Carving From Scrap. First project of 2026

 Carving From Scrap. First Project of 2026

Progress has been slow as of late. I'm slowing down all across the spectrum these days. It's April of 2026 and I haven't finished a project since September of last year. 

Art Work is like working out. It is vital to keep moving. Once you get in shape it's easy to keep up the momentum, but if the routine gets interrupted, one day fades effortlessly into the next and before you know it you're out of condition and you almost have to start from the beginning again. Being old accelerates the pattern. 

Four years ago Mary and I drove up to Ventura for an overnight vacation and a visit to Art City where I bought nine new stones.

 

I have two left. I finished the last project, Pebblebend, in September of last year. It  was OK, but just OK. Not one of my finer pieces.

Several of my friends at the Art Association have been encouraging me to do some smaller pieces, so I had a double dose of the procrastination blues.

 I finally pushed myself into action, but rather than break ground on one of the remaining stones I grabbed a chunk of scrap left over from this piece.

 I didn't bother photographing the raw chunk of rock. It was like pushing the truck to start work, and I didn't stop to do work-in-progress posts. So the first post on this project is the last. 

I've had the idea for this stuck in my head for a long time like a melody you can't forget. I call it a pierced leaf pattern, as if you plucked a leaf from some plant, bent the stem around and poked it through the middle of the leaf. Maybe it's coming from some odd primal memory of a thing that happened in another life.

This next week I'll be getting ready for a solo show at the Santa Fe Springs ArtFest. They have chosen me to be a Featured Artist. I'm kind of at a loss for words. This is quite an honor. But it's going to be a lot of work, and I'm ready for that... 

I think. I'll try to get pictures, and see about making a post on it. Anyway, thanks for stopping by.

JWM

 

Revisiting an oldie from2009

I'm revisiting this post fom 2009, sixteen years ago.

Toxic Nostalgia, 2009

I had to take my wife's car in for repair today. Not an infrequent occurrence, unfortunately. It's a '94 Acura, and it's just getting old. And women are hard on cars. I had hoped a new battery would take care of the starting problem. It didn't. Cars have made me feel stupid since the early seventies. Actually, the early eighties. I was driving a '68 Ford Falcon in the early eighties. I understood that car, and I could fix it most of the time it broke. Not so with the newer machines. I don't even change the oil anymore. It's too tight of a squeeze to get under the car.

Fortunately we have an excellent car repair, Pole Position, not far from the house. So I left the Acura off, and walked the three miles or so home. I walked past Citrus Drive, where the old house used to be, and that got me musing again about the disastrous bicycle run down Sierra Vista. I continued down the boulevard, and try as I would I couldn't help but enumerate the changes I've seen here in the last forty five years.

This is never a good thing to do. Never.

Because it is next to impossible to look at things the way they are now without comparing them to how they were then. The Heights, rising above the town of La Habra, was once a dark, shady, sparsely populated, and mostly undeveloped portion of the Puente Hills. Small houses nestled in the middle of five and ten acre parcels, and if there was any landscaping other than the native sage and sumac, it was family owned avocado or citrus groves. The narrow twisty streets were roads to nowhere unless you knew exactly where the houses were.

The Heights incorporated into its own city some years back, and the lot restrictions shrunk from five acres to one, and now I believe it's smaller than that, but I'm not sure, and I don't care to look it up. What you see when you look up to the heights now are big ass mansions: narcotecture in its most ostentatious, and obtrusive manifestation. There seems to be a battle going on up there to see who can build the largest possible edifice most violently in conflict with the land that surrounds it. And there are hundreds of heavyweight contenders in the brawl, with dozens more being built every year.

Below the Heights, the small, and not particularly well-to-do town of La Habra had the distinction of being the place where three major Boulevards ended. One was the fabled Whittier Boulevard: immortalized in song, main drag of East Los Angeles, and famous cruising ground in several of the towns along it length. Another was Harbour Boulevard, the street along which Walt Disney decided to build an amusement park. The other was Beach Boulevard which was the road to Knott's Berry Farm, and (take a guess) The Beach. Once you crossed Imperial Highway the first five or six miles of Beach rolled through the Coyote hills and entered the well built up coastal plane in Buena Park, home of the aforementioned Knott's. But the better perspective was gained on the return trip from Huntington Beach. After you finally got out of the stop and go traffic, and drab flatland towns you had that last five or six miles of empty road to stomp on the gas before you got home. The Coyote Hills are now smothered under thousand of houses, and there are two or three stoplights per mile along that formerly empty stretch of Beach Boulevard. All three of these legendary California roads ran their busy courses, then settled down and rested quietly in La Habra. They're now choked with traffic, and travel along any of these thoroughfares is done in increments of two or three hundred yards on a good day. So it is throughout Southern California.

And my point would be?

