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Paloodle Doodle (illustrations)

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This is a mixed media piece from ages ago titled after the hymn, “I’ll Fly Away“. It’s a song that takes me back to sitting on my grandmama’s roof, listening to the people singing in the church down the street. You can take the girl from the South to the West, but she drags herself behind her.

This is another old mixed media piece, titled “Headache.” This was done soon after I was hit by a drunk driver just outside downtown Denver. That’s when I got my frontal lobe injury. For months, I tied a bandana around my head because it felt like my head was trying to split in two.

This was a commissioned portrait done in acrylics. I thought I was going to pay my bills doing this sort of things but my life crumbled from under me – I lost my relationship, my job, and my home in less than a month. I let some other people who commissioned me down, something that truly guts me, and life, as it’s wont to do, took another turn.

This work was done in acrylics. It was commissioned a long time after the one above by a woman who, among other gifts, walks through life restoring people’s faith in themselves. I began to fall in love with landscapes around this time. I painted this from a photo I took when I went to visit my (now departed) Dad in South Carolina and fell into a ditch. Yes really. It’s titled “Ditch Weed/As I Lay Dying”. That title’s a tribute to William Faulkner. Obviously, I didn’t die. Or if I’m undead now, I didn’t get the gift of not aging.

This is a poor photo but I like this watercolor too much not to share. My oldest son wanted a Star Wars party when he turned six, and boy howdy, we did it up. But Star Wars posters were stupid expensive at the time, so I painted my second favorite ‘droid (my favorite is Chopper, from Rebels) and Chewbacca for a game of “pin the medal on the Wookiee” (sadly, no one commented on this much needed ret-con of the Throne Room scene). This was actually painted some years before I fell in the ditch (above). Timeline schmineline.

This is a watercolor I painted for my long-time friend Kent Huffnagle when he was in the hospital, soon before he died. His wife had asked his friends to send him art that we had made. That’s his cat Bozo who wandered away from home at 26-years old (way back when we were young and foolish and yes, his cat really lived to be that old). Kent always said that Bozo never died – he just went on walk-about. I didn’t mean for Kent to follow Bozo through that window. My kids were too young to be left alone (and Darth Spouse is always somewhere else with work) so I wasn’t able to make it to any of Kent’s memorials. I don’t really regret that. I regret that I couldn’t visit him in the hospital in Los Angeles. But I was sitting in a hospital in Denver with my youngest – week after week after week. It was a sad and scary time. Kent is gone, but my baby is 16 years old now, and that’s not nothing.

I’m going to leave this quasi-portfolio here for now. This is an ink drawing, probably done for some Inktober, probably done with a regular writing pen. I often doodle mice on adventures, but I haven’t written any stories to go along with them.