Tag: paint

Collectanea 30.25 Syrup-Ceiling-Advisors

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Week of July 21, 2025

Another Grows Short

“Sometimes a branch grows long and another grows short, although the pattern stays the same the branches can point in different directions. They seem like different trees, but if you look carefully…” (16).

—Bruno Munari. (2017). Drawing a Tree. Edizioni Corraini. #branching #pattern #directions #trees

Dawnwatcher Heliotropism

Figure 1. “Morningdala Gloryala.” In seasonal presences, summertime’s acuity.

Erin Manning on Sap-to-Syrup

“Experience grows from theoretical premise, but does so incorporating ecological emergence. It becomes sensitive to how a process is interlaced with the complexity that makes it singular in all its different ways. It’s not just a question of knowing what to look for – it’s about having been attuned to the quality of a practice over a long duration such that its minute shifts are discernible in the feel. It’s about being in the care of its many durations” (para. 8).

—Erin Manning. (2025). Promiscuous Pedagogies – on Creativity. Three Ecologies. Substack. https://threeecologies.substack.com/p/promiscuous-pedagogies-on-creativity

5ives

Degree-Granting Institutions, Year, and Chairs of My Dissertation Committee Members

  1. University of Texas–Arlington, 1997 (Victor J. Vitanza, chair; Frank, Kellner, Kolko, Van Noort)
  2. Case Western Reserve, 1980 (P.K. Saha & Frances Wolpaw, co-chairs; Stonum, Sweeney)
  3. West Virginia University, 1984 (Patrick W. Conner, chair; Almasy, Elkins, Madison, Miles)
  4. SUNY-Albany, 1997 (Not available in the Proquest filing)
  5. Michigan Tech, 1999 (Marilyn Cooper, chair; Selfe, George, Durfee, Bolter)

Writing Studies Tree bonsai, How might we re-activate, or re-engage, the invisible ramuli of advisory genealogies?

The Big Kettle Drum

Painting the front shed ceiling. Dark blue because a miss-mixed gallon was nine bucks at the hardware. Opportunity in the mistakes of others. Also being dumbshit because only recently have I discovered that one gallon will not quite cover the entire ceiling. Another fifty bucks for a second dark blue gallon to finish. Step ladder to reach. Step up, step down, step up, step down. Temporarily anchored thin chain segments to release the old, rusted, and very heavy florescent light bays each into a cradle so the electrical wires can stay put. Paint around the edge. La la. Johnny Cash Unearthed for a while. Hymnals for church of holler projects. Jesus, let it dry. Re-attach with same mildly corroded lag screws. Right shoulder aches familiarly. Pain Friend forewarns a visit. Overhead painting summons the pair of 1995 surgeries. Back when I was twenty-one. Pins to hold its many unpredictable slippages, hem in structural flaws. Paint on Monday and Thursday afternoon because those are the right recovery intervals for the age I happen to be now. Not finished but soon. Painting the front shed ceiling. Dark blue because.

Disappeared

“Suppose all of the syllabi and curricula and textbooks in schools disappeared. Suppose all of the standardized tests–city-wide, state-wide, and national–were lost. In other words, suppose that the most common material impeding innovation in the schools simply did not exist. Then suppose that you decided to turn this ‘catastrophe’ into an opportunity to increase the relevance of the schools. What would you do? (59).

—Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. (1969). Teaching As a Subversive Activity. Delta. #reboot #education

About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m tiring out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the ninth in this series from Week 30 of 2025, or the Week of July 21). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

2025 John Lovas Award showpiece arrived in July’s mail. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Coop

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Let’s call this one “Painting Among the Decaying Birds, July 1991” or “Coop.”

