Out of the Gutter Art

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  • Now We Know

    Now We Know

    But didn’t we already? I mean, really, deep down?

    Oh, my. I didn’t think knowing her cause of death would hurt so much. I’ve tried not to get swept up in the frenzy of pre-judgment, the swirling sea of speculation and conclusion-jumping. I have kept my distance from the personal pain of her family, her loved ones…even the pain of onlookers and hang-arounds.

    It still hurts. Even though I see some truth in certain societal prejudice creating a higher level of media interest, still it hurts. For me, I think it lies in her openness, naiveté. So schoolgirl-ish, eager to please. Happy. Blonde. Hopeful.

    A Different free-spirited blonde: “Party Girl”©SusanToddMartin2019(sold)

    That is not her fault. And it doesn’t do to focus on the social imbalance, not right now. Some may disagree, and stand on soap boxes and toot their messages throughout the land. That’s for them.

    A never-silent voice from my past: “I can still “Reach Out and Touch You”©SusanToddMartin2018 ; even past State lines, from prison bonds and the grave his hold still haunts me at times…Such is the legacy of domestic violence.

    For me? It hurts. Like a baby bird fallen from it’s nest, limp in my hands, I want to fix her. I want to swaddle her in my favorite fuzzy blanket, hold her like Mary holding Jesus. I did not know you, Gabby, but I know you. e

    You were me, at 17, drinking beer with my friends and my new boyfriend. When, in an instant a fist struck my laughing, open mouth. Spitting beer and a piece of tooth out behind a tree where he had marched me, saying I would ‘never disrespect him in public’.

    • Flashback 937(detail)©STMartin2017
    • Detail:Growth, Susan T. Martin
    Believing we needed to be in a relationship to be ‘whole’ , no matter the alarm bells, no matter the danger. Putting on masks to hide the pain, trying to become whatever the abuser wanted. Putting up with a slap, a punch, being berated and belittled and not telling a soul…buying into a ‘romantic’ dream turned nightmare…my art reflects all these processes as I lived thru it; so many others don’t.

    I closed my laughing mouth that day, at least when it came to telling anyone about abuse. I could talk about “anything” to family, anything but THAT. And, for me a huge part of the silence was shame and embarrassment. How could I admit I got it so wrong? The family wanted the future marriage with all the trappings, wedding albums, grandkids. They bought him Christmas gifts, let him sleep in their home, share the holiday table. Giggling with Mom and friends over future plans, seeing the romantic movies, going to the weddings of siblings and friends. So much family pride at a daughter married off…

    I remember my brother glimpsing him treating me bad, some rude remark made on the side, my face burning with embarrassment: He sat me down the next day, “Don’t go with him, he’s no good…” But Dad would have a Scotch on the porch with my abuser, making jokes about ‘the womenfolk” and “keeping a firm hand”, the knowing glances and cigars puffed…WAIT!! I wanted to scream. I don’t want this anymore!!

    But the abuser promised behind closed doors : ” If I can’t have you nobody can…”

    My heart cries out for the loss of a beautiful life, for the suffering of her family, and empathy for millions of others who have had to suffer and/or die at the hands of their mate…the person closest to them. I hope that others who are in violent relationships can tell a trusted confidante, find a safe exit and save their lives. Better yet, learn to treasure the life they have, value themselves without settling for a boyfriend of girlfriend who hurts them(mentally or physically). Take Gabby’s tale to heart, and live!!

    Sigh…

  • I CAN’T QUIT ARTING!!!

    I CAN’T QUIT ARTING!!!

    Woe Is Me!

    First I can’t Gogh and then I have to Gaugin!

    I’m sorry, I just had to ‘go’ there. It is true. I am under compulsion to express myself creatively. It’s 5am again, sleep fled from me ten years ago (at least!), and I am drawing sheep instead of counting them. In my other journal I describe my physical pain-it is at a new level of cruelty. I lie on my bed and moan, no amount of useless meds suffice to touch this beast.

    Is that why the faces all show this somehow tense+sad expression? Wistful longing for that elusive loosening of the bonds? Perhaps. I try to draw them less like who I see in the mirror, more like I imagine my ancestors to be. Those “other” Keel’s, in the ‘colored’ graveyard. The ones listed before 1865 as slaves who seem to disappear into thin air on the ‘new and improved’ census after the war. Mysteriously reappearing as ‘household servants’-female, age 10 years. Female, age 17…

    I thought it was a lark, looking up ‘my people’…amazed that my dirt poor, shoeless, hog farming grandpas had come from England a few generations prior, settling in “The Colony” , with names prefixed with titles like Lord and Sir.

    Such noble men and women whose blue blood runs thru my veins. How naive I was, never considered the blood on their hands. Native peoples whose entire lines and tribes now blotted out of existence, as their lands got hacked and sawed and planted with Tobacco, and cotton.

    I always thought how beautiful brown skin is, and wished I were a black or brown skinned girl. Now I cry because I may actually be here because a child was hurt, a young woman stolen from every semblance of loving kindnes… Ah well…

    I color an imaginary scenario with so much room for uncertainty… I will just let it be for now.

    n

  • Totally Spent

    Totally Spent

    The Feeling one gets when successfully submitting their hard work into an event. The finality of it. That deep exhale when a deadline is met, that chapter closed.

    Knowing you did your level best to create something worthy of hanging in an Art gallery, in a beautiful home. Knowing that gives me joy,

  • Memory’s Mother

    Memory’s Mother

    The Curling Tendrils

    All around me , I see the memories. The whispers of my love, echoed through the years. Images of the place we lived, when all of us were there. Those times are over now, and isolation makes the distance so much greater. But still the tendrils curl from the past and steal under the door frames, thru the cracks in the walls, and deep into my heart.

    In waking moments, bleary eyed, I try to grasp the essence of you as the dream recedes. Your scent lingers in my nostrils; recedes like the white foam of a wave vanishing into the eager sand. Why must the imprint flee-so rapidly? I had your housecoat in a Kipling, sealed like a time capsule. I would unzip it just enough to stuff my face in the hole, wuffling your smell for a moment; your baby again.

    Eventually the Mommy smell dissipated in spite of me only wuffling for a second every month or so. Even this part of you had to go, leaving me only your favorite T Shirt (which I only put on once in the past 11 years only to whisk it off and ceremoniously nestle it back into its shrine in my pajama drawer.) It’s the one with the tiny writing decoration: Read a book. In your favorite place. By a window. Under a tree…ad infinitum in line after line of script. Script I can recite as if it were an incantation to bring you back to me.

    It can’t. It won’t. It doesn’t. I still won’t wear it. It has your name hand written on the inside of the neck hem. I wrote it there before brining it to the rehab with your other clothes and toiletries. You looked so young, so childlike on the big bed in that old rehab. Giggling because you had the room to yourself. The first time in 50-odd years of oppressive marriage that you slept in a room alone. A little girl, playing house.

    My heart hurts, but I have that image of you, right now, to comfort me. My eyes are heavy; I will lie down, curling my body around this memory…

  • The Dreaming Forest

    The Dreaming Forest

  • A Long Lost Love

    A Long Lost Love

    I love etching. I haven’t done a “real” etching in about 40 years; since high school. We had a brand new state-of-the-art printing press. It had been installed in 1978 and here I was, a couple years later in advanced art classes with the finest teacher I ever had, Mr. O’Hara. At the time I did not think I liked the man, he was always on my case, pushing me and prodding me to expand my horizons. All I wanted to do was get high and draw my trippy burnout monsters. These were the days of Frank Frazetta and Heavy Metal The Movie; my dreams were filled with animation and album covers. But Mr. O’Hara had this printing press. And he intended to make me use it.

    First it was wood cuts. Hmmmm…This was pretty cool. One block, lots of options, different colors, placements and copies! Prints everywhere! I had written a poem about a nuclear holocaust, Mr. O’Hara had us make a book…I was impressed, and so were my Peers and parents. Which was unbelievable, they never turned the TV off long enough to know what color my hair was any given month. (It was many different colors, but not like today. We just had blue/black and red and blonde… I tried them all.) Getting back to the printing press, my curiosity was really piqued. Then we did a lino cut…again, very cool. I was into it now. Then he gave us some history and some homework.

    Etching. Renaissance. Rembrandt. Etching. Albrecht Durer. Zinc Plate etchings. I was enthralled: Oh the detail. The crazy details. It was better than smoking dope! I am so grateful today to have had the chance to be taught by Mr. O’Hara. I have often wished I could contact him and thank him for pushing me. He really cared, and I will always be indebted to him for seeing who I could be.

    yesterday’s piece: Too Soon to Yo Mama (Tucson to Yuma

    These pieces aren’t etchings, they are oil pastel sgrafitto. To me, though, they have the feel of etchings. The tiny lines, intricate detail. Not like a finished etching, but those wonderful moments when you are scratching the eensy-weensy picture onto the plate. I have even gone so far as to ‘etch’ a lamp globe and a mannequin in the past few years! Oh, the long lost love of mine!!

    .

  • What You Made Me Feel (Blue-Eyed Johnny)

    What You Made Me Feel (Blue-Eyed Johnny)

    Photo by Clement percheron on Pexels.com

    So Long Ago was Yesterday; I thought it was Gone…but I was wrong. I understand now; I was stuck Here all along.

