fish town

      He rose to meet the day. A dense fog hugged the lakefront. It tried to spoil everyone's business. The fishing shanties seemed like gray ghosts in the thick air. Crowded shoulder to shoulder in the chill they emerged and retreated into the mist. He wasn't going to give up that easily. He brushed off the claustrophobia and paid close attention to the ground beneath his feet. Experience told him to find a scene and sketch it nonetheless. 

He sized up the doorway ahead. The way it looked through to a boat and a shanty on the other side of it. Yes. That would work. He held his sketchpad with his left arm and steadily made light pencil marks with his right hand. He placed the threshold near the bottom of his page. Flicks on either side of the doorway suggested the exterior wall. His eyes and head tilted up. Quick lines framed the roof and the second story at the top of his page. Just enough marks to describe the building. Parallel strokes created the horizontal roof boards. His persistence paid off. He knew what he needed.
It was the way he gathered information. To make himself comfortable with the subject. So that it could be colored with washes from his kit. The fact that it had almost rained was not lost on him.

As the sun rose above his head more of the clouds were burned away. He could hear the knocking of footsteps over the boardwalk. Others were out drawing and painting in Fish Town. The last of the moisture cooled his neck as he found another spot from which to work.


That afternoon he focused on figures. Men were gathering their nets and laying them out to dry on the wooden reels.

    

Drawing with black ink and trying to capture form while it was moving was always a trick. 

His page was full of THIS moment, 

THAT sea gull, 

an arm reaching over,
and a head tilted forward. Linear snapshots. 

 Edges 
started 
quickly,
carefully, were then interrupted by the
absence

of the figure he had been drawing.   


 

It was the classic adage of "trial and error." 

He could draw a hand, 
maybe the back of a head 
and add a hat to it.
But people  

simply 
moved 
too fast.

If they would ONLY  POSE, or FREEZE in space, he would be able to draw that.










He thought of examples from his bound journal. Guys leaning against the counter at the campus library.

 

Friends chatting at a table.

 












A classmate, one row over from him, during religion class.


Goofy caricatures of his Valparaiso instructors, Waldschmidt and Wismar.

 The man asleep on the "L" train 

that he did in charcoal.

His ink studies from standstill drawings by Eugene Delacroix at the Art Institute.

The Life Class models, both male and female, who held their long poses for the drawing students at Ray Vogue Art School.

Gee. Even the dead insect specimens he drew for zoology class were easier to manage than these men, as they spread their nets.

The sights and sounds told him why the locals called the village "fish town." The squacking gulls, the smell of fish and maggots running all over the place. I could get used to this, he thought to himself with a grin.

The day ended with him sitting on the sands of Lake Michigan watching the sun set in a blaze of color. The water became orange blue or was it green, he thought, as he watched the blue edge of water nestle along the shoreline. Across from him the island was a deep purple. The traces of sun shone a deep rich red. He went back to his apartment and listened to the Lewis-Walcott fight. 

The night was full of talking. He stepped out into the night air and chatted with the women. All of that bunch were art students from East Lansing. The one called Lydia talked about her paintings. What a day it had been for all of them. He had finished four watercolors and a bunch of sketches. And from the looks of it Lydia made some nice watercolors too.

                          #   #   #  #


[Pencil, black ink, charcoal and watercolor drawings by Reinhold Marxhausen, journal sketch, June 1948. Courtesy of Marxhausen Estate LTD, Seward, NE. Story by Karl Marxhausen, copyright 2015. The narrative was based on journal entries by Reinhold Marxhausen, from June of 1948]

digging required !!!!

     Sleuths come in many forms. Most have questions that drive their curiosity. My brother and I are betting sleuths will come snooping once the bone yard is set up for exploration.  (DOUBLE CLICK ON IMAGES)

       Our father lived a DOUBLE life. To us he was the one who led us on adventures every Sunday afternoon, exploring creek beds, following the old rail routes out into the countryside, climbing over sand piles at the brick yard, making pathways through tall dried weeds. (CLICK HERE)
He made sandboxes for us to dig in, underneath the boughs of a willow. And he stayed with our mother all our lives. He worked, he put a roof over our head, he sent us to school, he read and thought and prayed, he drove us to the city swimming pool and was the first one in EVERY time. Running into the blue depths, ready to receive us, help us to float on our backs, or coaxing us to hold our breath and swim down and under, through his legs and up back to the surface. That was the life we knew and experienced, it shaped us and made us who we are today. Boys with a father. Boys with a MAN in their lives.

     His OTHER LIFE was less defined. Him going off to work. What he did during those hours. Who he associated with. How he got into it in the first place.

     We had heard some stories. Pieces of information lost on boys who were young and living their own lives at school, among classmates, eating lunch, playing tether ball, wrestling, talking on blocks of wood as if they were really walkie-talkies, hiding in the yard during hide and seek, doing our homework, practicing our piano lessons before school, getting to watch SOME television, getting ready for bed.

      Like, when he got out of the army on the GI bill, he went to college, he was at the Chicago Art Institute, waiting for his teacher to show him HOW to paint. The FURY and disappointment he felt when the painting instructor told him "to just START painting!!!!!" How he went at it with ambition, "like-there-was-no-tomorrow,"  "painting day-and-night," furiously. Doing that thing.

     We enjoyed the FAME HE HAD. Yep, it is true, our dad DID complete two giant murals for the Nebraska State Capitol. Yep, he completed against lots and lots of people and HE won, he got the prize, he got the job. That was OUR dad.

      We got to ride in the cool station wagon he painted with its crazy colors and stripes. The off balance circle of white on the tires, that made the wheels look like they were wobbling and soon to fall off!! The back tailgate painted silver. The large unseen red bulls-eye on the top of the car, that no one but the airborne birds could see from above, and could bomb that target with their bird poop. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Dad was so funny. What a great idea.

                 In 1960 - cement, steel rods, and a tall crane was used to lift up the heavy earth-formed "BOOK" on the campus of Concordia University in Seward Nebraska.

      But IN THE MIX of it all, I was NOT INSIDE his brain, I did not see his struggle or his thought process, or how he approached his projects, or the engineering required, or the permission he sought out from third parties. When I was out of college, on my own --- I thought I was destined to become like Dad. That his fame would automatically come my way for me. With the same notoriety I perceived of him. Alas, it did not turn out that way for me. I was his son, to be sure. But my PATH was not assured, not the same, and the One I was most mad at, eventually worked out all the kinks and attitudes and presumptions that I carried with me, thru tears and into His joy.

     So, now, years later, my father gone on to be with Jesus his Lord,
I am looking through time lines scrawled on paper, and thinking about that "other NAME"  his colleagues called him: "Marxy." A fictious character. Distant, cloaked, with me, a 59 year old grownup wondering, what each of these moments in his life, blessed him with.
     Others, perhaps YOU, will make the trek and find a piece of the puzzle. That is what sleuths do. They ask a question, then poke around on the Internet, seek out others who were inspired by Marxy, make a premise, test a theory, test and seek, and form a conclusion from their own perspective. Maybe - - - - post it in a thesis paper - - -OR online -- or in a book- - OR on Twitter -- OR blog about it. They might read what others have written, like Josh Duncan and Abbey Lange Groth.. Wikipedia has not weighed in on the matter.
     My brother hopes we will both live long enough to see and build a specialized website, which will hold much evidence, photos, lines of conjecture, and LOTS of bones. "the compilation of 13,000 images."

      Get a shovel ready.

      If you knew Marxy, please add a comment below for others to read.