jeffersonsevencollective-blog

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Here are some more recent drawings of mine.  I’m not sure if anyone has really been posting on this but whatev’

-JSS

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Here are some more recent abstract drawings I’ve done! Love you all!!!

-JSS

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even tho i dont post much i REALLY enjoy this blog. here’s another beat. 

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Here’s one of the decals my sister in-law helped me make. I made a few different designs and sold them on my most recent musical tours.  

-JSS

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Here are some kinda blurry pics of some drawings I was working on this fall/winter.  I have a few more that I’m pretty into that I’ll post soon.  Been getting deep into a loose doodle style and trying rework and mold drawings as they unfold instead of just abandoning them if I don’t like them right away.  I’m gonna try to post more now that I’m back from tour! Hope y'all are doing well!!!

xoxoxoxoxo

-JSS

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Tidbits and Opems by Greebers

I’ll say things at work like “I drink decaffeinated tea at night,” as if that’s interesting.

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For a while I thought it was dumb to wear hats. But it turns out, I like hats.

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It can be good to express yourself with your brain turned off. FfffrrrrrreeeeeeeeFLOW. The subconscious needs more than just dreams as an outlet.

                                           <><><><><><><>

They laugh, and that keeps them together.

They’re fine, even when they fight.

Bicker, bicker, bicker.

But that’s monogamy.

Humanity.

Relationship.

Laughter is glue, it’s binding.

Laughter is restorative, it’s medicine.

                                           <><><><><><><>

You don’t want to just reference, and regurgitate.

You want to be a critical thinker.

But you don’t want to be staunchly opinionated and sound arrogant.

You want to be well read, and open to the world.

You want to be compassionate, intelligent.

But you find yourself numb and dumb.

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Compassion, and the slightest effort to get someone to talk about themselves, goes a long way in the pursuit of connection. But you can’t just be a bobble head. You have to have your own opinions, or at least your own way of doing things. You want to be a critical thinker, and ask thoughtful questions.

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An Untitled Desert Poem by Chard Greene

Earth’s crust crunches, otherwise there’s nothing. Nothing but the purity of silence. Internal transmissions unobstructed, my brain b     r     e     a     t     h     e     s beneath the bright blue open. Walkie-talkies in my skull, I chat up all the crooked kooks and prickle pokies. Whisper a windmill rotational possibility into the ear of royalty or scum. Patch the shredded networks with spider silk strength. Little lizards scamper. Delicate behemoths bathe in my heart, thumping sandstone tears to the ground. An earthquaked ribcage rumbles, rumbles…then rumbles again. Eyes twinkle as reflections of the milky way. A distant band of stars, mounds of memories, the sun burns harsh. Dinky quirks keep me cruising. Grand vastness lets me bloom. I bob and dip in a bone dry moat, basking in the beautiful, the broken—thankful and floatin’. I can’t believe that plants spring sideways from stone. And so much life calls here home. Maybe I can be resilient.

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Looking deep into the eyes of Brendan’s Beaver made me feel something... -jg

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A character I’m working on called Goody Tooshoos. 

-jG

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Some drawing Brendan and I made for a game that we made. Which we made. 

-Jg

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Hi all, here’s more stuff. More of a christmas card than an art post but...j&h (the print shop I work at) has a lot of good paper, ink & laminators etc so the top image was something fun just playing in the shop. I got a lot of 2.75″x4.25″ cards with different colors and textures and been using paint pens on them. I didnt include any because I can’t figure out how to convert them from pdf to jpg and I’m out of patience for that. The second image was my late summer clothing, just bright solid colors. Michaels sells lots of colors of plain hats which is nice. Now winters here so I gotta find colored jean pants or some other thing to wear. I also had a little haircut (the bottom image, it’s like a half a mohawk) that I liked for a second but now I need a new one cause it’s growing back in. Hopefully by the end of the month I’ll have a couple more things scanned etc. peas homies, pickle salad (jk, it’s brendan)

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My latest demo reel. I got some good information on demo reels from a guy I met at the Indie Gathering. 

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Latest piece for theory class. Secondary Dominants. 

