Kelly McQuain’s Debut Poetry Collection, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers

Kelly McQuain’s Debut Poetry Collection, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers, out now from Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press  

In questioning the boundaries between the world and oneself, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers unflinchingly explores the dark eddies of coming of age and coming out. Kelly McQuain’s poems are far roaming in setting and far ranging in style, depicting the richness of a rural West Virginia upbringing as well as contemporary adulthood in the big city and abroad. Glints of humor and glimpses of pathos abound in the imaginative leaps these poems take as they tackle such subjects as LGBTQ sexuality, homophobia, domestic abuse, and racism. Unafraid to push the limits of contemporary sonics, McQuain’s work is rich in music and varied in form, with new riffs on the sonnet, the villanelle, and the persona poem. Accessible and lyrical, this debut collection deftly explores the homes we come from and the homes we create—all the while shining with wonder and resolve. Several of the poems won contests, including the Bloom chapbook prize, the Glitter Bomb Award, Best New Poets 2000 and more. (From the publisher, Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press)

Where I’ll be at AWP2023 in Seattle

–Friday 3/10/2023 3 pm – 4 pm — Signing at Texas Review Press table #601.
–Saturday 3/11/2023 11 pm – Noon — Signing at Kestrel’s table.

Learn more at Kelly McQuain: Art & Writing at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090843189546

Book Cover: Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers by Kelly McQuain

Buy the Book:  Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Texas Review Press is part of the Texas A&M University Press Consortium, so books can be ordered through the press at Texas A&M University Press.

Scrape the Velvet From Your Antlers. Kelly McQuain. 978-1-68003-332-8 Paperback, Pub Date: 02/15/2023 

Direct Media Inquiries & Review Copy Requests to: Texas Review Press (TRP, Publisher), P.O. Box 2146, Huntsville, TX 77341-2146  ~ * ~  Email trp@shsu.edu  ~ * ~ Phone 936-294-1992   

You can also contact Kelly McQuain directly at the links at the end of this announcement.

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“Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers”

As you take the hill, the hill takes you—
raking you and your siblings into
a grassy sway of beetles and spiders moving,
and the day’s hot ricochet of blue bottle flies
and bees gone crazy in their looping.
Your brother and sister run to catch the horizon.
You wade slowly through the lashing,
alive with combustion, eager for bursting…

Excerpt from the title poem, originally published in Kestrel.

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Advance Praise from Writers

Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers the debut poetry collection by Kelly McQuain

Winner of Texas Review Press’s Southern Breakthrough Award

Kelly McQuain’s language—exact, thrilling, exquisite—isolates the contradictions inherent in family, in our society. Queerness, here, is an ‘ache of wanting’ but also bewilderment, dangerous, messy, curious, and, finally, hard-won love—a bond to a man who brings home strawberries. Too often, in our era of easy oversharing and spectacle, we scroll past human utterances. But McQuain’s confessional poems stopped me in my tracks, brought me closer to what divides us, to what tethers us.” 

–Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine 

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Kelly McQuain has written a book of poems both poignant and mesmerizing.  The complexities of family relationships are examined here with a no-holds-barred frankness that makes it impossible not to recall the nearly overwhelming power of emotional dissonance in our own early lives.  There is also an intricate look at how a burgeoning sexuality can further complicate entry into the world as we know it.  However, the texture of these poems is wonderfully rich; McQuain’s poems have a cinematic quality that is hard to resist.  I quickly found myself caught in the current of Scrape The Velvet from Your Antlers, feeling compelled to read just one more poem and then another and then just one more. 

–Tim Seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto. 

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 “[H]ow easily the things we do go awry— / what can we // expect of truth / when we don’t dig for proof / or plumb its depth?” And digging for truth is what Kelly McQuain does in poem after beautiful poem in his moving collection Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers. The speaker in this book knows deeply the language of rural landscape and lives in the space where landscape and body merge. McQuain also understands grief and leaving, following the “[s]omething [that] calls you somewhere else.” These are generous poems, ravenous to love a broken world. Whether McQuain’s speaker is at a circuit party or trying to talk down a man who wants to jump from a bridge, there is a through line of tenderness, a lived-in melancholy. His longing becomes our longing. 

–Aaron Smith, author of The Book of Daniel 

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McQuain’s poems stun with tenderness and revelation. The poet sings of burlap and corn silk, wolves and drag-queens, and the heart shuddering like unripe fruit against Dolly’s billowy chest as he confronts the accumulation and loss of this life while searching for a soft place to land. 

—Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread 

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Kelly McQuain’s wholehearted and powerful poems lead us into the valley of his making, with tales of a hardscrabble rural childhood and his “boyhood’s sweet undoing,” giving witness to a queer boy at once at home and in inner exile. But with all his tough-love exploration of the past, McQuain blazes his way to a new home, in a keenly rendered Philadelphia—and into the heady, trying truths of romantic love: “I’d drink your heart right now if I could,” he writes, “even if we were silver/and red/and made of tin.” Equally at ease in evocative narrative poems and the vivid, painterly lyric, McQuain invites us to set aside “the weight of this life undermined” and join him to “dream of constellations not yet named,/of ghosts, in reprieve, sent ascatter.”  

