The Boy Who Loves Skeletons

The money I’ve pissed away over two decades on bootleg recordings of the Beatles, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and, wait for it … Noam Chomsky!, is somewhat embarrassing, especially given the fact that most of those recordings have found legitimate release in recent years by Apple, Columbia, Reprise and Alternative Tentacles Records.  Like looking through the sketchbooks of Picasso and Rodin and Cezanne, I’ve always thrilled to seeing the exposed anatomy, the real blood and guts – the gore! – of a deeply creative and/or intellectual exercise, like finding the vulnerability and the humanity that typically resides at the center of all art and philosophy before it is forever buried beneath the perfumed skin and fancy clothes and pretense of final publication, its hair combed and sprayed, its tits airbrushed into soulless plasticity.

Perhaps it is merely a fascination with how recipes, typically comprised of a number of elemental and unremarkable ingredients, can sometimes be expertly combined to create something uniquely moving and soul-stirring.

Whatever it is I’m sure it’s a form of voyeurism, this need to ogle the intimacy exhibited between a cluster of uninhibited, often well-endowed, brain cells freely procreating in private these exquisite melodies and awesome notions of truth and beauty.  Free from the fear of public ridicule, we are all members of a more honest and passionate species; ask any diary or god or sunset bombarded by prayer and inundated with hopeful pleading.  That said, I do maintain the notion that all art, like all politics and prejudices, may sometimes require some measure of access to the deductive reasoning responsible for leading an artist to do what he or she does – not to dismiss the gleeful experience of sometimes deliberately remaining dumb to the sequence of events that procure a specific artistic or intellectual outcome.  It might be true, for example, that one’s purposeful avoidance of botany may have some positive effect on how one is able to experience the beauty of a flower as an inexplicable miracle, while ignoring the slaughter of any number of hoofed and horned beasts for the creation of a single hot dog might contribute to making us more existential sinners than saints.

At any rate, I’m working on a book, sort of a graphic memoir, and have found myself somewhat reluctant to bury my artwork with text.  Outfitted with words, the skeletons that I create to help move my narrative forward become vain, defined by the fashion of the moment, and open to the contempt of those that may now or someday prefer contrary words and hipper outfits.  For somebody who loves to draw and paint, who revels in the boundless interpretation of a captionless picture, adding the rigidity of an alphabet to an otherwise liquid soup is akin to yammering over an orgasm.  Shut.  Up.

Here are a handful of naked pages: