Laura Gordon Art

The first painting I sold online was of a sandhill crane, wings spread, flying through a clear blue sky. Graphic and loose, it’s a nod to the sheer motion of flight, which has been a recurring theme in my work. Years ago, during my time at Herron School of Art, I dreamed about a crow puppet that my brothers and I found at our grandparents’ house when we were kids. The puppet itself was frightening. It had an obscene rubber beak, and huge, startled eyes. It wore a t-shirt dress made of bright striped fabric. We were disturbed, and more than a little fascinated by it, if only because we had discovered it in our grandparents’ dreary, echoing farmhouse, which always seemed devoid of anything youthful or joyful. It was fitting that whatever toys we were able to dredge up from that emptiness would be possessed.

In my dream, two such crows had come to life, walking upright. They appealed to me for help; they told me they were dying from encephalitis. Their sadness was so vast and real as to cast a shadow over my waking hours. My heart was broken. I drew them. I sketched and sculpted and made prints of them. This was long before I became sick myself.

Recently, Googling images of cranes for additional paintings, I came across something even more captivating: multiple images of people wearing crane costumes. As part of a conservation effort, staffers at the International Crane Foundation wear white, capped cloaks, with black veils over their faces, each with a crane puppet on one arm as they interact with the endangered birds. I browsed images of the human cranes walking near streams, or standing in meadows, baby cranes at their sides. The photos were so compelling, I wanted to paint them as is, but I couldn’t find any that weren’t copyrighted. (You won’t see them here for this reason, but do take a moment to Google them yourself.) I couldn’t stop looking at them. Not for the first time I wondered why this anthropomorphic bird held such fascination for me. I am perpetually haunted by the hollow eyes and exaggerated beak, the cloaked figure, the aura of magic, grief, and wild loneliness.

Not long after I fell in love with crane conservators, my son Ike said he might want to be a ‘plague doctor’ for Halloween. I had no idea what he meant, so I Googled that, too. Most people probably know about the plague doctors, but the history was news to me, and I was shocked when I saw the images. Physicians who tended to victims of the black plague wore special masks thought to prevent contagion. At the time it was believed that the plague was transmitted via miasma (bad smells), and could be inhaled. They covered their noses with a long beaklike protrusion stuffed with sweet smelling flowers in order to avoid infection.

The plague doctors looked a lot like the birds I dreamed of, and reminded me of the crane costumes, too. They seem to have captured the popular imagination at the time, as artist’s renderings abound. Imagine lying on your deathbed and being visited by this eery creature, or seeing it in the street, accompanying the body of your loved one. As of this writing, I think you can probably get a plague doctor mask at CVS around Halloween.

Perhaps it’s the plague doctor I’ve been referring to in my work all along. I mean…..maybe I had the plague in a past life?! I sure as hell have it now. Not that it matters whether I contracted it in Medieval Europe or when I was painting Christel DeHaan’s house in 2007. At an archetypal level, this image means something to me. I’m plagued by illness, I’m plagued by symptoms, there is a plague on my house! Lyme disease isn’t going to ravage me the way the black death must have made short work of its victims’ corporeal forms, but anyone with Lyme will tell you that’s often the biggest disappointment of all. I’m dying alright, just really slowly, subject to the whims of an illness that is chronic and therefore more sinister. Maybe if parts of my body were falling off, I could get disability benefits. Maybe people would stop insisting I really just need to get out more.

I was born into this life with a genetic mutation of the MTHFR gene that disables my cells’ methylation processes, and affects the way my body eliminates toxins. I have a double copy of the nastiest variant, lucky girl that I am. Recent attention has been given to this condition and its tendency to predispose one to certain illnesses and autoimmune disease. My specialists have speculated that most treatment resistant Lyme patients are packing this little number; it has even been said that I’m probably still carrying around the detritus of every toxin I’ve ever been exposed to. They always ask what I’ve been exposed to. Was there any toxic exposure in childhood?

