Sept 8

I wrote the following as a Facebook status:

The first stop today was a giant hulking wreck of a sycamore that hadn't even been cut yet. It was every bit of forty foot long and six foot around and it was all wet and green, green as a garden snake and vibrantly mottled like the way a sycamore does. Flinging various dismembered parts of it frightened me a little, like we were handling the carcass of a brontosaurus. I do believe I told it I was sorry that it had died.

To which my friend John Holland responded that he was expecting a "memoir of my time on the back of that truck" and that he was "dead effing serious." So I told him okay, I would do it.

So yeah, there you go. I'm going to try and write a book now and maybe even get it published. I'll keep you posted. Thanks for staying with me.

Clay

Been waking up with Dylan songs in my head all week

while summer lays dying in the street

NoLA Love pt. 2

"Benefactors"


















"Fig.17-Stonewall Jackson"



















"SelfPortrait" & "Fig.18-Stone Mountain"

Other pictures of these drawings can be found here and here. I have not yet taken pictures of the one with my parents on the elephant, I essentially "mostly" finished it up and then stuffed it in the tube so that it could make it on time for the show. Also Thank you Mrs. 21K for the Link!

NoLA Front

Last week I mailed down five drawings rolled up in a giant cardboard tube I found in an alley. Tuesday Ruth mailed down twenty small chapbooks made up of writing excerpted from here.

http://www.nolafront.org/

"Georgia"

CHICKAMAUGA Ernest Lloyd Gant Jr., 70, passed away Thursday, Aug. 25, 2011. He was a member of Fairview Baptist Church and the Ahaba Sunday School Class. Lloyd attended the University of Chattanooga and was the owner of Clydes Auto Glass.He was preceded in death by his parents, E. Lloyd Sr. and Marjorie Gant.Survivors include his wife, Patsy Edgemon Gant; daughter, Kandy Gant (Robb) Gilstrap, of Rock Spring, Ga.; two grandchildren, Haynie Jane Gilstrap and Harrison Gant Gilstrap; sister, Mary Frances (Jerry) Blancett, of Fernandina Beach, Fla.; several nieces and nephews.Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday at the East Chapel of Chattanooga Funeral Home, 404 S. Moore Road with the Rev. Jim Bennett officiating.Burial will be in Edgemon Cemetery in Ten Mile, Tenn.Memorial contributions may be made to Fairview Baptist Church, 108 Jenkins Road, Rossville, GA 30741.Please share your thoughts and memories at www.ChattanoogaEastChapel.com.The family will receive friends from 4-8 p.m. today at the funeral home.

My Uncle Lloyd Died this Morning.

there are more pictures of his place here

Clyde's Auto Glass

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this was his shop

Nothing About Elephants

I learned today that when the ruined suspension of the trash truck you're riding in bounces you to the point that you are propelled out of your jump-seat, it is imperative that you holler "BUCK MULE!!"

Statement of Purpose

At some point I decided I wanted to be a conduit. As an artist I figure it’s my job to report on the world around me, the beautiful as well as the grotesque. However, being the person I am, realized I could never attain the perfect impartiality of a mirror. My daily vision is clouded with worries, fears, minor resentments, and various physical urges. So I figured the best I could shoot for was a conduit, and attempt to let the world move through me, while allowing what I saw to frighten, to inspire me or to stoke whatever memories they may.

For example, working for the City of Richmond, I find myself daily watching refuse truck unloading at a transfer station over in Southside. Their freight is dumped on a “tipping-floor” of a huge, open structure, and then loaded by heavy equipment into open-top tractor trailers which is then “transferred” somewhere else. It is a loud, dangerous operation. Everything is huge and moves too fast. The texture of several tons of trash is enough to overload your senses, not even taking into account the smell. Plastic bags and styrofoam get blown out and hung up in the tall oaks and pines that boarder the place. At some point I started noticing the birds. Each tractor trailer seemed to have a line of sparrows riding along the top edge of its box, darting down occasionally to scavenge food. Red-tailed hawks hunkered down sixty feet up a massive radio tower across the way. The place is essentially in a healthy wood with some good sized loblolly pines and pin oaks. The trash used to depress me, as did my station and paycheck associated with it. I am a middle-aged pilgrim wandering the new economy with children to care for. After a few months of watching birds dart through chain-link choked with Trumpet Vine, I was struck by the idea, a concept maybe, of “Urban Naturalism.” I realized I previously always looked away whenever I saw a municipality truck, that I’d never really considered the shape a trash truck makes.

Or rather, I’d forgotten about it. Large trucks are like elephants. You become an adult and have kids and a mortgage and dysfunctional relationships and then one day you wander into a large open space at the Bronx zoo and there is an elephant walking on it’s huge elephant feet, waving it’s trunk around and you realize somehow you’d forgotten all about elephants. You remember the child-like feeling of not being able to fully comprehend something that foreign, that much bigger than yourself, much less appropriately describe how it moves through space. I mean, look at it! All you want to talk about is elephants, you want to write a story about elephants. Ideally it should be about the elephant, but shouldn’t you acknowledge that your anxiety about how close the children are is partially based on the hangover you haven’t been able to walk off? Also, how can you leave out the comment your mother-in-law made to you back in the dark halls of the reptile house? In the real world, shouldn’t all this inform your elephant?

Death from Above 1979

Nantes L'Elephant

Started a New Drawing Today

My parents are "commissioning" this one. So I'm going to try and incorporate this image into it. In the style of Stone Mountain, Georgia. Except as a mountain shaped like an Elephant or something.