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Artist Profile Series: Blaine Crosby "I Walk & Dance in the Lightning"

Artist Profile Series: Blaine Crosby "I Walk & Dance in the Lightning" image
Parent Issue
Month
July
Year
1997
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
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Agenda Publications
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Arts Agenda

Artist Profile Series: Blaine Crosby

"I Walk & Dance in the Lightning"

By arwulf arwulf

Greetings good people. Have you been to the library lately? I hope you'll make some time to visit the Ann Arbor Public Library to look at the artwork being displayed there during the month of July. the opening is Tuesday July 1st. Even more important: find a way to meet the artist, Blaine Crosby, and get to know him. Ask to see some of his poetry, or let him read it to you aloud. He's one of a kind.

When I first began gathering notes for this article, I stumbled across this quote from Klaus Mann, son of Thomas and Katia Mann:

Where does the story begin? Where are the sources of our individual life? What remote adventures and forgotten passions have molded our being? What secret influences have shaped our profiles, gestures, and emotions? What whim or wisdom has provided us with that abundance of contradictory features inherent in our character? Where do we come from? Who are we? Undoubtedly--we are more--something weirder and greater--than our biography indicates and our consciousness grasps. Nobody, nothing is disconnected. A comprehensive rhythm determines our thoughts. Our individual destinies are interwoven with the texture of a vast mosaic portraying and developing throughout the centuries the same age-old patterns. Every movement we make repeats an ancestral rite and at the same time foreshadows the attitudes of future generations. Even the most solitary experiences of our heart anticipate or echo the repertoire of past or coming passions. It is a long quest and wandering...

Blaine Crosby listened carefully as I read him these words. We were sitting at a table outside of Cafe Zola, my tape recorder picking up on the busy street and sidewalk traffic of the sunny downtown afternoon, while Blaine's husky voice rang out, like a baritone sax, over the din. Talking with this man is an unforgettable experience, and could change one's life permanently.

When asked about his childhood, Blaine paused a long while, eventually repeating the word "childhood," as if it were an enigma older than time. Gradually he spoke of his birth: "re-entering this cosmic cycle in 1941 at Cloquet, Minnesota"; of growing up near an Indian Reservation, son of an unwed mother, both of them abandoned by the father he never met. "As a pregnant 17-year-old, she was an outcast, a social pariah. I've always been a totem of shame." Americans were careful to stigmatize him for being part-Irish, part-Ojibwa, born out of wedlock.

After baptism, he was ex-communicated along with his mother. Still he was allowed to attend Catholic schools staffed by "nuns with hickory rules." Mother and child had no home; he was essentially raised by the elders on the reservation, where people lived in tar paper shacks, took game and gathered rice in order to survive. And the demons of alcoholism ran rampant. Still do.

Despair

Addictions settled onto him with a vengeance. Childhood faded fast; as a grown man he ran the streets, hustling to keep himself numbed. Over the years he became a thief. And thieves have a way of ending up in jail -- especially a thief who's going through $360 worth of heroin a day; "not to get high, just to stay normal." The biggest mistake came when he robbed a Sacramento bank, using nothing but a discarded brown paper bag. He landed about $1,500. "For that I did ten years and four months in federal prison. If I have any advice from that experience to share with anybody, it's: Do Not Rob A Bank. That's the only bank I ever robbed. It was a farce. Looking back, it was almost funny. But there's nothing funny about the consequences. You know the federal government probably saved my life. But they saved it so goddamn long!"

Now, somehow, instead of succumbing to ennui, Blaine became an artist. During one of his earlier incarcerations, he had edited a prison newspaper, and this brought him into contact with the graphic arts. Soon he was churning out poetry and pictures at a furious rate. Sometimes his art would get confiscated. Authority, with no real (cosmic) power, must seek instead to impose control. Imagine the struggle involved, to be creative while in a can.

