My name is Tracy Duncan. I was born in a place called Flour Bluff, a community that sits on the sandy edge of the Laguna Madre, the Mother Lagoon, on the Texas Gulf coast. On the other side of the lagoon is Padre Island, the 130-mile long barrier island named for it’s first written-on-paper owner, Padre José Nicolás Ballí, a Catholic priest who was born in Mexico of prominent settlers from Spain.
Flour Bluff is named in memory of the great Pastry War of 1838 — La Guerra de los Pasteles if you were on Mexico’s side; Le Guerre des Pâtisseries, if you were on the side of the French. Since the French had blocaded all the ports between the Yucatan and the Rio Grande, Mexicans had to smuggle their goods in through Corpus Christi, at that sandy point at the mouth of the bay where the naval base sits now. Some say Flour Bluff was named for the flour that was abandoned there by smugglers fleeing Republic of Texas patrols. Others say it’s named for the character of the sandy bluff itself.
It’s a different place now than it was when I was a kid. I roamed the canals and the lagoon in a boat my dad made for me out of plywood. It had a five horse-power motor; not much, but I could get where I wanted to go. The school is much bigger now, too. When I went, it had maybe eight classrooms for fifth grade, and eight for sixth. When my dad went there, it was the classic two-room school house set-up. His older sisters attended the one-room school. Their parents and grandparents were settling the area, and population was sparse there just 100 years ago.
I went to high school in San Antonio, and left for college at 16. I got a degree in journalism, and worked at small Texas newspapers. I worked on two separate occasions at the Huntsville Item. During this period, I made portraits: of the first killer whose execution I witnessed; of the last killer whose execution I witnessed; and of the the killer from Corpus Christi, whose execution I witnessed; of my husband as the dead christ; of myself as dead (in a fabulous dress). I also painted two fetching portraits of our sink.
There’s a lot of other stuff I did, jobwise: maid, mason’s assistant, copyeditor, cemetery sextant. Of them, copyeditor yielded the most amusing drawings.
Currently, I’m working on the Apocalypse, a loving homage to the painful, awkward, and glorious march of humanity toward oblivion. To finance the Apocalypse, I am selling extremely-limited edition prints and bronze sculptures. And I am looking for $30,000, so I can cast the maquettes of the four horsemen and the four angels who hold up the world, in advance of its dramatic demise. So if you got that, holla.