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and Sally LacKaff
Written and ¡Mutfrafod by Salty LacKaff ©2000
hook illustrations to a sort of futurism to the sharply
detailed scenes of rural Maine. O ne day, we drove down
the coast to the tiny town of Ogunquit to an arts
institute housing a museum full of generations of
members' works; with plenty of images of the sites we
had passed that day, including the view from the
building — a small neck of rock upon which a whole
herd of people with easels were presently cutting their
teeth.
Further down the coast we came to Portsmouth,
N H , where, in a cemetery too good to believe, we were
captivated by stones dating to the 1 6 0 0 ’s. The fear and
awe of Death was lively in the hearts of those carvers;
almost every headstone is lavishly embellished with a
fierce and spirited s hull, win ged and wrapped with trailing
plumes. Their hollows eye one from every side as you
squat on the cold grass, picking out the obscure
abbreviations and old, old ndinefl.
For the month of October and more, we went
on a trip across the continent, with goals of Michigan
and Maine. A ll along, our objective was to visit our
respective parents, and take in as much as humanly and
vehicularly possible on our vaguely straight course. A s
on any journey, plans warp and weave, priorities shift
and flex, and along with accomplishing our primary
aims, seeing new sights has opened our minds to new
possibilities.
^A rtists
In the Upper mitten of Michigan we visited a
print shop - the studio, press, and shop of Gwen
Froetic, an artist who for more than 4 0 years has been
dedicating herself and her art to minute and beautiful
details of Nature, rendered in lino-cut prints, and
produced on 10 antique Heidelberg presses right before
your eyes in Benzonia, MI. T o a fascinatingly designed
building of unshapen wood and boulder, people come in
huge and regular droves to buy Froetic cards, calendars,
boohs, etc., and have been doing so for years. Shelves
are built o f rough-hewn, half polished slabs of log; hurls
and nests and interesting artifacts of the wild adorn the
walls along with cobwebs and scraps of man-made
creatures. A running waterfall and tiny pond, filled with
moss and water plants, greet you in the foyer, and a
chipmunk has free run of the building. It is a
wonderful spot, and remarkable in that really all one
comes to do here is shop - while a small room houses
a library of well-thumbed natural history hooks, there is
no museum, or fancy garden, or interpretive center. It
is Gwen Frostic herself, 9 0 -some years old and a
mysterious personality, who forms the focal point of
interest and ambiguity; and her continuous devotion to
pointing out and stressing the importance of the natural
world is apparently an on-going inspiration and reminder
to succeeding generations. Fan letters from all over the
world decorate select walls, and hooks are filled with
gushing words of praise from countless admirers.
I am clearly one myself, of her beliefs as well as
her deceptively simple, almost period-style art. My first
encounter with this work came as a birthday present, a
slim hand-crafted hook with ethereal shadowy coloured
images of tree branches and moss and insects and small
furry things, and words printed in old-fash ioned font
speaking of just walking and looking at the world
around. Later, I came upon another similar hook, and
thinking they were quite old, was surprised when a friend
presented me with a current calendar by the same Land.
I was also pleased to find out that Gwen Frostic was a
favorite artist of a dear great-aunt, who continuously
distributed her work throughout the family.
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G u %T0 m I l LUS,TRRT/0K5 w B ^ Í or C olou H
DUEBER FAMILY STORES
A Little Bit o f the Best o f Everything
C oast R ange
A ssociation
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Tim is
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P.O. B O X 148
NEW PO RT, O R 97365
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Come join us for
dinner near the
pounding surf at
Laneda & Carmel
In Manzanita
<*«*»•»• ywaw T
A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no
suggestion to the a rtis t I t lacks imperfection.
Oscar W ilde
UPPER LEFT EDGE DECEMBER 2000
503/368-5593.
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DUEBER’S
Our trip was blessed by many such brushes with
art, both man-made and natural; and it seems that the
works which impressed me m ost were almost always
somehow a combination o f the two.
Passing through Montreal we made the art
museum there a primary stop, and were rewarded by
centuries-old iconic images, a room of Ourer prints, and
most of all, an exceptional gold painting from the
1 4 0 0 ’s by Mantegna, of Dido - Queen of ancient
Carthage, whose ingenuity won her the city. (She also
made us homesick, reminding us of our cat by the same
name.) Lexington, KY sported life-sized statues of horses
on every downtown street corner, each individually painted
and decorated by different artists. Som e were lovely,
and though many were corny, they aimed to demonstrate
a wide sampling of the abilities of Kentucky artists.