–David Groff, author of Clay  

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 Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers travels wondrously over verdant hills and down bustling city streets to find what matters: the gorgeous love, the all-consuming desire, the joy of human touch. This collection sings, pounds, and shouts. McQuain’s keen eye and sharp words command us to stop and see. Scrape the Velvet is a treat of a book, rendered by a man at the peak of his craft. 

–Jonathan Corcoran, author of The Rope Swing 

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In Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers, maturity is shown as a toughening process, a paring away of uncertainty. In the West Virginia of his childhood, McQuain finds himself a young gay man struggling against an alien and discriminatory culture. In elegant poems, so much of a place and time, he goes from the boy eager to please an exacting father intent on building a house, to the Good Samaritan in the big city where he has landed, stopping in traffic to talk a would-be suicide down from a bridge. In lyrical lines that stretch out where they need to, never losing momentum, he blends a Keatsian sweetness with the street smarts of a Frank O’Hara. “As you take the hill, the hill takes you.” It is “stubbled with stubborn flowers,” the deer he views, “a blister/ of orange-red and velvet need.” And in the lush final poem, the simple feast of Italian ices from a South Philly vendor that the poet shares in bed with his lover one hot summer night he rightly names “this moment/ a victory.” 

—Elaine Terranvova, author of The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: A Poet’s Memoir and Damages. 

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About the Author

Mr. Kelly McQuain
Associate Prof. of English, Community College of Philadelphia
Twitter: @kellymcquain   Instagram: @kmcquain
kellymcquain.writer@gmail.com  (email the author directly for readings or interviews)
http://www.kelllymcquain.wordpress.com  

Kelly McQuain is the author of Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers (2023), a poetry collection chosen by Texas Review Press for the Southern Breakthrough Award. He has also authored two chapbooks, Velvet Rodeo, which won the Bloom chapbook poetry prize, and Antlers, chosen for the Editors Series at Seven Kitchens Press. His prose, poetry and illustrations have appeared in The Pinch, Best American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Spunk, Assaracus, Kestrel, and Cleaver, as well as such anthologies as: Best New Poets 2020; Men on Men; Drawn to Marvel; LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia; Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia; The Queer South; Rabbit Ears: TV Poems; and Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology. Other honors include poet Dorianne Laux’s selection of his poem, “Ruby on Fire”, for Limp Wrist Magazine’s annual Glitter Bomb Award, two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Lambda Literary Fellowship, and selection as a Tennessee Williams Scholar by the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop. As a visual artist, McQuain has won prizes from the Barnes Foundation and Philadelphia’s William Way LGBTQ Center, and his series of writer portraits appear as cover illustrations on Fjords Review. As an Assoc. Professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia, McQuain has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the East-West Center of Hawaii, which led to his selection for a field study and research trip sponsored by the Freeman Foundation and the Chinese Ministry of Education, which took him from Beijing to Shanghai and many points in between. His travels greatly influence his painting and writing, and he takes joy in sharing his love of the arts with his students.

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“We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”

– Oscar Wilde

Advertisement

Art Show at Grasshopper Gallery

“Fantastic Creatures of the Highlands” – Featuring work by Kelly McQuain

June 27th – August 14^th, 2020

Grasshopper Gallery at Lost River Trading Post
295 E. Main Street
Wardensville, WV 26851
Store: 304-874-3300

Fox birds in one of McQuain’s paintings

Kelly McQuain next to three of his paintings

About the Artist: Kelly McQuain grew up surrounded by the lush mountains of West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. This proved a rich source of inspiration for his artistic imagination and his development of a style influenced by folk art and laden with evocative symbolism.

These works in watercolor and acrylic reflect the artist’s practice of layering paint in different ways.  “Whether on canvas or paper, I generally start a work with abstract layers of color laid down in soft washes,” McQuain states. “Then I tease out different forms based on how the washes speak to me. I try to let old layers peek through as I add new ones, conjuring figures and tiny details. It’s not my goal to transcribe nature in a realistic way. Rather, I try to find the essence of a thing and use dreamlike imagery to convey its spirit.”

Take a virtual tour below!

Video tour of Grasshopper Gallery art show featuring work by Kelly McQuain, Summer 2020.

“Never Stop Dreaming” Kelly McQuain

The result is a body of work rich with enchanting motifs. In some portraits, for instance, tiny robots appear, hinting at humankind’s need to reconcile life with technology and ever-advancing artificial intelligence. In other works, like “Fox Birds Hiding in the Brush”, a mash-up of birds and animals appear. Floral shapes also abound, evoking the exotica of the imagination as well as the wildflowers of McQuain’s youth. While McQuain is adept at painting human and animal forms, he often uses silhouettes to suggest the iconic power of his subjects. “Shape and pattern are as important to me as the richness of my colors,” McQuain notes. “I like images that pop, that have a sense of mystery and playfulness about them, that hint at stories.”

