Kliban by B. Kliban for June 24, 2022

Reality versus art.

I said BE STILL!

“Hold perfectly still, dammit! Can’t you see I’m trying to capture the spirit of freedom here?!?”

Painting birds, yeah

(Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)

Painting birds, now

Everybody have you heard?

He′s gonna paint me a flying bird

And if that flying bird don’t posing a bit

He′s gonna try to better wing it

Putting the squeeze on the subject and the tubes of paint.

A bird in the hand …

“But still get my modeling fee, right?”

Normally, art imitates life. But not in this case.

Before he is finished, that artist is going to have his hand full…

This is where the art training comes in. We once had an art assignment to make a detailed pencil drawing of a stick. Some in the class spent most of the time choosing the “ideal stick”. I grabbed the first long stick I found and came back next week with a drawing of beautifully detailed stick balanced on the head of an exotic belly dancer. Transforming the mundane into the beautiful is the trick I learned from that.

Wish I still had that drawing … I gave it to the dancer. :)

He’s winging it.

Variation on why the caged bird sings?

Mr. Audubon at work?

It’s a mind-reading act.

I remember reading about Audubon and his portfolios of birds and most of them had been killed so he could use them as models. More than a few of the birds are now extinct.