Yee-haw! The flying saucers are excited!
“The Red Saucer “oil on canvas, Sept, 2018, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.
Just finished this painting this week, it took about four sessions—when you use oil instead of acrylic paint, you have to go a little slower, giving the coats some time to dry. I take a deep, atavistic, satisfaction in painting flying saucers. No real reason. It’s like Wassily Kandinsky with his squiggles , or Larry Poons with his dots, or Jean Miro with his hairy ovals.
I laid on a about seven layers of paint for that red saucer’s rim, giving him a Kustom Kolor hot rod sheen. And that orb…is it a sun or a planet? The saucers are interested in it. Maybe it’s their home.
But, wait, what I want to tell you what these wise, living saucers are excited about !
My new novel, Return to the Hollow Earth, which inevitably has a few living saucers among its pullulating and thoroughly fabuloso cast of characters. Visit the book page to see extensive details and buy links. Or just go get the Kindle book on Amazon right now!
I’m still chuckling to myself about some of the bits I put into the new novel. That Eddie Poe!
Writing Return to the Hollow Earth , running a Kickstarter to fund it, and publishing it along with a new edition of my older The Hollow Earth —it’s been quite a push.
I feel like I’m emerging from that tunnel in Fellini’s movie 8½.
And arriving in 2018 San Francisco/Santa Cruz/Los Gatos, greatly changed.
I’ve been decompressing by wading up a long , isolated creek near our house. I walk in the water, on smooth stones, wearing sandals. I never see anyone else, but there are some graffiti. This pompadoured surfer dude is called Naeve. A naive knave? I like that he only has one eye, and that he always looks the same.
Signs of a skattered human tribe, kind of a post-WWIII vibe.
The scraps of nature are like signs from the majestic woomo sea cucumbers of the Hollow Earth.
There’s this one fallen tree I like a lot. Kind of magical, the light there. I painted it, and spent quite a long time on the painting.
“Up the Creek,” acrylic on canvas, August, 2018, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.
My old artist friend Barry Feldman had recently remarked to me that I should paint what he considers to be “real” pictures, that is, landscapes with no fantastic critters. I was annoyed by this, but I was in fact goaded into doing a pure landscape. And I’m forever intrigued and challenged by the shapes of running water.
Despite Barry’s injunction, there is a slight possibility that the pair of rocks near the base of the log are in fact a stone UFO. You never know.
Before I relapsed back into my full-on saucer-paintings mode, I did another somewhat realistic painting of the creek. I combined some images I’d seen.
The creek is, in a way, so abstract looking. Like this bi-color zone photo here.
And I saw this one-clawed crawfish kind of threatening me, or waving to me. He reminded me of my old friend Greg Gibson. “Hi Greg,” I said.
“Standing in the Stream,” acrylic on canvas, August, 2018, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.
So I put those two together, starting out with swirls that were meant to represent the flows of the water, and the ripples on top.
In the Kingdom of Puf and Naeve.
Not that I’m high on pot. High on sensations and ideas. I recently read this book by Carlo Rovelli, Reality is Not What It Seems. He has a crazy rap about quantized space and time. And I’m looking forward to reading his new pop-sci book, The Order of Time. By the way, here’s a short semi-techincal article of his free online, “Space and time in Loop Quantum Gravity.”
So what does he say about time? Well, the world is made of chunks of space, each with some associated “volume” but you can’t subdivide them. They’re connected via links that represent their shared surface areas. And time is links between events. But the links aren’t sharp…the image I came away with is that my memories of my past are a fairly accurate approximation of what physical time is like. If two events remind me of each other, they have a “temporal” link.
There’s no master time, no overall flow. Just this heap of events…or perceptions…or thoughts…or sensations. And the way we associatively piece together our hoards is pretty much what real time is like. We create time and it creates us…if that means anything. Scraps of imagery in the fog. Greg and the crawfish. With Robert Plant’s “Stairway to Heaven” solo playing. High on life, man!
The stone splash of my glance, the minnow darts of my impressions.
Those primeval playmates space and time.
Go get yourself some of that Hollow Earth, baby!