McQuain’s work hangs in many private collections. He recently displayed works at the Barnes Collection and the William Way Center in Philadelphia, the latter of which awarded him a showcase exhibit. His three-dimensional work celebrating the 200^th birthday of poet Walt Whitman is currently on display at the Free Library of Philadelphia. McQuain’s portraits of writers appear regularly on the cover of the literary journal, Fjords Review—reflecting another interest of his: poetry. As a writer, McQuain’s poems have appeared in scores of national journals, and his poetry chapbook, Velvet Rodeo, won the Bloom prize. McQuain works as a professor of creative writing in Philadelphia when he’s not visiting family and friends in his home state.

www.KellyMcQuain.wordpress.com

https://www.facebook.com/grasshoppergalleryatlostrivertradingpost/  @grasshoppergalleryatlostrivertradingpost

“Sunshine Flowers” Kelly McQuain

Whitman Sampler Talk at Free Library of Philadelphia

UPDATE: Due to COVID-19, my artist’s talk at the Free Library of Philadelphia has been cancelled. I’ll provide updates if something changes in the future. –Kelly

Original post:

So this is happening in April. Come if you can!

 Fri, April 24, 2020 3:00 p.m.Add to your calendar
First Floor Gallery West at Parkway Central Library

Join Voyages by Road and Sea featured artist Kelly McQuain in the West Gallery for an up-close look at his Whitman Sampler. McQuain will share the origin of this unique sculpture and explain the significance of its hidden parts.

https://libwww.freelibrary.org/calendar/event/99307

Detail of Whitman Sampler.

What is the Whitman Sampler?

The Whitman Sampler is a box designed to delight and surprise. It became a way for me to slip inside Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and grapple anew with the good gray poet’s famous life’s work. I think of it as a visual poem, an homage to Whitman’s opus and an educational tool.

Based on an advent calendar, each box of the Sampler opens to reveal excerpts of Whitman’s verse as well as found objects repurposed to reflect and critique his text. My hope is that curious viewers will use the Sampler as a springboard for investigating Whitman’s poetry more fully. Think of it as play, a means to see how Whitman’s myriad ideas echo and resonate against each other in a visual way.

A Walt Whitman Sampler

 

Nov. 15, 2019

My art project on Walt Whitman, “A Whitman Sampler” is now on display at the Free Library of Philadelphia’s exhibition, Voyages by Road and Sea: Philadelphia Perspectives on Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. The artwork is now installed in the West Gallery at the Parkway Central Library, Free Library of Philadelphia, located on the Ben Franklin Parkway. This project is a collaboration of the Free Library and the Rosenbach Center and features historical context on the authors as well as newly commissioned artwork related to the works of Melville and Whitman.

That’s where I come in. The Library commissioned artwork from me that consists of a box similar to an advent calendar. Each box contains pictures and text that correspond with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Part puzzle, part Whitman fortune-telling device, the box is designed as an interactive tool to help readers engage with the Great Gray Bard in a new and compelling way. In the spring I will be participating in an event where I take the box out of its display case to show off its possibilities. Time and date to be announced.

Special thanks to the team that created the exhibition: graphic designer Nathanael Roesch, writer/editor Clare Fentress, registrar Jobi Zink, FLP Deputy Director Andrew Nurkin, the Rosenbach’s Alexander Ames, and co-curator Professor Ed Whitley. In the coming year, a series of related events and programs in support of the exhibition will be held. Watch for details!

 

Update: On the back of the sampler there is an illustration of Walt for the 21st century, departing as air, waiting for us along life’s path in the grass beneath our soles/souls:

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

—Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Art Update – Jury Prize Win!

12/7/2018 – UPDATE! My painting, “Well, hello there!” won the jury prize at the William Way LGBTQ Center group show. This means that I and two other winners will have a combined show during summer 2019. We each get a wall in the giant parlor that greets visitors to the center, and I plan to fill mine up with new paintings that combine images and text! There is still time to see the piece below in the current group show, which is up until December 28th. There are numerous works for sale at the Center, so why not give someone a little queer art this holiday season? Stop by. Entry is FREE. William Way LGBT Community Center, 1315 Spruce St, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107.

“Well, hello there!”  by Kelly McQuain, 2018.Watercolor and mixed media.

 

Barnes Update! Top 20

#LetsConnectPhilly #Art #PhillyArtDepot

Update! Recently  I wrote about the Let’s Connect! art show at Philadelphia’s famed Barnes Collection. My hipster postman mixed-media painting, “Mind, Heart, Soul” placed among the top 20 artworks out of over 310 paintings at the show. I was especially happy to see my friend Tim Barton also make the cut with his stellar wooden folk box. As a result, this coming year the other artists and I have been asked to work with the Barnes on a series of talks and lectures geared toward the public and fellow artists. It’s a very special piece to me, and I hope it will find a good home with you. (You can read more in this former post that includes my Artist Statement., which talks about how Van Gogh’s work served as inspiration.)

