Good Morning Jessicca

Letter to my Daughter
Sunday, 8 March

Good Morning Jessicca…

I’m a bit absent-minded when I draw. 

It’s like I want to tell a story but I can’t find the narrative.

The words escape me, so I settle for this, a vague notion – a doodle.

Here’s a portrait of parents at the swing set.

One day out of the blue I saw something extraordinary in Little Miss Muffet.

I feel life must be going well for you.   You've always been engaged with people.  You’re someone who would invest their time in the welfare of others.  You care.  That’s what’s important.

Love,

          Dad

© Tom Taylor

Good Morning Jacob

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 22 February

Good Morning Jacob…

It’s raining outside.  The last of our snow will soon wash away.  Today will no longer be cold as temperatures return to the fifties.

I try to live my life objectively – making sure everything adds up correctly, no matter how I slice it.  But I try to bend the rules to my way of thinking and the setbacks are predictable.  Still, I remain committed to bargaining with life.

I draw pictures that start as doodles.  There’s very little thought given them at the time.  I just proceed with whatever seems an opportune image.  Maybe I visualize just a mouth on the paper.  There is no plan.  This isn’t always the case, though.  Sometimes I attempt to draw something real.  Later I doodle over it.  The item becomes a story.  Here’s an obsessive quality to be exploited.

There’s a downside to everything we choose to do.

Words usually tie things together that makes sense.  It’s rational but incomplete.  We can’t quantify everything, thank God.  People want to move beyond common sense.  We need mystery.  Our greatest minds feed on it:  Einstein, Newton, Shakespeare.  They had no desire to ever stop puzzling.

Reason is useful in avoiding loss of life.  We want to stick around and puzzle over all the pleasure of physical existence.  What is love?  See – here is something that can’t be quantified.  Why would you want to?  Do you really want to erase enjoyment of its mystery?  Like I’m actually worried that would happen.  How much thought has been given love in writing and song?  Rhetorical question; the point is how little progress we've made in its understanding.  For instance, what motivates its evolution?  I assume love has progressed up the evolutionary scale.  But what does all this matter to two people finding themselves alone together on a June night?  Mystery lets imagination go to work.  This can make for a wonderfully personal reality… something worth posting on the refrigerator door.

Love,

          Dad

© Tom Taylor

Good Morning Justin...

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 8 June

Cast Away

Good Morning Justin…

Sometimes drawing a picture has no conscious purpose.  Doodling is too absent-minded to be what it is I am talking about here.  I’m thinking about other things while I doodle.  The kind of drawing I’m referring to requires my full attention but it doesn’t start with any apparent theme or have any desired conclusion in mind while I draw.  I start with a shape.  It suggests to me something I have seen in life so I elaborate on the original shape to create something that often appears cartoonish in its exaggerated simplicity.  The item created usually brings to mind another item for me to associate with it.  I am building a composition of images gathered together through a process that may have some similarity with word association.  The items drawn are usually very elementary in their appearance.  A house may be little more than a box with a single window and a couple of lines representing a pointed roof.  A person may be as fluid as a stake punched in the ground.  The land about these simple figures can be very elaborate in design.  This design contains within it a suggestion of forms that individually and as a group hold no clear identity.  It is a pattern of line and shadow that does provide an illusion of dimension but no reality works quite like this.  There is often a sense of movement.  It is not so much fluid as it is crumbling, ripped and tortured, like the slippage between layers of dissimilar sediments in an earthquake.  Are those gaping holes in the terrain?  Everything made by man attempts to root in what is inherently unstable.  The earth is up and the sky is down.  What is the sense of it?

I haven’t a clue.  Maybe it is nothing more than a junk dump of the mind.

Love,

          Dad