I collaborate on a weekly illustration, caption and song column for Magnet Magazine with Mecca Normal guitar player David Lester. Normal History is billed as The Art of David Lester, but at many points in the 612 volumes, my captions turn into small essays. Along the same lines (pardon the pun), David’s illustrations aren’t, strictly speaking, “visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 36-year run“. We’ve gone way off track on many occasions, unless you consider our band’s history to include pretty much any social justice, labour history, feminist issue or event we care to “document” within the parameters of David’s illustration, a Mecca Normal song (free download from all albums running in sequence) and my “caption” – which we do… consider to be within the realm of our band’s history.
The lyrics on our last studio album (2014) were closely hinged to the novel I was writing at the time. “The Black Dot Museum of Political Art” (literary fiction) is about a museum curator who cures narcissism, but part of the story takes the reader back to the narcissist’s childhood and his mother’s origins on a farm in New Brunswick, Canada.
I was completely devoted to writing novels for 15 years. I had a part-time job at a gym for women and wrote many hours every day, getting up at 3:00 a.m. for long pre-work sessions. I completed four novels, secured a literary agent (no mean feat) to send one of them out to publishers. I had two novels on small presses in the 90s, but, as a next step, I wanted to go with a larger publisher.
Five years ago, painting replaced the world of part-time jobs and the novel I was working on went to the back burner. Turns out painting and novel writing don’t really go together in terms of time management and creative organization in my brain. The manuscripts are there. Perhaps the painting will attract new interest.
The ability to convincingly move a character through a plot is incredible skill to have. At a certain point I became aware that it was manifesting as a sense of personhood in my portraits. I don’t paint likenesses. I paint emotions, but beyond that it feels like I create individuals in the same way I do in fiction. Quite a few people tell me my portraits look like someone they think they know. No one specific, but they do possess that quality. They resonate as existing people in the same way a character in a novel does.
In the succession of Mecca Normal songs (for which I write all the lyrics), I’m currently putting together “captions” for a couple of songs that endeavor to examine how “The Black Dot Museum of Political Art” protagonist Martin Lewis may have ended up a narcissist. Evidently the personality disorder may be the result of a traumatic incident in formative years, one that was too much for the child to deal with.
Martin’s mother Odele had an emotionally-impoverished upbringing. Her mother Maisy had to contend with five kids and her brutish husband Nestor. I went through paintings from 2018 with these characters in mind and found four that resonate.
In the summer of 1936, Maisy died and without missing a beat, Nestor turned and began hurling his high-pitched railings at Odele, like javelin tips landing sideways in the tender field of her heart. Odele was fourteen when she took over the chores – the watering, weeding, the picking, trimming and slicing of green beans, making meals, just like before. It fell to her to tend the garden, carefully latching bean tendrils to the brittle netting that stayed out all year, weathered to grey. The beans were blind – reaching out into the vastness of her tiny universe – in the opposite direction, until Odele unfurled the coil of filigree and let it touch the net. The beans hung like slender green trout, green eggs plump in their green bellies. So much green – too much – and so much for the natural order her father talked about; the hopelessness of beans left to fend for themselves, on their own.
After her mother’s death, realizing that as a female she was interchangeable and therefore he’d be trying to fill her up and kill her too, Odele developed a penchant for very long baths with bubbles. Her father wouldn’t have dared to yell at her while she was naked, but she had her blanket of bubbles just in case. The tub was behind the woodshed where her two brothers’ bottoms had been paddled until they were old enough to endure a leather strap across the open palms of their pre-pubescent hands. The strap was for the boys and the soap was for Odele, the only girl, and it was appropriate. The boys were always in some kind of trouble that involved their quick fingers and plump hands – taking money, raiding fruit trees or fighting on the dusty shoulder of the road home from school. The strap across the hands was fitting for the boys and likewise, it was Odele’s mouth that got her into trouble – sassing back to her father, expressing her opinions unasked. The soap, it was for Odele.
