Loner Magazine Interview

by Marcel Mensah

(conducted in 2018)

Who are you?

I’m a 38 year old artist//teacher called Walker Mettling. I screenprint, draw comics, host story nights (rarely now) and I’m starting to play with wood and ceramics in Providence, Rhode Island. And since 2010, I have run the Providence Comics Consortium (PCC), a micro-publishing project that started as comics workshops at libraries and the publishing of Providence kids’s work along with adult artists from all over. Lately I’ve been running the PCC Sunday Morning Sketchbook Church in Ada Books where I also have a little risograph printing studio. At Sketchbook Church I get to try out new sketchbook games and have a more intergenerational group of people than I can usually do in a library after school setting. Personally I think the improv-y sketchbook games are the secret sauce for the workshops.

Where are you from and how has that affected your being an artist?

That’s a huge question with a long answer.

I am from California. My parents are from Kansas mostly. So I’m a mix of escaped midwesterner and Pacific Coast. I’ve lived in Benicia, Vallejo, Arroyo Grande, Oakland, San Francisco, New York City, Arkansas, New Orleans, Vermont and Providence, Rhode Island.

When I was tiny there was always weird magical animal stuff happening to me. When I was almost a year old there was an incident where my parents were taking a picture of me in a parking lot and a vulture that was my same size came over and struggled to untie my shoes. When I was five, my mom took me to the fair grounds to play and we stumbled into a baby orangutan named Ollie and his trainer. And I played with Ollie a number of times after that. He’d pull off my shoes and smell my feet and carry me in to the tree with his feet hands. A peacock took off from a local park and started living on our front porch for a few years.

I just asked my mom how she thought my childhood affected my later life and she said “we used to finger paint with pudding. Maybe that was it.” But I think they fostered my weirdness as a pendulum swing reaction against the oppressive Kansas macho straightness that they had left behind. They were and are both really cool people and it was awesome growing up with them. I mean, the Santa Claus I knew always buried a gift or two in the yard. I remember being the only people in a Chuck E Cheese on Thanksgiving. As a small kid I dressed up like Tom Sawyer a lot, once to go to the renaissance fair. For my 10th birthday, my dad made a map for me and a couple of my friends, with stuff buried in the Pismo Beach Sand Dunes and talked some random drunk beach dudes into wearing cloaks and giving us mystic hints of where to dig. 

As a teenager in Arroyo Grande, my friends and I got into diy punk music. I set up a few shows and was in a few bands, made a few zines. And we built up a network of couches (and sometimes rooftops) we could crash on up and down the coast. 

After I graduated from High School, I went to San Francisco State University and got a bachelors in Labor Studies, while heavily volunteering at a books to prisoners project. 

I hitchhiked across the country a few times. Worked at the Brooklyn and Little Rock ACORN offices. 

I lived in New Orleans for a couple years, a place where it seems like everybody is an artist. I ended up programming a few shows in a gallery upstairs from where I worked. When I moved back to the Bay Area, I  lead communal story book making field trips at 826 Valencia in SF, at the same time I helped with art classes at Alameda County juvenile detention, and during the summer was a camp counselor at a working farm summer camp in Vermont. After camp in 2008, I road my bike down to Providence to visit a few friends when the funding for the art job in juvie ran out, so I just stayed in Providence. I hadn’t screenprinted since high school so hanging around Providence was a reintroduction to screenprinting and bookmaking just because it was so embedded the poster and comics-heavy art community here.

Because jobs are hard to come by in Providence, living here has meant I’ve had to make a living creatively and it has kind of forced me to support myself through my artistic efforts more than the other places I’ve lived. But all of the previous zones, people and projects kind of keep snowballing together into the larger gangly life project. 

What’s the weirdest project you worked on? Did you enjoy it??

It might not be there weirdest, but the most complicated multi-tentacled project from my perspective is the RISD Museum Fellowship that I got to do in 2017. They gave me a few chunks of money through out the year, I could take grad classes at the RI School of Design, and I could hang out in the education department office and scroll through their object data base. I wanted to take full advantage of that opportunity so I met with nearly all of the curators, took tours of the museum’s different nooks, I took a wood shop class and made a big bat shelf. Towards the end, I hosted a night market in the museum lobby and paid eight peers and younger artists to make new stuff and sell it on the 3rd Thursday when the Museum was free. That was a fun night, Paris Paris Paris was doing screen printing and we had a big coloring mural and a bunch of 3D geometric shapes that folks could Sharpie over. I lobbied pretty hard for the use of multi-colored Sharpies in the gallery! And all the while I was using the RISD Museum database to look at objects that fell under the search categories of “mask” and “ethnographic art.” During a tour of the Decorative Arts department’s storage area, I noticed some large masks hanging on the wall behind rows of tarped chairs under tarps. Later I found those masks in the database, they were Baining Fire Dance Masks from the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea (object numbers 81.059.23 and 81.059.24). And from there I researched the other objects that came into the museum with those masks. And that turned into a series of trading cards of my pictures in storage that I used to have conversations about storage and these objects and their journey. And eventually I made a hardcover screen printed artist book called “On Display in a Gallery That No Longer Exists” documenting the objects, where some of them live in storage and my research process. I also made a nice black and white cheap-o version of the book with a fold out poster (Available at Ada Books in Providence, RI).