“Mind, Heart, Soul: After Vincent’s The Postman” by Kelly McQuain, 2018

On this blog I’ve mostly posted about my work as a writer, but it’s true I also do a lot of artwork, which I’m hoping to post more about in the future. Below is my current Artist’s Bio, in case you are curious. My artwork ranges from comics and cartoons to watercolors, acrylic and the occasional oil painting. I often mix media and like to embed details and back-stories within my visual work, things that a viewer has to look twice to discover and that leave a person wanting to know more. For instance, if you look close you can tell Mr. Postman is a major Eagles fan, but perhaps not the most attentive deliveryman. I take the occasional commission and book cover project, but most works start from a strong visual idea and spool out from there, with hopes they find a buyer in the future.

About the Artist

Kelly McQuain is an artist and poet who combines words and pictures in poems, essays, book covers, comics, and large-scale canvases. His collection, Velvet Rodeo, won the Bloom Poetry Prize, and his work appears in numerous journals. He has twice held Fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Recent projects include a series of Poetry Portraits that have appeared on the cover of Fjords Review. The painting series was inspired by Barnes artist Charles Demuth, whose watercolor poster portraits of famous contemporaries included the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe and William Carlos Williams. When he’s not painting, McQuain teaches creative writing, literature, and film studies at Community College of Philadelphia.

Visit the #BarnesCollection for FREE!

#letsconnectPhilly  Now through June 4, 2018 get free admission to the Barnes in honor of their Let’s Connect Exhibition. I’m one of 310 Philadelphia artists who have work in the show. Participating artists chose a work in the Barnes Collection that inspired them, and then did their own 8″ x 10″ work inspired by the original. (For me, the hardest part was working that small.) The public gets to visit the Barnes for free and vote for four artists who will each get a three-month studio residency at the Barnes over the next year. Admission is free to encourage public participation in voting. If you’ve never been, the permanent collection is amazing–arguably the best assemblage of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in the county.  Barnes created the collection to educate artists about form and technique. My painting is titled Mind, Heart, Soul, which alludes to what Albert Barnes sought to cultivate in the students who studied the masterworks he painstakingly displayed for them. The museum is open 11 am – 5 pm Wednesday through Monday. For FREE admission, you must register in advance at

https://barnesfoundation.formstack.com/forms/connect_voter_registration.

If you go, please consider voting for #1295, my version of Van Gogh’s The Postman. Why did I choose The Postman? Here’s the Artist Statement I sent along with my project.

Albert C. Barnes didn’t collect work based on historical or social context; he assembled his works as a testament to the pleasure of form. Barnes’ method, however, poses a dilemma for contemporary artists: in this Age of (overwhelming) Information, is it possible to create work apart from the context from which it rises?

I’m drawn to a painting like Van Gogh’s The Postman not only because of its virtuoso brushwork but also because of its unintentional commentary on so many things: the bearded hipsters of my Philly neighborhood; the fact that few people write letters anymore; the way internet businesses have staved off the Postal Service’s obsolescence; that Philadelphia has offered massive tax incentives to lure Amazon.com’s new headquarters here—a bid that could turn life here on its head.

I like art that talks to me and keeps the conversation moving forward. The Barnes Collection does this, whether its founder intended it to or not. When Albert Barnes paired paintings with old hinges and primitive sculptures, he created a series of “eye rhymes”–visual pairings that call to each other and echo back. In doing so he created a living conversation about art, one that surmounts time. I’m inspired by the collection’s interplay of forms as well as its interplay of ideas. I believe that Barnes’ singular arrangement is a conceptual artwork itself. It teaches me to see the times I’m living through in new ways and to curate my life carefully. Barnes’ collection teaches me to honor the old, reflect my now, and imagine a future. That feels like a fragile message, but it’s one that needs delivering.

–Kelly McQuain, Artist Statement, May 2018

 

#vangogh @the_barnes @kellymcquain

The Hot Hands of Summer: Ric McCauley

(Detail from “Hot Hands of Summer”)

The Hot Hands of Summer: New Paintings by Ric McCauley

Opening Reception July 16, 2016
Gallery 209, Cape Charles, VA

(Detail from “Forgotten Floods”)

Gallery 209 welcomes new work by painter Ric McCauley following his near sell-out show of May 2015. Whales and sea life make return appearances, as does the artist’s sly, understated commentary on the way the natural world is affected by technology. After Hurricane Sandy, surely no one in Cape Charles can underestimate the impact Mother Nature has on humans. McCauley looks at such things from the animal world’s point of view, as in his acrylic painting “Forgotten Floods”, in which an elephant makes an escape by boat. Other paintings question mankind’s impact on nature, such as “Autocorrect”, which depicts a whale turning into metal to ward off human hunters.

