Hello Now From Everywhere -A sneak preview- New Essay For the Second Memorial Book writen by Regina Clarkinia

Drawings of Ourself

More or less once a week, Veronica De Jesus draws another portrait of an remarkable person who just died. Each Friday she interleaves a newly-drawn memorial within the pages of a heavy book and takes it to Dogeared Books in the Mission, where she has been working every Friday night. I know this because we have been in love for years and years.

I'm aware of Veronica's process and am always submitting my newly-dead favorites. My perspective of the matrix of Veronica's memorial drawings is different from the perspectives of most viewers. I indulge in spying on people looking at Veronica's memorial drawings taped on the the book store's window. Each drawing is a thing, all the drawings together are a thing and the spectacle is a thing. I look at the spectacle thing when I'm at the book store.

Viagra for the Soul

I'm not sure how Veronica learned about Curtis Barefoot, African-American mathematics professor at New Mexico Tech. His portrait shows a man with uneven nostrils, a broken pencil moustache and a relaxed expression. The line depicting the bottom right of his cheek was originally drawn higher, and this original high line remains unerased and stalwart: an elastic birthday hat strap indenting the bottom right of his face. Hand-written outlined text says, "Yellow, his favorite color, is symbolic of sunshine and optimism." Dr. Barefoot's friend, John Orman, said, "Dr. Barefoot was a very large guy with an even bigger heart, a good teacher, and an incredibly gentle and soft-spoken guy." To me he is like a wildflower that exists one spring only to mutate into a new bird the following spring, or even the tenth spring after. Something impossible, that existed once.

The people memorialized on the window at Dogeared Boooks had faith and put forth effort to achieve wonderful things (even those with hot tempers, extravagant spending habits, addictions to surgical anesthesiology drugs or zillions of other faults). The already-deceased people on the window at Dogeared Books was taped up there to motivate everyone still alive on the sidewalk. Although it's not explicit in the text of the memorial portraits, I see the struggles and inspirations analogized in the misshapen physiognomies, the flying lines and doodads, bursts, flowers, and the sparkling eyes.

We all touch each other, everyone affects everyone. Veronica loves how one person's story of vanquishing misfortune & accomplishing greatness can inspire others to do similarly glorious things. This might lead you to conclude that she also loves sentimental movies like Pay It Forward. And were you to jump to this conclusion, you would be absolutely correct. I think the most watched movie in our house is Miracle, about the USA hockey team winning the Olympics in the 80s; Kurt Russell plays the coach. Veronica feels strongly that overcoming hardship is only possible with the inspiration of others' struggles & triumphs. Bring on the sports movie music montage! Let it bring us all to tears!

Lines

Each of Veronica's memorial drawings shoots straight to the arc of a person's life: one stroke that begins and ends so free and specific. Energy, exertion, effort.

Each portrait conveys what is important about each of these now-ancestors, what they worked for and built, often against all odds, often at first alone. Little imaginations and patterns are more important than actual likeness. Forget about a flattering likeness. Behold the effort it takes to be a human being. All the lines spraying & folding elaborately and as randomly-riven as the lines on a palm of a hand.

Arthur Russell's face is a nest of gentle frenzied lines. Circular beat loops drop freely from his bustling head, rooted on a firm neck encircled with a necklace of rectangular keyboard keys. Minnie Riperton's 'fro is a planet unto itself with enough gravitational pull for a moon or two. An unchained string of black beads line up to form a partial corona above her hair orb. The worlds of her hair, her face and her shirt are all rendered by different pattern routines.

Lines of blackened cloth and devotion, ideas and resolve cover Comandante Ramona all contained spirit and drive, like a firecracker. Merce Cunningham has sprouted almost Hirschfield-like strandy hair, which contrasts with the sharp resilience of his face. His little old hands, curled up on either cheek, bookend his face. I think they are his hands they could be the hands of dancers.

Making the Cut

People who hate Political Correctness, cover your ears. Sometimes when I pitch a perfectly-inspiring dead man to Veronica, she says, "I can't do that one, I already have too many men (or whites)." That said, Veronica has drawn portraits for more than a handful of apparently white and male people: Bob Keeshan, Art Clokey, Grandpa Munster, Robert Creeley, Arthur Russell, Merce Cunningham and Harold Blum among them.

Although Veronica has an eye for less-known individuals, outsiders & self-sacrificers of all stripes, some of the memorials celebrate massive icons like Rick James, Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Hunter Thompson, Julia Child and Michael Jackson. It's like birdwatching, where cataloguing the well-known and prevalent ones is unavoidable. Even though you may aim to take note of the rare birds, you ultimately snap photos of the ones who insistently fly into the zoom lens scope. But it's the uncommon ones Veronica is after. For example, one sub-genre is Female Athletes of Rare Sport:

Ellen Preis, fencer Patty Costello, bowler Lillian Ellison, wrestler Angelica Rozeanu, ping pong player

Our Ancestors, Ourselves

Like good porn's effect on your desire to fuck, these portraits (and mini-bios) place a bee in your bonnet to discover or invent something (a dream, a goal, a change) heartfelt and meaningful in yourself. Each of these memorialized people focused on accomplishing something unique and ambitious. Although their accomplishments seem like they were fated to be, at first many faced were doubts and struggles.

Pablita Velarde pursued a career as a painter while raising her children as a single mom. She painted colorful, straightforward scenes of her youth on the Pueblo reservation. Her paintings didn't sell for a number of years. Her family and social network were convinced that only men should be artists. They laid her with a heaping guilt trip, which she shirked. Eventually her father came around and supported her art practice. At the age of 83 she had a solo show at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.

In an interview on New Mexico's PBS station, KNM, Pablita Velarde said, "My dad, my grandfather, my great-grandfather: those are all my old fathers. I talk to them. I just ask them how they're doing and then I pretend like they say they're doing fine. And then sometimes when I have a problem I say why don't you come and help me figure this out. And it works."

Veronica's memorials are portraits of us all. These ancestors can guide us to live in a way that can one day inspire others, keeping us all in the now and forever.

Regina Clarkinia