Oh yeah. Did I enjoy it? Yeah. 

But obviously it was a complicated enjoyment. I had the privilege  to go behind the scenes at the RISD Museum and with their blessings (mostly) I churned up objects with very poor provenance, no curator or department attached to them, touchy sacred objects that were removed during the colonial and post-colonial period. I’m a strong proponent for a ‘Collections History Gallery.’ There is a lot of buzz at the RISD Museum right now over a Bronze Head (object number 39.054) that was stolen by the British from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897. The museum has been quietly communicating with folks in Nigeria to repatriate it. And due to a recent protest by a Brown University grad class that process has become a bit more transparent. I would love love love to see a gallery in the museum representing stolen art and cultural objects that were given back, odd objects (like the old mattresses) that are trapped maybe because of bureaucratic rules, weird trends in museum collecting, fake paintings, damaged art, stolen art, etc. etc. There is all of this interesting inside baseball that is happening in that museum (and probably most forward thinking museums) that the public would eat up and be psyched to collaborate on.

And for the readers in Rhode Island, just for identifying as an artist you get a free RISD Museum membership that gives you access to the museum. You do not need to prove that you are an artist, or a painter or a fancy pianist - - - people who cook are artists, people who work on engines, and run cash registers and take care of kids are artists. Get a free RI Artist Membership. Museum’s should be part of the social wage, what you get for just being alive. And it’s great for date night!

Also one last note. The registrars who took me into storage to see the masks asked me not to use my photos of storage - - - so instead I drew versions of my photos and that led me to realize that through tracing you can find other objects and details that looking with your eye doesn’t catch. There are all these weird lessons that just happen serendipitously.

How do you deal with an art block or artists anxiety?

Block and anxiety aren’t my main demons, my issue is distraction. If I’m doing mechanical work like inking a comic that I’ve already pencilled, using wood cutting  tools, screen printing, I’m fine. I can focus in and troubleshoot any issues that come up. Teaching too, falls into the category of mechanical work - - - make a game plan for class, execute that plan, print the book, done. But if I am writing a comic, writing a story, drawing panels or grant writing, if I’m using the whole creative chunk of my brain, A.D.D. constantly pulls me out of my chair every 3 minutes. Without realizing it I am up to get myself a drink of water, to research something, to go to the bathroom, to grab a guitar, to make a snack, to work on something less intimidating. So I use timers a lot. And I’ll set the timer, and I’ll draw or write whatever I’m working on until it beeps and then I’ll give myself a break. And then set the timer again. And that bleeds over into PCC classes too. I use timers for comics workshops all the time. It’s a good way of imposing time discipline. 

Also deadlines. Deadlines are great. I have the PCC and a number of other collaborators who keep me flush in deadlines. For example Julia Gualtieri coordinates PCC Tours and Workshops that happen out of state and Caitlin Cali & I do a kid’s comic called Splork! and an annual calendar. But before projects were one after another for me, I used to run mail art exchanges and field recording exchanges where each participant had to make a package for every other participant. And the whole point was to force myself to make stuff and to create a community that expected to receive a story or a cassette tape in the mail from me. I didn’t want to rip off anybody who was putting work into making a thing and putting it in the mail - - - so that accountability overtook the distraction or intimidation. I guess the mail exchanges weren’t all deadline fear either, if you made a cool field recording mixtape and mailed out 15 packages, the pay off was getting 15 mixtapes in your mailbox. 

#5 What is the PCC? Why do you think it’s important to local youth?

What is the PCC? Why do you think it’s important to local youth?

I started the Providence Comics Consortium with Andrew Oesch in 2010 as a series of comics workshops at the Providence Community Library locations, with a special emphasis on publishing diy books that would be available for check out through the library system. Since then the PCC’s horde of adult and kid artists have created countless workshops, comic books, magazines, a novel, a book of short stories, and have even manifested experimental parades and pneumatic tube fueled advice booths and a book of our time-tested drawing games: The Giant Book of Visionary Sketchbook Games.

I think the PCC is an example of how you can utilize a neighborhood library as a chaotic creative zone that is free to access. Kids who have maybe never made a book or a comic before, get published and on top of that the comic can be checked out of the library. So it changes kid library patrons into creators and authors and hopefully that process makes it clear that books (and culture and everything around us) is just made by people that wanted to make it and that the means of production aren’t very far away. Also, because the PCC gets adult cartoonists involved, it builds a bridge between kids in neighborhood library branches and the genius weirdo Providence cartoonists that they might not even know are here.

