Art Remnants

So my ex-husband had a couple of boxes of my stuff and a lot of old canvases–I offered to pick them up a few times, but what with one thing and another, it wasn’t until this last weekend that he had them ready to go.*

Honestly, I didn’t want most of it, and it went off to the dump. When I moved out, I stripped down to essentials, and I took all of those. But there were one or two things I wanted, like a fish leather mask my father got me, and a truly awesome statue of Digger, and some miscellaneous usable chunks of board, and some old art of various provenance that I’ll try to get photographed and posted here, in case anybody wants it.

There was also a box of old sketchbooks.

“Good lord,” I said, when I saw it, “what do I want with those? A reminder of how bad my art was?”

“You’ll want them,” said James, loading the box into my car. (It was far too heavy for me to lift.)

I came home, and Kevin came out to help me unload. “We can probably dump these straight in the trash…” I said.

“Are you nuts? You’ll want them!” said Kevin, and brought them inside.

Sigh. I know when I’m beat.

I haven’t cracked the main box, but there were a couple of loose ones in with the rest of the stuff, and going through them was actually much more entertaining than I expected. I always forget that I don’t really draw in my sketchbooks, I generally just do rough thumbnails of ideas, working out some of the composition, and scribble down phrases to go with them. So my sketchbooks were full of roughs that I recognized as later paintings, as well as more obscure  things like “Ninja Bob, Master of the Rubber Chicken!” “Five sardines doing the Indian Rope trick”  a whole bunch of Gearworld thumbnails, mammoth garlic being run off the edge of a cliff in an ancient garlic kill site, and something that appears to be a crucified fried egg.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to remember that I have been like this for YEARS, and I was not arguably less peculiar in ’05 (or whenever) than I am now. Anyway.

Couple of things that came back with me–I suspect I’m never going to do anything with them, so if anybody is interested in owning some of my early sculptural experiments, drop a line.

I seem to recall that I baked the teeth separately for this guy, and found myself pulling a whole cookie sheet of piping hot teeth out. His eyes are red glass…damnit, now I wanna do more twisted faces just as little wall pieces. Sigh. So many ideas, so little time…

*With the clarity of hindsight, I finally realized that the delay may have had less to do with having to go through the clutter in the spare room and a lot more to do with not knowing how to orchestrate a visit by ex-wife around schedule of live-in girlfriend-prone-to-highly-dramatic-scenes. As with so many things, I’m way past being ticked at him, and now I just feel kinda bad that he had to put up with that. **

**This is really no reflection on my high-mindedness–frankly, it’s  easy to be magnanimous when everything ultimately worked out so much better for me.  Anyway.