secret of water and the azure

another new original page

a page of festivity

A new page of more of my original artwork, this one on lined paper.