The Media is the Message

"I want to use wax crayons in my paintings but am not sure how. I was told that I couldn’t do that." One of my students asked me this at our last meeting. I assured her that there really is no such thing as a wrong or right media, only compatible or incompatible ways of using substances. So I thought of a way that wax crayons might work with oil paint and set about to experiment on some panels with my student. I mixed the tube paint with a combination beeswax and damar varnish medium and used a palette knife to trowel this heavy-bodied pigment onto the panel. I then broke off pieces of wax crayons and dropped them into the paint.
"We’ll heat up the paint with a hair drier set on high heat and see if the beeswax in the paint melts with the crayon so that it adheres." I said as I ran upstairs to get a high powered salon-style blow drier that I recently inherited from my step-mother. When I got back down to the studio, I enthusiastically set it on high speed and blew a good many of the wax crayons off the panel. So by trial and error we discovered that the blow drier had to be set on low initially to slowly soften the wax so that it would have a tack to it before melting it into the beeswax-laden paint. The tiny silver, red and green dots of crayon fragments melded nicely into the pigments and we discovered a new way of making what I would like to call faux encaustic. I then sent my student on her way with a dollop of the beeswax and damar.
Afterwards I was confronted with this little demonstrator faux encaustic painting that I wasn’t quite certain what to do with. I then remembered a multi-media mosaic and painting that I had done with pigment and glass some time ago and sought to recreate this effect. I became interested in combining somewhat disparate media after seeing the work of Michigan artist Ellen Stern a number of years ago in an exhibition in Miami. Her painting "Jack" began as an embroidery of a fairy tale, the threads of silk slowly dissolving into paint which then became glass and tile. It struck me as an allegory of a tale retold several times in translation - the same story repeated in a different media, altering the story slightly with each retelling as the various permutations of media reinterpret the narrative. Even more captivating was the subject of this particular narrative being about a vine that grows uncontrollably - like stories running rampant across borders. There was something else that was bold about this simple statement - especially since in contemporary art we rather arbitrarily assign art to "fine art" or "craft" depending upon what is used rather than how it is used. I think Ellen’s piece was a challenge to the notion that what is used in an art work is more important in understanding how to interpret it than what it says.
To try to capture some of the essence of what Ellen was communicating in her multi-media narrative, I decided to compose an art work traveling through three different media: oil and wax, ceramic shards, and glass. It first required fetching a narrow strip of prepared substrate out of my garbage pail and cutting it to match the height of the first beeswax painting. I glued the small painting and its companion column onto a substrate prepared with sizing. After they dried I proceeded to add bits of a broken ceramic vessel to the outside and inside of the painting - it was a tacky little Easter thing I found on the side of the road but it yielded some interesting texture to the work. Then I reinterpreted the colors and patterns of the painting in glass around the outside boundaries. This completed, I then returned to the column and reinterpreted the surrounding glass in oil and beeswax. I call the piece "Media Narrative in Translation I"

The Fine Line in Sleeping Standing Up

I made a painting of a man in New York some years ago. His name was Dexter, and he had an expressive face and an unusual ability to remain standing while sleeping. Although I liked how I painted him I was never satisfied by the back round. After moving to South Carolina I painted this back round several times over and was still never satisfied. To settle my frustration, I finally took a utility knife and carved his body out of the canvas and pinned it to my studio wall so that I would no longer be distracted by the failure of the surrounding paint. I then constructed a new canvas and painted him anew onto an entirely different back round - one replete with the angles and textures on the side of a barn at one of the many abandoned homesteads around South Carolina.
Later that afternoon, a friend of mine dropped by the studio and asked what I intended to do with the large cut out of the man pinned to my wall. “Discard it I suppose,” was my somewhat fatalistic reply. Gwen, my friend, wouldn’t have it. “But I really like his demeanor...the expression on his face has such pathos. Couldn’t you make it into a collage?” She asked. I had never made a collage with a piece of a painting before and wasn’t certain that it would work but I told Gwen that I would reserve this portrait and upper torso until I figured out how to use it.
I did eventually use the painting fragment in a large collage - surrounding the figure with red lines, gold leaf and abstractly painted geometric shapes. These embellishments were derived from the Russian icons I had seen when I went on a memorable trip to visit my relatives in Ukraine. The finished collage, which I named “Icon,” served me well. “ Icon” won a significant monetary award which came just in time for me - for two weeks after the award it was discovered that I had breast cancer and as a consequence had to take a leave from my teaching and my studio. There were two ways that one could understand this situation - that my award might be eaten up by illness and therefore diminished, or, that Dexter as “Icon” was the manna from heaven that arrived at the precise moment of need. I chose the latter understanding, gratitude being healthier than despair. I would have to extend that gratitude to good friends, husband, surgeon and radiation oncologist as well.