What work do you most enjoy doing? Why?

On a mechanical level, I really like pulling ink through a screen. Julia Gualtieri and I have a tiny new screen printing studio in an old factory and in December I was going over there in the mornings and screen printing and listening to the radio - - -toggling between slow jams, christmas music, hiphop, npr, and some old mixtapes. It’s totally frustrating sometimes, but I think screen printing rules.

On the communal creative brain level, I think the PCC Sketchbook games are probably my favorite. We do the sketchbook games in class as a way to get loose and get through any drawing anxiety so kids can focus on making character sheets and panel pages. But over time I’ve started to regard the sketchbook games as the most creative part of the PCC. For example at sketchbook church we played a game called ‘Food//Children’ (a variation of a game called Monster/Job). We started with strips of paper and two empty cups. On the first slip of paper everyone wrote an example of “stereotypical type of kid” and deposited it into the first cup, then on the second slip everyone wrote a type of food and put it in the second cup. Then the cups were shaken up. And each person would get a turn to pull a slip from each cup, and we would all have 1 minute to draw a child made out of that food acting in that stereotypical behavior. That particular round produced an indoor kid made of bone marrow, a jelly fish kid that’s too happy and friendly, a little princess made out of tuna, a drooling argumentative rice pilaf child and on and on. I’m such a fan of tapping into the magic of the improvised hive mind now.

Are there any memorable responses people have had to your work that have stuck with you?

I regularly run into grown men who corner me in Price Rite. And I don’t totally recognize them and they are like, “Mr. Walker?” And I’m like, “Yeah?” And they’ll say, “I remember you from comics at the library.” And I’ll have to try and picture them shorter without their beard. And that’s cool. That makes the long game feel pretty cool. And there are the kids that stay in contact through high school as they start comics and screen print clothes and make skateboarding brands and seamlessly become my peers as part of the Providence art community.

But there are two objects that I’ve come across that are pretty neat. One is a copy of the PCC Rhode Island Tour Book that is the circulation copy at Washington Park Library. It has been checked out a lot and it has cheetos stains and it’s puffed out like it’s been wet and dried  . And I think that’s what a kid’s library book looks like when it’s been used properly. The second object is the transcript of an exit interview from a kid named Mark, who was in a Fox Point Comics workshop with his brother in 2011. I found it recently and the words he uses to describe what was going on in class blows my mind. Emmy Bright recorded the interview on the last day of class after the kids got their books. This is what he said:

It feels like you don’t know what the imagination in their mind is like.  Like I didn’t know what my brother’s imagine mind was until I saw the real imaginative side of him.  And I didn’t know half of the people in this class, but once i got to know them, and their imagination. I started thinking! They have a really cool imagination!!!

What is an artistic outlook on life?

Well, I think my dad indoctrinated me pretty early into the “art of everyday life” idea. 

That you can drag fun, newness, and creativity (magic even?) into every realm of life. And I think it mirrors the original protestant idea that everybody should have access to the good stuff and not have to get permission from the authorities. Before the PCC, I wasn’t finding it easy to make money in Providence, so I started a secret restaurant with my roommate and we turned that into a job for a couple years. We’d have big dinners on Friday nights and for a time we did breakfast Monday through Friday from 8am to Noon. It was all word of mouth. And on the big nights 80 people would come through. We didn’t think of it as an art project. But it was. The kids from New Urban Arts came over with mentors and made decor one time. And after a couple of years we burnt out on it.

How do you measure growth in your work?

I’m not sure I’m doing a good job of measuring growth. I’m just trying to keep on chugging. Every new opportunity opens up a few more opportunities. I try to pull along my peers and the younger artists when I can. But at this point it kinda feels like a long distance race. I’m just trying not to fall over.

What’s a dream project of yours?

It would be super fun to go to a bat sanctuary and draw bats and make toys for them to play with. I used to have a weekly radio show that I loved and I’ve been thinking I need to start a podcast. Also I’ve been talking forever about writing a weird choose your own adventure book. 

And it’d be fun to have a general store and shoot a weird kid’s tv program in it.

Best piece of advice for people afraid to pursue a career/life in art?

Keep your expenses as low as possible. Avoid debt. Find cheap rent. Grow your veggies. And be part of an art community! Invite other people to be part of your projects and they’ll invite you to theirs. And just ask people for help when you need it. 

What’s next?

In March I’ve got a show of prints and plywood figures at Sutton Street Gallery in Providence. And I’m working on an art book about Knight Memorial Library that I’m going to try to finish before May. Also I need to schedule some PCC classes for the spring. Fun!