Sunfish, Moonfish

Ocean sunfish, or Mola-mola —Wiki

One evening circa 1974, we were walking along the shore at Cannery Row where the Monterey Bay Aquarium now stands, admiring a full moonrise over the bay. As we ambled towards a seafood restaurant on Cannery Row (The Outrigger?), I noticed something odd on the rock reef. The moon glinted on a reflection of itself. But then I saw a fin flip up, as if it were waving to the moon. Oh my gawd, whatever it is, it's still alive.

I hiked out the reef to find a strange sea monster stranded on the rocks at low tide. It was big as a millstone and silvery as the moon. I didn't know whether to shriek and run away, or what. The oddest creature I'd ever seen was watching me warily with an enormous eye, its little beak mouth opening and closing as if in supplication. I couldn't just leave it there to die. 

Not knowing what it was, I called it a moonfish. Now, I'm not sure who its mommy & daddy were, but I imagined a very large fish picked up the full moon at a Cannery Row bar, and well, after a few martinis, one thing led to another. Their progeny, like flounder gone wrong.

Mola-molas look like they were designed by Pictionary. All head and a scalloped petticoat for a pseudo-tailfin (called a clavus)—with nothing much going on in the middle. It looks like somebody forgot to add the body. Add a dorsal fin like a sail and an anal fin like a rudder and you have a mola-mola—a large winged coin. Mola is Latin for millstone.

They're also called sunfish because these deep-water fish like to laze and swim on the surface of the ocean to catch a few rays. Normally a pelagic fish, mola-molas like to dine on jellyfish and that year the jellies were so numerous they decorating the sea like flotillas of hot air balloons. Kids were tossing pennies onto their mantles to make them sink.

Purple-striped jelly, Monterey Aquarium—Wiki

This particular sun/moonfish wasn't clear on his own minimum height requirements for tidepooling (or the uselessness of fins on dry land), and he certainly wasn't clear on the concept of outgoing tide. So much for sunbathing, this was one vertically-challenged moonbathing mola-mola stranded on the rocks. He wasn't going to make it moonbathing like that on the rocks overnight until the tide came back in.

I hoisted the mola-mola up—he was the size of a hefty truck tire. It was like holding a big slippery moon in my arms. What I didn't know at the time is that they can weigh 2000 to 3500 pounds, full grown—the largest bony fish in the world. This guy was a svelte baby—somewhere between 70 to 100 pounds.

I wasn't expecting so much slime. The fish didn't have scales, but he was greased up better than a banana slug at a greased pig contest. I nearly went into the drink a few times, staggering beneath his bulk, skidding on sea lettuce festooning the rocks, while usuccessfully dodging shallow tidepools. My shoes would survive a saltwater bath but my new Irish coat sweater was ruined. I nearly dropped him a few times. My arms ached from his tarnished weight. But I was committed to dragging him to safety.

Tottering on the rocks, like a drunk clown, I reached deep water and eased him into a deep tidepool, nearly falling in headfirst in the process. I hadn't accounted for his weight as I bent forward. He lay on his side gasping, as if incanting a prayer to the moon, his small fins rhythmically slapping the water—as if in applause. I thought I was too late. Don't die now. How on earth do you give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a fish? But then, he slowly righted himself and then he eased into deeper water. 

I was startled by the sound of people applauding. I looked up to see what it was about. All the diners on the balcony gave me a standing ovation. I was thoroughly slimed, my Irish sweater ruined, and I smelled more than a bit fishy. Sardines came to mind. All I could mutter was: hypocrites.

Needless to say, that night, fish was not on my menu. Not one of those diners thought to pick up our dinner tab or offer us a drink. They went back to their fish dinners and tucked in. That night I dreamed the moon came to me to lay in my arms. It was my birthday.

Monterey Bay Aquarium—Wiki

Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: 3 Henry Miller and the Avant Guardians (journal)

Amazing to spend the morning reading about the Pat Wall Art Gallery and its wild guests, then to look around Micaela's room and see the very art mentioned in the reviews. The Avant Guardians are watching over me as I sleep.

I'm looking at Henry Miller's self-portrait with its red and green five sided frame, the brushstrokes are deft. Henry, supposedly in his 50s, stared back at me across the years, a young man with sallow skin and Prussian blue ears and nose. 

You painted what you liked, Henry. I hope you died happy. Henry looks a bit like Oleg Atbashian, which puts me off a bit. Self-absorbed men. Was it the talent that made them so self-absorbed, or was it the rank self-absorbtion that allowed them to become so talented?

I recognize so many of the paintings: McClatchy's Door. Several Graham paintings: Lament, and The Beginning of War. Other unnamed pieces. When Graham and Miller became rather famous, things changed. 

In the early 1970s, I remember traveling to someone's house under the Bixby Bridge to see Henry Miller's watercolors. I was not duly impressed. But I dutifully read everything that Miller ever wrote, so I felt compelled to witness the paintings too. I think I was reading Nexus at the time.

I think the owner was rather hoping that we'd buy a painting, but we were as penniless as Miller was when he moved to Big Sur. Micaela has more articles on Henry Miller's watercolors. Wish I had time to read them all.

Henry moved to Big Sur in 1943 and lived in a tent alongside the highway, he was already living the life of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, it was a cult of sex and anarchy on the coast. He said, "I'm not perverse, but the idea of looking through a keyhole fascinates me."

A keyhole in a tent? I asked myself. And thought of camera obscurae.

April 14, 1947: Henry Miller talked about how his paintings morphed from landscape into fish. I wonder if that's a reference to his Red Fish? 

