January 18, 2024
Painting, Sculpting, and Language
If you’ve already been through parts of my website, you’ll know that painting and sculpture (especially sculpting cities) have always played a large part in my activities. So, it’s only natural for me to add sections on the website about these supportive disciplines. They set the stage in which Tapissary has an indigenous home.
Recently, I added a new page under the FILMS+EXHIBITIONS tab called “Recent Paintings”. I used to paint with oils until I put down the brushes around 2008. My focus veered into digital art. But a dozen years later, in 2021 I was finally back to oils. This time, I’m studying some academic approaches to painting at school. It’s not an immersive program, only once a week, but the lessons are very valuable and I paint nearly everyday. Since July 2023 I’ve been taking time off from school. Away from class, I use new skills from my studies (which also include watching other artists on YouTube). If you visit the Recent Paintings page, you will also see some pages with paintings to illustrate a very short story I’m writing in Tapissary and English. It’s called the “Unknown Masons”.
The painting above is my oil copy of a painting by Guy Rose, a California Impressionist painter. During lockdown, the class I took was conducted in zoom. The school is very relaxed, and allows students to choose the paintings in any given category they would like to copy. Copying after the masters traditionally had been part and parcel in art training, but I never had it before, and wish I had as there is so much to learn with each piece.
This work above, was also done for my art class. After painting copies of a couple Impressionist masters, the assignment was to choose your own subject, but to paint it in an Impressionist style. I chose a photo I took of the cactus gardens at the Huntington Library.
Update October 09, 2022
The page on spatial grammar is making good progress…
For the past week or so, I’ve been adding pages to the spatial grammar page. There is now enough information on it that visitors can get a good idea of how to use it, and why it exists. I’ve also created a new tab for exercises for those who want to try speaking. Currently, the exercises are for basic grammar, but I will also be adding spatial grammar exercises eventually.
Update August 11, 2022
Some fundamental changes…
On August 6, I began an exercise in soul searching. I’ve gotten valuable feedback from people over the years that they enjoy the language, but the cyclic grammar stumps them. It seems the time has come to ask the hard question: how necessary is my cyclic system? Can Tapissary function without it? As I’d added my cyclic ideas to the language back in 1987, it feels like a limb of Tapissary. But taking a deep breath, a new solution is underway. There is indeed a way to keep it, but not make it a required part of the language. Since the cycles are rather complex and time consuming to construct, it might be best relegating it to poetry and literature and calling it Literary Tapissary. The Basic Grammar which has always been linked to the cycles, will now instead be paired with a much-simplified application called Spatial Grammar. Currently I’m testing that. The qualities of the Subjective and Objective persist, along with the distance between them. The degree of simplification may be somewhere around 75%. While this is an enormous change, I’ve kept true to the traditional base. The language retains its focus on the ever present balance and interplay of polarity.
New Years 2018
Smiley Awards
Some big news! On New Year’s Eve, 2018, David Peterson posted his annual Smiley Award to Tapissary. Click here to visit the post on his website. I had no idea he would go to the extent he did. Instead of asking me to translate sample sentences for him, David took it upon himself to figure them out on his own, and he did a very impressive job of it. He has a very skilled way of compactly summarizing things, giving a feel for a conlang in a clear manner. The Smiley Awards have been given out annually for 12 years now. While reading his article, I did more than smile, I was practically jumping on my poor couch. Thank you David!
This website is under construction as of Sept 20 2018