2 THE BOZO PORTAL Today we had no dogs at the Boukoleon and the bums’ tent was empty. It’s made of a blanket hung over a cord tied to the ancient wall and a little tree, with a teapot set up next to it, trash everywhere and wadded up against the fence. Away over in the corner near the big arch a guy sat scowling and reading. A pair of teenagers showed up, spread a newspaper on the brick pavement amid the blowing trash, and started necking. They were there for three hours. I felt like a duenna.
Here’s Take One on the far left portal, too narrow. Must re-draw. Had a time as I couldn’t find my pencil. Knew I’d put it in with the pens. The page I prepared at home, up against the window, tracing the layout with pencil from what I’d done before, turned out to be cut too short. I had to prepare another. And. No. Pencil. Trying to hold two huge flapping papers up to the light and keep them from sliding out of place while I made pen dots on the perspective lines. Then I packed up, went down to the bus stop and asked one of the drivers. He gave me a fine art pencil and I almost kissed him. Oh bliss, to safely delineate the basic block-in of that blasted portal.
Re-drew it, and am I glad I did. Now it works, it’ll carry the whole thing. The problem yesterday came when I drew the entire rectangle of the portal in ink and then tried to put all the arches inside, and they came out squeezed. This time I penciled only the left post and the top, the main horizontal perspective lines and some of the inside. Then I started drawing in ink, the inside of the portal, all the arches and twisted burned brick. This worked. See how it’s much wider?
Started sneezing but didn’t care, it was going so well at last. High above my small shady cypress tree is an enormous Sycamore, and something up there is crapping on the page from time to time. I have to be quick with a tissue or it soaks into the page.
Those neckers hung in there and I got a surreptitious drawing of them melted into each other. They felt it, her suspicious little face glancing over at me past the sheaf of black hair. A kid with braces from Iran asked me the history of the palace, said he was stuck with his mother and grandmother who only wanted to shop. I gave him a card for the website.
A guy crawled out of the tent, scratched himself, waved. Said he knows me, I’m the artist, I could draw there as long as I liked and he would keep off the riffraff. He works long hours at the gas station across the highway, was catching some sleep.
End of the day an ebullient Turkish guy came up and said he could feel the presence of the ancient Byzantines. I said I could too, they blow in with the leaves and watch me draw. He said he could also feel the spirit of Jesus Christ. I let that one go. The Boukoleon was built in 817, lived in for four centuries, sacked and burned in 1204. Byzantines built it and lived and prayed in it and Crusaders destroyed it, and all of them in the name of Jesus Christ. While I was drawing the portal I saw darkness and blood and flames, Crusaders in armor stalking through the arcade of arches, one standing there with drawn and dripping sword, the red cross on his chest visible through the smoke, over him the same cross carved in the blackening marble lintel, the flames fluttering like Crusaders’ flags.
