approximately 11" x 8"; ink on paper.
This is the first piece in my 70-part David's Book (AKA The Blue Book) project.
I'm almost sure I've mentioned at some point my reluctance to post any pieces that weren't complete, in fact I'm almost positive I was more direct than that. I can hear myself saying, I would never post anything incomplete. I have a problem revealing anything that's in transition. That's what I like to term anything in the works; in transition. Revealing these things ahead of time feels wrong to me for a lot of reasons. That time, that space of transition is one of extreme... influence... absorption. It's like taking something out of a vacuum. It ruins it. That space is sacred. It's private. It's a communion of sorts. It should be one-on-one till the very end. Anything else would be wrong. It's seeing the bride before the wedding. It's having sex in cage in a zoo. It just wouldn't be right. It's eating a half-baked cake. All of it speaks of spoil and ruin. I don't like it.
Unfortunately for some, being in transition means being in between life and death. That's what being incomplete is. That's what this piece is. I'm no longer working on it and never will so it's in a constant stage of... flux. It's in flux because it wants to be complete and I won't deliver that, I can't. I've posted before about losing the thread to a piece over time. It's having the idea of something at the beginning, the momentum, the energy and then losing it. Sometimes it can just be about time. You forget things over time. And sometimes it's about having the initial spark of that idea snuffed out by another. Maybe it becomes muddied by something larger. It becomes co-opted. So you lose the heart of what it was you started with. And it's not the same as evolving and growing... this is different. This isn't a positive change, at least not for what you have/had at the moment. My language and imagery for this phenomenon is tied to the language and imagery of child birth, or rather, miscarriage. It's having something and losing it. But losing it at exactly the wrong moment. But you hold on and it holds on... and you both wait for it to happen again. You have the fantasy of something, you can see it... it feels so real that you can almost touch it. But that fantasy can never materialize in this plane. You can't reach back into the past and change it. What you hold on to you save for the future, for another plane, another time.
So I've titled this piece Dragon... because the dragon, that concept, was a key instrument in it's making. But it's incomplete so I don't know if it's (something) Dragon or Dragon (something). In it's next incarnation that might be lost altogether. Who knows? And I don't reveal the Dragon... for the sake of doing something new and unexpected. I thought I never would. But I can feel this current, this push to do so.
I'm not one to make portraits. I've never really felt comfortable drawing someone because that would require drawing on so many facets of who they are. How do you cage someone in a single picture? People are far too multi-dimensional for my still images. If I were to make a genuine effort to encapsulate someone I would draw on so many mediums. It would require sound and animation. Color. It would need to be as rich an experience as possible and when it was all done it would still fall short of honoring this hypothetical phantom properly. So when I create a portrait I single something out. Something small. A particular laugh? A wrinkle. A memory. A phrase. Some one thing. And when I have that thing, I drill down further. Narrow my focus. Until it fits. Until I feel it's something I can tackle. I thought I had that with the Dragon... This is a portrait. An aspect of this person's character, someone I know. And what I mentioned before... the current, the push... is the memory of this person whispering. It's how these things sometimes work. They lay in wait, silent, for years and years until they decide to scream to let themselves be known again. The Dragon... is awakening you might say. It's time again. And something about getting it right this time around means acknowledging what went wrong in the past. So that's why I share this today. Not because I want to, but because it demands it of me.
DS333, reconciling.
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