Guest artist

I'm going to break with a sort of tradition that I've adhered to in this blog and in my life in general, which is to never promote or talk about and most certainly to never display or post artwork by someone other than myself.  It's a sort of rule, you see. I made the rule for several reasons:  if I pretend there are not millions of artists better than myself by basically refusing to acknowledge or even look at their work, I can continue to assess my pictures with that totally uncritical love that children and mediocre art need to live and thrive. 

The other reason is more complicated and philosophical and esthetically based:  I have created a sort of comic book world in these posts, an alternate universe where all visual depictions are in the awkward cartoonish form of the protagonist's childlike vision. A photo or professionally done drawing or even mildly competent artwork would shatter the spell, breaking the narrative and jarring the reader with a hackneyed violence that no writer with true passion for the craft could ever stomach. 

But to be perfectly honest, since the reader described in the explication of the second reason is undoubtedly in an overwhelming majority of site visits simply a temporally progressed version of the writer - meaning myself alone, re-reading my own post, the second reason for the rule could be truthfully said to be just a pompous and verbose re-hash of the first reason, which has already been exposed as shallow and contemptible. 

In any case, the other artist I'm posting is my own father. Since we share the same last name, his work still qualifies as "hagenart."  And genetically we are 50% identical, so what's the difference?  (Hint: it's the same number as the mathematical similarity, see above). 

I recently scanned several sketches from my father's notebooks. I don't know if he meant them to ever be seen, or had in the manner of our family some kind of imagined scenario for how or who or when he wanted them to be seen or discovered in the rubble by the archaeologists of the far future digging through the dirt of the titanic Yellowstone eruption that will annihilate the western United States most likely at the very moment when we've got self driving cars and surgically implanted iPhones and genetically engineered Google glass skulls, but I got them and I scanned them and this one's my favorite:

It's an owl reading the Book of Mormon. My father was devout. I don't know if he liked the owl after he drew it. The owl does not to me look as if he is enthralled by what he is reading, so I wonder if my father disliked the picture and did not use it for whatever he had intended. I can't even imagine. He was delightfully half-hearted with many of the unpleasant standards that the community he grew up in demanded of him, and all the time seemed genuinely disappointed in his own free inclinations. I never knew if he was putting everyone on.  He was as gentle as a dove with the feelings of his loved ones, even myself, his undoubtedly most disappointing son. 

I intend to color in this picture and all the others I scanned, it's a basic pleasure of children and infantile men, to add to a picture that someone else has already done the heavy lifting on, but instead of crayons I'm planning to use the photo processing software that eliminates much of that drudgery of colorization which is the last bastion of penance left to the mediocre doodlers. 

Where is Mr Sea Anemone?

I've begun a powerful new artistic technique more suited to my current lack of temporal resources. Here is an example, the title is Mr Sea Anemone:



Actually I don't know how to embed or place picture files, or graphic files, in blog posts. I know how to upload picture files to the blog, and I think I know how to insert a picture file, but the picture never goes where I want it to go, so if Mr Sea Anemone did not appear at the end of the colon...
Of course I was about to make a funny pun, and those of you familiar with the sophisticated verbal gymnastics of punning will no doubt be in the middle of or recently finished with a resounding bray of guffaws that erupted from somewhere inside you (don't read this in a car) the moment your eyes scanned the word 'colon', and you've been momentarily unable to continue reading for a few precious moments. Don't worry, you've missed nothing but the literary equivalent of one of those smug post zinger smiles that have made it very difficult for many people to enjoy live comedy.
Here's another portrait. I call it Mr Bunny Man:



Usually the pictures in my posts don't make an appearance until the bottom of the page, all in a row that takes forever to download because I don't know basic internet file management principles. I think more tech savvy people use imgur or Instagram which I intend to learn how to use after I've thought about it for a while, by which I mean thinking about the decision whether to begin to learn how to use them, I don't want to leap ahead and just decide to begin to learn how to use them on a whim, when free time is at a premium.