But what of that other painting? I continued to repaint the back round until I could do no more. The final addition was a row of blue dots at the base inspired by some roadside flowers. The painting was hung in one of my galleries, was returned to me, then was hung in another gallery and was returned to me. Unfortunately this painting, which I aptly entitled “Sleeping Standing Up,” suffered an accident which left a hair line crack in the paint on the upper right corner. It is not very noticeable but this means that I will never be able to sell it through a gallery. So now what? I had considered selling it to anyone who might be willing to pay for material costs and transport. Otherwise, he might end up in a cut and paste yet again. He probably will.

Milestone in Monologues

For Shirley:

The Horizontal Reading

Long shadow of a late afternoon
yawns before her
like the mystery in an alley
on a DeChirico canvas
The dark line on the blue horizon
reading from classical left to Biblical right
and back again
shifts along the straight and narrow path
as fleeting light mingles with the stars
of the milky way on her spotted dress

Yellow sun of a brilliant day
opens its eyes before her
like the spotlights on a stage
that follows spinning young dancers
Ascending light draws a reader up a page
from Mesopotamia below to the Orient above
and back again
as flower buds reach
behind the pages of a book
for tessellated words in stone

Back in November of 2007, I wrote a blog about a book of poetry that I was working on. I then wrote a post some time later when the book was about one fourth of the way finished. My book, Monologues: One Hundred poems for one Hundred Paintings, is now halfway completed. In celebration of making it to this milestone I am publishing one of the poems from Monologues and the companion painting.
I anticipate the second half of this book proceeding more slowly because I have identified twelve paintings that I either need to paint over again or substitute with new ones. When I finish six of these and have written seventy-five poems, I’ll mark that milestone by publishing another excerpt. I’m predicting this to come about at some point in mid to late summer.

Doggie Designated Driver

Had such a wild party today that I thought it best to let my dog drive me home.

Happy April 1.

The Other Side of the Mask, Three

My double-sided mask series concludes for the month with the cement painting and inlay on the obverse side of my recently completed raku pottery shard mask. Instead of tightly fitting the pieces this time, I tinted the cement blue and placed polyvinyl resin triangles sporadically around a central piece of fused glass. Since the glass was pasted onto the opposite side of the forehead of the mask, this left a hollow space behind the flat glass. I made a mental note here that this feature can be exploited in future projects to place objects in the space behind the glass to create the impression of a reliquary. I have to interrupt my pursuit of this project, however, to finish a conference paper, after which my teaching schedule will become busy. I expect to start my reliquary project, God willing, in late May. The preview is tantalizing though.

Crab Claws from Bermuda

Knowing that I am a mosaic assemblage artist, friends often give me with all sorts of unusual objects that they have found for me to use in my art work. It can take a while until these things find their way into an assembled art work but eventually they do. Most recently, as I have begun to make mosaic masks again, I have been rooting through all my bags of materials for just the right articles to apply to these faces. It gives me great pleasure, as a hunter-gatherer artist, to find them again and to use them. My most recent mosaic mask uses the crab claws that my friend Mary found on a Bermuda beach (at least I recall that it was Bermuda - as I'm not certain please don't go running off there in search of exotic crab claws just yet). The black, orange and white claws were quite dramatic so I designed the mosaic mask around them - using black enameling on top of a white glaze and lustre glaze. After using the intact claws I used the fragmented ones on the obverse side of the mask - the controlled chaotic side. On this side I have inserted a glass eye that I made with fused glass into an expired bulb from a slide projector. The small objects which appear like beans are actually polyvinyl resin bits from the now defunct Utica Tool company in Orangeburg. All these things are relics from the past.

Break Through

In my last blog I posted an art work that was made with fragments from a broken vessel. Over the Easter weekend, there was another studio accident which led to some unexpectedly interesting possibilities. While putting the final touches on a small mosaic mask in my studio, I heard the doorbell ring. As I jumped up to answer it the cleaning cloth that the mosaic was resting on caught on my belt and yanked the art work off the table and sent it crashing to the floor. I picked up the pieces slowly enough to allow my composure to return before answering the door. When I finally did answer the door I explained to my guest my hesitation. Although it is of course not entirely rational, she felt somehow responsible for the broken work so she helped me think up ways that it might be put together again. We both agreed that the hours of labor put into the piece warranted some kind of clever solution for salvaging it as a work of art. The glued pieces could simply be glued onto the surface again but the base section broken off the side left a tell-tale seam on the back of the mask when reattached. My student had the bright idea of cementing over the seam to hide the fissure. I did so later after she had left my studio but I wasn’t happy with the rather obvious patch. So I made a thick coating of tinted cement over the entire interior of the mask.
Then I did something that I had seen done on early African American memory vessels - I pushed objects directly into the wet cement to make a spontaneous design allowing the wet cement to ooze up between the interstices. I used fused glass with gold enameling, costume jewelry, and anything else that was fun and lively. The concave surface offered design possibilities that hadn’t presented themselves in flat and convex surfaces. The other side of the mask was a cave in which objects could grow like stalactites. It was a yin to the yang of the face. It could be a metaphorical other - the things that are in the back of the mind.
Thematically, I kept the first decorated interior related to what was on the surface on the other side. The face of the mask was decorated with white porcelain shards embellished with green heads of dragons. In traditional Chinese folklore, the dragon races through heaven in pursuit of the pearl of happiness. So on the secret interior of the mask I hung several pearls - both fake and real in addition to a ceramic fish - the symbol of prosperity. This completes the mask as an art object - with a decorated side and a secret interior.