(“Ground Control to Major Tom”)

Mostly McCauley’ work is full of joy and humor. His is a world where dogs are as likely to be found on telephone lines as birds are… and usually those dogs are Labrador retrievers. McCauley and his partner have owned two such dogs. Their current pet, Ellie, models for several of these paintings. Most notably is “Ground Control to Major Tom”, which reworks recently departed musician David Bowie’s 1969 song “Space Oddity” into a lament between a satellite and a blond canine wearing a cone collar that doubles as a radio dish. When Ellie is not modeling, she can be found rolling in the castoff paint covering her master’s drop cloth. McCauley employs a splatter and scrubbing technique for many of his backgrounds and textures, and sometimes the price for such work is a yellow Lab with a blue tail.

Miss Ellie supervises her master’s work

In Cape Charles, you just might spot McCauley painting in his back yard. He typically starts a canvas by first layering broad washes of acrylic color down on canvases that sometimes reach 4 feet by 6 feet. He scrubs at the surface or sprays it with water to remove excess paint and achieve texture, a process that allows random images to emerge and helps him intuit the detail work that comes next as he brings each painting to its final resolution.

(Detail from “Operation Migration”)

McCauley’s current show consists of fourteen large-scale new works as well as a small suite of miniature paintings. His whales, jellyfish and other sea life ground him as a thoroughly Eastern Shore artist, and his large-scale painting “Midnight on Mason” is an homage to the home he’s found here.

 

“Midnight on Mason” (Detail from a larger canvas)

McCauley grew up in rural West Virginia, and the traces of his early country living–exploring wildlife, growing his own food in the family garden–can be found in the foxes and plants that sneak into his other paintings. He graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland with a BA in Fine Arts in 1993. There he studied printmaking, photography, and oil and acrylic painting. Recently McCauley recently won Best in Show at the St. Mary’s alumni exhibition (Boyden Gallery, 2014). His work is part of several private collections and his commercial clients include the Cape Charles Hotel. Recently his art was featured in Sports Business Daily’s write-up on Billy Casper Golf, whose Reston, VA, corporate office features one of McCauley’s buffalo paintings.

To contact the Artist: RicMcCauley [at] yahoo.com

or contact Gallery 209 (ask for Sandy)
209 Mason Ave, Cape Charles, VA 23310
 (757) 331-2433

gallery209@gmail.com

Poetry Means Making: The Empathy Machine

A Process Essay

In working on “The Empathy Machine”, a visual essay on poetics recently published by Cleaver Magazine, I wrote and drew part 1 in the summer of 2015, and finished part 2 on the kitchen table over a snowy January weekend. Part two was much longer than part 1, which had been subtitled A Visual Narrative on the Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith. Part 2 expanded on those musings into something that took the form of an ars poetica. (You can read part 2 here.) For a long time, the ideas had been stewing in my imagination and coming to life in my sketchpad. But there comes a point when you have to pull it all together, even if that means doing so with tools as simple as glue sticks, a watercolor set, and some Faber Castell artist pens.

 

What appeared as part 1 in issue #11 of Cleaver started off as a series of New Yorker-style cartoons calling out poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s for his insensitivity in turning the autopsy report of Michael Brown into a performance piece. I was angry. I was MAD. I couldn’t understand how the “material” Goldsmith was performing and the poetry I was writing could all supposedly fall into the same genre. Other people were outraged, too, and when Vanessa Place, Michael Derrick Hudson, and Sherman Alexie entered the equation it all built to a critical mass. (It didn’t hurt that Goldsmith, with his penchant for wild suits and his long beard, was a fun figure to draw.) The anger and energy I felt proved to be a vehicle for me to look outward and inward, a way to ask myself questions to guide me in terms of future art-making, whether that be in words or pictures (or the two combined). Karen Rile, Editor-in-Chief, and Raymond Rorke, Art Editor, would prove invaluable to me along the way in terms of critical feedback.

 

 

As new ideas came to me, I found that working in a  “New Yorker” style wasn’t going to cut it. The project was opening up into an essay, stretching its shoulders, wanting more space.

My thoughts tend to bounce around in a ricochet, one idea playing off another. I decided my method needed to be old school (literally “cut and paste”) as well as very personal: a journal style to match my journey. I’m a huge fan of cartoonist Lynda Barry, and I’ve followed her work for years, even reviewing some of her early comic strip collections. Using legal pads — which Barry did in What It Is, her fantastic meditation on image-making — proved extremely liberating. Cheap paper gave me a freedom with the material aspect of the project. More color began to enter the drawings as I dug out the paints and Prismacolor pencils I had accumulated over the years. Why hadn’t I been using them? What had I been saving them for? For this?

Over Christmas, through a New Year’s Day plagued with a head cold, and well into a January snowstorm, I made steady progress toward the end of the project. My partner and I did not eat at the kitchen table for weeks.

