Mexican Menu Chac the Rain God

Chac the Mayan rain god sells you tacos and other Mexican fast food. I brought him to the menu board from my collection of Mayan and other pre-Columbian images. Tristan my bloggin' art buddy loves my Mesoamerican style art but he's at Pennsic now, so he won't see this till he gets back. I would love it if Chac could bring us some rain here in the Metro DC area but I'd probably have to sacrifice something living to persuade him, so I'll just wait for the weather to provide.

Chac menu board is markers on posterboard, 21" x 13", winter 1980. Photoshopped out of obscurity and dust.

Big Tree and Cottage

Here's another work break drawing from me. I went a little over the allotted 20 minutes to do this one. The cottage you see here has been remodeled which makes an asymmetrical silhouette to the front elevation. The roof to the right continues well beyond where my drawing ends. There is a large tree in front of the house which fortunately survived the violent "derecho" windstorm of early July. Note the also asymmetrical brick veneer  panels on the facade, which seem to be placed for no reason next to the window, in the middle of a large siding area. I am guessing that they remain from the facade of the original cottage before the rebuilding. The spindly structure at the right edge is a homemade bird feeder.

I love vernacular or amateur-built architecture but I suspect that many of my readers find my studies of it boring. More dragons and human figures are needed, I guess. But whose blog is this anyway.

Pitt technical pen on sketchbook page, about 6" x 5 1/2", July 29, 2012.

Philip Carter's Earthly Paradise

My wine destination this Saturday was Philip Carter's winery near Hume, Virginia. I first visited this place in 2008, when I was just beginning to go to wineries. I had better weather this time. The grapes were ripening under a warm sun, and big billowy white clouds drifted across the sky. Four years after its opening, Carter's winery is producing nectary white wines and juicy reds. I sipped their lovely Viognier while drawing this color study of the vine landscape and the line drawings of things on and around the outdoor patio. A winery is an Earthly Paradise, a foretaste of Heaven, if there is such a thing. If there is no Heaven, at least we have wineries.

Colored pencils and Pitt brown ink technical pen on sketchbook page, 11" x 8", July 28, 2012. Some blue sky added at the top in Photoshop. Click on the pic for a larger view.

Mexican Menu Latina Movie Gal

This "Latina entertainer" image is a lot less familiar now than it was in the 20th century when I did this piece. It's meant to evoke the famous Carmen Miranda, who wore elaborate headdresses and costumes when she performed. The headdresses often contained fruit but here she is wearing leaves and flowers. The film clicker with ID message is also a nostalgic artifact of the past, I don't know whether it is still used anywhere today. Anyway, it fit the generic "Latin" theme of Paco's Tacos. Dimensions and media are the Usual.

Recently my entries here have been visited by a "human-bot" putting up comment spam. This is particularly pathetic in that someone from some miserable foreign country is being paid pennies just to solve the "captcha" gateway and put meaningless little ads on my comment lists. I get so few comments anyway, I hate to get false ones. Many of the readers of this blog will be in the Middle Ages (at "Pennsic") for the next couple of weeks, anyway, so they won't see or comment on anything here. 

Bridge Over Route 50

Before this bridge was built, about two years ago, people from the teeming neighborhood across the big Route 50 highway had to risk their lives if they wanted to cross over the road to shop at the Seven Corners shopping center. In an extensive renovation program which is still in progress, a foot-bridge was built that allowed people to cross over safely. This drawing shows one of the covered stairway towers at the shopping center end of the bridge. You can also see the trestle of the bridge and its railway-style iron archway. This is a nice piece of early 21st century architecture, neo-industrial with its ironwork, rather like its contemporary, Nationals Park, which I featured a week or so ago here. This drawing was done while sitting at Starbucks, beating the heat with one of their new caffeinated iced fruit drinks.

Pentel Pilot G-2 pen on sketchbook page, about 6" x 6", July 26, 2012.

Mexican Menu Seth Speaks

One of my Paco's Tacos co-workers was a fan of the mediumistic entity known as "Seth," who was channeled by writer Jane Roberts. "Seth" dictated a massive amount of texts through Roberts, comprising a whole school of mystical thought which borrows from just about anywhere. One of their main tenets was that you create your own reality, an insidious notion that led to all sorts of bad behavior in the late 1970s. My co-worker commissioned a "Seth" themed Lunch Special, in which the spirit leans over the medium's shoulder and orders a taco. According to the books, this globe-headed ghost was what the spirit really looked like when he was not taking over the body of the human medium. Ectoplasmic Mexican fast food created our own reality.

"Seth Session" is markers on posterboard, 21" x 13", winter 1979-1980. Mystically restored in PhotoSeth.

Angel of Millennial Panic

I used to design and send out cards to the members of my religious group to remind them to pay their dues or thank them for having paid the dues. I am the treasurer of the group so this was something I did to make my job a bit less unpleasant for all concerned. I ran out of time to do these some years ago but here is one from 1999 which took its inspiration from the "Y2K panic" that was upsetting the technological world in those days. This is the Angel of Millennial Panic, in a retro-futuristic outfit, surrounded by images of disaster: lightning, a flaming asteroid or comet, an erupting volcano. The Angel is checking his/her laptop to see who has paid the dues before the Cataclysm arrives: "Y2K Bureau of Readiness." The reason the drawing is on a yellow background is that I used "panic yellow" cardstock to make the cards. 

The "Y2K" disaster might have been a fizzle but unfortunately the Cataclysm did happen, it just waited a while until September 2001, after which our panic-stricken lives have never been the same.

Ink drawing printed on yellow paper, 5" x 7", 1998-1999.