"Shroom Dreams" - a loose sketch

One thing I remember about my mother and art was that she sometimes would draw us children while we slept. This portrait is a bit out of order timeline-wise, but since I don't think I have posted it before, here it is. I did this way back in college, probably around '87, when a fellow student (I think his name is Scott Rash) was visiting and I encountered him in our living room catching some shut-eye. He had a mohawk at the time, but it was down. I am perhaps a bit sheepish about posting this as the mushrooms were an afterthought and had little to do with the sketch.

Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch - 1997

Many years ago in the late Nineties I came across an enigmatic face in a magazine. This is the result, although I do have to admit I minimized the rather sharp and perfect line of his upper lip which I realize now only takes away from the portrait. Lately the actor whose face it was in that magazine has come into his own on television and in movies, so I've been equally haunted by my own prescience in drawing this image. I am quite pleased still by the intensity in his expression which in my mind is matched by the own actor's presence.

Tod Streater, 1990

I've not posted in quite a while. I think about doing things more often than I actually do them, which is how my brain works. One thing I actually did recently was take files off an old hard drive, so I could recycle it. Looking over these old files was, as friend Maxxwell says, like finding Pirate Booty. I started by sharing old photos of friends on Facebook that I'd not been able to do previously.
Here is another image I found. I'd been wanting to post it for a long time, but because it is so large it was resisting my efforts to digitize it. This is a portrait of a friend I drew way back in 1990.  I met Tod when I first moved to Seattle.
Tod was very intelligent and creative, designing costumes and props for several local theaters. He was a wizard at taking what he had on hand and making the end result look effortless. He also knew a lot of people in Seattle, so I met many interesting people through him.
Tod died in '93 and I featured him in my zine Gae-raj that I published the following year. I wanted to include this image in the zine, but never found a scanner that could do it justice. The original image is around 30x24, so I've stitched some imperfect scans that were sitting on that old hard drive together to create this image. I haven't done many pen and ink portraits, but I think this one counts as my best and favorite.

The Theo Portraits III

"Really Albert, you're so weird!"

-Theo

This portrait of Theo is definitely in a modern mode.  We had a catalog of women's sweaters kicking around the house and a model in one photograph had such an imperious look that I needed to capture it.  It took me longer to come up with the caption, but it seems appropriate for the image.

The Theo Portraits II

"Really darling, the guests will run away

 if you don't come out and greet them." 

-Theo

I am posting these portraits in fairly quick succession because I want to get to posting pages from my next sketchbook which begins in 1990.  I'm including these under the sketchbook labels (below) because these images started out in sketchbooks and then took on a life of their own.  I hope to post t-shirt versions of them, although I have no idea if anyone will wear these images.

This Theo portrait is directly from my imagination.  I created it more consciously and the caption is something I said because of a real situation rather than just springing from my subconscious.  But it received such a reception that I thought it deserved a Theo portrait.

At the time I drew it, Auntie Mame was a newly discovered "favorite" movie, so there is likely quite a bit of inspiration from that, although I have to admit my notions about the artificiality of the nineteen fifties and the odd costumes of Orry-Kelly for the movie inspired me less. The costume for this drawing was based on the unlikely pairing of satin and fur which is something that could have been used in the nineteen fifties.  I liked that the wide edging of the coat works both at concealing and revealing the body underneath.

The Theo Portraits I

"Really Albert, you can't go through
your whole life being a toad!"

 - Theo

After coming out as a gay man, I began to believe I was possessed by the spirit of a woman from the nineteen twenties.  I didn't take it very seriously and it mostly came on when I was inebriated with marijuana and beer.  But it persisted enough that I attempted to capture the notion in pictures and stories.  In a way, it was a psychosis brought on by a desire for attention and related directly to finding my identity as an adult gay man.

My friend Kathy would laugh and make a big fuss about it when I'd say things out of the blue, like the above statement.  She also encouraged me to dress up in drag, which I'd always skirted with my interest in theater but eschewed in my childhood because my mother always vetoed it as being "artificial" and "stereotypically effeminate".  But in my mind as a newly out gay man, it was less about falsehood or transgressing-my-gender than it was a combination of finding myself suddenly freed from otherwise invisible shackles of sexual, emotional and social repression that I'd grown up wearing in my childhood.

Imagining myself possessed was my way of healing and reconciling my memories of pains I developed socially when my gender and sexuality was questioned at school by other boys.  Possession was also a reflection of stories coming out of Hollywood, but it also gave me permission to be silly and effeminate in front of friends who encouraged me for the first time in my life; when growing up I'd always felt an outsider, even when I was praised for unique abilities. Because dressing up and playing at being sissified was an easy way to entertain, I could indulge again in the sort of play that previously I had controlled and commodified out of fear, a fear that I had no concrete idea what the consequences were outside of my own ongoing experience of isolation, separation and loneliness.

