Calvin Grotepas

He went to West High in Salt Lake City, Utah. I'm not sure of his graduation date right at the moment, but he did graduate. He went to the University of Utah and majored in art—I don't think he ever finished his degree, but I'm pretty sure he was only a few credits shy of getting it.

He loved to work with his hands. When I was a kid, he made jewelry from polished wood—earrings, mainly. He taught me to whittle, though I sucked at it, and he made me begin with a bar of ivory soap. I didn't see the point. I wanted to start on my first masterpiece immediately. I wanted to be like Henry Moore, whose work he loved.

While he was still enrolled in college, he worked for the Deseret Press, the printing and publishing arm of the LDS church, and that's where he met my mom, who was working as a typesetter (to me, working in the publishing world, this love story is beautiful). She saw him first, so the story goes, and it was love at first sight. Later on, when they were married, he worked for a few other companies running their presses. He loved being a pressman.

They bought a house in Farmington, Utah, and he finished the basement—my mom and him, working as a team. After that, he worked long hours to sculpt the tiered yard into a beautiful landscape with flowering plums, spruces, Ponderosa pines, peach trees and cherry trees, yuccas, red buds, oaks, and the crowning piece, an almond tree (it died rather soon). The yard was a work of art—the railroad ties that delineated the grassy areas from the plants and trees were axe-cut by him (he cut his head open this way, once).

Years later following his divorce from my mom and after digging into pottery—mainly wheel-work—he found his niche. At least, it felt to me like it was the stuff he had always wanted to do. Hand-built pottery and bronze-casting. Some of the most organic-looking pots came out of this period of his work. Great, curving vases glazed in dark oranges and deep reds, but so finely done that they weigh much less than they apparently should. In a way, they remind me of something from another world, something from a science fiction novel. It's a fitting marriage of two distinct disciplines because he loved science fiction, space, and Carl Sagan.

Sometimes we realize that the only way to understand the interior of a person is through their creations—the way they organize the unorganized, apply order to disorder, filter beauty from the mundane. Sorting through the remnants of a life, we find that we didn't understand a person at all and we see that we measured them by the wrong instruments. When we were looking at the disorder of everyday matters, or the things on which society focuses, we should have been looking at the language they spoke best.

When I looked for my father on Google, I found two links: one from a news article from forty years ago when he was rescued in a skiing accident by helicopter and just a few other links regarding court cases against him. The cases were all reasonable, I'm sure, and I don't blame the people who were charging him because he suffered from severe mental illness and could be very difficult to get along with. That was the other part of his life. The messy part.

Bu I want him to have another legacy on the Internet. I want him to also be remembered for the good things. I didn't understand him completely, but I know from his art that he was beautiful.

Buying Lolita in Nashville (But Really Buying Pnin). Great Cover, Though.

I bought this book today. Notice how big the word Lolita is. That's why I bought it, I thought it was Lolita and I've wanted to read Lolita for a long time. I can't believe I fell for that marketing scheme. It worked! Who would have thought it would work? Especially on someone as brilliant as me. I blame the heat. It was so hot in the bookstore. I was dying. The pants I'm wearing today are this really heavy denim but they may as well be an electric blanket. They're bottling the heat up. And the bookstore is small and it was particularly crowded and there was this man sitting on a chair near me trying to have a conversation with me about the book he was reading and I couldn't understand a word he was saying. Poor guy. He was missing his front teeth. I think the bookstore owner, a part-time criminal justice lawyer, had just switched off the air conditioner. Maybe he was trying to sweat us out. So we were all stuck in there like houseflies in a mason jar, suffocating. I had to make a decision quick. I thought the book was Lolita and I've wanted to read Lolita for a while now, ever since I heard Robert Michael Pyle talk about Nabokov's love for butterflies*. . . . No wait, ever since hearing the Police song about the young teacher, the subject, of schoolgirl fantasy**. And Pyle just fed the fire. So I bought the book (it was ten dollars). I bought Pnin. I meant to buy Lolita.

In case you've never seen this edition of the book, the spine also says Lolita*** in huge letters, before anything else. It says, "By the author of LOLITA." Nevertheless, I'm excited to read Pnin. It's supposed to be great as well.




*If someone loves butterflies that much, they must be beautiful and therefore must write beautifully.

**First heard in junior high, 1991.

***At this point, Lolita is starting to sound like a bunch of nonsense.


I know you find the cover as irresistible as I find it.

Julius Caesar: Impostor or Emperor-Incarnate?

So, recently some divers in France found this, the oldest known bust of Julius Caesar at the bottom of the River Rhone in southern France. But what really happened was, my friend Mike posed for someone during his brief stint in the art program at Utah State, and the student—in a fit of rage because he couldn't get the nose right— flew to France and . . . . dropped it . . . . in the river. Is anyone buying this?

That's really what happened.

How to be Moved by Art: Know What Moves You

Winter Landscape, Jared Sanders

When Dani (my sister) was dating Jason (my brother-in-law), Jason's brother was having an art exhibit in Salt Lake (Jason and Dani might have been married already, the detail isn't important to the story). I think I was nineteen or something and I probably didn't have any friends at the time because I've never been popular (I know, you're thinking: how can that be?). So I went to the art exhibit with Jason and Dani. They probably didn't invite me, but I went anyway (yeah, that's the kind of kid I was).

I've always enjoyed art and at the time I'm sure I thought I knew a lot about it because I'd taken a few classes in high school. I'd studied my share of the big guys. And I'd also seen a good deal of art hanging on people's walls. Usually I thought it sucked because it wasn't Monet or Manet or Degas or Vermeer (how many can I name? Oh, believe me, I could go on for hours). Obviously I have a different understanding of art now, but back then I had your typical nineteen-year-old's grasp on art. The grasp of the nineteen-year-old who wasn't the art valedictorian.

Jared's show was small and unassuming. I don't think they had hor d'oeuvres or wine or anything. They're supposed to have that, right? And there was your typical art gallery curator (are they called curators?) hanging around in an impeccable suit, hovering over us. My memory is hazy, but I'm sure I felt compelled to inform him that I wasn't a potential buyer, so he would stop hanging around like a vulture. Or maybe he just wanted to be ready for any questions and since we were probably the only people in the gallery, we got the special treatment.

Maybe it's because I rarely go to contemporary art shows, but Jared's stuff killed me. He does western landscapes and being a westerner, perhaps it's no surprise that I'm pulled into his work. Now that I'm older and have been to the big time museums like the Met and, uh, the Met, I've seen work on large canvases, not just the reduced pictures in books. That probably makes a difference. As well, I've always loved the stuff of the Hudson River School painters. All I'm saying is that maybe it's in line with my taste.

That day in Salt Lake, I realized how a painting can swallow you. I wanted to live inside one. Literally. Many of the canvases were large and I probably would have fit. Until that moment I didn't understand what it meant to feel the life of a painting. What it means, I think, is that it stirs the life inside of you. Honestly, I think Goya's work is great, but when I see the painting of the The Third of May, I don't think, "Oh yeah, I hear you. I feel what you're saying and I'm going to start a revolution." Or even, "Yeah man, what happened was terrible." I see it and think, hmmm. Cool. Nice pants (and if that makes me shallow, well).

But when I saw one of Jared's paintings, I finally understood how big the western sky is. It's big. Really big. And that's more than what I've gotten from most works of art.