Author: wjacobr

Visual artist, poet, novelist, activist & Street Medic, living in North. Penn Name: Jacob Russell My blog is a confluence of art, writing, politics. my Art portfolio: Art-by-Willard.com

The Locust

street-sketch-the-locustThrough the summer, too hot to sit out in the sun drawing… had in mind what more I could do with the street sketches. Or maybe less. I wasn’t satisfied with where they were going…or not going. Maybe I’ll play with some of them I did earlier… see what happens

Textures. Tone. It’s not the city as it is that I’m after… it’s the city as it is and something else. The city of imagination.

Here is the before.street-sketch-52nd-locust

View GALLERY HERE.

Trickster makes this World

coyote_the_trickster_by_hyraxattax-d4azwu2

I love this book: Lewis Hyde’s TRICKSTER makes this WORLD.
“Wandering aimlessly, trickster regularly bumps into things he did not expect. He therefore seems to have developed an intelligence about contingency, the wit to work with happenstance.”
This says everything about how I make art. And when I veer from this… when I try to plan (oh, thank you Dorothea Lasky, for your Poetry is Not a Project)… people, especially people with Big Brains, don’t understand how profound, what a great essay this is!) … when I try to map out where I think I should go, it all goes wrong, horribly wrong. I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going. And for me, that’s the only way.. which is no ‘way’ at all.
I make a mark… or respond to one I see. We have a dialog.
That’s it. That’s the entirety of my aesthetics.
Coyote should be the animal spirit of any would be revolutionary in our capitalist system. They know how to survive without a pack, rob traps set for them, turn whatever environment they find themselves in to their own advantage, and eat genrtrification poodles for dinner.
And of course, I’m reading Lewis Hyde’s wonderful, Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth, and Art.
Wasn’t so sure, first 90 pages. It was ok, but wordy, I thought… then he turned the trick and revealed some powerful, moving personal stories that made everything before come to life. This is a great book

Found Things: making art at the Ox

262314_573942727920_1508677231_nThis was a journal entry from 4 years ago–popped up on Facebook.

Found Things… The significance of a fond object is that it has none. Decathected, by being lost—though I don’t mean lost, so much as discarded. The objects I find on the street, in empty lots. Not things still useful—things sticky with the snare of desire. The desire that adheres to and generates the delusion of ownership.

I like these objects because they are free. I don’t want to own them. I don’t want to return them to a state of servitude, to become their slave.

When collected, placed in some degree of proximity, they suggest their own form of desire… placed beside, under, inside another object, I sense affinity—or indifference. If the former—it is as though they have become a new object, each retaining its own identity, but now also, a part—of something else.

These are the assemblages that I build… or better– build themselves when I lend them my attention.

The prime rule… is that there must be no rules. Else I would be the Master, the enforcer, the tyrant god … and so, eviscerate my own existence… for there are no gods. No Masters. Were I to aspire to that… I would not be.