What's On The Wall?     
Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini are two of the most important poets to the North Shore community. They were and still remain, the Consciences' of Gloucester.  Both being from the North Shore, where i live and paint, i got to know their poetry and relatives/friends quite quickly. It seemed in my findings that Olson and Ferrini and their love for the Polis that IS Gloucester was being woven into a state of old history... but I knew that their lives needed to be re-presented to the younger generations of the North Shore and world at large. 

Their monumental presence in their attitude and poems reflected such immediate importance in the preservation of history concerning both specific sacred space and environmental/communal mentality. Their legacy and reason for existing is something that must be kept fresh in the minds of all the North Shore citizens, in order to properly preserve the importance of such a history soaked and geologically beautiful location. It was extremely important to me, to give back to the community in which I was living and it came to me that the perfect way was to paint a large mural for everyone to see, commemorating important local historical figures, in time for Olson's 100th Birthday, to revamp their important lives.      The mural is a long horizontal composition presenting the conflicted history of the 22 year relationship that Olson and Ferrini had, in their fights through publications on the importance in properly representing Gloucester. 

The Musician Willie Alexander had a dream of Olson, dubbed: The Gun Fighting Poets: “They were having a duel on Brace's Cove Beach or Niles Beach, maybe it was Niles because it has that Boston Skyline in the distance.  They had out their POETRY PISTOLS  and fired syllables, words, lines of poetry, ideas at each other. Did  they  came from the heart?   the mouth?   the brain? the asshole?  the fingers?  the penis?  They came from there being. The image resonates with me  because they had this dueling relationship. Olson would fire off a poem attacking Vince and he would fire off another turning his cheek and deflecting the blow.” -Willie Alexander
So i attempted to bring that amazing dream to life, because their clashes and spark was essentially what people remember as the basic background of their relationship.  So in the mural they are pointing at one another from opposite sides of the wall separated by Gloucester Bay that lies in the center.

Vibrating in the background of the whole wall is a white diagram of a Letterpress machine that Vincent donated to Montserrat College Of Art many years ago. Intertwined are sections from Olson's slap to Vincent in his poem, 'Letter 5', and Ferrini's love poem to Olson after the publication of Letter 5, 'In The Arriving', both in classic typewriter font:“In 1950 I met Charles Olson, a brother poet, who had a profound effect on me. A severe critic of the Art. He wrote a mammoth tome, The Maximus Poems , in various stages of development. The first was addressed to me while he was away, in the form of letters. In Letter Five, he castigated me for not having the precise care for the city as he had. I wrote him a thirty-page love poem In the Arriving that he called the "Anti-Maximus Poem," which it wasn't, which he said was the best of my books.” -Vincent Ferrini      While the mural visually represent the poets as simple figures in the middle of an argument across their sacred home, it was always for bettering and challenging each other, their works and for the preservation of Gloucester . The best history of their relationship can be found in the autobiography of Vincent Ferrini, Hermit In The Clouds. Chapter: “The Frame"

History Of Getting From There To Here       
Normally, One would commit to a great image or subject matter before finding a wall to paint! But I guess I'm a bit backwards concerning that trend. My advisor Jason Asselin and I began looking for a location to do a mural in early 2009, approaching ideal sites and offering to do a mural for them with a subject matter of their choice...their building, their choice, we figured. After 4 attempts and not one follow through, what was right in front of our eyes was finally revealed. The maintenance department at Montserrat College of Art was collecting sketches to review for a 56' by 13' mural, so I quickly got working. About 6 months earlier I met the filmmaker Henry Ferrini at the Salem Film Festival as well as Musician, Willie Alexander. I purchased a CD of Willie's where he had turned a selection of Vincent Ferrini's Poems into lyrical songs. And me knowing very little about Vincent or that his nephew was right in front of me at the film festival, I listened to the CD and began to research Vincent's Poems.