    Now that I know, can I go?

    No. Not now, maybe not ever. You have to remember, see? I need you to remember me. My family long ago passed on, they kept my picture right above the mantle, and I carried theirs’. I carried ours. Draped it around my 18 year-old neck like the roses on a Derby winner; around my neck like the rifle I carried. Around my neck just like my dog tags-the one’s that made that certain sound when they touched. You must remember. I am not a ghost, there are no such things. I am just a memory, dead in the dust, gone like the wisp of smoke that curled from the tip of the gun that killed me. Remember me, now and then.

    A wisp of smoke…

    More now. The children are on the battlefields today- at this very minute-with eyes of cornflower blue. Searching the horizon, squinting against the glare of sunlight that slants off the desert rock like a razor. Blue eyes scanning roadsides, green eyes scouring midnight skies for tell-tale vapor trails. Brown eyes staring blindly back at the insides of their night vision goggles, looking into eternity.

    ” Sweet Child in time, you ought to see the line-the line that’s drawn between the goodness and the bad. See the blind man? He’s shooting at the world; the bullets flying, taking their toll…If you’ve been bad (lord, I’ll bet you have) and you’ve not been hit, not been hit by flying lead; you’d better close your eyes-you’d better bow your head…

    Wait for the ricochet.”

    ©DeepPurple Sweet Child in Time

    Flashback 937

    I came across this post I wrote a few years ago, and it resonates with me today in light of recent events. War is always the worst of mankinds’ inhumanity, nothing has changed in the years since Vietnam. I was a baby when first exposed to war thru a little black box that sat on a shelf next to where Mother sat me in my crib some 50 odd years ago. To this day the sound of chopper blades overhead stops me in my tracks; I peer up in questioning wonder-not sure what I am looking for. Maybe my Mom’s cammo-clad lover to rappel down and proclaim fatherhood of me, maybe for shots to ring out and stop my questions forever…

    Today I am exposed to a little black tablet that bombards me with images of my unborn sons and daughters dressed in their uniforms, riding in Hummers, riding in wheelchairs, riding in hearses, riding away, always away…Day after dreaded year the casualties mount while my one life ebbs away: How many have sacrificed themselves in my 57 years? Have I even cried that many tears in this lifetime? How many is enough (Children? Tears?) to give to the General’s who orchestrate this endless miserable charade.

    I feel sick. All the time. And when I think of Johnny, I cry. I know and I believe and I am promised and he is promised, PROMISED a resurrection by the One true Ruler of this Universe, so soon I will hold my soldier in my arms and look long into those crystal blue living eyes.

    Until then, I will think of Blue-Eyed Johnny, and I will remember…

    with love.

  • A Power Play Please

    A Power Play Please

    Do something! Say something! Move a muscle, change a thought!

    All seems to be running smoothly-till it’s not, and it’s not; right now.

    How? Every thing seemed peachy-‘seemed’ being the operative word here. I seem like I’m young and beautiful-but is it truly the case? It ‘seems’ nice and comfortable outside-until you open the door and the 100°, 90% humidity slaps you around. Then it ‘seems’ like you are dying of heat stroke(which you may actually be if you don’t wise up and dash back inside).

    I have been on this couch for hours. Hours! I wake up, try to get up. Ponder it for a few dazed minutes. Then, with a sigh, I melt back into the blanket, squishing my head into the pillow, praying for alertness to magically reach in and yank me into an energized reality. It has yet to. Although, I must admit I did rise long enough to walk Kleo, feed the cats, her, and me. Then, drawn into the couch’s magnetic field I succumbed again.

    Someone may say, oh, you must need the sleep. Your body knows what it needs. No, I humbly disagree. My body knows how to seek a place to hibernate, sinking into the very fibers if this sofa till only my hands and feet will be left on the surface. Mute witnesses to the me that once was.

    I must fight this lesser nature, fill my mind with the memories of zestful living, long for that movement, yearn for that freedom, strain to break free!!

    When will living feel like less of an epic battle? Probably never. Does that mean I should give in, give up, throw in the proverbial towel? No! The opposite: FIGHT, SISTER!! THROW OFF THAT STRANGLING BLANKET! RISE UP AND FIGHT FOR ANOTHER DAY!

    Whew!! Ok! Ok, I will, I AM! I am motivated, I am engaged, I am leaping back into life!

    In…just…a…minute. Right now…yawn!…I think I’ll just stretch out for one second…just…one…sec…

    • The Bizarre Hunter
    • Passed On©STMartin2010
    • “A Big Beak”(detail)©STMartin2019
    • Susan Past ©STM2018