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10/01/2004: "In the Superstitions" by Walter King
I’ve been describing a trip to New Mexico and Arizona I took last December and January to clear my head and make watercolors. I left off at the studio and home of Elena Ray in Ajo Arizona, an old copper mining town out in the desert... I awoke the next morning listening for Havalina’s on the porch. Nada. I’d slept on the rug in Elena Ray’s studio. Next morning we got up and had breakfast after which I took a short walk into the desert and did a couple watercolors. I gave one to Elena and stuck the other in my book. Elena thought it would be worth a drive out to Organ Pipe National Park. She knows a lot about the natural flora and fauna and told me about it like a park ranger in her Greg Brown style canvas hat while we hiked around looking for desert rats and interesting plants and stones.
Then we visited neighbors whose son was in town having just finished college. She wanted to say hi and introduce me. Their small acreage is home to a collection of the unwanted animals others have no use for including horses, cattle, dogs, cats...we sat up on a wooden deck above their house drinking Jack Daniels paid for by a couple twenty dollar bills found on a horse trail out in the desert during a ride they’d taken earlier in the day. They figured it was either lost drug money or money dropped during an illegal alien round up. They said sometimes the ‘Coyote’ would dump the money hoping to find it later. The sun was out and warmed everything up after the crisp chill of the previous evening. We had a great view across the desert to the mountains from the deck.
(Photo of Elena Ray in front of her house in Ajo AZ) It was a good day. I drank a whole bottle of water and began to feel a little more stable. Sometime in the afternoon I said thanks and bye to Elena and made the hot dusty drive up to the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix. I set up camp at Canyon Lake. I bought some firewood (they’re real careful about camp fires due to some horrendous forest fires they’ve had recently) and had dinner at the park restaurant overlookingCanyon Lake. Did a little fishing till well after dark. Didn’t catch anything and didn’t really care. It was good exercise casting and climbing around on the rocks. I eventually crashed around 1 a.m. after letting the fire die. Before going to sleep I noticed the ring was still encircling the moon. In the high thin atmosphere you could even see the subtle rainbow effect. “Cold night, Still in the right place” I thought. But it really took me by surprise how cold it got that night. Apparently a front moved in during the night and the temps dropped substantially. And of course the high altitude didn‘t help. I woke up freezing in the middle of the night. So I stuffed my old Israeli desert sleeping bag into another bag I had in the back of my truck made by a friend.
(Superstitions Above Tortilla Flat (detail) watercolor and guache on BFK-Walter King) I took a drive after breaking up camp in the morning way up into the Superstitions. The buttes and canyons were the true stuff of western movies and Native folklore. I drove until the asphalt road became gravel then dirt and then found a view from a high bluff overlooking a part of the road I’d just traveled. I spent about an hour working on a watercolor until my fingers were too cold to flex. When I was done I was terribly hungry so I turned around and drove back to Tortilla Flat which I‘d passed through on the way up. The whole town is up for sale including the trading post, restaurant, post office and several other buildings all in a row in the finest tradition of the old west. I heard someone was interested in turning it into an artist’s colony. I think the price tag is around 4 million dollars for the whole shootin’ match. It doesn’t sound like such a good deal until you learn that the legendary Lost Dutchman mine is supposed to be somewhere in the vicinity. All you gotta do is find it.
(Al Glann, Scottsdale, AZ 2004) My reason for going to the Phoenix area was to visit a colleague and friend. Al Glann and I both taught in the Foundation Dept. of the Columbus College of Art and Design. I still teach color in that program. Al is a sculptor and now teaches at the Art Institute of Phoenix and lives in Scottsdale. He’s been doing commissions for various clients there in the Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe area and is doing quite well for himself.
(Title page of The Budapest Catalog-1992) His wife Debra Glann was a painter and printmaker. She was a strikingly beautiful woman with thick raven black hair, high cheekbones and dark eyes. In 1992 Deb and I exhibited together in Budapest Hungary with another painter, Tan Larrabee- my former painting professor. Tan and I traveled to Budapest as I mentioned in an earlier installment which was my first trip abroad. Deb couldn’t go due to the fact that she had Muscular Dystrophy and was working out of a wheel chair. Al took care of her like a guardian angel until she died about two years ago due to complications of her disease. I always admired Al’s undying dedication to his wife. I never saw him discouraged by the trials and problems and frustrations that must come with a disability of this magnitude. And frankly I was always a little humbled by his willingness to put his own art on a back burner more often than not as he put hers first. 