Months before the Film Festival I kept coming across the name and legacy of the Gloucester poet, Charles Olson and began reading his poems and researching his life as well. Finally, after talking to a teacher of mine, Ethan Berry, in an Artist Notebook class about Olson, I came across Vincent's autobiography, Hermit In The Clouds. In reading it, I came to realized the correlation between the two poets, Olson and Ferrini and their friendly yet turbulent arguments and attacks on one another through published poems. The more I researched each of these poets the closer it got to the summer of 2009 when the mural location at 301 Cabot street had revealed itself to Jason and I. I drew up some digital imagery one night that summer and printed it out to hand into The head of maintenance for approval to do the mural. It turned out that there was little competition, so I took to persuading all who I had to persuade at the school to grant me permission to follow through with the mural.

After a few road bumps and people being really vague on whether or not I could actual execute the mural, I just said, enough with permission! And got to prepping and painting the wall the next day. While collecting the paint colors and re-drawing the image for the mural with the help and persuasion of Thorpe Feidt, who knew both Ferrini and Olson quite well, the local poet Jim Dunn told me about a dream the musician Willie Alexander had in which Vincent and Charles where these tall enormous poet figures shooting poems and words like bullets at one another on a beach. In hearing this I decided to reorganize the image to pull in Willie's dream imagery and organize pieces of their arguments in poems they had into the image. After I finalized a composition with room to add and subtract on the spot, I began to grid the colossal wall...Just before I began the mural I had finalized in my mind, beginning a series of paintings, which would be portraits of poets: local, distant, dead and alive...I was captivated by so many poets I was meeting in researching Olson and Ferrini, from the younger contemporary slam poets and spoken word artists I was meeting and organizing for performances at Montserrat to the dear friends of Olson, such as Gerrit Lansing. So as I simultaneously started working on the mural I was traveling and meeting poets, photographing them organizing compositions for their portraits and gessoing canvases in the middle of it all. 

The best part about painting outside on a wall exposed to all of the east coast elements is that it is very day to day...what you can do to further along the process depends on how you make sure you have the time to work on it in the limited sun shinny weather, so one must skip class and be late to work sometime if one is to succeed at Muralism. And since I was approaching this wall by myself it was going to take quite a bit of time. I had originally hoped to finish it before the winter of 2009, but it was going to take a bit longer as the snows started to fall more frequent and accumulate in front of the wall.        Through the whole process up through the beginning of February of 2010, where we are now, my parents were both huge supporters of this project. My Father always said, “you make the art and I'll be the business man marketeer and sell it.” His utter joy in watching me simply paint, to watching where my art was taking me brought him great excitement. He'd Call me daily and asked how the mural was going, and i waited each day to tell him.  Him and my mom both supported me in my crazy explorations in film making...“Dad lets turn the porch into a blue-screen room and make a crane to shoot film from...” and in painting, “I want to make a 10 foot canvas, can I use your saw? Hey Mom, wana come paint the mural with me?” They were both more than willing to help me work on my creative binges that were becoming more and more daily as I was getting older and cheering me along the whole way.        

As the weather was closing in and snow was accumulating I was working more and more night maintenance at the school and had to concentrate on my portrait paintings of poets and let the mural be for the winter. And it was then that I received the call of my Father having some sort of heart attack or burst blood clot. I held his sedated yet twitching hand for 24 hours until he passed away all too suddenly... and it was then and in the days that came that I realized that one of my biggest cheerleaders was no longer a phone call away. He knew how to persuade me and juice me up to get out and DO IT!!! Even now writing this, it makes me cry and smile at the same time. His amazing work ethic and constant GO TO IT attitude is something I'm so glad and blessed to hold on to and keep going with. He worked his ass off day after day until the day he worked to literal death, and I know that his desire to succeed and make anything he was doing perfect has been passed on to me and I know I will continue in that fashion for the rest of my life, always for him. There is no Choice, luckily! Being back in Beverly and looking at the wall, I know that after the snow clears and I continue to paint, it will not be finished until it is perfect. The wall for me, is an integral point to which I have come, where nothing seems out of reach, nothing seems impossible and I know that in saying that my dad finally got one of his lessons across to me.              
                                                                                                                                                                                     -Erik Lomen