Nearly thirty years have gone by, but I can not forget that first job after high school, working for Coyne Oil & Propane. Didn’t have any description to pair with it, and I was 17, so didn’t pause to care for long about how the job was defined, what amounted to a do-anything unskilled generalist, some days refilling the windshield washer tubs mounted near the fuel terminal or sweeping the engine-leaks-absorbing clay pellets scattered on the concrete where fleet vehicles parked while fueling. Other days painting lines on parking spaces, emptying garbage, or loading grime-covered empty barrels by hand into the back of a semi trailer, one by one by one. When the weather cooperated, most days involved painting propane tanks. I wrote about it once before, several years ago (“Propane“), keying on some of the flashbacks to that job and how it was set up, the Ford half-ton flatbed I drove when the tanks were in the field and the rickety front loader whose hydraulics were so breezy, to hoist a tank initiated game show-like countdown, racing to paint the tank’s underside before it lowered to the ground.

It was an iffy first job. Minimum wage was, what?, maybe $4.25 an hour in 1991. The beige paint came in five gallon buckets with exclamatory warning labels about its toxicity and how you should avoid contact with your skin, but day in and day out for months my hands were covered with the stuff.

Iffy, too, were some of the situations that presented with the off-site, in-the-field painting. Some of the tanks were a mess–surfaces pocked and rusted and impossible to refinish with the limited tools I had available; many of the sites were heinous, too–tanks converged upon by tall weeds or branches, swallowed up by their surrounds, much of which the homeowners preferred to have left undisturbed. But there weren’t many rules, otherwise, and the only lines of communication were when one of the Coyne brothers who owned the company would receive a phone call of request or complaint.

The drawing up top returns again to the unforgettable excursion to a remote, wooded lot north of Farwell, Mich. A trailer in the trees with an ad hoc perimeter of chicken wire around, lazy-tacked stakes leaning, and inside that perimeter, the 330-gallon propane tank sat stably on blocks. I knocked on the door to alert them to my being there; but the adults inside were gravely ambivalent, vaguely gesturing “go on” without getting up from where they sat watching television. And in the side-yard, in that coop, all around the tank, dead, decaying chickens were strewn about right where the universe had left them–unfed to the point of starving, maybe, or subjected to a weasel’s spree. Who knows. Not the finest hour of my work life, tending to the job, stepping across the piles of putrid feathers abuzz with flies, getting out my painting supplies, pouring a roller pan full of beige paint, and rolling until the tank glistened, there in the shade. Naked or half-dressed, little kids ate cherry popsicles and watched from the window, onlookers almost like at one of those live sidewalk art performances in Chicago or New York, only humbler.

The memory comes up. This time, I drew about it, then wrote a few lines. Grand lessons, I don’t know, probably not. I do wonder if anyone has had to paint that tank since. How those kids are doing. Whether the residents got right with raising chickens and had a better go of it. Coop is of those memories that raises up any time I have a bad day at work. I suppose that’s why this was such a good first job after high school to have, painting propane tanks this way. At least it’s not that July 1991 excursion again. At least there aren’t dead and decaying chickens scattered about the place.

Digital Canvass

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Colors

Purple Dino

Is. has been asking lately–passionately–to paint. In
fact, "paint" is one of those five-alarm words around the house: we know that
saying it will tip Is. into such intense determination that, once it is said,
there is no getting out of some sort of painting. D. will happily set out
the water colors for her on the kitchen table (at breakfast this morning, Is.
pointed to lingering brush marks on the wall and proudly claimed it: "Baby
paint!" But she is almost as content with the graphics tablet and
digital canvass. I can
map the tablet to the exact size of the blank canvass on the interface and
assist her (by mouse) with choosing colors–all a far better match with my own
material preferences when it comes to painting. Whatever else can be said
of it, Is. is picking up on subtle distinctions between colors (i.e. dark red
and what she calls "yellow-white," although I’m still not always sure what this
latter one is). And, on any given day, she gets enough of the water colors
and enough of the graphics tablet to refer to them both as "painting" (a word
you must not mutter in our company unless you want to alter the course of our
lives for an hour).

Above, the first is just some futzing around with colors.
The second looks to me like the end of the purple dinosaurs or the smoke monster
from Lost knocking Mr. Echo onto his back.