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Here’s a beaver and dam that I made for work to welcome the OSU Beaver fans. It was put in the window, over the top of Fred’s desk (pictured) and resting on the window sill. The idea was to make something that could be put up and taken down in <5 minutes that didn’t require tape or glue. It also all fits conveniently into most of a bicycle box.  It’s also all recycled except for the tape and the beavers brown fur (sheets of brown paper). Also we won 4 football tickets to the game and a $50 gift certificate to a cougar clothing shop, obviously I had no use for those items but my boss Missy did. I’ll try to post more this week, I’ve just been low access to internet.

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Tragedy – The Valley

In the beginning, before the Word, there was the land. And the land was fruitful, and upon it rose the people. And before they were chosen to receive the Word, they were idle, and knew no rank amongst themselves. They sang meaningless hymns to the river that ran through their valley—not to all rivers, or to the idea of River— to the skinny river running from the mountains through their valley for time eternal, from whence came their water and fish; and so the people worshipped the river as though it was significant, but it was not. It was merely a river, so like countless others scattered across the world of which they knew nothing.  

Like savages the people lived for generations without memory and no one of the people could be remembered two generations after their death: they passed in to nothingness, as though they had never existed, dust to dust, for the people lived only in the present: catching their fish, gathering the greens that grew beside the river, digging roots and eating nuts from the land, no better than the elk or the deer that they hunted in winter (if they could be said to have a winter in so mild a land).

And the people lived, raising illiterate brutes that died forgotten under the unnamed moon, until the first Vir, the father of all the Vir, chosen to bring the Word.

A party hunting elk in the Mountains did not return upon the time looked for, and their corpses found weeks later spoke of an evil people coming to the land. This new people was dark and fell, named themselves the Morresvir, and they had the Word. Before them they drove their slaves, and it is from one or two of these slaves who fled that the people learned of the Morresvir, for the people had traded with these slaves when before they had been people of the Mountain, simple, living in caves, ignorant like the people of the River. They slaves told how the Morresvir rode upon great beasts of war, their lips and ears were heavy with shiny hard metal, ripped from the mountain, and their leader had many wives.

One from the people who would become the Vallisvir went with the slaves to pray upon the sacred Rock, and when he came down, he brought with him the Word, which had been revealed to him on the Rock.

He told the people that the Word would save them, but that the Word required Sacrifice: Time or Flesh. And each family chose one from them to offer. With this Sacrifice, he made great stone walls around his people. And this magic had been known to the people, for at times the land they settled could be cruel and cold, and the river frozen would not yield fish and the people would be hungry. And in these times the eldest would walk out in to the cold and come back as an elk, and the people would eat upon the elder’s Flesh and not starve. But the Word could turn Flesh to stone, and the people saw indeed that the one chosen upon the Rock was their King, and they followed him and turned the Morresvir away from their land.

And with the Word as his ally, he showed the people, who were now the Vallisvir, to sow and to reap the crops, and to build houses of stone, and that the nature of men was to work to raise the crops, and of women to tend the home, of men to own and of women to raise, and that there was honor beneath the Word in each, but there could only be one King. One Word, one King of the Vallisvir, one king of the home.

And he outlawed turning Flesh to Flesh, saying that man could not eat his father, and that sacrifice of Flesh was only just when there was no Time and that the Vallisvir must learn to sacrifice Time, to plan their lives, and to work, and with this Sacrifice, they would survive. Much was revealed in his life, and more by his sons and their sons.

*                                                                             *                                                                             *

Alone on the field, abandoned by cowards, he refuses to yield, for he knows if he does: behind him only children, soft flesh before the sword of the enemy. He has always been a good fighter, but storming toward him he sees the blue painted faces of a thousand savages, tongues impossibly red.

He names the flowers that make the paint on his enemies’ faces:  harebell, morning glory.

He names the villages the savages have burnt already: Riverside, Fern.

Closer now he sees the impossibly red tongues too are painted: currant, mountain-ash.

He names his sire, and his sire before him, the King: the gentleness of their voices soft telling stories before the hearth, the steel of their jaws set in war.

The smell of death reaches him, they are close now, twenty yards.

He names his friends dead in battle: Brendan, whose sweet voice kept the birds company; Gareth, whose black eyes like coal shined his smile.

He names places he kissed his lover goodbye: ear lobe the nape of her neck crown of her head the smell of sandalwood and musk names tears in her eyes stars names unborn children names

*                                                                             *                                                                             *

When he becomes King, the battle is hung as tapestry in the Great Hall of the Vir. The moon reaches her pale hand down to him, handing him a frozen hammer. The savage army shudders under the light as the Word reveals him as chosen and he crushes his foes.

