Stu Jenks' Fezziwig Press

A Passel Of Sticks: The vision statement for the Lord of the Rings series.

A Passel Of Sticks: The vision statement for the Lord of the Rings series.

[Images: 15 plus walking sticks/wall pieces in a corner nook in my house]

 

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have been very upset about the nature of our politics of late: the slipping away of our democracies; the general meanness and selfishness of American culture; the mendacity from media figures and conservative politicians alike; but I can’t continue to concentrate of the horribleness of the world.

I rely on physical beauty, spiritual mystery, and human goodness to get me through the day. And I can’t make art that’s entirely focuses on our cultural madness.

Add to that, I have Stage 4 Appendix cancer, that I’m getting chemo for.

Yea, I know.

It’s just not good for me to focus on the negative.

So…

What I can do is make objects that show the beauty in nature and in the world. Hence, I’m making wall pieces and walking sticks named after my favorite characters in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series and in Amazon’s new Rings of Power series. Also, other characters from my and other folks’ fictional books and TV shows, and people I admire in real life are honored here as well. Almost all of the pieces will be made of red cedar. All will be sanded, oiled and polished to a lovely shine and feel. All will be beautiful. At least that is my hope.

There’s an old story in photographers’ circles. French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, in the 1940’s, criticized American photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston by saying: “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks.”

I’ve photographed rocks and trees and stars for decades. Now I’m making pretty wooden things, made from red cedar that hang on the wall.

All us creative folks are doing the best we can.

As the Navajos say, I’m trying to walk in beauty. I bet you are too.

Love, light, and luck, Stu.

 

Circles and Spirals: Stu Jenks' Newsletter #7: 6/28/2022

"Flame Circle at St. Mary's Whitechapel, Lively, Virginia" (c) 2001, 2022

1) Just horrendous. You know what I'm talking about. The over-turning of Roe v. Wade. So much has been said already, and perhaps the last thing we need is a man bemoaning what I believe is a woman's primary right to her own body. Or maybe more men do need to speak up. I don't know. But I will say this. The steady march to a New American Theocracy, a nation ruled by religious beliefs rather than by laws, worries the fuck out of me. Vote in the Fall for all Democrats, no matter how wimpy or conservative they are, and register others to vote as well, so we can hold onto state houses and perhaps hold the U.S. Senate and U.S. House as well. All this makes me so angry and sad. That being said, I have to remind myself that America has only been a 'true' democracy since 1964, since The Civil Rights act.

So Rest In Peace, American Democracy (1964-2022). Adios muchachos. Hopefully a New Democracy will be reborn in the future.

One outside hope I have is that corporations will be less willing to invest into anti-abortion, anti-women states, not sending new offices and factories to those places. That along with the slim hope that Democrat politicians will eventually grow a pair and learn how to fight. I pray for the former to happen but have little hope for the latter. I just feel awful for all the women and girls in my country right now. Just awful. 

2) My radiation oncology has begun on the salvage/killing of the little bit of cancer that remains in my pelvic floor. Not fun. The feeling of having to pee all the time, not every day, but many days, sucks. But truly, the hardest thing about this daily process is walking from the parking lot to the cancer center on my bad left leg, and then the massive fatigue that hits me an hour after treatment. But I don't want to die before my time. The docs seems hopeful that this will kill the cancer that's still left. I sure hope so. 

"Desert Agave Walking Stick, North Topsail Beach, North Carolina" (c) 2022 Stu Jenks. 

3) I tried to sell some of my walking sticks and photographs at my local farmer's market last Saturday. Had very few sales but I met some very nice people, mostly the other vendors and a few shoppers. And of course, like my other Open Art Studio type events over the years, I had the odd person who said really weird things to me (I'll leave it at that). I may come back in the Fall after my radiation, when I have more energy. The people were quite sweet, but this really isn't my crowd where my art will sell, I'm afraid. People are there for the fruits and vegetables, not the rocking chair photos and high end walking sticks. But they were still very nice people. 

"Grimsley High School Graduation, Greensboro Coliseum, North Carolina" (c) 2022 Stu Jenks. 

