Daily drawing 6-5-2019: So Long Mom. Brush
When I first got onto Substack I was resolved not to show my face. It’s like when I’m reading someone’s book: I try to resist looking at the author photo until I’m done, because I’m a mind-meld purist.
Ursula Le Guin says in her essay Telling is Listening “My private model for intersubjectivity, or communication by speech, or conversation, is amoebas having sex.” Then there’s a little hand-drawn diagram: two amoebas connected by a pseudopod-channel exchanging genetic information. She goes on to say “My model of printed public writing and of secondary orality is a box A shooting information out into a putative spacetime that may or may not contain many box Bs to receive it— maybe nobody— possibly an Audience of Millions… Transmission via print and the media is one-way; its mutuality is merely virtual or hopeful.”
(More on that essay here: themarginalian.org/2015…)
Despite having spent hundreds of hours drawing people’s faces, I don’t really care that much what people look like (multitudes etc.). It’s the least interesting thing about them; the skin of the fruit.
Anyway, this morning I decide to switch up my previous profile photo (me standing on top of a driftwood tree-trunk on the beach: I chose it for its silhouette-ishness, which makes an image pop when it’s tiny, but I guess the literally statuesque stance and black face mask might have made it seem … unfriendly … to the casual observer) for an image that includes my face. The new/old image was taken on Midwinter night a number of years ago. I had spent the day constructing antlers out of driftwood (the most difficult part of the process was finding a matched pair), and I was about to wear them out for the first time, to a ceremonial effigy-burning in the city. The new/old photo is also very silhouettey— a very ancient silhouette indeed: I still remember the magical ripple I generated that Midwinter night, as I walked through the city with antlers on.
This drawing is a self-portrait wearing the exact same outfit as in that photo— driftwood antlers and Wizard coat. (More about the snake coat here: rosiewhinray.substack.c…) In the photo I drew this from, I’m at a seasonal Hallowe’en party at my friend Jen’s house. (Because we live in upside-down-land, all the Northern Hemisphere festivals are arse-backwards, so this was Hallowe’en in Southern Hemisphere Autumn-time.) Other-Rosie, Rosie Langabeer, is playing the piano, and I’m singing my favourite Tom Lehrer song ‘So long Mom, I’m off to drop the bomb’. youtube.com/watch?v=pkl…(Tom Lehrer is still alive— he’s 96!)
Cabaret singer is one of my future career plans. I’m saving it up for when I’m really old. Pretty sure it’s red wine in my cup. I brought home a party favour: a fake-blood-stained fake-hundred-dollar-bill with a certain orange President’s face on it, and on the back someone had written in blue ballpoint ‘Be the cryptid you wish to see in the woods’.
