Hairs on Fire - with an oil pastel technique

From the archives:

HAIRS ON FIRE! Not really. This is an oil pastel I did while working in North Conway, New Hampshire.  I often find the faces of people I know creeping into my work. I guess because I have had to look at them and their features are familiar. In my mind there is some facial resemblance to a fellow named Burns who was a planner there. (It's not much of a likeness.)

One of my favorite things to do with oil pastels is to lay down thick color then draw back into it with some handy implement or other. Sometimes the first layer is scraped, then a second color is heavily applied and scraped into revealing some of the first color. When I took a drawing class at Western Connecticut State University, many years ago, I remember learning to draw into  heavy pencil marks with an eraser. This is where I got the idea of removing material as a way to form the picture. 

Post Script 10/19/2011 - One of the reasons I reposted this at this time is, I recently read how Jay Defeo formed The Rose using sharpened knives as much as brushes as she cut back into the layers of paint and scraped and hacked to remove material to form the topography of the painting. Very cool stuff.

Guns as Inheritance: Passage or Portent?

From the archives:

I haven’t been able to think clearly about guns since my ex-husband shot me in the behind with a pellet pistol 30 years ago. He actually said those classic words - “I didn’t know it was loaded.” 

He said it in an uncharacteristically high and nervous voice as he was wringing his hands. My ex kept that gun in our over-the-junk-store apartment for the unbelievable purpose of shooting wasps, and he was actually quite good at it.This isn't on my mind at the moment. 

Right now, I am troubled because I was witness to an odd ceremony last weekend. A grandfather, a relative of mine, gave a pistol with a holster and ammunition to his 14-year-old grandson. It was not a toy. He talked about not being around much longer and wanting someone to have it. He helped the boy strap on the belt and tie the bottom of the holster around his leg. Showed him how to load it. His segment of the family takes periodic Sunday afternoon outings to a shooting range at grandpa’s behest. 

While I understand the idea, this last gift is a bit disconcerting. Adolescents don’t live in the same world this 78-year-old grandpa did when he was coming of age. After Columbine and other recent school shootings I can hardly believe anyone would think this was a good gift for a teen. 

Though this boy seems smart and sensible, he is a teen. The young seem to live in a world of exaggerated response, always testing the limits and forming the brain circuitry. A young teen’s world is up and down in a day. Their triumph and despair always seem life rending. I hope his parents had the good sense to store it out of reach.

No doubt guns have several iconic meanings in American culture. The giver of the gun was a guardian-of- freedom type, a wanna be militia man with twisted but good intentions. For him and for many conservatives and libertarians, guns represent a sacred trust by which we remain free, though the federal government runs amok, though invaders from abroad or from Mars descend. To the frontiersman or the hunter they are a tool to dinner, triumph, survival. To the egoist, validation. To the vigilante and the sociopath, gunfire is the bark of the archangel. 

As a wounded pragmatist, to me guns will always represent a pain in the ass and an unanswered moral question.

---- Mar Walker
December 4, 2006

Duct Tape Improvisations

From the Archive:

A few weeks ago, on a rural/suburban road I noticed a pitiful mailbox that had been hastily repaired. It’s a simple, stubborn fix, born of a determination not to let the wreckers win. That’s a sentiment my father would have appreciated.

We lived in the middle of a long dark stretch of woodsy road, and our mailbox often fell victim to the excessive exuberance of youths with unsafe levels of testosterone and beer in their veins. Once, a family who lived four miles away called to say they had found our mailbox, crushed to sheet metal, and tossed onto their lawn in the middle of the night. It was the fourth time that summer our mail box had been assaulted. Once it was blown to shreds with an M80.

In response, my father fell to clenching his teeth and muttering down in the basement. He had something more substantial than duct tape in mind. For weeks he worked to construct an impenetrable mail box fit for the great age of the vandals. He added steel plates to the ends of a heavy gauge steel pipe. One plate was mounted on a heavy spring so the Mailman would have to pry it open to insert the mail. What my father had in mind was Roadrunner and Coyote. In particular, the scene where Coyote raises his baseball bat, but the Roadrunner suddenly steps aside. Coyote, swinging for all he’s worth his a big rock instead of Roadrunner. Cartoon shock waves travel up his arms until his whole body shakes. My father planned a stealth execution of this script. He intended to wrap the steel pipe with a regular, vulnerable-looking mail box to lure the villains. Unfortunately he died before he could put the thing up. I often wondered if the extra stress contributed to his early death.

In Dad’s reckoning, making needless work for someone else, was a theft of their time and effort. “Don’t make work for you mother,” he was always telling me sternly. We put up the steel mailbox for a few months without its stealth covering. As fate would have it, a plow knocked it over. Though the plow driver apologized, the original vandals were never found. Now, twenty-five years after the great steel mailbox caper, I wonder if somewhere, somehow our vandals have mailboxes of their own, and a baggy-pants, spiky-haired teen with ear buds dangling is unknowingly getting even for Dad with a quart of green slim or a quarter-stick popper.