4) I went to my nephew Will's high school graduation a few weeks back. It was a hoot. I hadn't been to a high school graduation since I graduated from Sanderson High School in 1973. Got a couple of good shots with the long lens. So much fun. Congrats Will McIntyre, and good luck in the fall as you attend the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. 

"DC-10 Fighting A Fire, Dragoon Mountains, Arizona" (c) 2016, 2022 Stu Jenks. 

"Stu and Stuart Sleeping, Mothershead Neck, Richmond County, Virginia" (c) 2001, 2022 Stu Jenks. 

"Harriet Tubman by Arron Douglas, Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC" (Image capture by Stu Jenks 2022)

5) I've been to some fine local art shows lately, and I'm still trying to get into other art shows, here and in Tucson, but it's been slow going. Both having a bad leg that's not healing very quickly, and this fatiguing oncology radiation and I'm a bit hobbled. I'm not liking it at all. But it is what it is and it ain't what it ain't. Acceptance is the key and all that good shit. Keep me in your thoughts and prayers, to heal up from this cancer and this torn leg muscle, and that I sell more art, music and books so I can continue to keep the wolves away from the door. Love you all. Stu. P.S. Alexa says hey. 

"Mothershead Neck Flame Spiral, Virginia" & "My Ghost Likes To Travel Hoop Dance, Arizona" (c) 2022 Stu Jenks. 

“Abraham Lincoln #2, Saguaro Rib, Arizona” [Extended Family Series] (Originally "Thomas Hart Benton")

“Abraham Lincoln #2, Saguaro Rib, Arizona” © Stu Jenks 2021, 56 inches tall. (Originally "Thomas Hart Benton")

Price: $125, shipping included. Simply contact me via my email address at [email protected] or Facebook message me, if you would like to purchase one of my pieces. Payments can be made with Paypal, Venmo or credit card with Square. All pieces are signed with its title, and can be hung from the wall.

 

This is a very complicated piece.

Originally this stick was made for Thomas Hart Benton. A painting of his in the North Carolina Museum of Art moves me greatly. (An image capture of that painting is at the bottom of this post.) This 1945 painting is of a family moving from their home before flood waters reach them and their house. A few years ago, that painting was a powerful metaphor for me, because I had to leave my wife and Greensboro to return home to Tucson, in order to work, and make a living. I felt like that man lifting that bed into the wagon.

So. I made Thomas Hart Benton a walking stick. Signed it and everything.

Then I saw Ken Burns' documentary on the man a couple of weeks ago.

Benton was a complete and utter asshole it appears.

He treated everyone badly: wife, students, contemporaries, you name it. He drank way too much. He hated gays and said often how much he disliked the 'limp wrist crowd'. He thought he was the greatest artist who ever lived. He was a bad guy.

Jackson Pollack was one of his students. Benton said of Pollack, "The only thing I taught Jack was how to drink a 1/5 of scotch a day." A day. I know.

I told Alexa about my displeasure with the man. She suggested I burn the stick. I kind of liked that idea. It would burn like a son of a bitch in our fireplace. But I choose a more middle path, sanding off Benton's name and dedicating the stick to someone I actually care about, like Abraham Lincoln.

Old Abe already has a piece made in his honor, a saguaro stick, somewhat heavier from this one. I've been wanting to make Honest Abe another functioning walking stick, something he might have actually used if we had lived at the same time, and he happened to wander into my studio in 19th Century Washington, D.C.

So Mr. Lincoln, you get another stick.

And Thomas Hart Benton? You are shit out of luck. Love your paintings but you can go straight to hell. As you can tell, I feel very strongly about this.

I've said this since I was in art school, said it for decades actually:

You can be a good person and a good artist all at the same time.

The asshole white male artist driven by his creative passions is a cop-out. You, Benton, Picasso, many others, just didn't give a fuck about other people. You were children who just wanted you wanted when you wanted it, wrapping your awful behaviors in artistic rhetoric. It's a rationalization, not a vision statement. Simply, you were dicks. You knew it. I know it. Fuck you.

I've had the opportunity to make sticks for extended family members who were jerks. I've only made one, and that was the Uncle Courtney Saum/Donald Trump stick. If I'm going to spend the hours making lovely pieces, I want to make them only for lovely people. Just the way this artist is built.

