Hank Kaminski

 A good friend of mine passed away. Hank Kaminski was one of my early friends when I moved to Eureka Springs, and his wife JoAnn was the person I met who told me about this place and suggested I consider Eureka Springs as a place to work as I was ready to move on from doing pottery at Memphis State. 

Hank's life and achievements are discussed at the Arkansas Department of Heritage website. https://www.arkansasheritage.com/blog/dah/2020/07/23/sculptor-hank-kaminsky-named-2018-arkansas-living-treasure 

I was honored to have been a panel member selecting Hank as an Arkansas Living Treasure. 

I explained to the panel that I would recuse myself from voting because Hank was like a brother to me, but the panel voted unanimously and at the age of 79 he was named the Arkansas Living Treasure of 2018. 

I’ll be in Portland for the coming week so will have to miss the celebration of his life to be held on Saturday. Hank and JoAnn were such important persons in my early days in Eureka Springs and played such important roles in our development as an arts community. I always felt that Hank was my big brother in the arts… he always being a bit ahead of things. He gave me confidence for my own growth.

I was looking up at the moon this morning against a clear blue sky and wondered that the moon had no eyes to look back. Its movements around our planet have such profound effect, and yet we do not know whether it has the wondrousness of consciousness that life provides. Can it know love?

Artists are trained to look at both positive and negative space. The positive space is occupied by that which falls between the lines. The space beyond is not empty space, but is filled with all else... the relationships that bind us, each to each other.

Physicists tell us that once two particles are entangled with each other they can be thrust to the furthest ends of the universe and what happens to one is known to the other. It may feel as though Hank has been cast beyond reach. But the truth is that even when we are apart, our lives have been entangled and that entanglement is a thing that gives meaning. We are larger in each other than grief allows us to comprehend.

As I was watching the moon, a jet plane flew across its path. It was much too high to be landing at XNA, but I knew from having flown that it was full of beings, each having a consciousness that the moon might envy, connected not only with each other but beyond, each having personal connections at each end of their flight. What a wondrous thing it is that we live this life and that our lives cross.

The photo shows Hank with his Peace Globe in Fayetteville, AR.

Make, fix and create...