In Maine, we gleaned a taste of the inspiration
that so influenced a great many artists - the lovely,
harsh rocky coast. Here, for obvious reasons of beauty,
a rich selection of artists honed their craft, depicting the
tiny islands, the brilliant ocean, the stony shorelines and
stark lighthouses. The Portland Museum of A rt was
handily displaying a show of the works of N C Wyeth at
the time of our visit - a huge variety of his work
spanning all his passages of stimulus, from elaborate
,
O n our return trip, rolling along the huge flat
bed of the Great Salt Lake Desert, we became aware of
several strange unifications of art and stone.
For miles and miles of this windy salty highway,
an astounding and seemingly endless parade of faceless
people have left their marks. Words are strewn on the
barren white soil, formed with countless small black lava
rocks and sometimes highlighted with coloured rejected
hotties, spelling out a diverse array of names, love
messages, warnings, religious threats and promises, and
braggings. It seems a pretty unique form of folk art -
one has to imagine the myriad cars separately pulled
over, their passengers toiling under the monstrous leaden
sky as trucks caroom past, honking; gathering up the
sparse dark stones and laying them tediously out in the
sand; just to leave the world these bizarre mementos of
their passage. It certainly made the northwest comer of
Utah muck more interesting for us.
And passing by a small hillock alongside the
road, we realized some hills really do have eyes — two
tiny cave entrances had been fitted with barrel ends
painted with pupils and whites, set to stare eternally
across us and all the other west-hound traffic, across the
tarmac, and into the infinity of the desert.
The glorious coastline of Maine became a focal
point for one of my overwhelming passions — the
amateur examination and collection of rocks. O n e of
the most fascinating breeds of stone was discovered on a
point of land known as Prouts Neck (once hom e of
painter W inslow Homer). A public path edges the rim
of the neck, which is formed almost exclusively of an
amazing substance called schist — it is identical to wood
in every observable particular. Grain and knots, big
stumps and tiny hits of bark, all are in reality rock.
The whole point of land seems to he a big chunk of the
stuff, which has through the pressures of ocean and time
been demolished into smaller and smaller portions at the
rim. It is a remarkable stone, fascinating and puzzling;
each time you feel sure that this piece, at least, must be
wood — you are wrong.
The collection o i rocks has proved to be a
primary souvenir fetish. A t every stop my eyes find
themselves drawn to the earth at my feet — the
bedevilment grows, and as each piece of stone is lovelier
than the last, it becomes very time-consuming. Pieces
of places are to me the most obvious of relics, and in
any case, much cheaper than gift store trinkets. A t
state parks, rest stops, cemeteries, lake beds; from the
Craters of the M oon to the Badlands and Black Hills;
from the shores of Lake Michigan to the beaches of
Maine, our van accumulated a geological weight.
f o r th e E n t ir e F a m ily
G ourmet P iz . z A
made by drills and dynamite, but was handicapped by
the fences along the walkway, and the countless signs
forbidding any further exploration. A nd finally I learned
that the protection was precisely for people like myself,
eager to collect a piece of Roosevelt’s shapen nose — all
the honeycomb rock is considered a part of the
monument, and only one piece is known to have ever
left the site. S o I went away comforted in part by the
knowledge that I had been saved, against my will, a lot
of prosecution and strife.
STOWE.5
Gwen Frostic, who hides
herself away in her office drawing
while her magic elves print and
collate and fold and press her
works (so it was explained to us
by the man monitoring the
presses), seems to live inside the
images of her mind, where she
pontificates and ruminates on the
relationships between man, nature,
and the universe, forever enthralled
with the mysteries o f life in the
world around us and determined to
impress the importance of these
mysteries on the people of this
world.
A selection of
OREGON WINES &
fine BEERS
always on hand.
A thwart occurred at Mt. Rushmore, however.
Here, below the surprisingly intriguing carvings — truly
monumental both physically and artistically — lies a
skirting of chunks of the granite blasted during
construction. I itched to get my obsessed hands on a
piece of the honeycombed stone, crossed with the hollows
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