Sorry for the lecture. Here enddeth the lesson.

#lincoln, #stujenks, #extendedfamilyseries, #thomashartbenton

“Camille Claudel, Saguaro Rib, Arizona” © Stu Jenks 2021 [Extended Family Series]

“Camille Claudel, Saguaro Rib, Arizona” © Stu Jenks 2021, 66 inches tall.

 

Price: $195, shipping included. Simply contact me via my email address at [email protected] or Facebook message me, if you would like to purchase one of my pieces. Payments can be made with Paypal, Venmo or credit card with Square. All pieces are signed with its title, and can be hung from the wall. Love y'all, Stu.

 

Camille was a French sculptor, an associate and sometime lover of Rodin, a marvelous artist in her own right, largely forgotten because how poorly she was treated by her family and others. To read about her tragic life, click of this Wikipedia link.

To my surprise, some of her work, a bronze bust of Rodin, resides at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. In the last decade, Camille is finally getting the recognition that her and her work have so deserved.

You, Madam Claudel, get a complex wall sculpture from me, made specifically in your honor.

#stujenks, #extendedfamilyseries, #camilleclaudel

"Maggie, Will & Gabby McIntyre" & "Alexa & Sarah Clegg" (c) 2020 Stu Jenks [Extended Family Series]

"Maggie, Will & Gabby McIntyre" & "Alexa & Sarah Clegg" Saguaro Ribs, Arizona, (c) 2020 Stu Jenks.

Price: Not For Sale. Gifts to J.P. and Palmer McIntyre, and Rob & Catherine Clegg.

Apologies for the low-rez iPhone shots here.

This past Christmas, I gave these two pieces to my brothers-and-sisters-in-laws. I also gave my four nieces, my one nephew who lives in the area, my father-and-mother-in-law and another sister-in-law, their own walking stick and/or wall piece. Due to me not selling those pieces, I didn't at the time see the need to photograph them. I regret that now. After having made over 100 pieces and having posted most of them on my site, I realized that I didn't have many of my true extended family members represented here. If I was on the outside looking in, I would wonder if I, Stu, had any true extended family at all, and if I did, why weren't they here. Does Stu not like them? Do they not like him?

No. I like my in-laws quite a lot. I actually love them. And I think they like me too. 

Again, last Christmas, I made and gave twelve pieces, most being Desert Agave walking sticks to these folk. It was fun and a lot of work, but more fun than work.

But I'm an idiot for not photographing them. Maybe some day, but those sticks have flown the coop.

Lastly, the two pieces here were photographed with my iPhone, in my old studio in Tucson, AZ, before I moved to Greensboro, NC in the summer of 2020.

Hug and kisses, everyone.

#stujenks, #extendedfamilyseries.

"Bo Petersen, Saguaro Rib, Arizona" (c) 2020 Stu Jenks [Extended Family Series]

This walking stick is not for sale. Owned by Bo Petersen. Stick modified by Bo with the orange bungee cord to facilitate better grip.

 

Bo and I have known each other since college in the 1970's. He was the best man at my first wedding in 1984 and we have stated close throughout the years. Recently, he took me to one of his favorite hiking places, the Panthertown Valley in western North Carolina. That is where these photos were taken, specifically at Schoolhouse Falls.

Bo wrote the preface to one of my books, Dementia Blues. Being a now retired newspaperman, he can flat out write with humor, truth and vigor. And he knew my mother Mary as well. Below is the preface to that book.

Truly, Bo, you are my oldest close friend. And I'm grateful for our friendship. Thanks for enjoying (and tolerating) the weird and wonderful world that is me. You are family. Love you, man.

 

What You Have Is What He Found
Introduction by Bo Petersen.

 

Well, how it happened was I wanted to go to Florida for the weekend. My brother was in school there, lived out on the Indian River and had a beer ball game planned. (You don’t want to know.) My last class was Thursday morning, and my first class the next week would be Monday at noon. It had taken me until junior year, second semester, to rig this kind of user-friendly class load and I meant to use it.

There were two issues.

