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I’m an artist/teacher/student; bought out and divorced but still standing; a paleo-hipster, now retired; a legend in my own mind edited by 60-odd years of humiliating experiences. Captions, essays actually, related to these images on my other blog www.ehjohnson3.wordpress.com. 100s more drawings, CV, etc. there too.

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FLAG DAZE

It’s obviously You-Know-Who as a jailor here—and self-appointed judge and jury, but not executioner—we hope. And the incarcerated is Uncle Sam; he’s counting the days ‘til his indeterminate custodial sentence is ended. I want to believe Sam will outlast his corrupt prison guard. Sam is an allegorical, therefore deathless, representation of a nation founded with good intentions and You-Know-Who…

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WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

Friendship is contingent. That’s not meant to diminish friendship, it’s just a statement of how it seems to be. Pairbonding is not. That’s not meant to promote pairbonding because that’s only the theory—the myths, the propaganda—in practice it seems just as contingent as friendship. Friendship happens when you find yourself among others like you enough to like you and you them. Whereupon you…

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HEEEERE’S DONNY!

The headline has probably been used before in these troubling times. It’s too good to not have been. It comes from “Heeeere’s Johnny!” used on one of the first late-night talk-shows to announce the entrance of the host. It was later used in a movie when a madman breaks down a door, obviously becoming more a threat than an intro. While some of the theatrics of late-night talk-shows remain, in…

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SOMETHING THERE THAT LOVES A WALL

Adulthood is a strange time when you were theoretically a free agent psychologically, economically, and politically when in fact you never really were free to make choices to better your life. While you were given the illusion of choice, whatever you choose put you in the same position, doing what profits powerful individuals or institutions at your expense. Of course, you could always choose…

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MUSCA DEPICTA

That’s painted fly in Latin. It’s the art term for the incongruous insertion of a fly in euro-renaissance religious—when all painting was religious—paintings. It could mean sin, corruption and mortality or it could be just a demonstration of painters’ clever mastery in their ability to be able to fool the eye. Let’s go with the first meaning as I’m not all that clever or masterful. The beastie…

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LINES DRAWN, CURSES CAST

Not that long ago the machines we had to use were stupid. But they were different from simple tools we’d used since forever. So, to get them to work we had to speak to them slowly in their basic language, not our complex and subtle native tongue. They were frustratingly obtuse, so we often gave them “a piece of our mind,” but we ended up losing our independence and more recently our creativity to…

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STOCKS AND BONDS

Not actually—or even metaphorically—pilloried again, but rather a revisitation of an old drawing idea from the late 1970s. A variation of which from 1990 or so sits in one of my blogs pre-postings portfolio pages. The older of those two was just a rant about being stuck to a job that was not as creative as advertised, one that was just creative enough to choose not to look for work elsewhere. A…

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CONNECTIONS, COMPROMISES AND CONS

Here are some well-worn characters in my decades-long hoarding—a public poster or a misery stash, either definition works—of introspective sublimations. Perhaps they are observations, but I suspect the objectivity is confused by projection, condensation and displacement. The drawings revisit the story of sunny youth and uncomfortable closeness. Then there’s the bosses and spouses of partly…

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IT’S A LIE!

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” ― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein You know Lord Actions’ observation that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This idea was quickly followed by another “Great men are almost always bad men”  that is contradictory. Does power make people corrupt or does it simply enable previously corrupt people to do more…

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STRUTTING AND FRETTING

This one’s just some genial absurdity. After several posts about the always depressing antics of you know who and the continuing cruelty of unchecked capitalism. I need this.  This image, subtitled “Auditions at Théâtre de Descartes,” is a look inside an artist’s head. Like with the psycho-dynamic models of Jung and Freud a self-as-artist has to control ego, id and super ego or persona, ego,…

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DISTRACTIVE ATTRACTION

Inflatable tube men (the two-legged version is covered by U.S. Patent No. 6,186,857 for “Apparatus and Method for Providing Inflated Undulating Figures,” the legless version is not) are still a fixture along suburban USA highways.  Here is one elsewhere. It seems to me to be a near perfect metonym for you-know-who. I say near because this inflated, undulating—and legless—figure shows him as a…

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BENNU BENIR

First the dream. It is winter: dark, dirty and dull. On a limited-access highway, three women and one man ride in an old car that passing a dreary chateau rising on a hill, approaches a river and the town draped low on the hills beyond. In the back seat of the old car, the youngest woman looks at the chateau ruins and flatly states, “It wasn’t like that when I lived there” while the old woman…

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CANNIBALISM BY PROXY

Sometimes I just get an image I want to draw and I do just that, that’s like a captioned cartoon. But the core motivation for these posts is to produce illustrated essays like I did for fun and profit in the good old days. That’s where, contra Sartre, the essential essay precedes the existence of the illustration. This didn’t do that. The essence here, following the illustration, is that…

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METAMORPHOSIS

The top picture shows a scene from the misnomered “The Summer of Love” era called “The Sixties” in spite of its actual decade being more like 1963-73. And the bottom scene is now more than sixty years later, accurately labeled the “post-truth era”, when life as we know (believe, actually, no proof offered or needed) it has changed bigly. The sleazy little man on tiny tv in the wood-paneled…

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STILL LIFE

Thriving in relationships involves knowing when to be compassionate and when to be competitive. Friendship is almost all compassion, career almost all competition with romance having lots of both. Keeping all that straight is not easy. Friendships are the easiest of the three, being mostly compasionate. Less competition with them than the other two. A downside of friendship is its contingency,…

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OUR MASTERS’ VICE

The mechano-metaphorical machine shown above is basically a “Victor Talking Machine” record player from the early 20th century. It “talked” by way of a needle in a wiggling groove on a spinning disk vibrating a diaphragm making weak sounds that are amplified acoustically by the horn. Making the record is the reverse of that. There the needle is cutting the groove rather than reading it. The…

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SPLISH SPLASH…TAKIN’ A BATH

The USA, still nominally the hegemon of the New World Order, with almost every step in recent memory is getting less and less “of the people, by the people, for the people” well stated by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 as government’s proper role, and more and more resembling assorted authoritarian regimes past and present. Not that hard to figure out that’s what’s going on here. You-know-who is…

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