I’ve been drawing my cat Nekko at least once daily for a month now. Why? She’s cute (of course! She’s a cat!) and I enjoy drawing people and things that I love. She is definitely people I love and of course, she’s cute. (Did I mention Nekko is my cat?) Here’s the latest of her sleeping on the Bmore Art magazine I was trying to read.
In those hills
In fact
The yak
If put in a sack
Knows how to quack
It’s just a simple
fact
– written in honor of Ogden Nash and Jack Prelutsky
It’s fun to get out and experiment. Today I went to the zoo to sketch whatever animals I could find. The pelicans were standing around after eating, the bear dug itself a nest and fell asleep. And just as I was drawing a profile of the elephant, she turned her back to me and sauntered off.
I’ve kept notebooks to write ideas, scribble in, and well…scribble more in. Keeping them handy has helped me create my poems, stories, and art. Looking through my old notebooks is like going back in time and discovering who I was. Here’s a few drawings from the past year.
Trigger Warning: I draw my cat a lot. Cuteness overload may occur.
Placid waves
wash warm
Over toes, knees,
belly to breasts.
Drink in sun.
Float
cotton-candy clouds
framing
rose,
lemon,
sapphire
sky.
Pale silver sky
reflects on black iron.
Fire escape raindrops
slowly illuminate
this visceral world.
Birds’ babble,
laughter
rises with mist
from the street below.
I smile and
close my eyes
in calm satisfaction.
I lie still
between soft, worn
cotton sheets,
above spring verdant trees,
mahogany branches,
as lemon glimmers
among
sapphire clouds.
I know the secret
of tiny mosaics
and that
magical
pink metal
laundry box
in the bathroom.
The fire escape ladder,
is my tree house
framed by wet-dark branches
and cobalt curtains.
The rain-bejeweled
fire escape
will take me
directly
to heaven.
I have lived in artistic communities since early adulthood. I love the energy, feel it even when I am alone in my room. There is affirmation of the value of creating within an art community. There is knowledge that process is important. The energy in a community where people participate in the creative process helps generate ideas, even as we disagree about the relative value of specific pieces or particular forms of art.
Art for me has been a means of keeping an even keel in a crazy world.
Often when I create, whether a poem, a painting or a song, I don’t fully understand the symbols and juxtapositions of ideas until much later. Art is not a way to recreate reality, but distorts reality in order to fully portray it, like a curved glass will focus the sun’s rays on a single point, and result in a fire.
photo of Baltimore rapper Wealth making a music video in Savage, Maryland.
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