Rubies in Crystal: Ithwark (what happened to the Sunday self-portrait)

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Ithwark (what happened to the Sunday self-portrait)

The Sunday self-portrait did not happen. Firstly, I forgot about it. When I remembered late afternoon and sat before my sleeping computer screen to draw, I couldn't see much of anything. Some dim face. The late sun coming in the window didn't help; nor did a small reading lamp fixed on the mug. So I went with indistinct. Using mostly a brush and ink, I fashioned a face whose first lines were based on what I could see of mine. But then I stopped looking at the image in the turned-off screen and the brush painting went off somewhere else. I rubbed the ink around with water sometimes and used a dip pen for a bit before deciding less is more and photographed it balanced on a chair in the remaining dying sun.

It's been finished digitally for this blog post - some zoom, a little smudging, a bit of old photo, and so on. I may keep working on the original and show that later on too.

Then I went scouring for some writing and found some of the crazy text I'm working on. But it needed an appropriate font (something you could never use in a business letter, for instance). I went searching for some free add-on fonts to get this particular one. It's called Slabtag. I like it with the drawing and the writing (which is meant to be hard to impossible to read).

I'm calling it Ithwark. A made-up word, the kind that come when you are busy and try to make mental note of so you don't forget but of course you forget though you made a little mind puzzle for the phrase and through that puzzle you find the words that beckoned. What writers go through. The norm. Words and phrases swim to our surfaces or are dropped by passing angels and we are expected to remember until we can jot them down. Since they are like dreams which tend to disappear easily, it's not easy to do this. So we have to use other mental tricks to enable recall. At least, I do. It's mental mental acrobatics. Don't ask.

Anyway, once you write them down the ones behind them come too - like the tail of a kite. Or the rest of the thread on the spool. Or a pool of word genes who are all connected in DNA links.