This was the 1970’s. Thumbing was a way of life if you were in school and didn’t have a car. But the Indian River was 630 miles down I-95, the bad ass pro road of the East. I didn’t hesitate to stick out my thumb on most North Carolina roads, but I-95 was a different animal. I wanted a second. Only a few people I knew would do it. The all-over-the-place found object artiste of Chapel Hill was the first one. Naturally.

The second issue was a little more ticklish. Getting to I-95 from Chapel Hill meant going through Smithfield, and in those days the road to Smithfield had one of those huge, eyesnatching KKK Wants You billboards. Neither Stu or I was real big on strolling underneath it with our thumbs out.

Mary Jenks took care of that one. Stu’s mom drove us to the interstate ramp.

Mary Jenks always was a handful, not shy about laying into Stu or anybody else over whatever irked her at the moment. But she didn’t lecture us. She pressed enough to realize we had at least a clue what we were doing and that we were going to do it with or without her OK. She took us to the interstate and told us she would come get us when we got back. You had to love the optimism.
We grabbed our backpacks, walked on down through a stand of pines and stuck out our thumbs. Just like that, we got picked up by a trucker on a Quebec to Miami run who was bored enough of the twice-a-week haul to put up with us.

We ended up Sunday on I-95 outside of Melbourne, Fla., trying to thumb home and watching car after car zoom by with drivers and passengers giving us the sort of terrified glance you would give a guy standing there with a chainsaw. We had no idea that a serial killer down in Miami was operating as a hitchhiker and police had just alerted motorists to Be On the Look Out. All we got was sun poisoning and—in one of those double entendres that you could twist into a harbinger of either of our careers—a warning ticket for “walking on the expressway.”

Anyhow, it was Mary Jenks who picked us up Monday morning at the Raleigh airport, drove us back to school and dropped me off outside Greenlaw Hall just in time to stroll into class.

Mary has always been conflicted, so she tends to leave others with conflicted feelings about her. She is much more like Stu than he might be ready to acknowledge, and it’s tormenting in this book to see the glimpses of her coming through the dementia. What it does to him is right there bleeding on the page.

Stu has always been off somewhere. He lit out from school one time to hike the Nolichucky Gorge in the Appalachians in the dead of winter, with no real gear for the weather. He planned to sleep in his beater Karmann Ghia, which by this time had a rust hole under the passenger seat big enough that you could watch the road zing past. He gave me a lift to Hickory, where my family lived, and I sat hunched shivering in the warmest coat I had, with my feet up on the seat to keep them out of the cold blast. That one, I think, ended when he was forced to turn around on an iced-over mountain road. The Ghia wasn’t your ideal all-terrain vehicle.

Stu has made a name as a “mythic” photographer. To my mind his strength is earthier, rooted in landscapes and people who fascinate him.

I like to tell the True Fact that I lived with 11 different people in college after first semester freshman year. Every one of them dropped out of school; every one of them dropped out of school while they were living with me. Hell, one of them did twice. The found object artiste was among them, and maybe was the one you would have picked to go if you knew us back then. And, yeah, go he did, off in a lot of different directions.

What you have is what he found.

Bo Petersen
Reporter, The Post and Courier, Charleston, South Carolina
January, 2011

#bopetersen, #stujenks, #extendedfamilyseries

“Hamish Jackson, Saguaro Rib, Arizona” © Stu Jenks 2020 [Extended Family Series]

“Hamish Jackson, Saguaro Rib, Arizona” © Stu Jenks 2020, 54 inches tall.

Price: $150, shipping included in the price. Simply contact me via my email address at [email protected] or Facebook message me, if you would like to purchase one of my pieces. Payments can be made with Paypal, Venmo or credit card with Square. All pieces are signed with its title, and can be hung from the wall. Love y'all, Stu.

 

Hamish Jackson is a fabulous artist and potter who's currently getting his MFA in Ceramics at Utah State University. I met Hamish in 2018 when he was an apprentice for Mark Hewitt's studio in Pittsboro, North Carolina. He noticed my 70-200 mm lens at a kiln opening at Mark's. I noticed his wondrous pottery and his easy laugh. We became friends. I did some trades with him, my gelatin silver prints for Hamish's wood fired plates. Bought some of his work too. I also made him and his wife Lauren a couple of walking sticks a while back, just because. He also makes a killer cup of tea. Hamish suggested at one point that I start looking at hanging pieces off the wall and that's changed everything. This is why artists should hang out with other artists. We give each other ideas and new ways of looking and thinking about things.