To refer to my dad- or Biological Larry as I sometimes call him- as eccentric is to make somewhat light of his intensity, his obsessiveness, his negligence. It makes him sound cuter than he was, but it’s apt all the same. He was creative and intelligent, but disorganized, and prone to bouts of depression. He was capable of unwavering commitment to a project but lacked patience and a basic willingness to follow instructions. He would have built the IKEA dresser without so much as a glance at the cartoon worker people on the manual. He would have had several parts left over and been totally unconcerned. If it fell apart later, he would have just blamed IKEA, like we all do, despite his IKEA stuff falling apart way faster than everyone else’s.

No one was ever surprised when Larry launched into one of his many big moneymaking schemes. He enjoyed hard work-just not the kind that paid consistently, or had an organizational structure with actual authority figures or daytime hours-so he typically threw himself into his own endeavours with a brutal determination. He brought home a glittering purple kayak one day. It shone in the sun, like the trashy nail polish I wasn’t allowed to wear. He was going to produce them himself, he just needed to get a feel for how the thing worked. Never having been in a kayak before, he set out on the river with a paddle and more confidence than was warranted. We had to rescue him hours later; miles away and dehydrated. He never built the first kayak, but something about all that fiberglass seduced him. He was an artist, if nothing else, and I suspect he wanted to sculpt.

He had sculpted a few things already. Gordon Insulation Company had been a relatively long-term venture, albeit poorly managed and bankrupt by the time the kayak arrived on the scene. The last time I drove through Mier, Indiana, there was still a bumper sticker on the one stop sign they have there. It reads: “GIC: Roofers Do It On Top.” He was at least consistently embarrassing. The insulation game gave him access to spray-in urethane foam: that bubbly orange-or sometimes white-stuff one sometimes sees oozing out of cracks in the walls of industrial buildings. It’s sprayed in wet, and expands to fill the space inside the wall before it dries to a styrofoam consistency. It was begging to be repurposed. If I inherited anything from the man, it’s a propensity to browse the hardware store, looking for unlikely art supplies.

The first piece he unveiled was for a trade show at the County fairgrounds. I only vaguely remember that Larry may or may not have used someone’s hot tub as a mold, by covering it in visqueen, and spraying insulation over it. When it was dry, he removed the foam shell, sculpted it into the shape of an igloo, and painted it white. He brought in a truckload of fine white sand (another fixture of my childhood, as his previous business had involved a lot of sandblasting) and made a beach on one side, and a frozen tundra on the other. Surely he added a palm tree. The two weather extremes in his vignette were intended to illustrate the versatile insulating properties of the magical material he was peddling. He also asked my mom to stand around in a bikini top and grass skirt, handing out brochures. I seem to remember her taking issue with the bikini top, but I had a grass skirt to play with during subsequent dress up sessions, so I know she caved at least that much.

We were the only kids I ever knew who had an incredibly realistic igloo in the backyard. It was a bit of a shock to passersby in the summer heat. The foam was ridiculously strong; we stood on top of the igloo more often than not, and jumped off or swung down using tree branches. The inside was so well insulated as to be dank and inhospitable. We did try lighting a fire once, like real Inuit, and therefore must add that incident to the list of incidents in which we almost killed our younger brother (this time with smoke inhalation). One day another family came and hauled the igloo away. We protested loudly, but could not rightfully say we had spent much time playing with it in recent days, so we were left with a round patch of bare earth where the igloo had been for so many summers, and Larry had an extra twenty five bucks in his pocket.

Around the time of the trade show, the circus came to town. Larry owned a pole barn warehouse on the outskirts, and the show runners asked if they could hold their event on his property. They kept the elephants in the warehouse and staked the big top right beside it. I remember sitting on thistles while I watched the greatest show on earth. They were the only thing that would grow in the wasteland of white sand and urethane foam that drifted about the landscape. It was never a pleasant place to visit. Just outside the circus tent stood the precursor to the Igloo. It was a foam replica of a VW Beetle, painted red. I’ll never forget piling into the backseat of the family car, headed home for the night, and watching helplessly as people broke off chunks of the foam Beetle, and carried them away, for no reason I can understand to this day.