---- Mar Walker, 12/3/2006

On the Women Beats - a reading this Sunday

On Sunday October 16th 11A.M. - 2:30P.M. at Broad Street Books in Middletown Ct there will be:

 A CELEBRATION OF THE WOMEN BEAT ERA POETS/AUTHORS/ARTISTS　　 

The press release reads:

"This rare spectacular event commemorates Women Beat Generation poets, authors, and artists, featuring international poet GEORGE WALLACE, former Poet Laureate of Long Island, N.Y. based in N.Y. City, author of twenty-one chapbooks and was named artist in residence at Walt Whitman’s birthplace, reads Janine Pommy Vega; Helen R. Peterson, of Canterbury CT, writes poetry and fiction and is coeditor of The Waterhouse Review reads Diane DiPrima; Joan B. Kantor of Collinsvile CT, author of Shadow Sounds (Antrim House) reads Hettie Jones; Mar (Mistryel) Walker of Danbury, CT, painter singer and author of Inverse Origami the art of unfolding, reads Jay DeFeo; Yvon J. Cormier of West Haven CT, author of Life Sketches in Blue, reads Mary Fabilli, and Colin Haskins of Glastonbury, CT, latest poetry collection Drinking of You (Ye Olde Font Shoppe) is Free Poets Collective founder will read Elise Cowen. Following the features there will be open mic, music and a reception.

 This event is proudly presented by the FREE POETS COLLECTIVE, IN COLLABORATION WITH BROAD STREET BOOKS & CAFÉ, The Wesleyan Bookstore. YVON J. CORMIER will host the event at BROAD STREET BOOKS, 45 Broad St, Middletown, on Sunday, October 16, from 11:00A.M. to 2:30P.M. For more details visit http://freepoetscollective.webs.com/ or questions, call 860-233-4984."

Rant on Political Ads

From the archives:

Imagine a world where elections were won by over-the-top spending of a different sort, say donating millions from campaign coffers to pay down the national debt. Or spending to actually help someone: creating jobs for the jobless, homes for the homeless, assisting those left destitute by weather, war, disease or corporate raiding.

 Now that you have imagined high purpose, turn on your TV. Almost any channel will do during prime time. The election ads you will see feature distortions, half-truths. Say candidate x voted against an ethics bill. Maybe that bill didn’t go far enough, maybe it had a rider raising or cutting taxes, or granting a presidential power or some pork barrel project wasting millions.

 Any legislator or senator with a voting record has been in a bind at one time or another, having to choose the lessor of two evils according to his beliefs. Yet these unqualified sound bite ads are offered up to us as if they held facts revealed instead of obfuscated, and all backed by emotional music and images. This has cheapened, poisoned and polarized us. In the guise of free speech, this has enabled monied partisans on both sides to fool some of the people some of the time.... But the reality of any legislative situation is more complex than a two-minute ad. And the tasteless spleen-filled ads I see daily, more nearly resemble a mental mugging than the civic discourse they pretend to be. Don’t think I don’t mean your candidate.

 At the paper where I work, letters to the editor attacking a candidate are not accepted for the last week before the election. Partisans may tout their favorite, but may not blast the opposition at the last minute when there is no time for a rebuttal. For television, a ban on negative ads beginning a month before the election would give us relief from the onslaught of tawdry distortion blaring endlessly from the tube right now. TURN OFF YOUR TELEVISION IN PROTEST.

Join me in my small bid to change this disgusting election curse. Help America toward civil discourse! Ban negative TV campaign ads! Or at least ban them in the last 30 days of the campaign, so last minute lies, later debunked, can’t tip elections.

---- Mar Walker, 10/28/2006

POST SCRIPT 2011: OVERTURN Citizens United!!!

Uncle Henry Torments Deacon Wayne Just A Little

From the archives:  a fictional vignette

Uncle Henry was crazy, that's what Deacon Wayne said. And Henry had a few odd ways about him, in a sublime sort of New England way.

When he worked on his truck, he’d take a brown paper bag and roll it up until it was about six inches deep. Then he'd jam it down over the top of his head to protected his hair from any oil that might drip down from the chaise. When he was done fiddling with the engine, he'd forget to take it off. He'd stroll up the back stairs and wander in through the kitchen doors to where Aunt May was just pouring tea for the Ladies Garden Guild. He'd stride in with that bag on his head, grab Aunt May and kiss her on the cheek, then help himself to the cookies she was serving up with tea. Aunt May didn't mind. But it got all over town that Henry wore a brown bag instead of a hat. It was that sort of thing that made folks wonder about him.

One day Deacon Wayne stopped by the house about a blueberry pie Aunt May was baking for the church bake sale. Henry came upstairs to see who had arrived for tea. Naturally he had a bag on his head. Deacon Wayne pointed at it and announced that it was prideful to be odd. Uncle Henry said Deacon Wayne was prideful enough for both of them since he was so proud of being humble. Deacon Wayne choked and tea came leaking out from between his lips unexpectedly. The Deacon sniffed and poked at his mouth with a paper napkin then blew his nose. Said he was doing the Lord's work and that he'd just be about it now if Henry and May didn't mind. He stuffed the napkin in his pocket, snatched up May's pie and headed for the door.

"If that fuzzy old man you call OUR father wanted us all the same - don't you think he could have managed it hisself?" Henry hollered as Deacon hurried away down the walk. Then he noticed the Deacon's hat sitting on the radiator under the window. He opened the door and tossed it across the lawn like a Frisbee. The Deacon scrambled after his hat with the pie balanced precariously, all the while praying out loud that the Lord should bless him and save him from Uncle Henry.

--- Mar Walker, 2006

Chris August at White Plains Library

This past Wednesday, (10/5/2011) I headed over to the first Wed. poetry and Zorkslam event at the White Plains Library. I read in the open mic, one poem "Travel Ready."  The highlight of the night for me was the feature Chris August, a teacher, and a touring poet from the D.C. area who has a wildly vigorous performance style. I really loved it. He gets his whole body involved, like a dance....