MÉLANGE MONTAGE

My mentor turned out to be alive. That isn’t one of the regrets.

I had run across his books about our region in our library’s “Delaware” reference section. Books here were not allowed to be taken out so you had to read them in the basement area where they kept all things Delaware secure. My goal as a visual artist was to capture the “folk” history of Delmarva as I, sadly, am an artist who can’t draw and the whole line thing drives me crazy. But folk art I could handle as you don’t need to know much about anything technical. You just need to have something to say and I have never run short of words.

His books were eye opening. This man, Jack Lewis, did what I envisioned. He called the locals “elementals” and he went around the general local area during the depression era working for the CCC as an artist during the WPA era. It’s a government program - Works Project Administration— that hired civilians to do all sorts of things for the government. Jack’s job, my mentor I soon realized, was to capture the “boys” who were out digging in the marshes to control mosquitos and flooding from what I recall.

Jack wrote many books about our area and his thoughts on things. For quite a while I assumed he was dead as N.C. Wyeth had written the introduction to one of his books in 1940. Since it was almost the nineties when I discovered Jack’s books, I tried to learn what I could from his writings. And learn I did. There was no way, to my mind, was he still alive.

Here are a few photos I’ll explore in the next few posts because some stories and experiences need to be delved into and shared in more detail. No sense in others repeating some of my mistakes if sharing some of them I made might be helpful in some way.

My basic belief is that all things are connected in this world and it is no clearer than in those who pursue creative endeavors. A quote attributed to Timothy Leary has been my anchoring principal and his semi-treatise if there even is such a thing.

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…” Timothy Leary

I connected to Jack through his writing and his art across time it felt like. And who writes about his best friend’s death and casually mentions the bereaved widow put a nude photo of herself in the deceased husband’s pocket on the way to the graveside when he’s writing a book about mainly a trip to the Delaware headwaters with a teenaged talented kid? All I know is…Jack was “my kind of people.” “Everybody carries a piece of the puzzle,” Leary said. Jack had to fit in somewhere in my artistic pursuits and I was going to put it together. I had something to say!

Later… Taylor

https://substack.com/@taylorcollins/note/c-283281089?r=7hpl2&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

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