Said Miller, "When I paint I have a lot of fun but I feel I'm on a tight rope. I'm jittery sometimes when I start out to do a landscape I end up with a fish I worried about this until the other painter said they do the same thing."

I had to laugh, Mike Goldberg's painting, Sardines, came to mind. See, Frank O'Hara's poem Why I Am Not a Painter sums it up nicely.

....I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

Pat Wall's art gallery became the focal point in a Harpers article on the new west coast cult of "sex and anarchy." A Times reporter descended, to buy a Miller painting, then left for the East Coast, calling it Paris of the West. Miller was a Paris expat, so he had several threads going. The race was on.

About the same time, the restless New Mexico contingencies (Wilfred Lang and Co.), were experiencing hot flashes, the Age of Light was born. (My grandmother's niece was working on the Manhattan project).

And somehow the role of art went from the cultured confines of the City of Light to the Age of Light. Miller detonated a moral code in Big Sur. The world fell apart, the center did not hold.

Henry must've loved exhibiting his thermonuclear watercolors next to the surrealist nudes of Dutch oil painter, Cock van Gent (a she!), and Edward Weston's extreme close-up photos of bell pepper buttocks.

The Grahams, Toni & Ed Ricketts, James Broughton, Virginia Varda, Dr. Rodin, Henry Miller's physician, and someone named Brewsie were among those attending. Everyone signed the register as Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so, as if that slender slice of decorum could contain the avant guardians.

Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: 2 Betty Wall (journal)

Pat & Betty Wall, me, Arthur Boericke, Fort Bragg 1971

One of Pat Wall's gallery artists, Joseph Albers, a Bauhaus student and teacher, painter and poet, taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina with Jean Varda. Varda I remember from the Sausalito houseboat days when I used to stay at Pat and Betty Wall's house. Micaela, Chris and I often played on the Charles van Damme ferryboat.

I knew Walter Gropius's name would eventually crop up in this crowd. Too bad the Hexagon House in Guerneville burned down. We used to go to tea dances there in the early 1980s. I remember sitting on a tall stool admiring that open beam work. I was always told that he designed it, but someone else did. No matter, it’s gone now.

Another clipping on top of the scanner: thieves broke into Picasso's home, took his clothes, took his money a radio, but left the art. Thieves also broke into a Berkeley woman's house to steal a painting by Dan Harris. Who is Dan Harris? (a painter, his wife Gertrude gallery sat Pat’s art gallery).

Names from my childhood kept cropping up. Sue Wall dressed as a girl sucking on a lollypop, a painting by by Dan Harris. Pat's other wives: Rosalind Sharp, Mrs. Margaret Lane. Did those women have any idea what was in store for them? Still in their separate identities. 

Pat would later divorce Sue and marry Rosalind and have two children, Micaela and Chris. Meanwhile Mrs. Lang and Wilfred Lang separated… Which one? My God is that a reference to Betty Wall, Micaela's stepmother and Pat's third wife? 

So, who was married to Wilfred at the time? I can't imagine Betty as the "other' woman. But they all were "other" women, one way or another. Betty was more of a mother to me than anyone else in my life, certainly my own mother—besides my grandmother that is… The other women who raised us. Art was our mother. Art was also the other woman.

Aug 9, 1998

added 6/17 slight revisions

Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: 1 Ellwood Graham
Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: 3 Henry Miller and the Avant Guardians
Wilfred A. Lang, painter (1915-1994)
Banana

Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: Ellwood Graham (journal)

Patrick Wall, founder of The Pat Wall Gallery, Carmel/Monterey, ca. 1973

When I was a child, my eyes feasted on the paintings collected by my best friend's father, Patrick Wall, when he was an art dealer in Monterey during the 1940s. Pat's gallery was on Olivier Street, we never did collect his oral history, so this is a placeholder for what we collectively remember. We also didn't realize that Pat singlehandedly changed the face of West Coast art with his controversial unorthodox exhibits. 

Pat, who was from Jersey, the Channel Islands, UK, came to California ca. 1940, with his inheritance and a dream of art. He took a chance on the local "moderns" and created The Pat Wall Modern Art Gallery, and through this connection is how I got to know the work of Ellwood Graham who "painted out loud" with lots of hot colors. His abstract portrait of John Steinbeck was controversial at the time—circa the 1940s.

What I loved were how Graham's personal hieroglyphics, or pictogram paintings which were almost quilt-like in nature, I loved the way the heavy dark colors were a combination of thick impasto, a drawing, and transparent glaze. A doodle, a half a whale (the tail end) captivated my attention. He compared his work to a composer working on a "musical canvas." Graham painted an egg tempera mural in the Ventura Post Office. Is it still there?

So much history attached to those old paintings of Pat's. There was John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, known as Doc Ricketts— they too were juxtaposed in Graham's work. It was John Steinbeck who told the artist to paint out loud imagine that—paint out loud. Graham moved to Monterey because of John Steinbeck.

Steinbeck also created in Graham's [Monterey] studio. He wrote Sea of Cortez while Graham rendered his portrait. Of course he sold the painting to Steinbeck, but "I kept some studies and sketches." 'Where is that portrait now? "People have been calling me for years... I don't know." he says, "I haven't seen it in over 50 years."

Then he adds, "That portrait was very good... I hear it was bought by Burgess Meredith but I also heard it belonged to John Huston. —from Alta Vista Magazine, 1992 "Ellwood Graham: Never Say Die," —Susan Lea Hubbard (see bottom of this post for more stories).