His tiny son, Collum, loves when his father holds him by his crooked legs above his shoulders, so he touch soft threads, smell the dye on the cloth.

*                                                                             *                                                                             *

“Father of us all,” Collum said, “the River is frozen. What will the Vir eat?”

“The Word provides, son of my Flesh.”

The Vir were hungry, and the crops failed in the fog and ash falling from the Mountain. Some had remembered the stories of their people living off the fish in the River, but now it had frozen and would yield no fish.

The King, the father of all the Vir, went to his tower and stared at the cold moon, naming her by each night: Sliverluna, Bimorreluna, Wholeluna until she too forsake the people and left only the cold black night and the cruel stars, and he spoke their names then too and his people starved in their grey fields and on the bank of their frozen River until the son Collum climbed the tower and shook his father.

“Father, the scouts say they have seen the wild People on the Mountain—let me go to them and find upon what they feed!”

“They are a Word-less people, bearing brutes beneath a nameless moon to be forgotten for the ages.”

And so the son Collum told his father he would not go, but when he descended the tower and looked in to the grey eyes of the Vir, in their mud huts on the banks for their frozen River, he could not bear it and he went out.

He found the wild People not on the Mountain but in the Forrest and good that he did for he had walked for two names of the moon without eating and he sat with them and they gave him elk to eat by their fire and he found that they spoke not the Word but sang to the river, and the mountain, the forest, and even the elk. It was this last hymn sung to the elk, melancholy, pierced with grief and guilt, that froze his teeth around the greasy bite of elk in his mouth and then he found he was eating the father of the man to his left, who had named himself ignominiously Reed. The father of Reed had walked in to the snow two days before.

And so Collum smiled and said he understood and that although the metaphor was to him needlessly chilling he felt that these men were not as wild or savage as his father in his cold high tower had said.

Fed he slept with them that night only to be awoken in the dark by screaming and he ran in to the night. Another group of wild men had come and with spears and arrows stormed the camp and Collum was struck with an arrow as he fled.

The fever came on him slowly such that at first he did not notice it but by the time he was back to the starving city of the Vir beside the frozen river he was burning with fever and did not protest when he was taken to the tower and put on the pyre.

For his father had spoken to the stars the Words and they had answered that there was no time, and in place of Time, there must be Flesh. And so the father had ordered the youngest to burn so that he could have shiny metal to trade amongst the Morresvir when they came. And then he ordered the daughters not yet mothers to burn so that he could send out signal fires to ask the Morresvir to come to treat. And then he ordered that the sons and the mothers together go on the fire, and this was hard even for the kings of the homes to see, but the sacrifice demanded Flesh. And then the King in his tower surrounded by his gold lay his son upon the pyre and fed upon his Flesh and named the moon and the stars in their cold sky by all the names he knew.

�9�b�}

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Tragedy – The Valley

In the beginning, before the Word, there was the land. And the land was fruitful, and upon it rose the people. And before they were chosen to receive the Word, they had no name for themselves. They were idle, and knew no rank amongst themselves. Their songs were meaningless hymns to the river that ran through their valley—not to all rivers, or to the idea of River; nay, but to the skinny river running from the mountains through their valley for time eternal, from whence came their water and fish; and so the people worshipped the river as though it was significant, but it was not. It was merely a river, so like countless others scattered across the world of which they knew nothing.  

Like savages the people lived for generations without memory and no one of the people could be remembered two generations after their death: they passed in to nothingness, as though they had never existed, dust to dust, for the people lived only in the present: catching their fish, gathering the greens that grew beside the river, digging roots and eating nuts from the land, no better than the elk or the deer that they hunted in winter (if they could be said to have a winter in so mild a land).

And the people lived thus, raising illiterate brutes that died forgotten under the unnamed moon, until the first Vir, the father of all the Vir, chosen to bring the Word.

