Art and Poetry at the Polasek

The Albin Polasek Museum and the Jack Kerouac Project,  joined forces to present this night of live art. Local poets and winners of the Winter Park Paint Out’s live poetry contest on Allpoetry.com read their work while I did this sketch which was projected live on a screen as I created it. It was the golden hour as the sun set illuminated the Polasek gardens a gorgeous golden tone. In the distance a painter was capturing Lake Osceola on canvas. I will be doing a similar sketch again this year at the Winter Park Paint Out which runs from April 22 to April 28, 2019.

I worked quickly to try to capture the fading light as the Kerouac House resident author Laura Lee Bahr read her work. She is the author of two novels, Haunt and Long-Form Religious Porn. Haunt was translated into Spanish under the title Fantasma. Laura has been a screenwriter for various award-winning films, including Jesus Freak and the little death. Her debut feature as writer/director, Boned,
won “Best Micro-Budget Feature” at the Toronto Independent Film
Festival and is currently distributed through Gravitas Ventures. Her latest book, Angel Meat, a
collection of her short stories, is available through Fungasm Press. To
promote it, she created the “Bahr Crawl,” a string of readings across
the U.S. and overseas where local authors join her in a celebration of
the spoken word. She lives with her sweetheart and two lovely felines in Los Angeles,
CA, where she teaches at a school for twice-exceptional students.

The Kerouac House is in cozy College Park. Jack Kerouac lived in the area for a short time in
1957–58 when his classic work On The Road was published to much acclaim. It was also the place he typed the original manuscript of his sequel, Dharma Bums. Four authors each year take up residence to focus on their writing without having to worry about paying rent.