Like I said, it's never a good idea to start cruising memory lane. Nine times out of ten you're really searching vainly for a glimpse of your own misspent youth. And it's the cheapest of shots to sit around bemoaning the present, while longing for the good old days. I can get all kinds of wistful remembering the lost beauty of La Habra Heights, but the truth of it is that that little chunk of the Southland is now, and was always expensive land accessible only to those who had the ambition and drive to earn the kind of money it took to live there. It was, and is private property. And people can do what they damn well please with what they own. No one hired me to be an aesthetic consultant for the development of that, or any other municipality. I never had what it takes to achieve the Heights. Still don't. Nor was it ever up to me to declare Southern California officially full, and begin turning people back at the state line. After all, we too came here for the same reason that drew everyone before us, and after us. So it's crowded. There's no law against leaving. The past is just that: passed. It isn't the days that were better then; it was the eyes that saw them. It's not the traffic on memory lane that gets you down, but the reflection you see in the storefront windows.

JWM

Return to the Fall part two

I've been overhauling my den here at the Suburban Hermitage, and in doing so I've been  going through my altogether too large collection of books, and irresistably cool shelf items. 

 It isn't easy. Every time I lay hands on something I ask, "Do I really need this thing?" The answer is always, "No, BUT..." That's from Art Class in 1969. I got this thing back in the 70's. I made that one when I was a kid. Here's a souvenier from a vacation back in 1960...

Worse is the stuff that belonged to my mother or father. Worse yet is the stuff from my grandparents...

It has been a week of hard work, and there is still no end to it.

I woke up in the middle of the night, last night and rather than lie in bed staring at the ceiling, I got up, and went into the living room. Buddy the Cat hopped off the bed, and followed me out there. Looking out the sliding screen door I could see a soft overcast blanketing the sky, and feel the cool, quiet air flowing into the room. I sat in the big green chair. Ol' Buddy jumped up, made himself comfortable, and went to sleep in my lap. Good ol' Kitty! Odd how things come to light in the dark hours of the morning. I saw very clearly that there are many things I need to let go.

 I didn't intend for rearranging the den to be anything more than moving furniture and opening up wall space for artwork. But somehow, sitting there in the dark, I realized that it's more than getting rid of stuff I don't really need. It's time to put some things to rest and move on. I recently sold my 1950 Schwinn B6 to a very nice young guy whom I met on the local bike path.

I didn't ride it any more, and it was a shame to just let the old cruiser collect dust in the garage. As I sat there in the dark living room I decided to gift him the 1956 girl's bike as well. The bikes are a matched pair, and I don't want to engage in the hassle of trying to sell it. Maybe he can use it to get some young woman on a riding date.

We really don't own things like these, anyway. We are stewards of them, preserving the old machines against Time.


Neither Mary nor I have children. I have a niece and a nephew, but neither of them has much in the way of a connection to the family. My mother's and father's families are all from Michigan and Ohio. That lineage and history means nothing to the niece and nephew, and to be fair, there isn't much reason that it should. After all, those are people they never knew, and places they've never been. They have only a vague memory of my maternal grandmother, and not much connection to my mother either. Mary and I see them maybe once or twice a year at the most.
Going through the accumulated treasures in my collection, I find that so very many of them are touchstones to people, and places I knew and loved. 
I can't hand that down. Memory creates the touchstone, and the heart alone can appraise the value. It is not transferrable. Things are only things after all. What to keep? What to toss? These are melancholy considerations. But the considerations extend to more than souveniers of the past.

As I mentioned in the last couple of posts, I'm about to put The Lost Canyon Project to rest.
This project has been center stage in my life for eight years, now. I still have the feeling that it was a mission that chose me. The number, and frequency of wildly improbable coincidences that led to this work is too great to ignore. If I hadn't engaged this effort there would be nothing of Pete's legacy but a disorganized pile of very old paintings moldering away in a storage bin. I have some few gestures yet to complete, and those tasks will be discharged in the next couple of months.

Right now, I'm waiting for results on a submission to the Doc LA Film Festival. Results were to be posted on September 24th, but they postponed it until Friday, the 26th. This November I have a Lost Era Film presentation at the Whittier Museum, and another at the Whittier Art Association gallery. Pete's sister-in-law will be coming out here for other stuff, and she'll be attending the museum show, and probably taking some paintings with her when she goes back to So. Carolina.

I'm having a new copy Of The Lost Era Transcripts book printed, but I'm still waiting for the printer to get his machines fixed, and complete the order. I'm having it printed up for my one last attempt to get recognition for Pete Hampton's The Lost Era.

George Lucas is building his Museum of Narrative Art in Exposition Park in Los Angeles, and The Lost Era is nothing if not the quintessential California narrative. I sent them an email, and got no response. I don't think anyone answers emails anymore. So I'm planning on sending the new copy of the Lost Era Transcripts book to the address posted on their web site and hoping for the best.  It's kind of like putting a message in a bottle. Hope is a Virtue, after all. 

Some very slim chance of real success does remain. Maybe the film festival. Maybe the museum show, or the art gallery show. Maybe the message in a bottle  will wash up on the right shoreline. 