A party hunting elk in the Mountains did not return upon the time looked for, and their corpses found weeks later spoke of an evil people coming to the land. This new people was dark and fell, named themselves the Morresvir, and they had the Word. Before them they drove their slaves, and it is from one or two of these slaves who fled that the people learned of the Morresvir, for the people had traded with these slaves when before they had been people of the Mountain, simple, living in caves, ignorant like the people of the River. They slaves told how the Morresvir rode upon great beasts of war, their lips and ears were heavy with shiny hard metal, ripped from the mountain, and their leader had many wives.

One from the people who would become the Vallisvir went with the slaves to pray upon the sacred Rock, and when he came down, he brought with him the Word, which had been revealed to him on the Rock.

He told the people that the Word would save them, but that the Word required Sacrifice: Time or Flesh. And each family chose one from them to offer. With this Sacrifice, he made great stone walls around his people. And this magic had been known to the people, for at times the land they settled could be cruel and cold, and the river frozen would not yield fish and the people would be hungry. And in these times the eldest would walk out in to the cold and come back as an elk, and the people would eat upon the elder’s Flesh and not starve. But the Word could turn Flesh to stone, and the people saw indeed that the one chosen upon the Rock was their King, and they followed him and turned the Morresvir away from their land.

And with the Word as his ally, he showed the people, who he explained now were the Vallisvir, to sow and to reap the crops, and to build houses of stone, and that the nature of men was to work to raise the crops, and of women to tend the home, of men to own and of women to raise, and that there was honor beneath the Word in each, but there could only be one King. One Word, one King of the Vallisvir, one king of the home.

And he outlawed turning Flesh to Flesh, saying that man could not eat his father, and that sacrifice of Flesh was only just when there was no Time and that the Vallisvir must learn to sacrifice Time, to plan their lives, and to work, and with this Sacrifice, they would survive.. Much was revealed in his life, and more by his sons and their sons.

*                                                                             *                                                                             *

“Father of us all,” Collum said, “the River is frozen. What will the Vir eat?”

“The Word provides, son of my Flesh.”

The Vir were hungry, and the crops failed in the fog and ash falling from the Mountain. Some had remembered the stories of their people living off the fish in the River, but now it had frozen and would yield no fish.

The King, the father of all the Vir, went to his tower and stared at the cold moon, naming her by each night: Sliverluna, Bimorreluna, Wholeluna until she too forsake the people and left only the cold black night and the cruel stars, and he spoke their names then too and his people starved in their grey fields and on the bank of their frozen River until the son Collum climbed the tower and shook his father.

“Father, the scouts say they have seen the wild People on the Mountain—let me go to them and find upon what they feed!”

“They are a Word-less people, bearing brutes beneath a nameless moon to be forgotten for the ages.”

And so the son Collum told his father he would not go, but when he descended the tower and looked in to the grey eyes of the Vir, in their mud huts on the banks for their frozen River, he could not bear it and he went out.

Indeed he found the wild People not on the Mountain but in the Forrest and good that he did for he had walked for two names of the moon without eating and he sat with them and they gave him elk to eat by their fire and he found that they spoke not the Word but sang to the river, and the mountain, the forest, and even the elk. It was this last hymn sung to the elk, melancholy, pierced with grief and guilt, that froze his teeth around the greasy bite of elk in his mouth and then he found he was eating the father of the man to his left, who had named himself ignominiously Reed. The father of Reed had walked in to the snow two days before.

And so Collum smiled and said he understood and that although the metaphor was to him needlessly chilling he felt that these men were not as wild or savage as his father in his cold high tower had said.

Fed he slept with them that night only to be awoken in the dark by screaming and he ran in to the night. Another group of wild men had come and with spears and arrows stormed the camp and Collum was struck with an arrow as he fled.

The fever came on him slowly such that at first he did not notice it but by the time he was back to the starving city of the Vir beside the frozen river he was burning with fever and did not protest when he was taken to the tower and put on the pyre.

For his father had spoken to the stars the Words and they had answered that there was no time, and in place of Time, there must be Flesh. And so the father had ordered the youngest to burn so that he could have shiny metal to trade amongst the Morresvir when they came. And then he ordered the daughters not yet mothers to burn so that he could send out signal fires to ask the Morresvir to come to treat. And then he ordered that the sons and the mothers together go on the fire, and this was hard even for the kings of the homes to see, but the sacrifice demanded Flesh. And then the King in his tower surrounded by his gold lay his son upon the pyre and fed upon his Flesh and named the moon and the stars in their cold sky by all the names he knew.