Here are some paintings I've either just recently finished, or started and are works in progress. Apologies for the fact that some are sideways; my scanner is busted so all I can use is my crummy cell phone, and I don't have Adobe Photoshop on this computer.
Hillbilly Hunstman From Outer Space gouache on paper
Brainburn For Bubbleglum (work in progress) acrylic on cardboard
Concerto For Violin and Hand Puppet acrylic on canvas
I actually made time to sit down and do some painting this afternoon and evening. I'm not sure if this one is done yet or not. I think I've reached the point of "Do I keep adding and fixing until it's ruined, or do I stop?" Of course there are bits that I think need tightening up, and this hyper-saturated-while-somehow-gloomy-because-it-was-photographed-with-an-ipone-in-weird-lighting-circumstances picture doesn't really help sell it, either.
The first weekend in November I travelled back to Winona for a couple of reasons–one, to take my grandmother out to lunch and catch up with her; two, to visit the Prairie Moon Sculpture Garden in Cochrane; and three, to attend my friend Kathy's Dia de los muertos celebration.
It was great to spend time with my grandmother and catch up, I don't get to do it as often as I like, nor engage in it as often as I should. The Prairie Moon Sculpture Garden was fun; it's one of those weird slices of roadside Americana that people either find curiously fun in a kitschy way or wrinkle their brows at ask "Why?" while driving by. I'm ashamed to say I'd lived mere minutes away from it for nearly two decades, and it took two more after that to realize the place was there and coordinate a visit to it. Well, it's one of those weird slices of Americana that I find intriguing and see less as a quirky roadside road trip footnote, and more as a shrine to outsider folk art. Some of the pieces were in poor shape, particularly the coral snake, but it was a delightful shrine to one retired farmer's artistic vision.
It's pretty impressive actually, and ballsy when you think about it. Here was Herman Rusch, a farmer, son of Prussian immigrants, who decided to keep the boredom of retirement at bey by building these bizarre concrete sculptures and having his friends make concrete sculptures of dinosaurs and animals and even a man knife-fighting a bear! In the rural farmland of Cochrane/Fountain City and the Coulee Region, that's the sort of eccentricity that would tend to serve as a red flag for Jeb and Skeeter to think maybe you ain't the way you oughta be, but hope the judicious application of work boots to head might properly recalibrate. Probably to the tune of "We don't do that 'round here." I know, I grew up in the area. Not that it's solely a haven for backwoods ignorants and Trump voters (nor am I suggesting everyone who lives in the woods is ignorant, lord knows I'm itching to join you), but casually suggest to a Cal or Rick working mandatory overtime at one of the factories keeping the town afloat that you don't eat meat, and to this day there's a bit of a straightening of the neck and a looking-down-the-cheekbone "You don't say" sort of response. But he had a yen to do this out of the ordinary thing and did it!
Here (above) is a video that gives a little detail about Rusch and his legacy.
Later that evening I attended a wonderful Day of the Dead celebration organized and hosted by my friends Kathy VanCor and Brandon Rustke. I even got to operate the piñata! It was a great time and a call to remember and celebrate the lives that may have left us with little but memories in their wake. In fact the idea struck home hard enough to inspire me to visit my grandparents early Sunday morning.
I hadn't been to Oakland Cemetery in Stockton since my grandfather was interred there, the day before Thanksgiving 2010. It's a small, unassuming collection of headstones; definitely a country graveyard, and it suits him to a T (though I'm still not sure what that idiom means, really). It's quiet, rural, surrounded by farmland and rolling bluffs, and, as in life, has a set of train tracks running right next to his home.
It's a bit hard to see but Ralph has a fish jumping out of the water near his name. He loved fishing.
The road into Oakland Cemetery is a dirt and gravel road, accessed across a field. The land where the cemetery rests is butted right up against Garvin Brook, and faces a wide stretch of Stockton valley in the other direction, a panoramic view of the humpbacked bluffs and all their various color changes throughout the year. Ralph always was an outdoors kind of person who loved country music and professional wrestling. He loved being outdoors and watching the birds and squirrels. He gets the quiet of a country graveyard now, the trickling current of the brook behind him, the direct sun above him, and all the wildlife the area has to offer.