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Nature "Cooked" and in Ferment

Just read Cooked, by Michael Pollan, the guy who wrote Omnivore's Dilemma, which I have not read but intend to read now, although I can already hazard a guess as to the overall theme; mass produced food is bad and makes you fat and diabetic and prone to heart disease. In other words, it will make you an American.
That was his general point in Cooked anyway, which was written to persuade Americans to cook, and it worked, even on me. Now I want to cook, or at least I wish I already learned how to cook, which is what I usually mean when I say I want something.
In any case, back to Cooked. Its a journalistic book in the best sense of the word, even handed and thorough, and the author even successfully came up with a beautifully designed and esthetically pleasing outline and stuck with it to the end, a feat of perseverance which as an amateur writer I find even more miraculous and unbelievable than the ancient fire water air earth theory of the elements that he pays homage to with his outline structure. It's a pleasing idea, but to be perfectly honest it forces some arbitrary and unhelpful categorizing in his book, as does any outline. I think he got overexcited with the pleasing dichotomy he worked up between fire cooking as masculine and water cooking as feminine, but didn't have a third gender on hand to categorize fermentation with, and at that point he had to find something in fours.
But the book is interesting. I bought most of his argument against processed food, and for home cooking, even if I think American obesity and health issues is a fairly trivial problem, on the scale of things. If there are children actually going hungry in some parts of the world, who cares that more Americans could die in their forties and fifties instead of their seventies and eighties? I say this, of course, as an almost fifty American male who would himself prefer to live for at least a few decades more. But who cares what I would prefer? I had an awesome childhood, and only went hungry at scout camp (by choice).
But I mostly agreed with him. I did take issue with all the times Pollan uses the words "Nature" and "Community-based" in the book. It began to seem a little calculated after a while, as if an editor suggested more buzz-words or something. If it wasn't calculated, and Pollan honestly believes in Nature as the source of all goodness, then it's a little worse in my view. Journalists should be cynical and atheist, which is how Pollan comes across for most of the book, except for his "what have we lost?" nonsense.
I could go on about the true "nature" and source of modern Nature worship, but I will be dissecting Nature Worship in my massive thesis on The Hierarchical Nature of Homo Sapiens, which constitutes the fruit of twenty years of thought, still in ferment. Please note that I will be incorporating the word "Nature", as it should be used, in the title. Also please note that I used the word "ferment" to describe it. I use that word in a calculated fashion because the main success of Cooked, for me, was that the third section (divided unnecessarily into two parts just to fit Pollan's Fire Water Air Earth outline) goes into fermentation of food and induced me to purchase the Art of Fermentation, by Sandor Katz. I am excitedly delving into Art of Fermentation, and will hopefully soon be reporting on the success or failure of my own preliminary fermentation efforts!

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Tribute to Top Notch "Snowy Day"

New picture from the Art Department, a Tribute to The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats. This is part I of a new series I've been planning, a Hyper Critical Review of Children's Literature, complete with pictorial tributes to Top Notch Books. There will also be some suggested improvements for other books that require them.
The Snowy Day has that dreamlike, fresh from the subconscious feel that all the really Top Notch kid books have, especially the Margaret Wise Brown books, without going overboard like The Night Kitchen. The Night Kitchen is like a funny uncle who wears T shirts and puts food on his face for a laugh and gets really into the Lego Star Wars battles and the kids laugh and laugh but with some nervous starts and they never feel quite safe around him. And no matter what people say, kids should always feel safe and openness can go too far. But I know it's won some awards. It was written to win awards. It's very poetic and would make an interesting spoken word piece and the pictures are good. It just doesn't tell a story.

The Snowy Day is just as deeply meaningful, and the pictures are good, and it was obviously written for children to understand and enjoy, or even if it was written to win awards, it doesn't read like it was written to win awards. This makes it Top Notch.

This review would make a good advertisement for the Snowy Day, but the true test of a successful Ad Firm would be to write a glowing review of a book that sucked, or needed improvement. This worrisome element of the Ad business, discussed in previous hagenart blogs (link not necessary), has come to haunt Hagenart Advertising, even as we celebrate the planned renovation of the Art Department. The renovation will be based on Peggy's office from Mad Men Season 4 (if the blueprint graphic was done it could be linked here. Another missed Opportunity - unacceptable!)
Hagenart headquarters will be based on Don's office as far as the couch and the liquor cabinet and the uniforms, Season still to be determined.
But as exciting and challenging as these business plans are, the spin issue is casting a pall over Hagenart staff, highly trained for Esoteric Criticism in college


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