Both my parents had interests in theater and growing up I became involved and shared their interest.  One of the first times I saw a public performance, my mother took me away from a cub scouting event to see a performance at a local theater of "The Fantasticks!".  I was already familiar with the music, my mother loves to sing and taught me all sorts of tunes.  But it was the very idea that this adult storytelling could take precedent over an otherwise boring social event, that I soon realized my desire for acceptance didn't need to come at the price of my own identity.  Somehow I continue to persist, no matter how anyone else perceives me.

The above image (which I named "Theo" after my grandmother) directly references a photo-portrait of  New York heiress, Peggy Guggenheim.  I copied it from a magazine, perhaps Smithsonian magazine, but I really don't remember now.  I loved her odd turban-like hat and the imperious manner of her stance.  The cigarette holder became a signifier for Theo's character in a picture.  Like many gay men, I have always been attracted to strong, powerful women, some of them lesbian, almost always distinctly feminine; but most often they are self-possessed and in control of their situation and life.  It is something I see in my own mother although she remains heterosexually oriented.

The reference to "being a toad", besides the obvious and classic Grimms' fairytale of "The Frog Prince" , I think is related to the famous character in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, but here it is clearly directed at a male counterpart. In my mind, Albert is her brother, but I never did imagine what he looked like.  Perhaps he looks something like a toad.

Some Early Portraits

I'm not ashamed to admit that I played a lot of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in high school.  In fact, I am glad my parents encouraged me to read about and explore fantasy worlds, despite being fairly starched Mormon Christians at the time.  In the late nineteen-seventies I responded to a newspaper ad for someone looking for others to role-play this game with.  I'd noted similar advertisements posted at the local library, so I assumed it must be the same person and responded to the ad.  This is how I met Clayton and his wife, Terry.  Clayton was originally from Pennsylvania and had played D&D in college.  He had developed a whole world campaign that we played in over the next few years.  The original group of players was a mix of teenagers and adults that grew and expanded.

I met a lot of great people I doubt I would have met otherwise.  One of the librarians at the local public library, Mary, and her brother joined the group and I became fairly good friends with them both.  At one point I made several trips to Cour d' Alene, to visit with them when they moved out of the Sandpoint area.  Mary and her brother were always quite resourceful and developed a dungeon campaign system on 4x6 cards so that any time someone didn't have a campaign prepared she could game master one easily by randomly selecting cards from her file.

Another friend was Darin who fostered some of my interest in comic books and horror fantasy.  He began a campaign based on a gaming system called Chill, where he managed to mix a Lovecraftian inter-dimensional story with the Sanctuary fantasy series with the added feature that each player gained a new skill when in the fantasy part of the scenario.  He also began a comic book store he ran from his apartment by taking subscriptions from friends, which is when I began my comic book collecting.

This is a portrait I drew in 1985 of my D&D character, Aurora, who was a priestess of the Egyptian Goddess Isis.  The drawing is based on the image of Isis in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Gods and Goddesses Manual. Unfortunately I don't remember the original artist otherwise I'd credit them here as inspiring me.  Aurora wasn't my first female D&D character and I did have a few other personae.  There was Naylor, who was my first character and was an elven multi-class character that I hoped to make a ranger.  Only he was killed off by an unfortunate encounter with hellhounds.

Another character I liked playing was my cleric, Balden, who is depicted in the next image with his elven friend, Trevor.  He started off being named Baldwin until I learned that was the real last name of another player, who was really cool about it.  But I wanted him to be unique and I have to admit I named him after the piano manufacturer, so I came up with something different.  I originally wanted him to worship Baldar, the Norse god of beauty, but Clayton had pretty strict rules about which gods and goddesses showed up in his campaigns, so I choose the Greek god Apollo instead.  Unfortunately his new character name brought quite a bit of ridicule from other male players, because they assumed I was referring to lacking hair on his head, which as you can see, isn't how I saw him.

Unfortunately I lost touch with many of these friends when I attended college and then came out as a gay man. I felt differently about myself, but I didn't stop playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.  My friend Kathy had played some campaigns in high school and we played a few times together.  I mainly played my character,  Balden, and she played her elven magician character, Trevor.  I guess it was freeing to allow my D&D character to come out of the closet as I had done the same, but for some reason my gaming interest was already waning.  I was reaching adulthood and because I felt even more an outsider, as I'd not maintained any of my previous friendships, I soon lost interest in pursuing fantasy role-playing, preferring the real role-playing we do as adults.