Jack Kerouac’s sister Caroline died in 1964. For years her grave was an unmarked spot below an old Maple tree in Greenwood Cemetery in Downtown Orlando. Members of the Kerouac Project arranged to have a stone marker placed on the spot on March 13th of 2009. Yesterday a small group of Kerouac supporters gathered to honor Caroline, who Jack had nicknamed Nin.
It was a beautiful morning. As I searched for the site I saw several squirrels scrambling between headstones and then up a tree. The birds were chirping joyously. Once I found the site. I leaned my artists chair up against a tree, leaned back and started to sketch. I knew the dedication would not take long so I had to lay in the background and stones fast. Bob Kealing who was going to pay tribute, had been called away on a news story, he had to cover the Casey Anthony case down at the Orange County Court House. Kim Buchheit took his place and did a wonderful and moving job. David Amram, a multi talented performer, played a hand carved courting flute whose warm tones drifted through the morning air.
This days events left me with an impression that art leaves behind a life affirming and ever propagating force that spurs the next generation to keep creating. Get out, find people with amazing stories and listen and learn. David Amram now 78 years old and Pete Seeger about to turn 90 years old are proof that some creative flames burn bright well into old age.
Caroline Kerouac Blake
October 25, 1918 – September 19, 1964
Mother, Daughter, Sister, Wife
World War II Veteran
JE ME SOUVIENSTI NIN ( I remember little Nin)
Premise Entertainment
I returned in my first scene of animation drawings to Premise Entertainment. Rather than immediately leave I decided to stay and get sketch done of some of the talented artists now at work in this small production company. In this room are the Effects artists Tonyand Enoc are busy working on Cintiqus. Tony West was working on a scene that needed to be rushed since it was needed for marketing. Conversation in the room centered around the strengths of Macs versus PCs and different modeling programs that had been experimented with such as Maya and Zbrush. Tony actually felt that Sketchbook Pro which is the program I was using to do this sketch has its advantages over the program they were using to do inbetweening for the effects work on the film. I however was very impressed watching them work. They could zoom in as close in as they wanted to in order to place line between line. That might not mean much to the casual reader but I have lost some of my eye sight trying to focus on tiny thin graphite lines being inbetweened on sheets of back lit paper. To me these Cintiqus look like the dawning of a new day. They give me itchy fingers. If only they were Mobile.
Richard Goodman on Burroughs and Kerouac
In 1944, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs all met in the span of two days at Columbia University in NYC. Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker.
Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law when Lucien Carr, killed David Kammerer in a confrontation over Kammerer’s incessant and unwanted homosexual advances. Lucian had allowed Kammerer to hang out with him for years and Richard speculated that perhaps Lucian was a bit of a masochist. The killing happened in Riverside Park in Manhattan’s upper west side. After the killing Carr sought out Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the knife and some of Kammerer’s belongings. Kerouac may have had a somewhat loose moral code based on necessity yet he was very generous to fellow writers and friends. Kerouac was arrested as an accessory after the fact and served time in jail. He married Edie Parker so her parents would bail him out of jail. The marriage was annulled one year later.
This incident inspired Burroughs and Kerouac to collaborate on a novel entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. This title came from a WWII news radio broadcast. It was the broadcasters last pitch before signing off. Completed in 1945, the two young authors were unable to get it published, but the manuscript was finally published in November 2008 by Grove Press and Penguin Books. Plans are in the works to make it into a movie.
Richard Goodman personally met Burroughs after he sent him a letter and Burroughs wrote him back. Richard had those letters and showed them to people after the talk.
Whole Foods Fresh Market
Terry and I went down to see the Whole Foods Outdoor Fresh Market. There really wasn’t much of a selection when it came to produce. This sketch is of one of the few vendors that offered plants and produce. The rest of the vendors offered cheap trinkets and crafts, non of which interested me. One vendor did have nice ripe tomatoes for a great price, but honestly the trip was a bit of a hassle. The tents take up a large chunk of the parking lot leaving few spaces to park and some genius arranged it so all the traffic leads to a dead end at a traffic cone where everyone must do a 10 point turn to go back the other way. Some folks back up at top speed while others are making the turn. It is a disaster waiting to happen. In front of the store a huge tourist bus was parked in the no parking zone forcing cars to face off into one lane of traffic. A security officer was yelling at the bus driver to get out of there before there was a head on collision. Whatever urban planner designed the traffic flow of this spot should be fired. If Americans didn’t have cars this place could be a fun place to shop.
Winter Park Art Festival
I went down to the Winter Park Art Festival to sketch. Tom Burton from the Orlando Sentinel wanted to meet me there to get some final video footage of me as I was out sketching. The festival itself was shutting down for the night and everyone was making a mad dash for either the free concert in the park or the local restaurants. I decided to sit down across the street from Bosphorus, a Turkish Restaurant. Tom simply hovered around shooting me and the scene I was sketching from every conceivable angle. It was a little distracting when he shoved the camera between my head and the sketchbook, I actually had to crane my head to the side to see what I was doing. It was convenient that the street was shut down since Tom would at times sit down in the street for low angle shots. It was fun having someone there to share the experience with. For instance he noticed that the lady holding the umbrella was there for a very long time. We both conjectured that she might have been trying to keep it from blowing away. It was interesting how often he focused on close ups of my nervous lines being thrown down on the page. The sketch was fun, I was afraid that I might tighten up with all the attention but the opposite was true. I loosened up and flowed with the experience. The jazz music in the park also gave me a beat to set the pace of the sketch to. When Tom was shooting on the opposite side of the street I started to notice myself bobbing my head to the beat and I thought, “maybe I should look a bit more serious, I am an artist after all….what the heck, go with it!”
