"Tree Guy"

By Gary Riggin. 24"by 18" Oil on Canvas

This is for a sick friend (acrylic on canvas)

A New Painting by Gary Riggin

New Paintings from Gary

That Time of Year

I haven't been posting much lately, so I thought I'd throw this quick sketch up here. Baseball is upon us and the Phillies could be in for a long year with the Mets' powerhouse pitching staff (A pox on you, Johann!).

The Stories They Told

I finished Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried last night (or was that the night before? this round-the-clock CoAdvil regimen is beginning to affect my thought processes) and was happy to discover the book was as much about storytelling as it was about the war. I avoided this one for a while because, between movies, television and novels, I felt I'd had a lifetime's fill of Vietnam stories. 

O'Brien, however, uses his own career as a writer (fueled by his experience in Vietnam) to blur the lines between fact and fiction in this novel. In the second half of the book, he'll return to stories from the first half and admit that, well, it didn't really happen like that or that kind of happened but it didn't happen to that character, it happened to me. And throughout the novel, stories are being told by characters and their technique is critiqued by other characters. O'Brien's point seems to be that the "truth" of fact doesn't matter; it's the emotional "truth," the larger "truth," that captures our experiences.

The Third Policeman

I read Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman recently and throughout this whole surreal vision of hell I couldn't help seeing it as an animated film. From the red-faced, fat policeman to the bicycles that take on some of the attributes of their owners (and vice versa) to the enormous subterranean machine known as "eternity" I saw it playing out as a dark cartoon.

I scribbled a few of images with my limited (laughable?) drafting skills.