Paul D’Agostino, “Cloud Blossoms 1” (2017), watercolor, ink, felt marker, graphite, and charcoal wash on paper, 12 x 9 inches
Disclaimer #1:
In a very real way, these “Cloud Blossoms” drawings are about as vapid as they look. Frivolous eye candy for some, perhaps, and maybe relatively pleasant as such. For others, idiotic visual treacle, more or less, and likely several drops too much. I’m fine with either take on them, really. I’m also fine with a regard of complete indifference. At the same time, some of the drawings do just happen to engage in joyously silly dances when looked at through 3D glasses. So, there’s that to consider. Oops!
Those are a few possible takes on my “Cloud Blossoms,” takes that might well have been made more resolute following the note about 3D glasses — the likely effect that note had on the treacle-seers. Speaking of treacle, and while I’m still here disclaiming, I might as well also acknowledge that it’s abundantly possible that looking at my “Cloud Blossoms” brings to mind the Care Bears, because that’s what happened to me at one point as I was photographing them — which did seem an almost exaggerated act to perform on works like these.
But it is true that I thought, with mixed chagrin and delight, ‘Care Bears!’ And then, an instant later, ‘Care Bears.’ You know, because sometimes one thinks with punctuation. The more I thought about that, and the more my thoughts went back and forth in punctuation, the more resolved I became that there must be something about a certain mix of blues and pinks that causes the brain to conjure an entire spectrum of colorful little teddy bears who live in the sky and shower love, happiness, peace, well-being, and other 80s myths all over the place. Right?
Well, I suppose this would require being of a certain age, which I am, and having a certain slightly-less-than-passive awareness of Care Bears, which I do. All the same, I did think the Care Bears were a mushy drop of treacle too much even way back when I was a kiddo — long before I would’ve used the word treacle, obviously, which was also a time when no amount of exaggerated sweetness was ever ‘too much,’ particularly with regard to breakfast cereals — in part because I was much more a fan of Transformers, WWF wrestling, Garbage Pail Kids and, very soon thereafter, Thrasher Magazine, among other things that weren’t very Care-Bear-like. This is back when Thrasher’s inner pages were still printed on newsprint, by the way. It had a smell; it sullied your hands; it advertised mostly skateboard decks, wheels and other parts, and hardly ever shoes; and it would even feature round-ups of contest results, which were interesting and important to the sport back then. You bought Thrasher and sometimes TransWorld at local surf and skate shops, where you’d also leaf through the concurrent mix of surfing magazines, in no small part because of the significant presence of girls in very slight bikinis in those periodicals, a tendency which didn’t filter into skate mags with real consistency until the early 90s, most notably with one called Big Brother.
Paul D’Agostino, “Cloud Blossoms 3” (2017), watercolor, ink, felt marker, graphite, and charcoal wash on paper, 12 x 9 inches
Big Brother, oh my, what a magazine! Visionary! Transitional! Transcendent! Excellent skate photography, a somewhat oversize format overall, lots of raunchy humor and, yes, copious soft porn. Come to think of it, some of it was actual porn. On a magazine shelf, at your local skate shop! What a coup! It was also a definitively problematic skate mag to look at in school. I’m pretty sure a skater or two was beaten up for snagging someone else’s Big Brother.
Back to the Care Bears, though. They were out there too, or perhaps up there, in the Zeitgeist, right there alongside so many other broadly propagated falsehoods about the better angels of government, commerce and society at large, or about alleged improvements in equality and opportunity and so on. This is not to say that the Care Bears were part of some massive 80s conspiracy to dupe the distracted masses into waving American flags and pledging allegiance every day (remember that?) while overlooking the incipient dismantling of all manner of generally supportive sociopolitical structures and democratic mores. The Cold War hadn’t quite yet come to its supposed ‘end,’ after all, so such superstructural shifts, probably so subtle at the time as to be nearly imperceptible, were often obscured if not subsumed by the greater narrative of The United States of America versus The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And so on.
No, the Care Bears were (probably) not part of some conspiracy like that. Although if they were, then the Cabbage Patch Kids were in cahoots with them, along with professional sports and soap operas, sitcoms, and talk shows, Saturday morning cartoons, minivans, and home improvements, and enough soda pop to fuel many a journey to space.