Mask with Fragments of a Shattered Gift

A good friend of mine from Michigan sent me a gift of a beautiful raku bowl. Unfortunately the bowl shattered in transit. Since both the giver of the gift and the receiver are mosaic artists, however, this was not a tragic thing for our is the art of pieceing together fragments to make a new whole. The fragments of the raku bowl found their way into my most recent mosaic mask featured at right. The base is ceramic with attachments of glass and shells to augment the raku shards. Inspired by my earlier reading of Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico I used small, closely space tesserae, cutting on the bevel whenever I could manage it. So the raku bowl and its kind intent live on. I hope my friend likes it.

Reflections on Gericault's Face of Envy, Or: For Everyone Who Wants But Doesn't Get

Gericault’s jealous woman

her eyes askance

obsessively follows goods withheld

The classic face of envy

disconcerting in its human incarnation

For centuries her frozen unsatisfied eyes

glare in perpetuity unfulfilled

Her mouth pulled tight by thwarted desire

a bitter witness to others’ consummations

Vexed at unshared happiness

she ogles the crowning contentment

of rivals to gratification

-Janet Kozachek 2008

This past week, the subject of jealousy was broached a number of times and in various permutations. It seemed to me a great topic to write on and I had an illustration at the ready with a drawing of mine that I had just cleaned up catalogued.

Thinking of the Romantic painter Theodore Gericault, the images that I usually associate with him, other than The Raft of the Medusa, are his luscious renderings of dapple grey and roan colored horses. But late in his short life as an artist, he turned his attention to a series of poignant portraits of the mentally ill. Having a family history of mental illness himself, one wonders at Gericault’s motive for painting these. To exorcize demons by coming face to face with them perhaps?

While in a museum in Lyon, the particular painting from Gericault’s madness series that captivated my attention was the portrait “A Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy.” Making a sketch of this painting at the museum was a strange yet moving experience for me. Of course it would be easier to obtain postcards and catalogues of favorite paintings in a museum, but drawing from a master work is more inspiring and humbling. The act of rendering the picture stroke by stroke integrates the image into the very fiber of one’s being - to be conjured up into consciousness again at some future time in order to mull it over and absorb its saliency.
“The Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy,” has from time to time hovered in my imagination almost like an illustration for a cautionary tale. For with dependable regularity in life, like most people, I’ve been either a target of or a repository for jealousy. On any given day, I can look around this small college town of Orangeburg South Carolina and see the visage of Gericault’s face of envy - that sulking suspicious glare. Worse still, on some days, she stares back at me from the mirror.

I was haunted by envy in the years before graduate school. I was envious of people who had the means to obtain advanced degrees while still young enough for higher education to have an impact on their lives. Two graduate degrees and several years later I am envious of people for whom the same or lesser sets of credentials have secured them the rank, status and security that a position such as full time college teaching grants and which has always eluded me. Oddly enough, it sometimes seems that college teachers envy my free-lance lifestyle. This is probably because a secure paycheck is often paid for with constraints upon time and liberty - not to mention putting up with jealous colleagues. “At least you have time to do your art!” they opine. True, I do have some spare time at this juncture but what most people tend to forget is that when working free-lance, free time means no money. And while short term this is not necessarily a bad thing and it is enviable to have a chance to write and paint, the ramifications for long term underemployment are a bit more daunting.

In a broader context, perhaps the most serious consequence of jealousy is the insidiously terrible stasis that results. It restricts personal attainments and prohibits individual accomplishments. Jealousy keeps a community backwards. For the jealous will do anything to thwart those who appear to be doing better than themselves. I must share here a very colorful illustration of the power of communal jealousy that one of my husband’s English students wrote in a composition paper. “When a crab tries to escape from a pot of boiling crabs," he wrote, "the ones stuck deeper in the pot pull the one getting out back in.”