Sleepwalk
Brian Feldman has devised another amazing performance piece. He plans to sleep for 50 hours while allowing people to walk over him. He is sleeping in a wooden box built with two by fours outside on the sidewalk . On top is a black metal grid and then a sheet of Plexiglas so people who walk over can get a good view of Brian sleeping. When I got to the site I really didn’t know how I would get a drawing. You can not really see Brian from the street or sidewalk. Only when You walk over him do you get a full view. I finally decided the only option was to walk right on top of Brian, sit down on my stool and sketch him from that vantage point. It was rather like sketching a corpse at a wake while sitting on the coffin. Two young women stopped by and wanted to walk over Brian. I got out of the way, and they started across. They hesitated however and asked, “He won’t peek will he?” They were concerned because they had dressed on. Brain however was wearing a mask, perhaps for exactly that reason. When they left I climbed back up and resumed my sketch.
A student from Valencia College named Dariel wandered by and we both recognized each other. He is a young tan fellow who could well be a surfer. During my visit at Valencia he really seemed to get the point I was stressing, which was to get out in the community and take art and academics outside the classroom. He related a story about a character he met who he thought was homeless who was taking pictures of graffiti. This fellow was actually an artist from Jamaica who was traveling the world on the cheap. The fact that he related this story was a real highlight for me. That meant he understood the idea of art as an adventure.
Feldman’s performance makes me wonder, am I truly living everyday fully? Am I fully awake? Do I let people walk over me? Brian will continue to sleep till 6PM on March 22nd. So if you want to walk over him, go to Frames Forever & Art Gallery at 941 Orange Avenue, Winter Park, FL. It is a half mile from the Winter Park Art Festival.
Valencia Community College
I went to Valencia Community College today to visit with students in a fundamentals drawing course. The instructor, Kelledy, asked me to tell the students about my background and about how I got involved in my latest endeavor which is, as you know, posting a drawing a day to this blog. I am seldom asked to share my thoughts about what I love most in life which is to draw and share my drawings with others, so for me it was a real treat. The students seemed really interested and with any luck my simple sketches might inspire one or two to look around and slow down to sketch and observe.
The students were working on still life’s from buffalo skulls. They were using mostly charcoal on large sheets of 18 by 24 inch paper with lots of tooth to hold the media. They constructed the compositions in a cubist manner then used cross contours to further refine the shapes. Finally everything was delicately shaded. I pulled out my Tablet and sketched for a short while. The room was a cavernous space with a huge skylight high in the center of the room. It really bought me back to my college days in NYC.
Fiddler’s Green Rush Hour
I decided To go to Fiddler’s Green on the Day after Saint Patrick’s Day. The outdoor beer garden was still set up in the parking lot but otherwise the scene was oddly serene. There was a steady stream of patrons walking in the front door from the parking lot. This pub is located on a very busy intersection so more often than not a bus or car was blocking my view but I chose to keep my eye moving around the scene sketching whatever could be seen at any given time. I was leaning up against a metal pole for some store signage and every time the wind blew, the pole would lurch causing me to be shoved from side to side. This might explain why the line work is a bit looser in this sketch. Shamrocks still were hanging everywhere, and green remained the color of the day. It turns out that there is a Sonny’s Barbecue right across the street and boy did it smell good. I suspect I will be back.
A Pint and Some Music?
This group was playing when I walked in to Fiddler’s Green. The place wasn’t to crowded yet and happy hour had just begun. They had a warm sound and I quickly got to work, however they only played one song. As a matter of fact I had to draw the guy closest to the window as he was taking his guitar off to put it in the case. I stubbornly kept sketching, filling in details by peeking at the group as they sipped drinks over in a corner table. I never even caught the name of the group. I was surprised that the entire time I was working on this sketch, no one asked me if I wanted a beer. In this economy you would think they would be pushing beers a bit harder than that. I gave the waitress a decent tip anyway since I ordered a beer when I moved closer to the bar and I got decent sketches out of the evening.
Fiddler’s Green
For Saint Patrick’s Day I went to the most Irish bar in town, Fiddler’s Green. I ordered a cup of Guinness and sat back and watched the patrons. The couple right in front of me were very much in love. He never stopped touching her. Most of the time he had his hand on her knee as they spoke and sometimes he ran his hand through her hair and they would often hug and kiss. Other patrons were more focused on the soccer game on the televisions. But as an artist I was happy to record the public display of affection being exhibited in the center of the bar.
I struggled to see into the darks of the dimly lit interior. Toward the end of the drawing I started taking longer sips of liquid courage as I pushed the watercolor closer to pure blacks. When the loving couple got up to leave, I was surprised to find out that the man was on crutches. I hadn’t noticed the crutches once while I was sketching, he had hidden them well under the bar. I was left wondering what had happened to his leg, was it a sports accident? Had be been involved in a fender bender on Interstate 4? Oh well, I may never know.
“Wrap me up in my oil skin and blanket,
No more ’round the docks, I’ll be seen,
Just tell me olde shipmates,
I’m takin a trip mates,
and I’ll see ya some day in Fiddler’s Green”