Check out his website. There is stuff for sale and beautiful things to look at.

I'm grateful to our friendship. We talk and text as much as we can. Both of us are busy. I'm not as busy as Hamish, with his new baby and school and all, but we talk and laugh and email as much as we can.

I love you, dude. You and your family mean the world to us. 

(At the bottom of this post is a picture of four plates Hamish made for me. It's not a great pic but these are great plates. I truly eat off them every night. They hold my Trader Joe's Mac & Cheese perfectly.)

#hamishjackson, #stujenks, #extendedfamilyseries

 

 

“Father, Son & Holy Ghost, Saguaro Ribs, Arizona” © Stu Jenks 2020 [Extended Family Series]

“Father, Son & Holy Ghost, Saguaro Ribs, Arizona” © Stu Jenks 2020, 7 feet 6 inches tall.

Price: $495 (or free to Holy Trinity Episcopal Church), shipping included in the price. Simply contact me via my email address at [email protected] or Facebook message me, if you would like to purchase one of my pieces. Payments can be made with Paypal, Venmo or credit card with Square. All pieces are signed with its title, and can be hung from the wall. Love y'all, Stu.

I’m Episcopalian by birth, but I believe The Risen Christ is a spiritual metaphor not a physical reality.

That being said, my mother’s progressive Christian teachings: of freely giving to the poor, the sick and the lonely; of honoring an Always-Loving-God-That-Loves-You-No-What-Matter-You-Do-Or-Don't-Do; of the communion of good people trying to make a better world; of the power of prayer and meditation to help me makes the best decisions throughout my day; of a God that is simply the powers of Goodness, Light, and Love, those beliefs she taught me have resonated throughout my life, starting from when I was a small boy. Thank you Mom for putting me on a healthy spiritual path. It was a very big deal that you didn't teach me to fear God.  

As a child, I had a hard time wrapping my head around a Loving Father (didn’t really have one of those,) and a Risen Son (didn’t really see how Jesus rising from the dead was possible or even necessary,) but The Holy Ghost? I was down with The Holy Ghost. An invisible loving spirit, moving through the world, helping little boys like me. I liked that. A lot. Still do.

I made this piece specifically for Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Greensboro, North Carolina in 2020, as I was recovering from my radical prostatectomy surgery. They are very good people over there at Holy Trinity. I'm not going to force them to take it, and better yet, if they want to buy it, sweet; but it's not about the cash. It's about appreciation and gratitude.

Really, more than anything, I'm grateful that my mother Mary taught me that God is not scary, and that The Holy Ghost is a mysteriously wonderful thing that can love a little boy like me. A little boy who lives inside of this 66 year old man.

And heck. The church is called Holy Trinity after all. Seems like the perfect place for this wall piece to live.

Love you all. Namaste.

#fathersonandholyghost, #stujenks, #extendedfamilyseries

“Dad, Saguaro Rib, Arizona” © Stu Jenks 2021 [Extended Family Series]

“Dad, Saguaro Rib, Arizona” © Stu Jenks 2021, 54 inches tall.

Price: $195, shipping included in the price. Simply contact me via my email address at [email protected] or Facebook message me, if you would like to purchase one of my pieces. Payments can be made with Paypal, Venmo or credit card with Square. All pieces are signed with its title, and can be hung from the wall. Love y'all, Stu. (This piece is no longer for sale)

"Dad at Ed-Lil, Virginia"

My father in 1999, during happier times. Photo taken by me using a 35mm Pentax, loaded with Ilford SFX 200 black and white film.

 

So here's the good, the bad, and the ugly about Stuart C. Jenks Sr., at least how I see it at the end of April, 2021. I have a lot to say. And I might change my feelings about some of this at a later date, so take this post with a container full of salt. Here goes.

 

Dad's been dead almost 20 years now, dying in September of 2001. We had a complicated relationship which took me a couple of years of therapy and a couple of decades of recovery to be OK with. Mostly OK with.