So now that the disease is identified, is there a cure for jealousy? Perhaps not and perhaps there ought not to be - at least not to the point of total eradication. The wellspring of self-serving competitiveness from which jealousy grows may impart some survival value to the envious. (The aforementioned crabs may just have been trying to hitch a ride on the escapee) But as a maddening obsession that thwarts both individual and social progress some amelioration might be warranted. I cannot make recommendations on anyone else’s behalf, but in my own grass is greener experiences I have found that there are a few salves to the sting of envy.

One is the realization that no matter how qualified for and deserving one is of something, that does not mean that there is an entitlement to it. In fact, the only things that we are probably entitled to are those items covered by legal contracts - and our most serious heart’s desires fall outside that jurisdiction. So, short of becoming an emotional ascetic, the best one can do is to come to terms with the reality of unfairness and make the best of what remains after dissappointment. And after that, to be especially grateful for those things given and obtained without the asking.

Although it takes some stretching if one is unaccustomed to it, nothing expands the parameters of happiness more than joy in the accomplishments of others. It is especially helpful to seek out a community that supports and cultivates the achievements of its members.

On those who inspire envy, most people probably do not fully comprehend their own advantages and as a consequence can appear callous and impervious to the disadvantages of others. Sometimes it is evil. Most times it is ignorance. It nearly always results in fanning the flames of jealousy. In a society such as it is in the United States this is especially heightened by so many inducements to make a conspicuous display of one’s socioeconomic prowess. A funny example comes to mind here of a well-to-do man complaining to me (complaining here as merely a facade for bragging) about losing the instructions to a very expensive camera and having to buy a second camera to get another set of instructions. If I had been more quick witted I might have offered to take the spare off his hands along with a photocopy of the instructions but I just chuckled and gave a slack-jawed stare instead.

Sometimes jealousy is more actively provoked - as in a response from an acquaintance to my news that I had made a few hundred dollars from a recent seminar. She was considering running seminars herself she tells me and charging $3000 each in accordance with the high demand for her expertise. Following my own previous admonitions it should give me great joy if she nets this amount. Initially it does not. In fact if an experimental MRI of my brain were performed to register the response to the $3000 seminar news undoubtedly the reptile portion would be lighting up - that crocodile nature which commands "Go, seek competitor's nest. Dig in sand. Find eggs. Eat them. All of them. After a reluctant tug into higher consciousness, however I find that ultimately it would satisfy me if she conducts seminars that are that remunerative because she probably earned the privilege and because she faces some long term uncertainties.

And this brings me to my final conclusion on the ultimate folly of jealousy. At any given time one can never be too certain about another person’s actual situation in life. The man with the great job? Maybe he hates it and returns home every day to a family that loathes him. The great house? Who knows what kind of mortgage is attached to it. And even if present circumstances are verifiably enviable, the future is yet to come, with all its attendant vagaries of fortune. To paraphrase Sophocles, “One can never count a man’s fortunes until he passes his dying day without pain.”

Last Square for Fallen Floyd

Some years ago, when hurricane Floyd grazed the coast of South Carolina, my husband purchased several sheets of heavy duty composition board for boarding up the house. Regardless of the fact that we were well out of harm’s way and far inland, the fear of a repeat of the path of Hurricane Hugo weighed heavily upon his mind. Needless to say, Floyd never made it to Orangeburg and the boards were unused. They were expensive, however, and I could not bear the thought of throwing them away wasted. I therefore had a friend with a circular saw cut them up into stacks of various sized pieces - mostly 12" squares. Over the years, I used them as substrates for mosaics - countless mosaics. I thought that they would never end. Today I used the last one and draw the “Archeology” mosaic series to a close.
In homage to the hurricane that brought these little squares into being I entitled this last work, “Fallen Floyd.” Like a previous mosaic featured on this site, the ceramic relief sculpture of the twisted man is an adaptation of my drawing of a man in that position in Peter Paul Ruben's painting "The Battle of the Amazons." Looking straight onto the surface, his body appears in a position somewhat distorted from the original. Looking at it from the side, however, restores the original vantage point of the figure in the painting.
In the mosaic, the figure is not quite as static as in my previous works and does not rest quietly in the usual position at the center or at the bottom of the square. He is instead thrown up into the upper left corner as if blown off course by a storm. His body rests where I typically would have placed a barrier. This angular figure now becomes the wall.
The pottery shards I used for this work are also much darker than the ones I used for previous mosaics - with black drips in them and swirling sgraffito lines indicative of unrest.
One technical advancement in this mosaic are some more precisely beveled edges on the marble due to my using a wet saw. I just learned how to use a wet saw a few days ago and thought I would use some of the cuts I was playing around with.