Actually, at least one of the boys did not miss that. But judging from the creatures that inhabited his drawings, you might decide that he had something of an octopus complex.

Well, no, at least 50% of the population isn’t likely to evince this kind of deep-seated, or even quite-on-the-surface-obvious impulse. But that may have been a different generation anyway, one that your boys skipped.

I’m happy that you aren’t narrowing your eyes at this exercise in appropriation.

What’s funny is my assumption that Bret’s image was a personal narrative as he could have lifted it, whole cloth, from some book or show. But I like to believe otherwise. It’s kind of you to allow me room to take the kids’ stuff as I did, as the question of inheritance is often contentious.

An interesting phenomenon for me was how some of the dozen or more exercises that I undertook simply came into being, while most were frustrating and ultimately inconclusive. But I don’t see myself as unique for all that, as you often report on the same in your work. Simplicity in the chosen format made a difference as the two illustrations show. In both cases there is an interaction between two themes: the arm wrestlers and the audience in the first and the figure and the overarching complex in the other. In many other instances there would be a bunch of elements jostling with each other and filling space, and I wouldn’t be able to read the medley in any coherent way. In fact, some of these will be visiting the tree lawn this coming week.

And I do have to ask about your Freud comment as I’m not all that versed in the esteemed Dr. He may have said something about the son needing to overcome the father – or maybe not. Elucidate por favor.

AS is so often the case when one takes one’s ailing auto to the shop, and the offending symptom refuses to show itself, we may see no more of this particular WordPress balkiness. But if it does come up them I will be prepared. Thanks.

Having left the intelligent comment to June, I’ll respond to your formatting issue (comment 1). Spaces are generally stripped to one, so you can’t really use them to arrange things. The other thing I find frustrating is paragraphing: sometimes that gap gets too small. The way I fix that, for example to open the gap between your last two paragraphs, is to backspace from the start of the second one until the two are run together as one paragraph, then hit the return key. Hope that helps…

These are fascinating studies, and they certainly are yours — as are the boys, in some sense, too. That is, the paintings were their images, they whose genes came partly from you and they who spent formative years watching you work your color and art and make your inimitable comments and faces and so forth; moreover, you chose these particular images, not others that you might have chosen. And I see your specific artist’s touch, especially in the first, by Bret.

What also interested me was that you said you were looking for something “that had the aspect of a personal narrative.” Since the boys were into “whatever” it was up to you to work out the narrative — I see skulls and munch-like heads laughing, gasping, grimacing at the contest — a contest between whom, I wonder. And what Freudian notions come up when I think of you, “appropriating” Bret’s drawing and making it your own — reverse the usual narrative, indeed.

I know I’m just making stuff up, as Bob would put it. But it’s there, too, the narrative, the heads — and you supply the father-son context.

The “boys”, as I have been calling them, are all in their thirties, and whatever prompted their images is quite gone. And it might not be a cave at all but maybe more a sort of frieze. As for the red object, I might surmise that we are looking at a toupee. I have always liked the way it interacts with the head, leading down to the small, caricatured bodies.

This was part of the challenge in that I tried to avoid interjecting too many of my own reactions into vague aspects of the images.