As I was working on the project, David Bowie died. I loved Bowie, a grand statesman of the ’80s British Invasion that I loved, and so much more. Bowie became another of the visual homages that the narrative called for. Others included Keith Haring’s pop art from the 1980s, which seemed to be everywhere back when I was coming out (and is long overdue for a resurgence in popularity). Another inspiration was the current  plight of the honeybee in the face of colony collapse disorder. The list goes on: Ganesh and Cthulhu and Superman; Calvin & Hobbes cartoons; the art of activist Rini Templeton, whose brilliant drawings I happily discovered by way of Christopher Soto’s poetry book, Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press). Templeton’s image suggested connectivity and transformation to me, and were ripe to combine with the image of a mermaid, a sometimes-symbol of the trans community as well as a symbol of the connection between humankind and nature. Other allusions included The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai, which I saw once in the Michener collection at the Honolulu Museum in Hawai’i. Most importantly, I relied on a sketchbook filled with faces of the inspirational people I met during the summer of 2015 at the Crosstalk, Color, Composition conference, the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. To those  amazing people and their inspiring words, I am grateful. I am changed.

In terms of negative inspirations, I’ve been bothered by this era’s bad habit of people anonymously attacking one another through social media channels when they disagree, and how if anyone critiques that practice he or she is quickly accused of tone-policing or censorship. I understand that anonymity is an appealing veil when one fears for personal safety, but we also diminish our nobility on occasions when we don’t fight fair. If you ask me, there is enough micro-aggression going around these days that it all very quickly adds up to full-sized aggression. Such tactics should be used with caution. That might sound funny coming from someone who has taken a number of shots at Goldsmith and Place, but I also believe in the power of satire as a vehicle for critique and an instrument for social change. Certainly there are voices that get too often heard, and certainly we need new platforms to raise up those voices needing better representation. Yet every time I see a dialogue opportunity get crushed, I hear the creak of more minds closing.

Poetry is essentially about making. It’s a messy process, and one often feels pulled in different directions at once, torn by competing ideologies.

What did I learn about image making? Poems and visual art rely on images, and these images are not always seen with our eyes but with our mind. Ezra Pound described an image as an “interpretative metaphor” or “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”.  I think sometimes images can be sounds. Or smells. Or things we touch or things that touch us. These images take us on a journey that at times feels circular and difficult, an uneasy game–but that path is not without purpose. 
On a practical level, I found it useful to lay my pages out on the floor in order to get a sense of narrative flow and design. l was reminded how easily paper crinkles when watercolor is added, and that sometimes you need to make your better half gently iron pages the way Carson the butler irons the Earl of Grantham’s newspaper on Downton Abbey. I learned that there are probably better glue sticks out there than the ones Staples sells, and that there is great  joy to be found in the smudge-proof nib of a good Faber Castell drawing pen.

I learned that even with ironing it is best to have heavy books on hand to continue flattening your pages prior to scanning. I combined the weight of an atlas, Chip Kidd’s Batman Collected, and a collection of nude studies by photographer George Platt Lynes for a little extra frisson.

In my work, I’ve often felt pulled in many directions at once, that my different art-making impulses compete with each other. This has often left me frustrated. In teasing out the reasons why I think art-making should be viewed as an empathy machine, I learned that what I’ve feared can also be a strength. That the mistakes of others can teach us almost as much as the mistakes we make on our own. I’ve learned that hybrid, ekphrastic constructs bring great satisfaction. Along the way, I developed an Empathy Credo to guide my future making. It might not be the same approach as yours, and my own credo might change and evolve over time. Most of all, this project reminded me that poetry—and all art—is in the making, that the key to overcoming obstacles can be found in the words “try” and “do”.

Now I need to go get busy. What about you?

What Ya Gonna Do This Summer?

I’m stealing this idea from Philebrity editor Joey Sweeney. What are the things you are looking forward to between now and Labor Day 2015? Here’s Mine. Now it’s your turn! #SummerToDoList #summer2015