(Deb with tour of Duty, from the Budapest Catalog- 1992) And he’s still putting her work forward. Al is trying to find a way to raise money through the sale of her work to establish a scholarship in her name at the college. I wanted a chance to talk with him about it, to see if there might be something I could do to help. And of course I just wanted to see him and talk a little about old times. We did just that. He told me the whole story of how they made the move out west because the climate was better for Debs condition, how she’d been awarded a Pollack-Krasner award which helped them set up her studio so she was able to continue to work nearly right up to the end, how she died and that he still missed her desperately. Al has a web site set up with both their work. You can visit it at: artxtwo.comI spent one night with him and in the morning he went out to his courtyard in the back of the house and picked me a bag full of oranges from one of his trees for my trip home. They were delicious.
(Tour of Duty, collage- Deb Glann (from Glann, King and Larrabee: the Budapest catalog 1992)) I picked a different route back to Santa Fe to spend a couple days with Michelle before driving back to Tulsa and on to Columbus. This time I cut across to New Mexico south of Albuquerque. I spent a night near the Little Colorado just west of the border, climbed a mountain and once on top did another watercolor looking west. Walked back down the mountain and began the drive over to New Mexico. Again I pulled into Michelle’s pueblo in the evening. Again we talked for some time. She told me she had tickets to a Greg Brown concert the next night, that she would try to get an extra one for me but if she wasn’t successful there was a movie playing that I might like to see.
(Above the Little Colorado (detail), watercolor- Walter King (a few hours before seeing a mountain lion)) Michelle had a friend she wanted me to meet. Adasti Gadahee (Grandmother Jean) is an Ulunsuti (Cherokee crystal worker) who is invited to lecture all over the world. Michelle met her in Florida, Grandmother Jean had recently moved to Taos with her husband J. Hector Bustos who is also Native American from Columbia. Hector is a painter with 21 exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Canada to his credit. I didn’t get to meet him but his work filled their little adobe house. Hector lived in Paris for 9 years and built quite a reputation there. His work is very bright and colorful, truly joyous. Grandmother told me the themes are often based on the villages he lived in as a child. 
(La Plaza by J Hector Bustos) Grandmother Jean is a handsome woman with a friendly smile and a positive outlook on life. She lives in a small adobe house with dirt floors. Michelle had brought a small heater for her because the one in the house was not functioning properly. We looked at some of Hector’s paintings before going into the living room. I gave Grandmother a copy of the Internal Scenarios book with poems by Ed Lense as a gift and she immediately began looking at the images and telling me about what she saw in them. She asked if I knew that the lizard image was a good luck sign for Native Americans. I said I’d heard that but didn’t know why. She got quiet for a little while and began by saying the Reptile clan fell to earth from the distant stars. They were star people, shape shifters and man eaters- though they cannot stand our odor nor we theirs. Now a days she said they just domesticate us to make money for themselves. They are the 7 families who rule the earth from power and wealth. Native Americans make and wear lizard images as a kind of protection from the Reptile Clan. The Reptile Clan are said to be very vein and liked to see their own image which is why the good luck charm works. Makes sense. If someone is wearing a pin with my picture on it I would count them in my fan club.I then got quiet for a while. I was processing the information and making metaphorical connections to current events. She asked me if I knew what a shape shifter was and I said I knew something of the legend. That it was a very popular theme for horror movies these days. She then explained that one day she and Hector were watching TV. She says she saw a famous politician giving a news conference or a speech or something. His countenance flickered for an instant then faded to his lizard shape and back again. She said she turned to her husband and asked if he saw it and he nodded and said he did. She left out the name of the politician as have I. Substitute whoever you secretly believe to be a lizard. I have my favorites.
