Busy People
Ronald Walker an artist living in the Sacramento area of California. He works in a style he calls "Suburban Primitive". This style combines his interest in the origins and functions of art along with life in the suburbs. His work is less about depicting this experience from a realistic visual sense but rather from a psychological, emotional and intellectual one. He's have had more than 50 solo exhibits over the years and holds both a MFA (University of Kansas) and a MA (University of Central Missouri) in drawing and painting.
Murphy, Inspired By Murphies
by Richard Weems
How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
–E.M. Forster
Take this writer. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call him Murphy:
One day, in a hunt for inspiration, Murphy shambles down into the subbasement of his basement writing-office, also known as his prompt-office. There, heads hang upside down like track lighting from the ceiling. Murphy cups the crown of a skull and turns its face back and forth. He squints at each feature, as though inspecting each for blemishes, as though looking into another set of eyes will let him re-see what he’s looking for. Better yet, that he might finally see what he meant to say in the first place.
His draft is already written, of course. (Silly reader! Murphy does not look for inspiration before the birthing process! Why waste the potential of these bottom-heavy ceiling fixtures when the newborn is but a glint in Murphy-daddy’s pre-revision? Who was it who said, “Revision is inspiration”? And was absolutely right?) On top of Murphy’s shiplap desktop upstairs, the draft squalls and writhes, sans swaddling clutch. Naked and newly formed, it resembles the innards of jackfruit in both texture and smell.
“Shriek all you want, Draft,” Murphy mumbles. “You’ll stop squalling when I get back to scrawling.” Murphy sees wordplay as a warm-up stretch for writing.
Murphy taps another forehead, then another, as though testing for sap. He taps the temple of a head with a beard, a beard like he once had. Was this, in fact, a head Murphy once had?
Truth is, he’s had them all, these heads. They’re all Murphy. Like the drafts he’s lorded over and learned from, Murphy is himself a creature of iterations, one version after another, that sometimes present causal links but more often than not document a life of stochasticity, of adapting and responding to the circumstances at hand without agenda. These heads have menaced insubordinate high schoolers, argued religion with their backseat fares, stared down drunks, been the drunks stared down by others. One dove off a cliff just days after a hurricane, while another fancies pedicures. The one thing they all bear is the mark of Wales/US dual-citizenship.
“I need to get ahead,” Murphy mumbles, and this pun sparks the head he’s currently tapping to mumble back, “Get your head around this.” Another, “You need some head.” The bearded one, “I think you need to hit the head.” A drunk one slurs, “This is a no-brainer.” Others contribute in kind. Not a one remains (ahem!) unprompted.
Meanwhile, the Draft shrieks and screeches, bawls and bellows, flipping through one synonym after another in its desperate need for attention, for Murphy to coddle and grow it, send it packing out into the world where others may laud its efforts or lambast its hum-drummery. Worst of all is to be ignored, and over this possibility it squeezes its lungs for every ounce of keening it can muster.
