At Long Last, My Big Art Show
I used to make visual art. Might again sometime.
So, with this plague going around, we’re staying at home more, and finding novel things to do. Lucy and I discussed putting together a picture puzzle on the dining room table, but agreed that we’re both so compulsive that if we committed to a puzzle, we’d suspend the very living of our lives until every piece was in place. I’m relieved with our decision. A few years ago, at a cold, rainy music camp retreat in the Northwest, there were a few picture puzzles in process at one end of the dining hall. I still recall one unresolved corner of the elaborate, irritatingly whimsical design that we struggled with, and didn’t complete by the end of the week.
These days, there’s more pleasure for me in singing finished songs than struggling with the lyric ideas that are awaiting some sustained, inspired attention. My song ideas are on paper scraps and in notebooks that trail behind me from one room to another. Recently in an attempt to escape from The Unwritten, I stopped before my cluttered bookshelf. It’s been a background wall to hundreds of Zoom calls, and become a bit forgotten. Back when there were live lessons and music jams in the room each week, the wall of books and CDs was a resource. Now I need to reacquaint myself with what’s even there. Reaching down to the bottom shelf, I pulled out some dusty old portfolios and put them on the desk. Between folded sheets of glassine are a variety of small paintings, drawings, and graphic designs done over the last 45 or so years.
In Berkeley in the late 70s, I was an unpaid volunteer at Pacifica radio station KPFA, doing layout and graphic design for their Folio magazine, a print publication mailed each month to subscribers. There were many opportunities to make illustrations, centerfold calendars and cover designs. My tools were Rubylith, Letraset, X-acto knives, t-squares, Rapidograph pens, Canson paper. Clear plastic rulers with zero at the center. Also pot, coffee, and Balkan Sobranie pipe tobacco.
These drawings and graphics were widely “published”, if only in a time-sensitive newspaper. But people were seeing them. No one but the other folks in the Folio department knew who I was, and I was even hidden in those days behind a college nickname, Brandy. And in a characteristic gesture of ambition impairment and self-effacement, I signed everything with a B.
This is a page from the centerfold of the Folio for December of 1977. I had moved to Berkeley in January of that year, and began working at the front door of KPFA within a month. That meant buzzing people into the studio halls from the long stairway up from Shattuck Avenue. When Malvina Reynolds wanted to be let in one day, I was there to push the button and take my place in history. Bzzzzzzzzz. Click.
The programmers were the evident stars of the system at KPFA . One such of these was Padreigin McGillicuddy, the Editor of the Folio, and becoming producer of “A Terrible Beauty”, a program which dealt with Irish and Irish-American culture, music, and politics. She was pleased to welcome an artist to the Folio staff who had studied Celtic art and was eager to create some. It was a quiet way to support an aspect of my own heritage, in an environment where the conscious celebration of one’s cultural roots was serious business.
This is the first of a series of these articles, which I imagine as the art show I could never have put together at the time. I have friends today who have no idea of this part of my life, who know me only within the music community. And in the isolation of being sheltered in place against a very real contagion, I am thinking about the various arcs of my life, and utilizing Medium to do so.
