existential silliness

"external" click to view

Deady Eddy click to view

Z page this week "external" was birthed in Guadalajara during the restoration time I shared about in my 6/9/10 post. And as I shared before, it was when I began to paint these faces made of shapes and the lines of negative space in between. Some landed in ZBOOK including this one, created not with paint but instead with white sticker pieces. These pieces made up the borders and framing off an old sheet of stamps which was by this time stampless with only the sticker peripheries remaining. Let no sticker be unrecognized nor unused! As I've proclaimed before, there are stickers all around us in our lives, far beyond the packaged sheets sold at the craft store. The skeleton body came later...
O my goodness it just hit me that this body was drawn in Guadalajara also, but 2 years later when I was living their for 6 months and teaching art an an elementary school. My partner at the time Vinh was going to medical school there (which is why Guadalajara was a frequent spot for me during and after college) and it was a skeleton doll we got during our travels around mexico, in either Guanojuato or San Miguel De Allende, which inspired the drawing that gave the sticker face a body in ZBOOK. O man, what was that skeleton's name?! O yeah! Deady Eddy! ((sigh)) Dead Ed. We loved that that little dead dude. And I didn't even connect that early this week when connecting this page to Dia de los Muertos!

click these to view

ALSO from Guadalajara are these wrappers on the left, that I picked up from the playground at the elementary school I worked at. The top one is for some kind of candy kids eat by scooping out with a little plastic flat spoon. The one below is the top of a sticker package, folded open, you can see the hole in both sides for hanging the package in in the store display. It was Jennifer who later came in and added the middle section that gave a body to the face in the candy wrapper. And after that the dino's body line was extended into the stickers wrapper to excentuate the mirror opposite image in the wrapper, to which I apparently wrote on the side in orange pen " a kind of ying yang" Okay Cec, I suppose :) I'm now teasing myself. And now I'd like to tease myself for teasing myself. O man I did it again. Wait, the date says March 1999 also in orange which would be when I collaged the sticker wrapper in... so Jennifer's dino body came after... so how beautifully did she match up the body line with the "ying yang" line... simple things like this make my day. That is so much of what ZBOOK is about... the magic in simple gestures that meet in perfect timing in the presence of trust and play and availability and receptivity for it all to be revealed and discovered.


So we have bones which are internal yet external in terms of being the matter of the physical... and wrappers that are external and made for for disposal but kept to live on in the internal realm of ZBOOK (look for many other candy wrappers through out ZBOOK too) and on both sides of Z page are the glows of external light of which appear to be auras around these skeleton and dino bodies, also indicating an expression of something internal... or eternal. It tickles me how this page, which is so silly fun to me, also speaks to me of existential awareness. The element that probably set the latter tone, and certainly appeared on the page before the auras did is the cut out quote collaged over Dead Ed:

Cut out from a book that Jennifer sent me color copies of... of the cover and some inside pages, a beautiful book, O man I forgot the name of it again... Hemphill please refresh my memory... and if you feel like, I'd love to hear about how this book came into your hands and how it came to be copied and sent to me... that was late 2000 or early 2001 when Vinh and I were living in New York. And other images and words from those copies of that book appear in other places of ZBOOK. ZBOOK is indeed the search of understanding the mysteries of life... which can never be fully understood of course... thank goodness.


∞ ceci
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