THE BUFFALO BOY’S LAMENT
(Ink and watercolor on Moleskine Japanese album sketchbook, 8 x 127 1/2in)
This was the last concertina sketchbook – Japanese album? accordion book? what do we call these things, anyway?! – I finished before the New Year. I began the book with the last two spreads – the triceratops and T-Rex skeletons at the Academy of Natural Sciences followed shortly by a drawing of Reading Terminal Market, both spreads drawn mostly from life during weekly visits down to Philadelphia last spring. Then last summer while visiting my folks on Cottonwood Lane in Bismarck, North Dakota I had an early morning dream in mostly gray: A lanky half-man, half-buffalo figure was loping slowly through an aspen forest with a herd of regular buffalo, silently. Upon awakening I made a thumbnail sketch of the vision on a Post-it Note. Later that day in Bismarck I began the third spread in this sketchbook based on my thumbnail sketch. And the book finally circles back to New York City and Union Square Park and the Barnes & Noble there and the bronze Gandhi statue which I drew on a visit last fall with my ADVANCED DRAWING class at the School of Visual Arts.
I haven’t done any hard research on this but it seems to me that what we’re referring to when we talk about “dreams” are those moments just before we wake up, our eyes darting back and forth underneath their lids, our brain’s synapsis firing to life with all of the things that have been on our conscious and subconscious minds. And the most epic/erotic/emotional/joyous/overwhelming “dream” you’ve ever had probably lasted only a couple of minutes. Maybe even just a minute. Maybe a flashing few seconds.
These scrolling sketchbooks, simply put, are Daydreams.