Painting by Ric McCauley

What I’m Looking Forward to Doing the Summer of 2015
–meeting my friend Steph (along with all out other peeps) to show her the pleasure of happy hour drinks at Harbor Park.
–water gun battles.
–corn, potatoes, shrimp and sausage boiled in Old Bay.
–actually calling at least one old friend a week to catch up and stoke the embers of the good times we’ve shared.
–drinking wine and watching movies in the park.
–checking out the El Bar and hearing friends’ old stories about getting chased and beaten up on that block and boy has this neighborhood changed…
—-hanging out at the Lambda Literary Writing Retreat and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. (https://kellymcquain.wordpress.com/2015/05/17/lambda-literary-fellows-need-your-help/)
–reading for pleasure (hammocks preferred).
–planting something and watching it grow.
–wearing sandals every day.
–aw, hell. Going barefoot.
–helping my high school pal Ric hang his solo art show on the Chesapeake Bay.
–Jersey tomatoes.
–taking pleasure in my friends’ successes.
–jazz cocktails on M Restaurant’s patio.
–t-ball and playground trips with my adorable nephews, and pool trips sans their water wings. Checking in with all the other nieces and nephews, too.
–getting someone to go tubing with me in New Hope, or canoeing in the pine barrens…
–drawing, painting, getting messy and having fun.
–talking to someone older who might be able to give me a little wisdom for what’s ahead.
–wearing breathable seersucker shirts and shorts.
–eating outside.
–jumping in a fountain and pretend I’m on Friends.
–visiting Mom at her WV home… and seeing what latest critter has tried to get inside her house (in the last year, it’s been a mother bear with her cubs, two blacksnakes, and myriad deer. Only an enterprising groundhog has actually made it all the way into the living room)
–eating my way through Philly’s festivals. (Italian Market Festival? Check. Greek Festival? You’re up next)
–sudden thunderstorms where the temperature drops fifteen degrees in twenty minutes.
–peeling off wet clothes with someone I love.
–beach trips to Jersey, Delaware, and beyond, I hope.
–discovering the Drink of Summer (Paloma? Dark ‘n Stormy? Mojito? Some new invention?)
–writing, writing, writing. Finishing things, finishing things, and not beating myself up when I don’t finish everything.
–making a summer Playlist with the help of my music guru (he owns nearly six thousand CDs and they are all alphabetized! I know, I know. What’s a CD?)
–easy desserts of John’s Water Ice (lemon) with a shot of limocello (add strawberries for additional fancy-pants points.)
–hard cheese drizzled with honey infused by chocolate and habaneros (thank you, Mr. Artisanal Beekeeper at the Italian Market).
–seeing two summer blockbusters back-to-back on the big screen. Maybe even three!
–celebrating Walt Whitman’s birthday with some great out-of-town writers as part of the “Five for Philly” reading at Giovanni’s Room. https://www.facebook.com/events/836983619708969/
–shooting the shit with my neighbor in his yard.
–taking part in some exciting secret projects with various literary journals.
–and so much more!

Good Karma Donations Being Accepted for Lambda Fellows

Lambda Literary Fellows need your help! And I am one of them. It’s been a great year for publishing poems, and recently I received the good news I was named a Lambda Literary Fellow, where I will get to study with poet Kazim Ali at the University of Southern California in June.

The opportunity comes with a steep price tag of around an estimated $2650 for tuition, fees, board and travel costs to Los Angeles (such as airfare & shuttles). I am trying to raise about a third of that money to help offset my out-of-pocket cost. If your rent is due, if times are tight, by all means pay yourself first and forget this message. But if things are a little easier in your life and you’d like to gain some good artistic karma, please consider making a tax-deductible donation via the Donor Page to help me or one of the other writers who has yet to meet his or her goal. While many Fellows have already met their goals, others haven’t made a dent in it. $1? 5? No amount is too little, and it’s easy to make a secure online payment. You can also help by buying a copy of my poetry book, Velvet Rodeo, this spring at one of the many readings I have in the Philadelphia area or by ordering one from me directly ($8+shipping=$10). Just shoot me a message if you like at kellymcquain.writer [at]gmail.com. I hate asking for help, and no worries if you can’t do so. In fact, many of my online writing communities have already helped just by offering ongoing support, which truly means a lot. If not for such communities, I would not have maintained the momentum to keep sending work out and to apply for competitive opportunities like the Lambda Literary Retreat.

In related good news, I was also recently accepted as a Tennessee Williams Scholar to the prestigious Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee for July 2015. The scholarship helps cover that those costs, but I’m still saving for airfare and board for that too. But mostly what I’m sweating at the moment are the Lambda costs. Please consider helping out a writer this summer even if it is not me. Buy books, pass the hat, and help keep the beauty of words coming for somebody.

I’m working my ass off this summer publishing new poems, doing illustrations for journals, and even writing a chapter in a round-robin murder mystery that’s a fundraiser for a great literary magazine I’m happy to support (more on this fun project later). An anthology I was published in—The Queer South–is up for a Lambda Literary Award on June 1st. More new publications in anthologies like Rabbit Ears: TV Poems and journals like Eleven Eleven and Knockout are on the way. 2015 is shaping up to be the best writing summer of my life! I love a lot of different art forms and sometimes feel pulled in a thousand directions, but I’m proving that it can all work if you keep your nose to the grindstone. I hope your summer is equally productive, too.

Thanks for listening.
–Kelly McQuain, May 2015. Philadelphia.

You can find out more about Lambda Literary here: http://lambdaliterary.donorpages.com/WritersRetreat2015/KellyMcQuain/

A list of all Donor Pages and a list of my fellow Fellows, with their bios. at the links here: The full list of all Donor Pages is here: http://lambdaliterary.donorpages.com/WritersRetreat2015/ (Click on “Show all fundraisers for this event”)

The Fellows:
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/writers-retreat/39293-2/

 

Visual Fables for the 21st Century

Fire at the Surface: Imagery and Process in the Paintings of Ric McCauley
Gallery 209, Cape Charles, VA

“Fire at the Surface” –Detail, Ric McCauley, 2015

In Ric McCauley’s paintings, you will find whales listening to iPods, elephants riding Ferris wheels, dogs walking on power lines, and richly textured abstract color fields resonating with vibrant energy. A surreal dreaminess permeates McCauley’s work, as well as a deep love of the natural world. McCauley studied painting at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where he graduated with a BA in Fine Arts in 1993. There he studied printmaking, photography, and oil and acrylic painting. Recently McCauley recently won Best in Show at the St. Mary’s alumni exhibition (Boyden Gallery, 2014), and his work is part of several private collections.

