RIP / Iowa Poet Marvin Bell (1937-2020)

Marvin Bell—
So let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a pigeon poised upon a nickel. Let us not get into a pickle. Or, finding ourselves already deep in the briny pickley flesh, let us find there the seeds of our poetry.

artist Orr Fisher in process of painting his mural

In the previous post, we featured a delightful WPA post office mural, called The Corn Parade, by Iowa artist Orr Cleveland Fisher. At the time, we didn't realize that someone named Blake Schnormeier has put up a multi-page Sutori site on the same artist. It offers interesting snippets of text, news clippings, paintings, cartoons, and a selection of vintage photographs, including the one posted above, which shows Orr Fisher putting the finishing touches on his wall-sized masterpiece.

favorite feather in the cap of Ringgold County

Above Detail of Orr Fisher's WPA mural, The Corn Parade (1941), in the US Post Office in Mount Ayr IA. 

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Roy R. Behrens, THE CORN PARADE: Orr Fisher's wacky WPA mural, in The Iowa Source (Fairfield IA), Vol 38 No 1 (January 2021), pp. 10-11—

American astronaut Peggy Whitson was born in south central Iowa, in Riggold County, and attended high school in Mount Ayr, the county seat. She is that region's claim to fame, although it should also be noted that the parents of Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock also grew up in that county. My favorite feather in the cap of Ringgold County is a Depression-era WPA mural that hangs in the US Post Office in Mount Ayr. Created in 1941 by local artist Orr Cleveland Fisher (1885-1974), it is titled The Corn Parade.…more>>>

how structured and deliberate designers are

Above Streamlined-era magazine page layout for an Oldsmobile advertisement.

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Mirra Merriman in Wendy Deutelbaum and Carol de Saint Victor, “The Art of Teaching: Interviews with Three Masters” in The Iowa Review Vol 28 No I (1998), p. 13—

One of the illusions people have who don't know about the making of art is that it’s an activity that comes out of a creative surge, a genius or passion. What is missed most of the time is how deliberate and how structured the choices that artists [especially designers] make are, and how one can read in the works of art the intellectual process that was taking place in the mind of the artist.