But what would real success look like? I ask myself frequently. It is surprisingly hard to envision what shape success might take. 

 I have worked very hard. Indeed, I worked myself to exhaustion creating the catalog, the blogs, the book, and now the film. I've invested huge amounts of time, and spent no small amout of money. I've been ignored by Laguna Beach, Fullerton, La Habra (of all places), La Mirada, and Claremont. I've given over a dozen film presentations. For all that, I have reached a few people, but only a few. I just don't have the energy to continue.
Failing isn't easy. These are the last gestures I intend to make. I really want closure. I need to get this whole thing off of center stage, and move on.

 It's hard to express all this without sounding angry or bitter. But I'm neither bitter, nor angry. I'm tired.

As I wrote at the beginning of this post, it's time to put some things to rest. There is always a melancholy turn of heart in the first days of autumn, and that is compounded when your autobiography is in its last few chapters. As I've said before, If my life were a book then the thick part would now be in my left hand. But the last chapter hasn't yet been written. So there is that.

JWM

Return to the Fall 

It has been quite a while since I sat down here to write a post. I did a note on the Lost Era show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid gallery, but that was way back in March. I never did follow up writing about the orange stone even though I finished it over a year ago. Anyway, here it is:

Fire on Ice

It has not been a productive year for the stone work. Other stuff kept coming up. I put a rock on the carving table but it sat there for months like an unpaid bill while my creative energies were diverted into the Lost Canyon Project stuff.  I finally got to work on it, and finished it up a little over a week ago. Here it is:

It isn't one of my better pieces, to be sure. But nobody bats 1000 at anything. 

The other day I was checking the statistics for the WFB on Blogger, and noticed a spike in page views, but I can't imagine why.

What could possibly be the reason for a lot of traffic from Duke, Princeton or Oxford universities? And the jump in views is here at the World Famous Blog, and also on the Lost Era blog, and The Lost Canyon blog as well. Maybe I'm a better writer than I thought. Maybe some clever undergrad is plagiarising some of my musings for a quick "C" in English class. Many of the views here were for stuff that I had written in 2009 which didn't feel like a long time ago, but that was sixteen years in the past. 

 I guess sixteen years is a long time, but as I just said, it doesn't feel like it was all that long ago. It's a feature of being old. When you're in high school, sixteen years takes you back to infancy. When you're seventy three, it's just a short while back.

So very much has changed since 2009. Here's one of them:

Today we braved the rain for Time Out Burger. The place was a mediocre dump until a Korean couple took it over a few years back. Now, Time Out defines hamburger, and you can get a great grilled chicken dinner with a full plate of salad, and a big drink for under six bucks.

Time Out is long gone, and a chicken dinner like that, anywhere these days, will kill a twenty dollar bill, and seriously wound a fiver who goes along. So few of the features of daily life around here remain unspoiled. With every passing year, life here in So Cal is measurably worse than it was the year before. More crowding. More traffic. More high density housing.

More foreigners. Perhaps it isn't politically judicious to not be pleased with folks deciding to prefer Southern California to  wherever it was they came from. But I see headscarves on women and masjids springing up like the noxious weeds they are. There is nothing whatsoever to be gained by importing moslems. There is nothing worthy of admiration, or emulation in the muslim faith, or the repressive cultures that it spawns. They are not immigrants, but invaders, colonizing  bits of our nation to spread their vile religion.

Except for the moslem incusion, Pete Hampton predicted this future back in 1961, and launched his quixotic, and failed crusade against rampant development.  And, more and more it's looking like my own quixotic crusade to preserve Pete's legacy is coming to a similarly unsuccessful conclusion. But more on that in another post.

Summer is gone. The days are getting shorter. Time is getting out from under us, and change rolls on at an ever increasing pace. There is no brake on Time, and no breaks in change.

JWM

 

 Samples of Pete

I've written before about my work to preserve my late friend Pete Hampton's legacy as an artist and storyteller. Without going into great detail, there has been some, but only some success. It looks like the project has gone as far as it is going to go. It isn't over, yet, and there is still some hope. I haven't lost faith in my belief that Pete deserves to stand with, at the very least, California's finest regional artists. Here is a small sample of my favorites among Pete's work.

See the links to The Lost Era Transcripts blog, and The Lost Canyon Project Blog on the sidebar for more about Pete, and my work to preserve his legacy.

arc11P561

arc4P272

arc1P005

arc7P348

arc4P273

arc1P012

This stuff is all quite old. All of the above paintings have come unglued from their backings. It'll take some work to get them in any shape to hang.

arc1P033

arc1P037

 These two, however are a couple of Pete's favorites. They are nicely framed, and ready to hang.

So, we'll just have to see where this thing goes from here. There will be two final Lost Era shows this November. One will be November 8th at the Whittier Historic Museum, and the other at Whittier Art Association Gallery on November 22nd. There are two other remote possibilities. If either of them comes to fruition I'll post about it

JWM