Ink Therapy Resurrects Old Friends

My hope is that Ink Therapy saves us from this crazy, greedy, violent world. And that's just as good a reason as any to spend hours doodling with black ink on white paper.

My second inking session (Doubting Tanda) started at the top of the page with a series of short, parallel lines that eventually turned into a wooley creature with a noble probiscus. How do these things happen? Do these wooly creatures inhabit my brain? yours?

Grab a pen and paper and start doodling. Just make marks. Lines, circles, chevrons, dots, whatever feels good. Don't think too much. My ink therapy is not an activity that depends on plans or forethought or ego. Just the opposite; I simply doodle until the pen starts moving by itself.

Click on image to enlarge.

Before long a formally attired, pen-headed character and his strange dog-like buddy appear at the bottom of the page. Nothing too intimidating for a 70 year old inkster with viagra in his pocket, however. 

The pen-headed character is Tanda, an old friend from previous ink therapy sessions. Tanda always shows up with weird baggage; that’s his nature. Tanda is my psychological Shadow; his full name: Tanda Lobit Shadowself. He's here to amuse me.

But Tanda's first appearance was one of uncertainty on the page. He was dubiously amused when he showed me how he's changed during the past 16 years. He had been resting in a near visible sofa world waiting to make a reappearance in india ink. 

I told him he looks like a full professor on his way to a brandy sniffing party. 

The Leaf and Me

The Hubble space telescope focuses on distant galaxies and astronomers see our Sun in another 4 billion years. I look out the window and spy a mystery in my swimming pool: A flat leaf floating on the surface of the water casting a grape-clustered shadow on the bottom of the pool.

I am neither an astronomer nor a botonist, but I knew the tiny lens on my Kodak camera could record the mystery.

How can a spade like leaf cast such a shadow? What properties reside in the water? the leaf? and the sun? Where is the closest physicist with an answer?

Despite my ignorance, I like the geometries of this composition. The triangulation between the leaf, the shadow, and the camera lens takes me along a deep space route to a shadowy nebula. Even the cracks in the pool light up like runway lights pointing the way.

And then there's that guy over there, out in nebula space, with the shadowy camera. Looking over a high wall at parallel worlds? A reflection of the viewer who is seeing and being seen?

I love a good mystery.

Stress Test

Vanity be gone! This is my latest self-portrait during a doctor-ordered stress test.

So, the quick nurse raised some blood and blood pressure hacking off the top of your favorite mole! So what? Those blue things don’t stick to four inch chest hairs! And Medicare is paying for this portrait anyway, aren’t they?

Your nose looks so big from down here at lap level. And that doesn’t look like a fresh shave to me. Are those worry lines around your eyes? When are you going to trim your mustache? Who are those kids in the background any way? And what does that light switch mean?

Awk! There you go again, attempting to interpret everything in a picture!

Under the Knife

I am infatuated with my little Kodak digital camera. It is so small and so accessible during any moment of the day or night. It enables me to take something away from an encounter - even encounters like this when others are taking pieces of me away, even if they are cancerous. 

This picture, out of four submitted to an unbiased jury of family and friends, won the award for most interesting portrait.

Making self portraits during surgeries amuses Dr. Bedi. And I believe it is wise to amuse anyone who wields a scalpel near my face.

Life is Short

I made this self portrait about ten years ago with one of those little fiber optics cameras that was supposed to connect us all live via our computers. The little camera was a wonderful toy, but it was married to my old, clunky Macintosh. I couldn't take it anywhere. And I couldn't find anyone to field my calls.

So I got bored looking at myself and I gave the camera away.

But I realize now that I had a real affection for that image making cable. The depth of field was awesome. The optics could focus sharply within inches of an object and maintain that sharpness all the way to infinity. The simplicity of it made me  happy. 

Cool Tessellations

Here's a cool self portrait taken at the Jepson Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia thanks to Daniel Shiffman. 

That's a mosaic of my reflection with my handy dandy little red Kodak camera. A mathematical algorithm drives the mathematics behind this Voronoi diagram. The diagram moves continually as you do move beneath the screen. The longer you stand still the more of your reflected image comes into focus.

Self Portrait with my favorite dentist

I brought my handy dandy little red point-and-shoot Kodak to the dentist where I captured another Self Portrait just as Doctor Johnson loaded me up with novocaine. 

In fact, I bring Little Red everywhere these days. It's small and it's close at hand. Easy to draw from its holster when I want to shoot a picture of just about any thing.

Living the Metaphor

So, here I am living in my blog's metaphor again. What is the trick here? 

Am I designing my future to fit a Self-Portrait yoke?

So it's "ears that see and eyes that hear".  Some times a little extra stimulation will bring one to the point of recognizing their photo moment. This picture coming immediately after a little tip-of-the-ear surgery. 

And the show goes on.