A few other Haedtkes are resting in Oakland as well, including my
great-grandparents.
That morning I also visited my paternal grandparents in the certainly more "metropolitan" St. Mary's Cemetery, which is in Winona proper, right next to the armory (where my senior prom was held). It's a sprawling, multi-tiered cemetery on the town's east side, not far from where my grandparents lived, actually. Bob and JoAnn lived in an amazing mid-century split-level on East Lake Boulevard, a house that I had decided I was going to own one day when my grandparents either moved into a retirement community or, god forbid, passed on. That didn't happen for a number of reasons, but it was an amazing place with some choice mid-century decor and an amazing finished basement. It sat on a hill at the foot of the bluffs, right below Sugarloaf, and overlooked the twin lakes. But I digress.
Bob and JoAnn's headstone suits them as well. Quiet, polished, with a classic
sensibility that ties some mid-century modernism with traditionalism.
Something struck me while I was out walking around these tombstones that frosty morning. John Waters once said something (I'm paraphrasing here) about how people's homes should be filled with all kinds of "weird art" and wall colors that reflect their personalities, rather than something just picked up at Sears, hung on the ever-present off-white or beige walls. But people largely don't. I've been in a lot of homes and I see a lot of off-white and beige walls with the same Terry Redlin prints and hotel-friendly abstract art picked up at Home Goods or something. That's fine, if that's what you like, but a home, the place where someone would hopefully go to decompress and remove the normalcy filters they need to put on while out in the general public, should ultimately reflect the person living in it, right?
The same goes with tombstones. Now, I know there's more than desire and personal vision that goes into the choosing of a tombstone. For example, there's cost. Expense is prohibitive for a lot of people, myself included, when it comes to making decisions on anything. I see a lot of old headstones that are just sometimes-smoothed blocks of stone with a name chiseled into it. Then there are the obviously wealthy folks who have the massive stone angels and the large sepulchers. But as I toed my way around the headstones at St. Mary's, I saw all of these amazing headstones that reflected some aspect of the individual they stood sentinel over.
For example, this headstone with the image of Elvis and a flying monkey on it. What the hell is that all about? I want to know more about these people and why this was chosen as the imagery best to reflect the memory of their presence on Earth? It's fantastic!
Or how about this die-cut marker with the etched portrait in front of a palm tree in the setting sun? Winona, Minnesota is diametrically opposed to a tropical seascape sunset in so many ways, why was this chosen to be what this woman will be forever memorialized with?
Or this stand up bass iconography I saw in Oakland near my grandfather:
Personally, I'm not sure I even want to be buried. I don't know, maybe cremation is the way to go. I haven't really given it much thought. There are days when it seems like a high dive off of a bridge might be the best route to take. But the trip to the cemeteries was cathartic and necessary; it had been a while since I had a chance to sit and talk to my relatives and just say hello, even if it was a one-sided conversation. It's really more of a balm for the psyche than anything else, I suppose, helping you feel like that connection is still there even if they aren't. Like Herman Rusch we all kind of want to leave something to be remembered by after we're gone, whether that's a kind impression on the people we love and hope love us back, or a concrete replica of our features, sternly watching over what we had the audacity to dare to build in life. It's a good reminder to appreciate the people that flavor our lives in a positive way, and restrict the time given to those who do not. There are a lot of things to be thankful for, whether hidden in the minutiae of our daily struggles and pursuits, obscured by the folds of frustration, or sitting in plain sight. There's nothing wrong with being happy, and pursuing that happiness by being yourself and reveling in your own interests, even if there's a lot of unhappy people who would like to take that away from you.
As mach as it sounds like off the cuff, platitudinous pablum, be yourself and be kind. Appreciation is one of the best gifts you can give to someone, and a little goes a long way.