Those Care Bears, though, were very much a part of the popular consciousness — relevant to the ‘kindness and might’ of the USA and the evangelical movement alike. At least, they must’ve been, because they were everywhere — all over the place in toy stores and department stores, not to mention at the homes of most all of your friends who had younger sisters, and just generally visible on everything from TV to t-shirts to some kid’s Trapper Keeper. And you know, visuals sink in. So those visuals sunk in. This is also because, you have to admit, the quality of those graphics was more than passable. A few simple lines. Entire personalities conjured out of belly-bound emblems and colors. The Care Bears were also quite fun to draw—because sometimes you drew them getting ripped in half by Transformers, Voltron, or the Powell & Peralta ‘Ripper’ guy.
There were good cartoons back then. There were great cartoons back then. There might also be great cartoons now, but I don’t really know. What I do know is that gems like Ducktales are obscure to college students these days, as I recently learned from some of my students. Do they also not know about Muppet Babies? What about Ren & Stimpy, who really carved the way for so much newfangled cartoonery thereafter, along with The Simpsons? I do believe they’re aware of The Simpsons.
Paul D’Agostino, “Cloud Blossoms 5” (2017), watercolor, ink, felt marker, graphite, and charcoal wash on paper, 12 x 9 inches
Well, before this first disclaimer gets any more out of hand, I’ll move on — because if I don’t, I’ll soon get on a ‘useful’ tangent about the joys of certain breakfast cereals, especially those high-octane sugar-fests that had the best graphics and most lovable ‘mascots,’ and that your parents would almost never let you get.
And so, in sum, the thrust of Disclaimer #1: My “Cloud Blossoms” are insipid drawings, and easy to like, hate or ignore (with or without 3D glasses). They might also be reminiscent of the Care Bears, icons and associative memory-conjurers of an entire era.
Disclaimer #2: There’s not much of anything interesting or justificatory to say about these drawings, and they’re not in any fundamental way ‘about’ our times, these times, strange times.
Disclaimer #3: You’re still here? There’s not even a third disclaimer.
Well, no matter the content of my disclaimers, my “Cloud Blossoms” drawings, however devoid of concept or active sociopolitical commentary, do exist for a reason. They’re the result of wanting to make — starting one weekend afternoon, on a whim and while listening to a basketball game on the radio — some corny drawings in a variety of media.
That desire to make some corny, mindless drawings had its partial impetus in a need to get away from the cerebrally crushing news cycle that day, because it was a day in 2017, and nearly every day of the news cycle has been like that this year.
That’s also why these drawings don’t have any words on them at all, which is somewhat atypical for me. I tend to relish merging texts of various sorts with drawings of various sorts, especially when working a bit insouciantly with simple materials on paper.
This was also around the time I had written quite a long treatise on ‘the difficulty of words’ this year, thanks to the caustic nature of debate and the generally shocking or harrowing nature of the news. I wrote that as a cover letter for a job, actually, knowing quite well it wouldn’t really ‘do the trick,’ as it were, of getting me the job. It certainly didn’t.
However, I did think it might ‘do the trick’ of somewhat counterintuitively making ‘words’ thereafter ‘less difficult’ — to receive, to read, to write, to process — which it did. A catharsis of sorts.
Paul D’Agostino, “Cloud Blossoms 6” (2017), watercolor, ink, felt marker, graphite, and charcoal wash on paper, 12 x 9 inches
But I still didn’t feel like putting words on these drawings. I just felt like toying with the image of thick ‘happy’ clouds having flowers blooming out of them. ‘Better than silver linings,’ I thought.
I also thought, ‘What if ‘cloud seeding’ could do this!’
And now I’m wondering if perhaps 2017 has been a particularly great year for questions beginning with ‘What if…’.
These times do feel very hypothetical, conditional, conjectural, if in fact ‘times’ can ‘feel’ that way. They’re also not awfully different — although it’s possible they’re relatively more awful — than the ‘times’ a few decades ago, as described in Disclaimer #1.
It’s all very weary-making, even for the most fearless and thickest-skinned among us. The fellow below is a testament to that. He loitered on my block for a few days a couple weeks ago, then simply disappeared.
Ah, to disappear!
What if?
