I've tried to write at different times in the past...I mean really write. I've had no real interest in plots. The idea being to write vignettes that have no connection but are still essential to one another...forming a whole. I don't know that I've had much success with it.
Besides, you never want to tell people you're writing writing. Not in these parts where things haven't changed much since Flannery O'Connor's worried about her own credibility.
"In the South there are more amatuer authors than there are rivers and streams. In almost every hamlet you'll find at least one lady writing Epics in Negro dialect and probably two or three old gentlemen who have impossible historical novels on the way. The woods are full of...writers, and it is the horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them."
Better to paint pictures then.
By the Great Mose T (Moses Tolliver).
the pressure is not the same...not nearly as burdensome or distracting.I paint pictures.
My word! I've never seen that Beefheart clip before. Simply fabulous. Another great painter, of course. Do you have any formal training in 'art'? I really like what I've seen of your work so far. I'm also a very frustrated writer, mainly poetry and prose-poems, and have often fantasized about being able to create some kind of visual art. I'd love to be able to paint like you, Erik.
ReplyDeleteIt is fabulous. It's just one song from a longer segment. Something from an old German TV show...if you follow the embed to Youtube you should be able to find it. If not I'll get the longer link.
DeleteThank you man...I really appreciate that. I have no formal training. In fact I had very bad training (I've written about some of it on another blog and maybe we should bring that one back)...but, I'm not ignorant of art history or entirely ignorant of technique. After all I am really just ripping off paintings I like to make more paintings I like.
Prose-poetry...you are ambitious. Are your efforts available anywhere...mighty curious about that.
P.S. Do you think Panama Jack there is actually playing anything while he's running around in the beginning...I can only hear the slide.
DeleteLord knows!
DeleteThanks for asking about my writing. You can read some of it at this address: http://ragmansscrapbook.blogspot.co.uk/ but haven't posted there for ages. Nobody ever read any of it and perhaps there's a good reason for that! Maybe I'll start putting things there again and push it out into the world. I have no idea if any of it is good, bad or indifferent - it's just my words. Let me know what you think and try no to laugh!
I actually scrambled around and found it after you posted.
DeleteThe gash made an imperceptible line by the surgeon is an image that sticks.
I've only been over a few times...but, as far as I can tell it's good and people should have read it.
Thank you very much, sir. There are quite a few pages on the blog, with a largish number of bits of writing, if you should ever feel like going there again.
DeleteYou're a talented man e.f.
ReplyDeleteI'd buy this. All of it - especially Ms Who-gives-a-fuck-don't-fuck-with-me blue eyeshadow wummin. If buying is any measure of a paintings 'worth'.
Paintings usually intimidate the hell out of me. And Painter Artists scare me the most out of any of the disciplines... so I asked Evan (17 yr old middle child) the family art-talent-wonder-child... According to him: 'Aye.This is guid. The guy's got some talent here, Maw'. His favourite? Headless wrestler. And for what it's worth he thinks he should remain headless.
Apologies for my absence. I've been busy deciding what to do with my grown-up life e.f. - so I've been absent from my own writing. I'll be setting up a business as from August. It's time for me to do something I actually enjoy...
Hope all's well with you and yours.
Yx
Good to see you around.
DeleteWe are well thank you ma'am...and I hope y'all are too.
Tell your boy that option has been seriously considered twice now...as I've removed the head three times and I may just take his advice. Also tell him thanks.
Oh how I wish I could post the entire picture of her...the source of her confidence, and I'm glad that comes through, would be more obvious. I'll wear Martha down. It's hardly unflattering.
Don't be a stranger and best of luck with your plans and schemes. Keep us posted.
Erik, you were born to paint. Glorious :-)
ReplyDeleteDon't give up on the writing either though if you can help it! I know what you mean about it - but painting and writing can sort of complement each other too, I think, exercising different parts of the brain but still they're both about making pictures.
Ha...Martha said the same thing about the complementary nature of painting and writing or story telling.
ReplyDeleteI do appreciate that C...it feels right.
Blogging is writing. But keep the paintings coming, too...
ReplyDeleteYou are right about that ma'am.
DeleteOf course being in Mississippi, which has produced the likes of Faulkner, Richard Wright, Percy Walker, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams and on and on.,.one is peculiarly hesitant to talk about writing...or WRITING if you catch my drift.
There's two issues...one everybody wants to write and two the standards are really outrageous...if you're of a certain mind.
It's really interesting to read Mary Flannery talk about her fear of mediocrity...how shed rather be an imbicile than be mediocre. The South is overrun with writers and guitar pickers.
Still you're right...I do write.
That picture of your kids is so freaking precious. And hilarious.
My education is incomplete; though I am familiar with Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Tennessee Williams I had to look the others up. I get the drift, though. Harper Lee there, surely (though my Geography is rubbish)? Still, I only have to contend with Shakespeare, Dickens, and one or two others. Great writing should inspire, not stifle...
DeleteWell...there are still less than 3 million of us and it's very specific kind of writing which my own concerns naturally fall into. These aren't just people born in the South but people with deep Southern roots like my own. Its all relatively fresh too. I only lived a couple of blocks from her, in the same neighborhood when she died...and the stories of her baby setting a drunk Faulkner in Jackson were the best parts of a visit to, the now sadly closed, Choctaw books. All very inspiring but also very close and crowded. Like deciding to play the blues
DeleteLee is from Monroeville, Alabama...right next door. Of course I was forced to read To Kill a Mockingbiird as a child. I'm just curious about whether she actually wrote it....Dill is actually Truman Capote who was from New Orleans (also right next door) but spent his summers in Alabama.
If you aren't familiar with Eudora Welty or later writers like Larry Brown or Willie Morris you're in for a treat...if you can clear some space.
We're all under the pressure ( even in our thinking) of Shakespeare and Dickens...I've got a great article somewhere comparing the Percieved backwood similarities of Shakespeare's and Faulkner's background.
Are you writing in meter. :) (I'm sticking my tounge out here).
Ultimately your point is the correct one...mine is cowardly but, I have to say the painting has broken something loose that the writing couldn't.
The she and her in the first paragraph is Ms Welty.
Delete