- So What Are You Doing? - Having Some Very Nonfictional Feelings About Fictional Characters. I Mean,

“Muhammad Ali, formerly Cassius Clay, boxing world heavy weight champion in Chicago, on a bridge over the Chicago river”, Thomas Hoepker, Chicago, USA, 1966. 

Source: Magnum photo.

Source: lefthandedtoons.com

“Sitting on a Million Dollars”, Howard Bingham, 1963. 

Oku-no-In, Koyasan, Japan, 2015.

Source: Mystic Cheesecake Balloon. 

Thought I’d let you know Society6 is having another sale in case you want to take advantage:

Promo: 25% Off Everything With Code GIVEART25 Start: Sunday, 11/12/17 at 12:00am PT End: Monday, 11/13/17 at 11:59pm PT

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Passive income like this really helps me and other illustrators keep going and keep making work so if you’re on the hunt for holiday gifts already, I hope you’ll check out the sale!

いざ行かむ  Let’s go out 雪見にころぶ  To see the snow view 所まで   Where we slip and fall

Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)

Boxer Muhammad Ali prior to fight against Ernie Terrell in the Astrodome, Richard Pipes, Houston, USA, 1967.

Diving into the Wreck First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

Adrienne Rich, Poems 1971-1972, 1973. 

Trainer Works on Muhammad Ali's Shoulder, Gordon Parks, 1966, Miami, USA.  

市人よ   Hey townspeople, 此笠うらふ  I’ll sell you my woven hat, 雪の傘   The snow umbrella

Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)