Hello all, just an update here from the Secret Basement Laboratory. I will be at the Northeast Minneapolis Farmers Market Winter Market at the Secret Basement Lab booth with my wife this coming Sunday, November 17th, from 10am until 2pm.
She will be selling handmade earrings and pet bowties, and I will have various prints and my Just For The Sketch Of It booklet for sale. I've also made up some small, six-page "business card" zines that feature some illustrations and doodles (pictured above) that I'm calling Experiments Without Electricity, because there's no charge. Get it?
I'm sans scanner right now, so please bear with the crummy pictures.
I know everyone is familiar with the standard caramel apples, cutout cookies, pumpkin pie and whatnot when it comes to Halloween snack fare, but I came across a peculiar recipe in the Evening Edition of the October 26th, 1949 Winona Republican Herald. It's called Hootin' Owl Pie, and it appears to be some sort of a chocolate meringue pie with an owl's face made from marshmallows and cloves.
Apparently it was the invention of some Republican-Herald reader, or it's a culinary treat long lost to time, because even a cursory search on the internet for Hootin' Owl Pie garners nothing of relevance. Anyone ever heard of this thing? It seems like one of those charming colloquial adaptations of something else with a tweaked recipe, since most chocolate meringue pies I've seen have a layer of white meringue on top of it.
Halloween! It's definitely one of my favorite holidays. I generally get the decorating itch around mid-August, and damn if it doesn't turn into full blown hives come the second week of September.
Tastes and the idea of what is scary, not to mention what is deemed presentable, sure has changed over the decades. It's understandable that while my grandparents found Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff terrifying, it was difficult to be driven to shivers by a leering Vincent Price in my parents' heyday, when there was footage from Vietnam on the nightly news and factors like Kent State and the swell of sensationalized serial killers, the rise in crime and social disillusionment eroding away at the squeaky clean and safe image of 1950s society. In a way, the world that was generally marginalized to pooh-poohe'd, trashy, hyper-sensationalized True Crime magazines at the newsstand, was now shown to be closer to the state of things than the Lawrence Welk broadcast illusion that many had tried to paper their lives in, regardless how many holes and tears it bore. At that point, The Mummy ceased to be terrifying. Hence George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. New terror for a new era, where the chills on the screen had to match and exceed the ones the curtain had been drawn back from in the real world.
Take a walk through any department store Halloween section these days, and you'll see a plethora of brutal set pieces: bloody handprint window decals, cake toppers cast in the shape of butcher knives with bloody blades, polystyrene decapitated heads. Me, I'm a traditionalist. To me, that isn't Halloween. Halloween for me is a celebration; it's a charade; and, damned if it isn't supposed to me fun. Human butchery isn't fun, it's horrible, which is why while I understand the evolution of horror as a genre from William Hope Hodgson and Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man to Poppy Z. Brite and Saw, I'm strictly in the former camp when it comes to decoration.
Most of my decorations come from Beistle, the company that made all those nostalgic paper window decorations popular when your parents and grandparents were children. Due to popular demand they've been reprinting their classic designs over the last few years, even modernizing their game by upgrading some of their cardstock decor to window clings.
If you're interested in these throwback decorations as well, check them out here. For some great goods (including shirts, pins, etcetera) utilizing some of those amazing Beistle designs, check out Creepy Co here. And everyone have a great Halloween!
Sometimes, when life's little downturns and inconveniences have me irritated, I find the best therapy is to whip out the old sketchbook and pencil and start to doodle the stress away. Conversely, when I'm sitting there staring at a blank sketchbook page, pencil impotently clutched in hand, that aforementioned irritation compounds like guinea pig poop.
Last night my television stopped working. Boo-hoo! you might chide. First world problems! you may sarcastically sneer. Yeah, I get it. It ain't exactly the end of the world. But I generally watch one television program on one station, and I don't have cable. So when 7pm Central Standard Time rolls around this Saturday, and I flick the idiot box on to immerse my troubles in MeTV's Svengoolie, and see that my digital antennae has suddenly stopped functioning, I get a little chafed. Yes, I checked to see if it was plugged in, before you ask.
