[JCLFA Home Page] [Meeker#2] [The Studio] [Adonis as Meeker as Narcissus] [A Few Friends]

Dee has invited us to send something. Best laid plans and all, my intentions got beyond my grasp and I find myself instead tapping away at this keyboard hoping that this missive will somehow rise to the level of my esteem, my simple and sincere admiration for you, your life, and your work.

I cannot write about you without writing about me, too. I suspect that I have constructed my understanding of myself, in large part, by way of hesitant explorations of those areas that are hard to get at–the sub-zones where the real "we" hangs out. Although I have adopted the guise of a physician and pathologist, now I wonder if much of those forty-five or so years were spent incompletely alive, if not brain-dead. Yes, I know it is easy to cast-off Odysseys after they are complete, but I found recently that I look at my recent life as an awakening–sort of a Rip Van Winkle sleep, only twice as long. And Odysseus after his own twenty years, did finally end-up home. In my trip, I have no ardent suitors to dispatch, at least none that I know of, but it is been important that as I searched for who I was, trying to make pens and pencils or clay or styrofoam adjust to some specific shape, you never discouraged me nor laid on me that stultifying term: dilettante.

For it has been a fear, very real, that the moniker I own, Jack, is connected to "Jack of All Trades; Master of None." Thus, the other day, when I announced to who-ever might be listening, that I intended to quit, not RETIRE, that other bad word, but rather the out-right hang-up the microscope and join Odysseus or perhaps Theseus (Aridane was cute) on the trip I should have been taking all along.

That's OK. I'm gonna do it. So to you, I send thanks without limit for helping me to set the course of this thing. For I truly needed a mentor, a stalking horse to blaze a pathway I might imagine taking.

Some of the by-ways we have traveled together I am going to try to gather, here, again, as much for my benefit as (I hope) for yours. I stopped at "100" in trying to find and scan some pictures. I must have several thousand that concern you, me, Madison, our mutual friends and connections that span only the past 12 years of so.

Bases, I became quite proficient at bases, or so you said. Here you are in about 1989 preparing to add "Meeker" to your Minotaur.

And, what would the Minotaur be without Daedalus?

The Maze became a metaphor for me many years ago, probably just after I learned about the Theseus myth and learned about Michael Aryton, the writer, draftsman and sculptor who probed this myth as deeply as you have.

But I had to have another Minotaur to occupy the center of this thing. With lots of encouragement from you and a huge piece of styrofoam, more balls than bullets, I wasted lots of good bronze on this:

The subject is Dean Meeker's Balls: They come in all sizes and colors and are by now famous throughout the land–perhaps lands. It all started, I'm told with Tom, Dr. Evermore, the intrepid finder. Balls, balls, balls. Once you see 'em, you gotta have one or more.
Some examples:

Balls to Babes. Meeker could never be accused of ambivalence to feminine beauty. Perhaps that is what attracted me to his way of thinking in the first place. For me, woman not individualized, but rather the concept, idealized,formalized woman has occupied most of my waking thoughts.

An attempt at Versailles, West.

Position in life, a laudable goal. Besides, this makes a great cigar holder.

Every artist has a series of subjects which interest him, or which present problems to be solved. Some of Deans: