That day is a-coming when we let our mothers know how much they mean to us. Can’t think of a better time to give this block. Mothers Day Gift for Mom- There Was Never Any Mom Art Block- 4″ x 4″ Gift for Mother- Gift for Mom to Be- Gift for New Mom- Gift – John W. Golden Art.
Here’s a brand-spanking new piece all about being in the moment. I really like the simplicity of the way this is stated. I think it’s a great reminder for kids and and adults (maybe graduating teens?), and I know it’s a great reminder for me.
This here is the door to the place in which I first started selling my artwork at age 11 – way back in 1977. In an interior corner just to the left of that door opening was the first public display of my work called “John’s Corner”. Linoleum block prints my mother helped me make. Two sailboat prints and one of a surfer on a wave. Later, there were reproductions of pen and ink drawings of the NC lighthouses that I begrudgingly hand-colored with watercolor throughout my teenage years.
I guess you might see where I got my affinity for urban texture. But it wasn’t just here. I walked from my 5th and 6th grade school, every day, after school, through the wilds of our downtown. The Atlantic Coast Railroad was long gone by then, and those buildings were either torn down or being demolished. There were huge piles of rubble everywhere, especially across the street from the Golden Gallery. A few years before, the reflection to the right of the picture would have shown an old hotel. But by the time my mother rented the space that had once been a barber shop it was just a lot.
The department stores had not yet left for the new shopping mall and the Five and Dimes had not closed down. Across the street on the corner was the coolest toy store combination camera shop ever. Owned and run by an aging man sufficiently crotchety when faced with daily visits from an 11-year old with time on his hands. We had a McCrory’s, a Walgreen’s and a Woolworth’s within two blocks. I bought Micronauts and Star Wars figures at two of the three with my art sales money, or with coins I spirited from the Gallery cash box when sales were low. It was figured out that I was the culprit.
The gallery survived my pilfering and is now in it’s 5th location in the same shopping complex. I changed my ways and went on to develop an overactive sense of right and wrong as well as a love for downtowns, rubble piles and making art.
via John W. Golden.
I am a child of the South, specifically the coastal South. To me that means childhood trips at night into the piney woods to little docks on tidal creeks – to lower a Drop Net (crocheted by my mother around a hoop my father fashioned from old copper tubing), full of clothespins and salt herring from the Red & White or Piggly Wiggly, to let it rest beneath a few feet of water on the smelly marsh mud. It’s pulling on a piece of wet cord to bring that net back up, not knowing until the last bit of the bottom of the net clears that water if you have handfuls of twitching, sharp-nosed and tailed shrimp or an empty haul.
It’s tying a rotten chicken neck to a piece of dirty nylon twine and tossing it in those same creeks and learning patience. It’s holding that twine just tight enough to feel that slight tug that means a Blue Crab has found it. It’s a the slow retrieval of that line with one hand while you loop the slack other end of the line around a scavenged stick of wood. It’s using an old broom handle with a notch cut in the end to lift the string up straight from the bottom while your parent slips a dip net quietly into the brine to net the monster catch from behind. It’s the day you first manage to do all that singlehandedly, using the net to both lift the string and catch the crab.
It’s the salt spray over the bow of an aluminum Jon-Boat, as you sit holding an empty 30-gallon trashcan from bed to bed until it’s full of enough oysters to stay in the boat by itself.
It’s shrimp trawlers gliding by as you dangle your bare legs over the hot crumbling concrete of an old causeway, hoping the bait at the other end of your toy fishing rod will entice a bite. And stopping to brush the concrete “crumbs” from where they stick to the back of your legs and shorts while a small Spot flips at the end of your reeled-in line before you throw it back.
I learned patience, persistence, resourcefulness and appreciation as a child of the coastal South. Seems like many of our favorite foods here are always an exercise in all of those skills or virtues. Don’t get me started on boiled peanuts or picking crab.
The Art of John W. Golden 