We talked a bit about how I chose the images I used and I explained that it was somewhat intuitive, that I had passing knowledge of a number of religions and ancient beliefs and that I found the images full of metaphorical allusions that spoke to me and often struck a chord in others as well. I said my mother had a rhinestone lizard pin when I was a child that fascinated me which was my first reason for choosing the lizard image. Grandmother told me about some books to read on the Reptile Clan and we small talked for a while until it was time to go.
Later, when I ot back home, I looked up some of her references and ultimately found myself on a site that talked about the Illuminati and the famous theory about the 10 (some have said 7, 8 even as many as 30) families who rule the world. It mentioned families like the Bushes, the Fords, the Kennedies, the Rothchilds. Of course these ideas date back to the Monarchies of ancient times. A modern variation on the theme is that 10 international corporations control all the worlds economies - witness the stories about Enron, Halliburton and Worldcom (now there’s a telling name) dominating the media recently (or those media giants themselves who are so supposedly liberal leaning.) Of course they manipulate things but control? If you call what they do control I call them pretty incompetent. There is a new one I heard recently which came up after the publication of the Da Vinci codes. Supposedly Mary Magdelene and Jesus had a child who ended up in Scotland and fathered a line of spiritually superior folk who are preparing, I guess, a blood line for the second coming and heaven on earth. This is all right out of the X-Files.
Of course I’m always intrigued by such ideas like I‘m intrigued by every belief system, every world view and the myths and legends every culture eventually develops over time to explain their world. Many cultural stories can be understood as parables, allegories and morality tales- tropes or foils for another message. And science fiction as a genre is certainly no different. In my lifetime I’ve seen the idea of aliens from other worlds rise from the ranting of a few spooky oddballs and ‘B’ Sci-Fi movies to the status of a religion if not quite science (Carl Sagan is a great example.) Believe what you like. I won’t criticize so much as look for the metaphors behind the system.
(Deconstructing Lizards, stencil drawing , Walter King) Some stories aren’t harmless though. Take the fables about Jews eating Christian babies which caused fear and loathing in Eastern Europe leading to the pograms, the horrible persecution and eventual holocaust in Eastern Europe. Today in the U.S. even after changes in laws following the civil rights movement there are still fables about African Americans, Latin Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Republicans, Democrats and others which are quietly swimming beneath the surface of our society having their effects. We have become a society of whisperers. Maybe we have always been this way. And it is just as easy for any sidelined minority to float a myth as it is for the politically powerful majority to use racist, ethnocentric and gender biased myths to keep the others sidelined. Myth can be a very powerful tool either way. Problem is it is very hard to discern the truth if only because it is all around us. Can’t always see the forest for the trees and oftentimes we really don’t want to see anything but the myth if it suits our purposes. And as Muldur is so fond of saying...”The truth is out there” Somewhere!So I mean no disrespect to Grandmother Jean. I liked her. She has a good soul and her beliefs come from her traditions. She holds them sincerely. I’d never interfere with another persons beliefs or traditions anymore than I want someone to try to convert me to their particular take on religion. And, of all people, Grandmother Jean will understand that a soul must make up its own mind about these things. So I honor her belief with interest and intrigue while remaining somewhat skeptical of all mythology and legend.
I have a bad habit when I drive long distances. I get into this contemplative day dream state in which my mind seems divided so I can drive while having a running creative dialog in my head at the same time. The problem is that from time to time I begin to get images of art I want to make and am just stupid enough to actually try to sketch with a small sketchbook on my right thigh or the arm rest while trying to stay on the road. The deer images I have been using for a while came from a long drive to and from NY through the mountains of Pennsylvania a few years ago. Kept seeing these deer crossing signs on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. After a while the deer icon began to resonate and I began roughing out the entire Dilemma’s series exhibited on my web site. While I’ve never had an accident doing this I did miss my exit and ended up in Pittsburgh once instead of Columbus on my way home that trip.
On my way back from Phoenix I was making notes in one of my little sketchbooks while heading to New Mexico when I saw the Mountain lion crossing the highway. But I’ll tell you about it next time. Being in the right place at the right time is a glorious way to live.
