For this last year I have been a Project Learn volunteer, helping Leon brush up on his reading skills. I have doodled during lulls in the sessions. Recently, my idle scratchings revisited an old compulsive tic. Some twenty years ago I stumbled across one of those holes in the fabric of existence that I have often felt a need to patch. I discovered that Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanism, was visually underrepresented in traditional Hawaiian art. Since then I have gone so far as to attempt carved wood and plaster visualizations, along with paintings, all of which I have thrown out.

I began to wonder, while scanning these doodles into the computer, how they might be worked up in Photoshop. Here are some results. But before showing these, I would like to review a few Pele things.

pele.jpg

This painting is typical of how Pele is visualized these days: a volcanically-adorned woman, or a tableau depicting an episode taken from her narrative. I have tried to treat Pele in a more symbolic way, pulling together “woman, island, lava and symbolic depiction” as more or less geometric constructs. A parade of discards testifies to my great success.

Some years ago I carved this portly example.

older-carved-pele-revised-11-23-07.jpg

Later I tried my hand at some Pele perfume bottles using sand as a medium. They look too phallic for the part.
sand-pele-parfum-bottle-designs-11-23-07.jpg

Below is a sketch as recently doodled while with Leon.

notebook-peles-11-01-07-resized.jpg

My doodling was a bit of a mishmash, but it sat on the sheet in a promising way. I brought it home and exported it from my scanner to Photoshop. There I was surprised to find it ending up like this.

notebok-processed-resized-11-23-07.jpg

I had gone for a calligraphic look in another set of doodled Peles. This translated into a sort of fireworks seen through a Venetian blind. You may have guessed already that the straight lines came with the notepaper. But instead of being a negative, they create for me an interesting counterpoint to the flowing lines. I’m reminded of our recent conversations about art and music – the music here having come from Leon’s improvements in reading.

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And finally, this, taken from another page in the notebook. I return to an old theme of Pele as some kind of a pineapple and Hawaii as a striped tent. Some writing from the other side of the sheet bleeds through.
test-_4-11-02-07-processed-resized.jpg

One can begin to get carried away by an illusion of painterliness that appears on the screen. As a result of my happy discoveries with processing, I have been going back to older objects and images with an eye toward improvement. This means another lengthening to-do list of work to be reconsidered for a renovation. It’s as though the proper subject of my future work could be my past.

Hooray! if this turns out as I hope it will. However, I fear a missing image or two, as WordPress has been balky on my computer. I’m also trying to create this as a joint venture between two computers.