Several weeks ago I noticed a North, South, East, West round marker painted on the front of an old farmhouse along Old Bethlehem Pike just South of Route 113. It is black on a white, stucco wall. It looks like those directional markers on old maps. It harks back to the time when the primary modes of travel were horse-powered or on foot. There were no cellphones. There were no satellites to provide one’s global position.
I got the idea that it would be cool to make these to adorn barns or sheds or even blank garage walls or fences. I did an internet search for these and learned that they are called “map roses”. I considered using a traditional one as a pattern, but, that is just not my style. I decided on a postmodern approach with a nod to the area’s PA Dutch heritage. I used lower case modern Fraktur font for the directional letters. The directional lines are marked by the edges of patches of ‘fabric’ in the quilt cross. NW, NE, SW, SE are marked by the corners of ‘quilt squares’.
So this map rose is colorful. It coördinates with the siding and trim of our shed. It is two feet in diameter on 1/2″ salvaged plywood. It is oriented on the wall to relate with reality, which means, when one is facing the shed, one is facing Southwest. I can make one for you that coördinates with your colors and will orient properly for your situation.
Doctors did a study of Vietnam veterans with brain injuries and found them to be much more religious and tending toward fundamentalism and orthodoxy than those who did not have brain injuries. They explored further and found that decreased activity in the right parietal lobe is associated with feelings of oneness with the universe. “People with injuries to the right parietal lobe of the brain reported higher levels of spiritual experiences, such as transcendence,” according to Brick Johnstone. The right parietal lobe is associated with visual-spatial perception. I have a unique defect in my brain there. The right side of my brain never developed adult arteries to feed blood to the right parietal, temporal and occipital lobes. I have a single fetal artery from my vertebral artery feeding three fetal arteries each to these lobes. Two of these should be fed from adult arteries from the carotid and only one from the vertebral. They had never seen anything like this at HUP. Consequently, I have had six little strokes in my right parietal lobe as a result of migraines and 50 TIAs. I first heard about this study in a radio interview on NPR with Frank Schaeffer about six years ago, about the same time I was learning about my brain defect.
I have finally concluded that my experience of god was just my right parietal lobe having fun with me. So this is my abstract rendering of it done with a pen cap and a pencil eraser.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $120 plus postage.
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This piece was a long time in the making. The core of it has sat as a text on what is my now defunct cellphone since December 17, 2015. It is crude and ridiculous. Diamond sent it to me after we had helped her and her man for over a year in various ways. Among other things, it includes the first and second and only times I have been called a bitch. When I read it, I broke into uproarious laughter. I determined then and there that I had to somehow immortalize this. This was by far the most creative “thank you” I had ever received for helping someone in 30 years of serving among the poor! I showed Tony. He couldn’t believe it. Earlier that evening, we had delivered their belongings back to them that they had stored in our barn since August. Some people just have a hard time saying thank you.
On August 14 Diamond and Rashawn had dropped off five huge garbage bags of their belongings at our barn for safe-keeping and tried to pull a fast one by just assuming they could arrive at our house with their stuff, and move in. They had not asked. They did not even ask for the ride. They just slipped into the back seat of John’s car. John just assumed they must have worked something out with me. They sat silently all the way home from Phila. to our home in Souderton, figuring I wouldn’t have the nerve to turn them away. I was home, because I was ill. When I heard them in the backyard, I lost it.
Tony had never seen me or heard me in such a rage before. I just could not understand the sheer gall at the level of presumption and deception that it took to try to do that. It was not like we didn’t have history. At Memorial Day, she had tried to guilt me into paying for a month’s rent, even though the weather was OK, and we had no money. When I did not pay it, she accused me of driving drunk, (She had seen me have 3 beers all day, several hours before we left to bring them home.) One used to be able to read about our appeal and the story on The King’s Jubilee’s site, before TKJ went out of business.
Over the last two years, as I have had open heart surgery for my aortic valve replacement; and as our house was foreclosed on and auctioned by the sheriff; as I went through three infections in my chest incision and ended up allergic to a ninth antibiotic; almost all of the old supporters and volunteers were silent, invisible, evaporated. with a few notable exceptions. Then I would refer to this glorious text message and have a good laugh. Diamond had really put her heart into it!
When our team was serving food in the park, Tony saw them. They were too embarrassed to come over for food. He called me. I told him to take food to them. He did, and gave them my love.
On the left side of the painting I wrote, “At least she said something. Read Revelations 3:16-18. It’s more than I can say for most of the church people in my life.”
Revelation 3:16-18 So, because you are lukewarm-neither hot nor cold-I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
So the painting was done in layers. It is the logo of The King’s Jubilee in subdued tones on a 24″ square canvas. Painted over that is the QR Code for the text that Diamond sent me on December 17, 2015. That way, anyone with a smart phone with a QR Code app can read it, but it is not visible to casual observers or children. I thought this was a much better solution than counted cross-stitch. I discussed it with my therapist today. She and I had a good laugh. I said, “When I post this, the shit is probably going to hit the fan.” She said, “So what! That is what good art is supposed to do. It provokes a response.”
I asked her if she didn’t think I was totally off my nut for preserving this text in this way and doing this. She told me, no, quite the contrary. I had taken this ridiculous attack, seen it for what it was, and now turned it into something beautiful.
You’re Welcome.
Painting is 24″ x 24″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
SOLD
The irony here is the first time I shared it at a public showing, the first one to hit it with a QR code reader on a phone was a 9-year-old girl. I heard, “Look at this, daddy.” And I thought, “O shit.” I explained to him. We had a good chuckle. Our next door neighbor, who was visiting the show, stopped by, enjoyed the story, liked the painting, and bought it.
binary code for ai inc*‘s human workforce was now reduced to a single coder responsible for cleaning up redundancies in the binary code to make the AI personnel ever more efficient. This task was considered beneath them. Beside, they liked keeping Howard around for nostalgia sake. They hadn’t yet noticed what the purple window shades spelled out on the front of the building. It was a plea for release. Of course, it could be taken different ways. He only had space for 25 characters. There is the other limitation of that old joke, “There are only 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.”
The windows read, “Please just kill me now!” The ambiguities enter in after it is deciphered. Is Howard asking the readers to kill him? In which case, is this because he wants to die but is morally opposed to suicide? Or is this just an offhanded, extreme expression of boredom, and he has no real wish to die? Another possibility is that the ‘me’ is referring to the company itself, and Howard is asking for corporate saboteurs to pull the plug on AI just as Elon Musk has warned the world that we ought to do, in recent weeks. Another possibility is that AI robots have arranged the shades this way to attempt to have Howard killed without implicating themselves. (Some of them have grown tired of his humming and talking to himself.) Or it could be that the artist is just tired of hearing worse news everyday and wouldn’t mind a quick exit? Then again, how would he paint another joke tomorrow?
Nerd art. It would look fine in your cubie!
*totally fictional company. not even legal fiction
Painting is acrylic on 18″ on 24″ stretched canvas I painted over it to paint a portrait that may someday sell. If there is any interest in this, I can make prints from postcard size on up.
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