McCauley grew up in West Virginia, swimming in creeks and sewing a garden to provide for his family’s supper table. Early on he learned how to get his hands dirty in the best possible way. He knows that an idea needs to be carefully tended if it’s to grow into a work of art. Now, as a seasonal resident of Cape Charles, sea life has recently entered his visual lexicon. His new body of work ranges from textured color fields (“Fire at the Surface”) to whimsical juxtapositions of nature and technology (“Whale Pod”).

“Whale Pod” — Ric McCauley, 2015

In many ways, Ric McCauley is a process painter. He harnesses the chaos of his raw materials through will, determination, and a sense of play. It’s a delight to watch him work as he blasts tracks from his enormous music library in his Virginia studio or Cape Charles back yard. McCauley starts a canvas by first layering broad washes of acrylic color. Then he scrubs at the surface or sprays it with jets of water to remove excess paint and achieve texture. Rorschach shapes emerge. These serve as a catalyst for the dream-like imagery McCauley teases out of his projects. In “Buffalo Carnival #1”, an enormous beast of the plains carries a roller coaster on its back; in “Kiss the Sky”, a subterranean city hums beneath a melting, volcanic-orange atmosphere.

Interestingly, McCauley’s visual sense is informed by the fact that he is colorblind. He is unable to distinguish between certain shades of red and green, so you won’t typically see these colors side by side in his work. Instead, McCauley explores unusual palettes of blue and yellow, of orange-reds against stark blacks and winter whites.

His influences include Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko as well as Pop Artist Andy Warhol, whose Interview magazine was a literary and visual staple during McCauley’s formative years. Keen-eyed gallery goers will spot the influence in McCauley’s use of repeated motifs, as well as the black silhouettes that echo Warhol’s stenciled silkscreen shapes. McCauley also cites German artist Anselm Kiefer’s use of unorthodox methods and materials as an additional influence, though McCauley’s imagery tends to be more hopeful than Kiefer’s.

“Buffalo Carnival #1” by Ric McCauley

 

Is a painting like “Buffalo Carnival #1” reducing wild creatures to mere landscape? Or is it trying to remind us that the world we build our playthings on is actually animate and alive? Ric McCauley isn’t one to wags a finger. Instead, his artwork–with its fanciful shapes and colors, with its strong eye for form and balance–points toward the accord we must reach with the natural world. Deceptively playful, these paintings linger in the imagination with the power of enduring truth: they are new fables for the 21st century.

–Kelly McQuain
May, 2015
Cape Charles, VA

 

UPDATE:  Well over half the paintings at McCauley’s May 2015 solo show at Gallery 209 were sold to collectors on the opening weekend. Nearly all the remaining paintings sold shortly thereafter. A show of new work is scheduled for 2016. Those interested in McCauley’s newest creations, or inquiring about a commission, may contact Gallery 209  or the artist directly at:

RicMcCauley [ a t ] yahoo.com
Gallery 209 (ask for Sandy)
209 Mason Ave, Cape Charles, VA 23310
(757) 331-2433

“Jelly Headphones” — Detail, Ric McCauley

 

Peter and Jane Learn about Satire

You really don’t want to get me started on discussing satire. Because then I will have to talk about my experience with the Best American Erotica series, Batman, and Simon & Schuster. And then I’d probably have to expand into why the Sony Bono copyright extension act is a death knell for artistic creativity. And you don’t want to hear that. You don’t. So instead, enjoy the story of this lovely pair of artists being sued in the UK. Good times!

From Miriam and Ezra Elia’s We Go to the Gallery.

Superheroes Reimagined in Stunning Portraiture

Ever wonder what your favorite superhero or sci-fi characters would look like if they were plopped down into another time period? Sure, true aficionados will realize such reworkings are an occasional trope of the genre, primarily in “what if” or time travel stories. But never have retro superheroes been realized with such painstaking photo-realist detail as in the work of French artist Sacha Goldberger. Goldberger recontextualizes these American icons alongside fairy tale characters in a manner that invokes the techniques of 17th century Flemish painters. His work has been shown at the School Gallery Paris in a show called “Super Flemish”, where he uncannily channels the likes of Christopher Reeve’s Superman and Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman. Sacha’s good. Just ask his mom, who calls him the “best photographer in the neighborhood”(!).

Take a look here at Sacha’s droll website here:
http://sachabada.com/portfolio/index.php/nggallery/page/1?portfolio=super-flemish-12

Birds in Stormy Skies

Ric McCauley, my childhood friend from West Virginia, is a painter. In his new beach house, one of the first things he did was take down the old owner’s art (he and his partner bought the house fully furnished) and hung recent work of his own. Here is one of his paintings from a series on birds. I quite like Ric’s keen design sense and the scrubbed textures he manages to pull out of the acrylic washes he uses.