Dad didn't want to have children, didn't like having kids. He made that clear often when I was young. He felt obligated to reproduce the species he said, and he did enjoy having sex with my mother, so said Mary when she lost most of her boundaries when she was dying of dementia. Pamela and I knew he didn't like kids. He barely talked to us. Mostly just gave us harsh looks. That hurt both of us a lot knowing that. Me? I moved through most of the pain after a time. A long time. Lot of work. Pamela? She carried that bloody wound throughout her entire life, trying to drink it away and never fully succeeding. She died bitter.

Dad was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps, fighting in Okinawa in WWII and stationed in Japan during the Korean War. His only son, me, was a conceptual artist and sculptor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the 1970's, a young man who felt things deeply and voted Democratic since he was 18. Dad voted for Richard Nixon in 1960, 1968, and 1972. Two of the few things we had in common was we both liked NASCAR auto racing and we both found his wife, my mother, irritating.

But Dad did share a love of 12 Step Fellowships, his brother Edgar Jr. having gotten sober in AA. Dad would come with me to my Sunday Morning Cocaine Anonymous meeting when he would visit Tucson, mostly to get out of going to church with Mom, but also because he liked colorful people. CA and AA have colorful people in spades. 

To his credit, Dad had some form of epiphany when I was in college and started telling me that he loved me when we would see each other. I think Dad figured out that he hadn't paid much attention to me in my first 20 years of life and maybe he should start.

He tried to be a good father. Still wasn't very great at it but he tried.

We worked to get along, but we never completely bridged the gap. Dad was intrinsically judgmental and silently angry a lot of the time and even as an adult, he scared me. I think if he was alive today, that would make him sad to hear me say that. But it's true. Mom and Pamela were scared of him too.

However I am my father's son in a number of ways. Both he and I are creative people. He was a good photographer and so am I. Dad knew how to tell a story, as do I, and Dad really liked people. Me too.

However, in other ways, we were very different. I believe Dad felt trapped in his marriage with Mom, him being too cheap to divorce her. I love my wife Alexa and am happily choosing to spending the rest of my life with her.

Dad was not generous with his cash. I am, perhaps to a fault. Got my generosity from my mother. And Dad would on occasion say something extremely racist. "Son, you're spending money like a n----r on a Saturday night." In my 40's, I would ask him to not say the N word around me. The best I got was, "Well, Stu, I know you hate it when I say this, but you are spending money like a n----r on a Saturday night." Yeah.

On the other hand, I can see me through his eyes too. He wanted a tough guy for a son. He got a sensitive artist-type who cried easily and felt the pains of the world. He felt saddled with two children, one of those kids, my sister Pamela, had no boundaries, was loud and impolite, and started saying the word 'fuck' at age 17 and never stopped. He really hated that. He might have loved Mom but I don't think he liked her very much. I don't think he was really that happy, but I could be wrong. He could have just been a jerk, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Yep, I cut Dad a ton of slack nowadays, even though it may not sound like I do. He didn't want kids but I'm glad he had sex with Mom so that I'm here. He did pay for my college education. That ain't nothing. And he was supportive and proud that I got sober and stayed sober. He wouldn't admit it but he was scared that he would, at some point before I got clean, get a late night phone call saying that I was dead.

There is an old saying in recovery, that we should look for the paradoxes. Two contradictory ideas when put together often show a greater truth and a pathway to wellness.

He's one. "My Dad did the very best he could with the tools he had, and he did a shitty fucking job being a father." And with me holding those two opposing thoughts in my head, I feel a greater compassion for Dad. It's weird but I do.

One last sweet story about Dad.

After he died I felt his presence often. He was kind, generous, happy, forgiving, and encouraging me to spend money on my art business. At one point I said to the spirit off to my left “Who is this guy?“ I had a chat with Dad’s ghost at one point saying “I need you to go away for a little bit because I’m still mad about what are used to be like when he were alive. But don’t worry, I’ll call you back.” 

He went away as I asked and I called him back in a couple of weeks. He was sweet and kind as ever. I got used to it. After a year or so, I didn't feel him around anymore. Maybe he had Angel Ghost work to do.

