I meditated for ten minutes under the loquat tree. I had a view of a dilapidated trampoline, a bougainvillea bursting with color, a stunted kumquat bush, two loquat saplings and foxtails.
A memory of my college mentor and art professor, Don Evans (d. 2013). Both my freshman and sophomore years, I’d taken art classes with him. During my junior year abroad in Germany, he lost his son in an accident.
His son Jonathan was so talented, like his father. He’d built a giant Rube Goldberg machine, mostly of wood, in Don’s studio and both he and Don liked to show it off.
I didn’t know how to talk to Don about his son’s death when I returned. I took another class with him my senior year, and felt I should talk to him about his loss, but didn’t. When I received word of Don’s passing, I sent a letter to his kind wife. She wrote a lovely response back to me. They also have a daughter, who is also an artist and organized events in his honor.
Don’s art collective was called “the Little Marrowbone Repair Corporation.” I’m glad to see his website is still up. He was such a wonderful, quirky personality. He created a clown car, which also served as his art collective’s logo. But it existed, as an actual car and it had a face on it, just like the drawing:
http://www.thelittlemarrowbonerepaircorp.com/
There are photos up on FaceBook. Guess I really have to join. If you go to the FaceBook page for the Little Marrowbone Repair Corporation, you can see videos of his collective’s performance art.
I’d been looking out at my yard and thinking about what Don said: everything could be art. He didn’t separate art and life. How you kept your home, how you live your life, how you cook–all art.
I stayed with his family one summer for about a week in Tennessee. They lived in an old farm house outside the Nashville city limits. Their home felt like art: a funky clock with pictures of family members where the numbers would be showed them reacting to the different times of day. Their kitchen table was a picnic table setup indoors, next to a large glass door looking out at the back yard, which was a gentle stretch of land bleeding into the woods. His “clown” mobile, which I’m sure he drove at Burning Man, was parked in the front.
In my eyes, theirs was such a happy home: full of laughter, art, wonderful cooking, free spirited friends. He had all sorts of friends who showed up at all times. And there, also, was his wife, a warm-hearted school teacher, talented herself, and his gifted children, already young adults my age.
At this moment, I am so heart-broken thinking about the loss of their son, right when he entered college. He was just starting to live out all that promise–their home full of the art that all of them had created: childish art, colorful youthful art, serious young adult art, middle-aged and wise old folk art–all there in that home, around them, and him gone.
