Summer’s about here. Gettin’ hot. Republicans going even more apeshit.

“Those are some of the most delicious tomatoes I’ve ever eaten.”

“Damn straight. Bursting with lycopene. And I did it all with my own special urine concentrate. Would you like to see how it works?’

“Uh. No.”

One thing I’ve been meaning to do for years is finish the study outlined in Bruno Lucchesi’s book Modeling The Human Figure in Clay. I always had trouble understanding how he achieved his results in clay, and set the book aside. I picked it up again once I found a supply house that carried sculptor’s wax, and it works a whole lot better for me than clay-plus I get to work in the house since wax is the perfect neatnik medium.

I’ve also been working on a Chinoiserie mantle in cedar for one of the upstairs fireplaces. I think this would also be a good basic plan for the head and footboard of a Ming dynasty bed knockoff.

The swallowtails have been all over outdoors. The stinkbugs have the indoors covered.

This is the guy who said a German victory in WWI would have ushered in a Pax Europa and jumpstarted a European Union decades ahead. It would have stopped the red wheel and the black wheel and Alfred Krupp would have started making dinner plates and cars and beer steins instead of those naughty things the existence of other states forced the German industrial apparat to make.

They were only going to do the Shrecklichkeit thing for a little while, until the troublemakers got it out of their systems, or a few more thousand were fried trying to escape through the ingenious electric fence the Germans strung along the borders of whatever country they happened to occupy, or were systematically shot, or hanged, or playfully gunned down by a few high spirited German boys.

This European Union could have done without libraries or books that maligned the essential superiority of the German virtues of loyalty and precision and loyalty.

The petty bickering of politicians would have been replaced by the smooth operatin’ machine staat, where chronic inefficiencies were absorbed in the mesh of gears like undesirable light spectra in a lampshade.

And most of all, it would have held out the possibility of a return to the Hapsburgs, who were Not. Fucked. Up. At. All.

Fuck Harvard up its ass.

On a related Bush administration arse-gobbler note, where do Republicans study history? In the swampy recesses of their own cracks?

http://www.dependablerenegade.com/dependable_renegade/2013/05/um-ari-fleischer.html

Maybe it’s the Foley work. It sounds like someone smacking the top of an open drum of vegetable shortening with an oar.

H/T lady bunny

For what must be a couple of years now, I’ve been trying to come up with a big painting to cover a large uninterrupted space on a wall in the really old part of the house. I figure an eighteenth century house built on a sixteenth century floor plan deserves something like a Stubbs, but I didn’t want to go entirely equine. I started drawing a cartoon based roughly on Balthus’ The Mountain, but while the neoclassical grouping works well for someone trying to make some L’Ecole de Weirdass point, I’m not trying to say anything at all. I want to make wallpaper.

The first idea was a flop, but it took a long time to draw, and I was determined to salvage something from it, so I put it aside and I went back to Stubbs. Looking through some photographs I took of my mules, I found a picture of Barney that looked like it been painted in thin layers of glazes over a silverpoint drawing, like Van Eyck.

I decided to steal Van Eyck’s Eve from the Ghent Altarpiece and seat her on Barney. I like this drawing, except for the fact that in this version, I was too lazy to think much, and I lifted some background details from Puvis De Chavannes’ The Prodigal Son.

I started to call this one The Prodigal Daughter, but while I was vacuuming one day I placed Eve and Barney up against the Balthus cartoon and voila!

I don’t talk to my paintings, and they rarely talk to me, but Eve told me to put her in that wallpaper and call it “The Rutherford Sisters”. So that’s what I’m working on right now. I always knew somehow that I’d go even more batshit if I kept at art long enough.

What a pretty animal. They always make me think of tiny watches, even though I know they’re much smarter and more complicated than that.