Okay, yeah, another long silence … again …
Big sorry…again…
I started this thing to give myself a voice as I go along.
A chance to feel like something was finished more of the time...
To generate a window, instead of feeling walled in where nobody could hear or see what we are doing…
To generate a door to let you in on how we are doing all this…
I will argue that I am disciplined, more or less, most of the time...
Argh, obvious that it’s been a really looonnnngggg week or so isn’t it?
It always takes so ridiculously long to do ANYTHING in this work!
I know … ‘nuf whining, get on with the story of the day already …
A definitive case in point to prove that I AM disciplined at least part of the time is the picture I have been saying I would tell you about…
I know … off task again already … oh come on … Fine, I will try to behave …
I had to be disciplined to finish my first, though imperfect, attempt to create a reconstruction of the Piasa from the Lewis Lithograph.
Yeah, this same crazy picture I showed you before.
That first reconstruction took me months to complete.
And a lot of that was spent just staring at it…
I still missed details that I won’t catch till much, much later…
Not my fault, I guess…
I thought I would go crazy a lot of that time…
But I knew I couldn’t start on it until I really felt like I had gotten “into his head” when it came to Henry Lewis. I looked at the incredible level of attention to detail in other pieces of his work that we had taken pictures of at the university library…
I looked for Chinese depictions of dragons…
And of pairs of dragons…
And of more pairs of dragons…
And redrew the ones I found in that search in the colors that eye witnesses said the piasa creatures were drawn in …
I looked for elements that I could still find in the picture of what was already largely lost…
Those grooves scratched into the rocky outcropping (trust me they ARE there).
The disembodied head that I was sure belonged on the body of a dragon like those I had been examining elsewhere …
And that blasted second beastie…
With that utterly WRONG head …
…and those crazy feet!!!
What really troubled me was that I couldn’t fit “him” as a whole into any of my resource pictures. And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out “why?”
I even looked again at that Alton monstrosity and sketched it…
And, I ate a LOT of Chinese food…
I know that the massive consumption of Chinese food was not entirely necessary, but this was as good an excuse as any to do that, and I do love doing that …
Mostly, I stared at the overall picture and tried to see what Henry Lewis had seen, and had so painstakingly tried to reproduce in a way that made sense to him, and I am sure, that he hoped would make sense to those who see his finished work and the shape of the flattened arch into which the original had once been placed…
I traced that original, and then overlaid that tracing with another piece of paper and tried to incorporate all that I had gleaned into one coherent image …
And after that six months of struggle that ended in two months of very, very, VERY focused tracing and sketching, I came up with this…
I was very proud of this finished piece, and there was no way at that point that I could notice the mistake that had so blatantly slipped by me… I have to show myself at least that much mercy and say that or I will go nuts because of what I have figured out since then …
And there was no way back then that we could know that the answers to my unanswerable questions about the winged beast that Lewis had put in the middle of his picture awaited me in Nanjing, including those we had about most of what Lewis left off the right-hand side of his lithograph …
Or, that we would not realize that those answers were hiding in plain sight in one of my photos form the trip until way more than a year after we returned home…
Still, I was ready to take what I had then on the road…
Nanjing lay dead ahead of us at that point, too much like Titanic’s iceberg I feared, so we packed our two kids off to my parents’ place down south, kissed them a tearful goodbye, and then went home to finish packing before we threw ourselves on the “not-so-tender” mercies of the airline industry …
That last bit was about to be singularly unpleasant…
But I think I’ll save explaining the depths that fiasco sank to for next time…
Suffice to say, we would survive what we were about to go through …
Enjoying being subjected to that degree of insanity is another matter entirely …
The real fun wouldn’t start until after the fireworks finished …
Trust me when I tell you that Mother Nature has a really EVIL sense of humor…
Okay, yeah, another long silence … again …
Big sorry…again…
I started this thing to give myself a voice as I go along.
A chance to feel like something was finished more of the time...
To generate a window, instead of feeling walled in where nobody could hear or see what we are doing…
To generate a door to let you in on how we are doing all this…
I will argue that I am disciplined, more or less, most of the time...
Argh, obvious that it’s been a really looonnnngggg week or so isn’t it?
It always takes so ridiculously long to do ANYTHING in this work!
I know … ‘nuf whining, get on with the story of the day already …
A definitive case in point to prove that I AM disciplined at least part of the time is the picture I have been saying I would tell you about…
I know … off task again already … oh come on … Fine, I will try to behave …
I had to be disciplined to finish my first, though imperfect, attempt to create a reconstruction of the Piasa from the Lewis Lithograph.
Yeah, this same crazy picture I showed you before.
That first reconstruction took me months to complete.
And a lot of that was spent just staring at it…
I still missed details that I won’t catch till much, much later…
Not my fault, I guess…
I thought I would go crazy a lot of that time…
But I knew I couldn’t start on it until I really felt like I had gotten “into his head” when it came to Henry Lewis. I looked at the incredible level of attention to detail in other pieces of his work that we had taken pictures of at the university library…
I looked for Chinese depictions of dragons…