Well it turns out the channels needed to be rescanned or some nonsense, but for the night my television was out of order. After a good fifteen minutes of glaring at the thing like I might be able to magically fix it or cause it to explode with childish vengeance simply by glowering at it, I decide that that's maybe not the healthiest or most productive way to spend a Saturday night. So's I whip out the little pocket sketchbook and the mechanical pencil and I start to doodle; as a result I come up with this scribble about how the world might change if cats had pyrokinesis.
Day Four of Creepy Consumption continues with a quick sketch of the Patron Saint of my Saturday evenings: Svengoolie. While not a horror movie or a television show per se, Sven is the cool ghoul who hosts the Universal Monsters classics, along with The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, and a plethora of other Hammer Horrors, Universal and Warner Bros. monster mayhem from the golden age of monster movies, all wrapped in a heady helping of Vaudeville-esque humor (aka jokes your grandfather would tell).
If you don't know what Svengoolie is all about, go here, or check out MeTV on Saturday night, 7pm Central Standard Time!
Acrylic on canvas. I’m still learning how to use acrylics; after the easy blending and quick drying nature of gouache, they make me feel a bit clunky, which is why it kind of looks like a six year old made this. I'm finding precision and clean lines difficult with them.
Mechanical bank developed by Daniel Cooke for the Hubley
Manufacturing Co., on display at the MIA.
A visit to the MIA is never less than inspiring. I made a trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Art this past weekend to see the Hearts Of Our People: Native Women Artists exhibit. I didn't take any pictures of the experience because: a) many of the pieces on display were prohibited from being photographed at the artist's or donor's request; and b) it was an immersive experience with lots of multi-media components, and constantly withdrawing from that to stop and snap dimly-lit pictures on my iPhone seemed to countermand the purpose of the exhibition itself. I definitely recommend the visit, though, and you can get a peek at some of the pieces here on MIA's website, including one of my favorites of the exhibition, a series of clay tower sculptures by Santa Clara Pueblo native artist Nora Naranjo Morse.
Here are some examples of her work, including a detail of the series of sculptures on display (bottom pic) at the MIA:
"Khwee-seng (Woman-man)" Nora Naranjo Morse at
The Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ.
I recommend checking out Nora Naranjo Morse's website here. According to her website she's moved away from ceramics and into utilizing recycled materials and recently opened an exhibit with her daughter Eliza in Redwood City, CA.
On my way out of the Hearts Of Our People exhibit, I walked out into the rotunda designated as Gallery G280, which had a number of recent acquisitions hanging on the wall; some pieces holdovers from the recent display focusing on Hairy Who and The Chicago Imagist movement. Up until that point I had been woefully ignorant of the Chicago Imagist movement as an art movement and of the MIA even having had a spotlight exhibit dedicated to it. I definitely left with a list of names to do further research on!
Art Green "United Opposition" oil on canvas, 1975.
Ray Yoshida "Miraculous Matriarch" acrylic on canvas, 1980.
Roger Brown "Skyscraper" oil on canvas with painted frame, 1971.
Errol Ortiz "Astronaut Targets" acrylic on canvas, 1965.
Jim Denomie "Vatican Cafe" oil on canvas, 2014.
Dominick Di Meo "Untitled (Red line with heads)" mixed media on Masonite, 1952.
There's a great website that gives a good overview of the Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagist movement here, though be warned it is quite media-heavy and even with contemporary internet speeds and blink-of-the-eye media plug-in loading, the media hasn't all been necessarily streamlined and compressed to modern standards. The navigation leans more towards the novelty than the user-friendly as well, though the site is packed with great information and examples of each artist's work.
You can read about a recent controversy involving Ojibwe artist Jim Denomie's piece "Standing Rock 2016" and a Minnesota House Republican's offense at his depiction of Donald Trump here.