Dad's ghostly presence reminded me that underneath all of our failings and crap is pure light, pure love, and joy. That’s how all of us are in our soul of souls, don't you think?  If we choose the light, the love, the joy as we live our lives. As the old Todd Rundgren song says, love is the answer. It really is.

I miss you Dad. I wish you had met Alexa. You would have liked her a lot. A lot a lot.

I'll see ya when I see ya. Love ya Dad.

"Stu & Stuart Sleeping, Virginia" Photograph taken by me, using a cardboard pinhole camera, loaded with Ilford HP5 400 ISO film. The camera was given to me by Mom and Dad for Christmas, a couple years before. Exposure time: 90 minutes or thereabouts. Photo taken a few days before my father's death from cancer in 2001. 

#stuartjenks, #stujenks, #extendedfamilyseries.

“Lynn Shelton & Marc Maron #2, Saguaro Ribs, Arizona” © 2021 Stu Jenks [Extended Family Series]

“Lynn Shelton & Marc Maron #2, Saguaro Ribs, Arizona” © 2021 Stu Jenks, 64 inches tall.

Price: $295, shipping included in the price. Simply contact me via my email address at [email protected] or Facebook message me, if you would like to purchase one of my pieces. Payments can be made with Paypal, Venmo or credit card with Square. All pieces are signed with its title, and can be hung from the wall. Love y'all, Stu. (This piece is no longer for sale.)

 

I've met Marc Maron a couple times at small shows in LA where he was workshopping his next stand-up comedy hour. Much like his persona on his podcast, WTF with Marc Maron, he is anxious, sweet, grouchy, delightful, talented, intense and kind. (A friend's wife had committed suicide the day before I saw him in LA. He was very compassionate to me in the ten seconds that we talked before his gig.) Actually, Marc doesn't have a persona. Marc is Marc wherever he goes. It's why we love him so much.

I've been listening to WTF pretty much since the beginning. His twice-weekly conversations with good folk has gotten me through hard times. His podcast always delights me, uplifts me, makes me laugh. I never fast-forward through his initial 10 minute rant before the show. Sometimes, that's the best part. And Marc is an amazing interviewer. He actually listens to people and you can tell.

Marc has been married twice and has had his share of drama in his romantic relationships. So have I. So have we all.

Then he met Lynn Shelton, the amazing director/writer/actress/filmmaker. After a bit, when they were both single at the same time, they fell in love. I was so happy for Marc that he had found true love with Lynn, someone who fully grokked him. He, like I, are acquired tastes. It takes someone special to find us delightful. Lynn found Marc a delight, as Alexa my wife finds me. I'm a lucky man. Again, Marc and I aren't friends nor acquaintances. I just listen to his show and watch his work on TV. But I was very happy for him. (You really feel like you know the dude if you've listened to him twice a week for a decade.)

Then, last year, in May of 2020, tragedy struck. Lynn died suddenly of an previously undiagnosed leukemia. It happened fast. One day she was here, a few days later, she was gone.

I had recently had my own radical prostatectomy cancer surgery and I was slowly healing up from that, when I read the news on my phone. I literally said out loud, "Oh no! Marc! Oh, no!"

Marc grieved in public on his podcast. He was honest with his feelings with all of us. He stayed sober. He inspired many with his expressions of grief. We all were moved.

So I made Marc one of my walking stick/wall pieces and mailed it to him. Sadly, the stick got snapped in half in the mail. Yeah, I know. Sucked. I thought I had packed it well. Guess not.

I looked around my studio and found these saguaro ribs. This will work nicely, I thought. Two saguaro ribs married together. It even kind of looks like Marc and Lynn, at least to me. I haven't mailed it yet to Marc or maybe I'll sell it instead. Marc doesn't live or die over getting some of my artwork. It's truly the thought, the thinking, the caring, that counts.

We love you, Marc. 

Thanks for all that you have done for me and for many others. Your light shines brightly in this world, even when you yourself doubt its strength.

Stu.

P.S.: End Times Fun is a master work, and Sword Of Trust always makes me cry. I miss Lynn too. JDFD.

Photo of Marc Maron and Lynn Shelton by Greg DeGuire.

#marcmaron, #lynnshelton, #stujenks, #extendedfamilyseries.