Between the foam and the fiberglass, something else was born. Something so monstrous, so consuming, it would be his opus. Larry was a devoted member of the Experimental Aircraft Association, which, according to Wikipedia is “an international organization of aviation enthusiasts based in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.” I myself have been to Oshkosh for one of their conventions and airshows, in a rented RV. Not a good time for the whole family, in case you were wondering, although I was allowed to bring my friend Debbie, and I did fall in love with a 12 year old boy named Steve. Steve would say things to me like, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I fell promptly out of love with him on the last day of the airshow when I noticed he had corn in his teeth, and we never saw each other again.

Many of these aviation enthusiasts have built their own aircraft from kits or plans. At the  Oshkosh airshow in 1976 a plane was debuted to such fanfare that the designer made plans available immediately thereafter, and by 1980, at least 300 Rutan VariEze took to the sky. For reasons I never knew, harking to the whispers of his lunatic muse, Larry decided he would make and sell wings to the people who were building the VariEze. Perhaps the wings were the most difficult part for the amateur to build, and he wanted to corner a market. Maybe someone else was successfully manufacturing the wings, and Larry was going to become his primary competitor. I don’t remember. In any case, he was going to do it in the basement of our 3 bedroom arts and crafts bungalow, and we were all going to help.

My mom had probably gotten to the point in their marriage where she just wanted him to do something, anything, so her primary concern was not that he was installing an airplane wing manufacturing center in our home, but whether he could get the wings out of there once they were built. He assured her he had measured. Naturally, once the first wing was completed, with it’s giant fin, and strange angle to our strangely angled hallway, he could barely get it upstairs, much less turn it 180 degrees and take it out through the leaded glass doors to the living room. I came walking down the alley from school a few days after this hard truth became apparent to find a gaping hole in the back of our house, covered with a tarp, and a backhoe sitting on a mound of dirt. He had tunneled out.

I don’t know how long the hole was there, but at least a handful of wings were completed. He waited in his lair, obsessed, until we came home from school each day, and in violation of God knows how many child labor laws, yelled, “kids! Come down here!” My job was to mix epoxy. The boys worked with fiberglass and carved foam with a hot wire. We were burned, sawed, sanded, and yelled at. A French man came to wheel and deal. Much was made of a Canadian singer called Gino Vannelli, who was purportedly interested in a set of wings, and may have sent his representative. I only remember giving up my canopy bed for a night, and feeling as though it was a grievous violation of my stuffed animals’ privacy. I guess prior to the internet people flew in and shopped for their airplane components in the basements of homes in small town Indiana, but it all seems too intimate now.

Larry’s wings never got off the ground, which may be why Gino Vannelli is alive today. The only thing that kept Larry from going to jail for mail fraud is that each of the people who bought defective wings put property liens on our house. When it finally sold, long after we had all abandoned it for the city-for Larry’s new sales job and eventually our parents’ divorce-the proceeds were a pittance. Mom faithfully doled out a thousand dollars each to us kids, in recompense for child support-or perhaps wages- we had never received, and that was the end of it.

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about old Larry. I wasn’t thinking anything special-nothing related to birds or planes or the plague-just wondering why he always wore sunglasses. Did he get migraines too? He certainly was creative, and mad, and a hell of a subject for a blog post. I was getting out of the car and heard the sound of a loud motor coming from above. I looked up just in time to see two VariEzes flying over. I was too stunned to get my camera out in time to get a better picture, but this one sufficed for the purposes of the Plague Baby painting. I don’t know what the odds are, but I’ve never seen one fly over before, have you?