Cluny the Scourge

This is Cluny the Scourge, a character out of the Redwall book series. He was a large, very bad rat wielding a staff topped with a weasel skull. The challenge was the head which I just kind of did out of my own head. My son insisted that he be completely hidden, so I managed to make the mouth large enough for him to see out of (through a scrim of dark cloth)......
Here he is lounging in NYC, with velvet-barbed tail and his gilded, deer skull staff:



...and dancing across the lawn upstate, tail tucked in his belt:

The Gryphon

Here, in the autumnal woods of yesterday, lurks the legendary Gryphon. He spreads his fantastic, fake-fur wings and slyly looks our way. Those wings almost drove me to despair. I was out in the studio for a week. The head piece went relatively OK--involving my own version of paper mache, sewing, painting (eyes) and gluing. But the architecture of the wings proved daunting. Fortunately my friend Chris came up to visit and assist, thereby avoiding being a witness to a case of art madness....


Here is the Gryphon hanging from my ceiling in NYC, laughing all the way...




...and here is the Gryphon, the Stinkbug, and another glimpse of the Gutmonster (whose story has yet to be told):

Creatures flat and round

One of my favorites, who later showed up in the painting East Wolffland:





And now back to the Great Halloween Years where my son became a demon cat one year:



This is the costume on its own with Lylin (a stuffed creature I created one xmas) sitting on its lap:

Wolff Creature

This is one of those imaginary animals..............

The Stinkbug

Above is the stinkbug with no one in it. Below it is inhabited by its requestee. In the second year of the Halloween Costume Enterprise I had been doing some drawings for a children's website about real and imaginary animals. The stinkbug was one of the real ones. When my son saw the drawing he said that that was what he wanted to be for Halloween. The basis for the costume was an old denim vest and a baseball hat. Underneath went a red sweatshirt and red sweatpants. Everything else was invented with wire, cloth, rhinestones and stuffing.
I have found that I like working with soft materials and going from a two dimensional idea to a three dimensional realization.
In my brain are some interesting plans for stuffed catspiders....

Built by the Boy

These are photos of something my son built. He was always constructing something. I was continually fascinated by the aesthetics of these edifices. This in particular with its aperture for the miniature car and its resulting collapse...

Ming and the Boy

Ming and the mask

This is a mask I made for my son when he still did Halloween. Actually it may have comprised the entire costume. He came to me with a Moorcock paperback, I think Hawkmoon, and pointed to the dragon-wolf head on the cover and said he wanted to be that for Halloween. This is what we did every year. He would come up with an idea and I would go into the studio for several days to a week and emerge with the solution.

Ming

Ming was one of my cats. Today we had to put him to sleep-he had acute kidney failure. I use to go out into the garden and call to him and he would run in that cat-flow way, in a series of fluid bounds to my side. He would look up and lift one paw, his face full of light: the gold eyes in the orange and white fur. Ming means bright in Mandarin. I was totally smitten. I just loved him completely. I use to call him King Ming. He liked that.
This painting is called Wolff & Ming Late at Night. When I would get up in the middle of the night to pee I would think about death. After a while I started to think that I had a date with Death by the toilet every night. The minute I thought that I knew it was a painting. So it became, except I put Ming in with me. In the painting he is unfazed by Death's flamboyant appearance and under lit wing. He is totally cool about it all. I hope it was really like that for him.

doodles, atmosphere and water

The curlicue has become official, the two headed flourish standing in as character and figure.
They fall from the sky like bombs, glorified weather interpreters, or a frieze of design.


But perhaps their best gig is as a crew of pirate-floaters----parachuting behind their red smoked ship in a sea inhabited by climate personalities.

glass, folly and death in the rain

Glass is like water except it doesn't move, or to be exact it is a fluid that moves so slowly that we can't perceive it, except after many years as in rippled old window panes. This is a quick drawing of the glass chandelier in the room where the constitution was signed:


And here is Mr D again in the guise of a threesome in the rain---a divergence from a photo in the NY Times......



In the silliness of perfect alchemy we can draw anything. Glass, water, fire and doodles leave their unions to come do serious work for me:

considering water

Here is an extended doodle about the ways to draw water in line, using the actual visuals of moving water and some designed indicators. Then take the body, dip in through and you get a reading.

black and white

I got to thinking about drawing and what kind of decisions you make when working from life. What do you do with color, shadow and depth? Do you go for illusion or do you go for design? And how do you decide between color and depth when the two collide on translation? I don't like to get too fussy, yet am intrigued by dark & light and the topography you can make. I also really like the quick line. This is a drawing I did in Venice of the Grand Canal as seen from a rooftop. One of the buildings depicted had a story of being bad luck wherein the family living there all came to tragic ends.

The White Horse

Partially from a dream and the rest from a childhood gilded with the equine mythology. And of course the long, long love affair with water. I have spent decades learning to create the illusion of water. Often I will hover over a puddle that is creased with ripples, standing until I have memorized its pattern of silver and shadow. One of the things that fascinates me about limited animation and comics is the way the artists portray weather, and in particular water. I'm always thrilled when I find one doing something completely eccentric and counter-intuitive and making it work. I'm thinking mainly of line and simple color. If you have made friends with paint you can do anything. Black and white is a lot trickier.
I once spent a year living on the Hudson River. My son was very small at the time and the only consistent art work I could do was drawing. So I drew the river over and over: rippling, in rain, frozen-over and breaking up. If a bird was there, in it went. If a dog came by, ditto. When a storm hit I did the trees whipping sideways and the small waves slapping the shaled beach. It was a school of narrow focus and delight.

Horse

The horse doesn't stay out of my imagery for long. This one (2 Heads) came by way of an Australian cowboy movie and a photo that my neighbor took of me in the post office. They met cute and fell over the falls of my painting brain. A lot of pictures happen this way. Consider Through Moving Glass which was a result of my daydreaming on the subway while gazing out at the tracks. Many things happen there:

Miho & Death

This is Miho, Frank Miller's assassin from Sin City, and Death. Its the only time I've ever painted someone else's character. It was fun.
Today is Thanksgiving and the possibility of a glittery snowfall in NYC, one my favorite visuals, is locked in the vault of December's thoughts.

love in the garden

The lush impulse to dig, plant and look is something genetic. You can't decide to love it, anymore than you can turn on the chemical spigot for another human. But having been born with it--it is as nutty and ecstatic as the human folly. More lanquidly paced, and more muddy, but gloriously sensual anyways. Here's my guy doing the purple garden dance:



And, taking a rest on a log--the resultant ease liquifies and turns to gold in the spine and pelvis:

Sphinx & Death

I only did a few things about 9/11. Always the Sphinx was there.

city of light & dark

Where the city is the the constant landscape for the collage of my characters. They make footprints everywhere, at home among the other hybrids.

ripple

A ripple in the field of things. The surface of water. The conjuntion of intention and fluidity.