Death of a Japanese Maple

A little over a year ago, two friends of mine purchased a house encircled by sumptuous Japanese landscaping. Cloud-pruned evergreens and spiritually-positioned rocks abounded. So when my friends decided they wanted a paved courtyard and a privacy fence in one portion of the yard, an exquisite specimen of a Japanese maple had to move. We're talking a lacy, 9-foot-wide cascading affair with, as it turned out, a surprisingly robust root system.

I was recruited to assist with the transplant on the understanding that I would receive the tree after it had been removed.

The reader is spared the expense of watching the moved tree through winter, March, and (painfully) April with no sign of leafing. I eventually admitted failure, though the maple retained an air of majesty with its tangled grey arms, refusing as they did to issue buds.

By late April, I had despaired of running outside after work to stare at the branches and will them to bud, so I decided to represent them in paintings instead.

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Ad Hominem and the Carney Lexicon

Ad hominem is one of the better-known fallacies, perhaps because it is so common. In Latin, it means: "to the man." In American, it translates fuzzily to: "Oh yeah? Well, you're ugly." Broken down, the ad hominem argument looks like this: Person 1 makes claim X There is something objectionable about Person 1 (maybe ugliness) Therefore claim X is false Ad hominem is one of the many red-herring arguments, fallacious when it diverts attention from the core argument to focus on some flaw about the arguer. In creating my illustration, I needed a distracting character, and what character is more distracting than one of those bellowing circus-game people with the rings, bottles, and inflatable dolphin prizes? I quickly realized my vocabulary lacked a word for a purveyor of state-fair gamery, other than the generic "carney." Perhaps this is because I have never played a circus game, due to my lack of coordination and my dominant interest in spending my tick...

Work from Home

The reference for this piece is a known work of fine art: a photograph by Peter Mitchell, a lorry driver who traversed West Yorkshire and occasionally snapped photos. The piece is titled Eric Massheder, Leeds, (1975) . Eric is the man in the doorway, a drippings refinery worker who posed in his home, adjacent (really, attached) to the refinery where he worked for 12 years. Eric woke up in his home in the morning, walked one room (or so) over, and began his shift. I have changed and omitted a few details for the sake of composition as usual. I've now been working from home for about four years, and I make a similar commute without stepping outdoors. My house even resembles Eric's a bit, though there's no factory nearby. I enter my workplace by transferring a USB cable, which joins all of my input and output devices from my personal computer to my work laptop. I stoop under my desk to make the transfer, so possibly a similar amount of exercise is involved—the digital equiva...

LD8: From the Warmth of My Carhartt

In recent news, it seems that Lucy's Dance will be translated into a Yup'ik language edition by one John Toopetlook of the Alaska Native Language Center. Many thanks to John and the ANLC. Lucy's Dance deals largely with the suppression and revival of Curukaq , the Yup'ik potlatch/dance festival. In not-so-cheerful news, I have recently learned that native dancing has remained banned in certain bush villages until as recently as a year ago. Many Native Alaskans still feel vaguely guilty for reviving the tradition, as the idea that the dancing is idolatrous has been deeply ingrained. Lucy's Dance touches only briefly on the religious aspect, but the book's message still feels more relevant in light of this piece of news. Like last week's drawing, this week's is a gift-gathering montage. I spent some time cross-referencing photos of dogsleds. The sled I drew is not a cutout from any one photo that I found, but rather a composite of different common elemen...

Design & Execution

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