Going beyond the news

On any given day, the daily newspaper delivers stories of both the good and the bad in black and white. Subscribers of the medium learn that sometimes it is necessary to read between the lines. Every so often a story compels us to read beyond the words on the page. It is this place beyond, or more precisely, underground that local artist Bette McIntire explores in her handmade collages where she is the inventor of the Daily News. And while McIntire’s new gallery and working studio that opened to the public in December in the Laguna Village bears not a hint of the subterranean with its view of the Pacific, it is an ideal setting for appreciating a volume of work that calls attention to the depth of things.

McIntire is a two-year veteran of both the Sawdust Summer and Winter festivals. On the card she uses to promote her work to potential subscribers of her vision of the news, McIntire describes the why behind her collages. It reads, “It is my suspicion that stirring within the black and white ‘who, where, when, what,’ of the day’s news, there is an underground poem.”

At the Sawdust Festival grounds, and now inside her ocean-side gallery, proof of this suspicion is evident in the hundreds of daily poems McIntire has torn, quite literally in some cases, from the day’s newspaper. Part philosopher, part artist, McIntire is a provocateur with words and images as she explores all the possibilities of the quotidian hiding in the news.

“My work is real timely,” McIntire said. “I’m woeful about the economy and the war situation.” Yet when she opens the newspaper in her studio “” where a jolly red Buddha stands atop copies of the “I Ching” and Strunk and White’s illustrated version of “The Elements of Style” “” the woeful is transformed.

Watching McIntire work, you understand that she is indeed a poet of what she identifies as “the raw black and white data that is there every morning when we wake up.” Bit by raw bit the found poem begins to take shape as words that moments ago reported one story endure inking, stamping, drops of paint, smudges and tears to reveal a message that McIntire likes to think of as “something more real.”

Given the increasing reductions in both writers on staff and the content of metropolitan newspapers across the country, what is especially timely about McIntire’s work is its promise of reinvention. Here is McIntire, the archaeologist, mining the layers, preserving a different daily record before it vanishes.

“Our biggest lack today is a lack of imagination. If you can’t see it differently, you can’t make it happen differently,” McIntire said. The poetry at the heart of McIntire’s unique collages speaks to this vision of difference.

“The goodness is always there. I think reality is dear. What is real and true and good about life is dear,” she said. A quick inventory of the “headlines” in McIntire’s found poems underscores this sentiment as the soulful sits next to the sorrowful, the jubilant beside the subdued.

Mass communications guru Marshall McLuhan once famously observed, “The medium is the message.” When it came to addressing the effects of media on the individual, McLuhan was more interested in what was to be explored rather than explained.

If McLuhan had been a poet, he may have found himself likewise immersed in McIntire’s universe where the message in her medium is all about the exploration.

McIntire’s Daily News collages exhort her fellow participants in this thing called reality to “awaken to life,” and to do this every day. Just as the poet Robert Frost did when he was going to clean the pasture spring, the poet in McIntire gently invites those who wish to explore the vision in her work, “You come too.”

McIntire’s studio, Hoboworks, is at 577 S. Coast Hwy. For more information, call (949) 375-2943 or visit www.hoboworks.com.