Kindness

Katherine Moor came into Blaine's life during the late 1980s. She was visiting prisoners in order to maybe do some good for humanity. This is something for which far too many of us seem to have no time. Her interest in Blaine increased as he showed her the art which he and his best friend had been conjuring within the confines of the brig. To make a long story short: Katherine was working at the U-M Hospital and eventually succeeded in there arranging a display of the prisoners' work. The art was accepted before it was generally known that the artists were jailbirds. This triumph brought Blaine and Katherine even closer. They were married while he was still behind bars. Then, on August 9, 1996, our friend was released from custody, and he's been blossoming in public ever since. "My marriage is so rich, so grounded -- it's helped me," says Blaine.

Freedom

Hanging out with the two of them, these are my impressions: Blaine is absorbing the reality of every single moment in the free and open air as if to miss nothing and savor everything. Katherine has the remarkable nature of one who cares for others; her eyes open in upon oceans of calm reflection and patient empathy. Blaine speaks openly, in gusts of rocky, uncontrived observation. Katherine listens, smiling quietly, her laughter soft and genuine.

I cannot speak of Blaine's graphic art as something separate from his poetry.There is only the individual. As favorite poets he names Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. Not exactly lightweights. His own verse is rich with his having survived and grown deep:

I am taught to consider those distant
and different
my enemies

how do I surrender my sword
and share the nobility and honor
of small words
small gestures
small labors
and small loves?

Blaine's visuals are all carefully rendered: some are faithfully reproduced fragments of natural landscape. Others exist in what would be termed an abstracted reality. Spheres float amongst lines suspended in a particulated aspic. One piece took three days and nights in a flurry of concentrated effort following a private violin recital which Katherine transmitted to him over the prison telephone. Everyone who sees this study agrees that music is conjured inside of the ether. I saw  saxophone or bass clarinet among the shapes. This mysterious work speaks happiness, fascination -- impossible transcendence of the cell block -- undeniable proof of a survival instinct gone beatific.

Quite well-known at this point are the portraits of women, usually based upon photographs of models. Most interesting is the use of light and dark the absence or presence of ink. These tributes to femininity were extra meaningful as drawn within the confines of a crowded cell-block. Eventually our hero was able to try out a different setting for artistic contemplation: the second day out of prison, he and his wife went to the art museum in Chicago, where Blaine stood in front of the Impressionist paintings and cried for a long while (he digs Renoir the most).

Now, in our town, he's going to schoolboard meetings and voicing Native American chants, "to call the ancestors to hear the words of the meetings, because I know that if your grandmother and grandfather are sitting there, you don't lie much. You don't make promises you don't intend to keep. Some of the school board members came up and introduced themselves to me. And awhile later I was standing at the African American Festival downtown, when the superintendent of schools came up and gave me a hug! I bitch a lot of about Ann Arbor, but I'm pretty grateful to be here. There's an openness and a willingness to accept me here that I might not find in other communities. I believe that in my village I have certain responsibilities. One of these is to help provide the best possible learning experience for the young people. That's where my hope is. I want to create opportunities for others to see in some wider way -- to see things they wouldn't normally see."

"I got kicked off the county beach at Independent Lake the other night, dancing with the lightning and the trees. They told me if I didn't stop that I'd have to leave. So I left. I'm not so sure how easy it is to get 86'd out of a county park! That's probably as crazy as I've been in a while. See, I know that lightning's not going to hit me. I walk and dance in the lightning. In prison when it lightnings they lock everything down, make you go indoors, cause they don't want to pay a law-suit if someone gets hit by lightning. So you don't get to go out in the rain when it storms. That's energizing to me, to get out near the edge."

Katherine laughs; a lovely sound. I am honored to have befriended these people. When I first met them, I told her how moved I was by the reality of the man, the depth behind his eyes, a power summoning mountains and watersheds. She smiled triumphantly and said "Ah! You see it too. Not everyone does right away."

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