Their cast iron clawfoot tub was raised up on bricks to make room for the fire beneath it. After supper, the bath regime began with Odele’s father climbing in first to soak for the better part of an hour, after which, when her mother was alive, she’d be next, but she tended to make it quick. After her – the boys, one at a time. Finally it was Odele’s turn. Frequently she had to chop more kindling to stoke the fire and wait until the water warmed up again. She pulled the sash of her pink chenille bathrobe tighter and swung the axe more accurately than either of her brothers, splitting wood like she was slicing bread. Truly alone, she sat on her thinking rock, poking embers, vowing that one day she’d take baths twice as long as her father’s and soak in bubbles until the cows came home. When she had a child she’d spoil it. It could eat cake all day long for all she cared. Odele shifted the wood with a twisted iron rod so familiar in her right hand that it was invisible to her. All week it hung beside the leather strap in the shed, next to the soap, until bath night when, individually they held it like a mediaeval weapon, jabbing it into the heart of the fire as heat flushed their faces and alone, they allowed themselves to imagine episodes of liberation – and even retribution – as they prepared to bathe their scrawny hillbilly bodies in murky water beside an unnamed stone on which sat the soap. Unnamed by everyone except Odele. It was her thinking rock, although she’d never said it out loud to anyone except herself. It was here that the term ‘run through with an awl’ played over and over in her head and she blamed the rock for making her think it. This was what happened when she sat on the thinking rock. It made her think awful things about her father. She blamed the rock for putting things into her head and she thought it best to say them, to let them out, rather than save them, in her head, fearing that she might blurt out ‘run through with an awl’ instead of please pass the potatoes at dinner.
Odele kept her small bottle of bubble bath in the pocket of her chenille robe. As she dribbled it across the dirty water she repeated her mantra, ‘run through with an awl’. Naked, one foot on her thinking rock, she used the soot-blackened poker to agitate the water, to make bubbles, and she laughed at how she must look, the real Odele, and she added to her chant – if all eyes were on me now.
The saving grace of her otherwise woefully lacking existence was that her father was not a man of god. Unlike her schoolmates traipsing off to church, Sundays were her own. Not to run through fields of buttercups, but to catch up on chores. Odele sometimes found herself glancing skyward while she squeezed dirty water out of a mop, thanking god that her father was not religious, thus cracking herself up enough that she twigged onto how humour worked – it split apart the dark tendrils tightening in her gut and around her heart, soothing her like a slug of moonshine, but laughter didn’t burn and make her cough. Odele tried to find external sources to make herself laugh, to reduce the internal grumbling in what she knew was not her soul – nor was she hungry, unless what she felt could be called a hunger to express herself. If she laughed or cried her father got angry. He was a man who was staunchly confused about most things, but in his role as head of the household, he felt compelled to have strong opinions. Anger was the only emotion he let his family see. He pontificated wildly, combining nuances of opposing stances, putting on a show. All bluster. Odele tried to follow his logic, but when she was nine she heard the word irrational uttered by her mother while they were going through the remnant bin at Hester’s Dry Good Store.
By the time she left the farm at sixteen Odele had eaten enough green beans to last her a lifetime. Emancipation from what she regarded as emotional tyranny came by way of the SMT Eastern bus line and her overwhelming determination to never again eat anything green.
Odele (Martin Lewis’ mother) as a young girlMaisy (Odele’s mother)Nestor (Odele’s father)Martin Lewis (the narcissist)
Between Livermore and Tracy, at the time of writing it, felt like the end of something more personal, a milestone within my lifetime, at what was the beginning of many more hospital visits for my father, who could very well have died at that juncture, but lived on another 6 years.
The “found” footage is entirely unrelated to my experience, yet prompts a sense of human connectivity in a document from another era, one that my parents would have occupied and evolved from as they, along with everyone else on the planet, hurtles towards death.
The death of Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old African American man, at Altamont was regarded from many angles. His sister Dixie had evidently suggested he take a gun to the concert, warning him of potential racism. Mick Jagger evidently didn’t realize that hiring the Hells Angel to do security in exchange for beer, wasn’t in keeping with his documented promotion of the event as everyone getting together for a nice time.
