| POETRY * PAINTING * MUSIC |
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| "Black Joe's Pond" (narrative poems) * "Gift of Vision" (opera & dance drama) |
Maryclaire Wellinger
(M-C) of WESINGFIRE and INIUSA is a poet, painter, librettist & sailor.
1. In 1995, M-C worked as Ship's Cook & Ship's Artist aboard the "Halve Maen", a full-scale replica of Henry Hudson's 1604 vessel, where she kept nine men happy with her cooking and rendered myriad riverscapes and landscapes in watercolour & pen-and-ink drawings of shipmates and scenes aboard the vessel. M-C jumped ship in Manhat-tan, rode Amtrak to Boston with $20-in-pocket, then hitched a ride to the Kerouac Literary Festival in Lowell, MA where she met poet & beat bibliophile, Mark J. Fisher, who became her husband.
2. M-C painting "April Foolsday Blizzard", April 1997.
3. M-C, the librettist, after final performance of opera and dance drama "Gift of Vision: The Life & Work of Fitz Hugh Lane (1804-1865), February, 2001.
4. M-C with composer Jeffrey Steele during rehearsal for "Gift of Vision."
5. M-C reading at "Black Joe's Pond, March, 1996.
Projects in various mediums, including publications,
Chapbooks, Foundation Grants, Readings, Performances
- 1992. M-C Receives a Mass Cultural Arts Grant for her work-in-progress, "Black Joe's Pond," a collection of narrative poems emerging from the lives of Lucretia & Joseph Brown, free blacks who in 1794 established a tavern, a gathering place for North Shore blacks and fisherfolk of Marblehead, MA. M-C illustrates this work with her own paintings.
- 1993-Present. Creates Rosewater Press to publish her own chapbooks, including "Black Joe's Pond". Available here for $25.
- March, 1993. Performs "Black Joe's Pond" for the Multicultural Alliance's "Under One Canopy," featuring herself, Brother Blue, Mad-Dog Biker & Beat Poet Peddlar with host Steve Hemingway.
- 1991-1998. Studies drawing and painting with master painter, Ronald Kulloway and creates paintings to illustrate her poems.
- May 1996. Invited reader, Harvard University's Annual Spring Poetry Festival.
- 1996-1999. Cofounds band of poets known as "The INVISIBLES" with Mark J. Fisher, Peddlar, Steve Hemingway and others who perform in the Boston area.
- October, 1999. Organizes with Mark the avant garde poetry, theatre, music & performance-video event AZTEC RADIO starring John Sinclair, David Amram, Elliot Katz, other New York poets, M-C & video shredder Walter Wright.
- October 25, 1999. Performs with musician/composer David Amram at the Oasis Lounge, the East Village, for the event SAFE IN HEAVEN DEAD.
- Jan 2000-Jan 2001 collaborates closely with composer Jeffrey Steele and Choreagrapher Carl Thomsen in their Gloucester studios to create on original opera and dance drama based on the life of Fitz Hugh Lane, the first "luminist". M-C writes the libretto in poetry for four operatic voices and in her own painting studio renders many paintings in watercolor, studies of Lane's oil paintings.
- Jan-Feb 2001. M-C's opera and dance drama, "GIFT OF VISION: THE LIFE & WORK OF FITZ HUGH LANE (1804-1865)" is produced in 6 sell-out perform-ances in Gloucester, MA.
- Jan-Feb 2001. MC's Rosewater Press publishes original libretto as a chapbook, illustrated with her own watercolour paintings, studies of Fitz Hugh Lane's luminist oil paintings. Available here for $25.
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2001-2002. M-C becomes part of the Italian avant garde movement, "INI."
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Oct 2002. M-C's digital painting, INI ON WHEElS is the cover illustration for "BERENICE", an Italian biannual academic literary journal.
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