I prepared an offer for the house in Hedley and posted it on FB yesterday, as I am wont to do. Someone asked me about a few things I hadn’t really considered – one of them being whether or not the house was on a flood plain. Kind of a weird idea (to me) considering how close it is to the mountains, but, lo and behold, there was an evacuation order pending in May that included “my” address! The river is right there, with a bridge over a narrow gully, but I guess with the spring run off and higher water levels everywhere, they anticipated it coming up and over the banks after which there isn’t much of a grade to prevent it from coming up towards town.
Also, there was an evacuation order pending due to the fires this past summer. It’s a bit scary right there because it’s a feeling of getting trapped if the road washes out or if there’s only the one road out if there’s fire.
Somewhat disappointing, but mostly relief that I didn’t make a mistake here. I’m glad Marcus took an interest and looked into it! Thanks! Thanks to Scott too, who, when I made the video from Hedley (above) and stated that one could build whatever they wanted on their property, he posted a comment that evidently, that’s not the case. I didn’t see the comment because I accidentally posted the video about 10 times and quickly deleted them, but Dave mentioned it. Thank you – and to everyone else taking an interest. Please chime in!
I learned so much during this whirlwind! I feel so much better equipped to follow through on future locations, whereas it was all daunting before.
I’m back to the drawing board in more ways than one. I haven’t painted for a week with all this going on. I gotta get back to work and I’ll keep looking for property. If I keep painting and try not to stress out over the for sale sign in front of my building, I’ll be adding to funds and have more choices. It’s a great feeling to know that I could have gone forward with that place and maybe I’ve energized or intrigued my FB community to take an interest. We’ll see! I don’t want to panic and take a serious misstep.
Overall, I feel more myself after becoming way too involved in my parents’ plights. I’ve created much needed distance there by putting my mind on a big project – where it should be! I actually got outta town and that was fantastic!
August 23rd I launched a 30-day IndieGogo crowdfunding campaign for $20K to go towards the outright purchase of a facility for the Free Artist Residency for Progressive Social Change where writers, painters and musicians will focus on projects that intend to change the world. The property will be bequeathed to a cultural activist group for use in perpetuity.
Accommodation for guest residents
Art studio
Rehearsal space (soundproof)
Writer’s cabin
Presentation area for workshops and collaboration
I was offering my paintings as $100 USD perks, encouraging my FB followers to buy directly from me to save the campaign fee. All the money from painting sales (almost $3000 USD) during the campaign go towards opening the Free Artist Residency.
While the campaign failed to inspire the donations (painting sales, basically) I’d hoped for, it did bring the project into the light of day. I came close to putting in an offer on a small miner’s house in an historic town 3.5 hours east of Vancouver, but, in the final analysis, it wasn’t quite right. I’ll continue to look for a place to set up. Have a look at what the campaign outlines – the video etc.
Testimonials
“Hey all, the incredibly cool and inspiring Jean Smith is finishing an indie go go campaign to fund an artist retreat AND if you buy a painting to support the fund YOU GET AN AMAZING PAINTING!!! She’s already sold 23 in the last 23 days. Below she explains the concept and what’s she’s been doing. Take a sec to look at her beautiful paintings at the link at the bottom of her pitch either way. They are very much worth viewing.” – Jenny Toomey
“Hey, I don’t know if you know this revolution that is Jean Smith from Mecca Normal, but she is raising funds to create an artist residency in the Northwest / British Columbia. Jean has more integrity than most of the free world. Take a moment and read what she has planned and support her huge effort. Seriously she is running the show, get on board.” – KH, music composer
“My comrade in sounds Jean Smith of Mecca Normal has a practical vision to establish a permanent Artist Residency for Progressive Social Change. $100 donors to this mission may select one of her amazing paintings as a bonus for contributing. Please learn more and contribute.” – Rich Jensen
Jean Smith 