My Women, My Monsters in the T & D

Many thanks to the Times and Democrat for posting news about my new illustrated chapbook, My Women, My Monsters. https://thetandd.com/news/local/orangeburg-poet-artist-releases-new-book/article_deac6177-4fe7-5abd-871a-313c4f50303c.html

A Seat at the Table: Cafe Bebe Gets a New Chair

A patron lent me an odd little chair that someone had made a homemade dress for. She thought it might inspire me to make a painting of it for the upcoming group exhibition, A Seat at the Table: The Chair as Aesthetic and Social Construct. As my opening line suggests, I found the chair a little strange and discomfiting. I found it confusing as well. I was not certain if the dress was made for the chair or the chair for the dress. And there was this tangle of ribbons sewn to the crest and arms of the chair which obfuscated the form.

For months I could not figure out what to do with it. Even though the patterns were attractive, the form seemed to defy any definition, no matter what lighting was applied. And what would this chair, which appeared to be made for a doll, mean? Generally the chairs I had been using served a narrative, and there was nothing about this chair that inspired me to want to tell a story, imagine a story, or recall an interesting piece of history.

As I was restoring what was left of my old painting series, The Monologues, I came across one with a scene of a couple in a Café in Germany. Some of the paint had been pulled off the surface while it was in storage and it was badly in need of repair. So I carefully removed the varnish, let it dry a few days, then gave the paint a light sanding.

The painting, Café Bebe, was used to illustrate a poem about a painting hanging in that bar in Konstanz, that, for some reason, made me feel mildly annoyed. The painting was of a flock of winged cherubs frolicking along a river of emerald green. Looking back on that poem written years ago I must have been more repulsed by the art than I remember because I referred to all those pink putti as "winged hams." Revisiting that phrase made me laugh at my utter inability to understand putti appeal.

It then occurred to me that the little doll’s chair that confused me belonged in the corner of the painting that included an art work that my sentiments could not comprehend. The undefined form was made slightly more definite by manipulating the light in ways that did not coincide with reality - but made a seat discernable.

Some of the people viewing the new painting liked the little chair and it presence created a pleasant narrative for them. Secretly, I thought that a winged ham might just fit on the seat!

A Seat at the Table: Chairs in the Wild

Exhibiting in Charleston at the Nina Liu and Friends Gallery brings back fond memories. Nina Liu often held exhibitions on specific themes: the trees, the angels, the hearts. As with most of these exhibitions, I would enthusiastically produce a body of work, sell about one eighth of it, and then bring home the rest for storage. Eventually I might sell a few more of these over the years, but there generally remained four or five painting that would refuse to leave home. The tree exhibition was no exception. I included in this exhibition some paintings of truncated trees that I had made in Holland. Three of these were somewhat intimidating, made even more so because I gave them titles like Tree of the Wicked Spring. I have not decided what to do with Wicked Spring yet, but two of the paintings of this trilogy have been re-purposed for the upcoming exhibition A Seat at the Table: The Chair as Aesthetic and Social Construct, at the newly designed venue, Artists Collective, Spartanburg.

The pale winter scene in Holland is now embellished with the mysterious presence of an ancient Egyptian chair in the background, and an overturned chair in the foreground. The former came from my studies at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the latter from an old Charleston chair from our private collection. The painting is still haunting but a little less spare.

My painting, Truncated Trees, now has an addition of an African chair from the permanent collection of the local museum here in Orangeburg - the I.P. Stanback Museum. I needed a very strong structure as a focal point to balance those massive trees and the African chair seemed to suit. I liked the way the top piece was fashioned from a single branch.


Just one more or more two revised paintings to go before I start painting and drawing new compositions again.

A Seat at the Table: The Red Thread Gets Reinvented

This little square painting used to house just a solitary man squatting on the floor and looking out at the viewer with a quizzical expression. His home was a mass of wild and wooly red lines. The painting was originally completed for the poem, The Red Thread, from my poetry book manuscript recently given the new title of A Rendering of Soliloquies. (The new title seems to lend itself to typos so I have some minor regrets about this update. It almost went off to the last publisher with a glaring spelling mistake right there front and center in the title - not the best way to make a first impression).

My second update was in the painting itself. With the addition of a chair, the painting will now serve a double duty. The chair entered because this will now be used for the upcoming exhibition in Spartanburg in January 2020: A Seat at the Table: The Chair as Aesthetic and Social Construct.

This particular chair was patterned after a late eighteenth century mahogany American armchair that I had sketched from life at the National Gallery.  Including this chair from the days of our founding fathers served as a good contrast, with its orderly, rational and upright form, to the chaos of swirling red lines in the squatting man’s environment.

Early American chairs had symmetrical structures formed around a centerpiece called a spat. The spat was carved into decorative designs that often depicted charming and harmonious musical instruments like harps or lyres. For this chair I made a design where the spat should be that is in the shape of an American dollar sign. This dollar sign crept into the work as a product of present concerns and recent reading.

I had just finished reading Thomas Pikkety’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, a brilliant work that encompassed more than two hundred years of economic trends. In a carefully researched analysis, this 750 page tome tackled the question of why societies tend towards wealth inequalities and proposed some solutions to prevent this from becoming so extreme as to be socially destabilizing. At the same time, I had been ruminating on tackling a complicated and prickly financial transaction. As a result, the dollar sign in the chair has shifted from where it should be as a center spat, and has moved rightward. Something to ponder!

My Women, My Monsters: The Duchess of Lists

The Guenall Lioness, mentioned several blog posts ago, was a monster misidentified. Other monsters from my chapbook, My Women, My Monsters depict monsters within. Many can relate to the feeling of not living up to internalized demands. I’m no exception. It occurred to me that one manifestation of this was my compiling impossibly long "to do" lists, which would only exacerbate feelings of inadequacy at the end of the day when ruminating upon all those items not checked off the list. Enter the monstrous, "Duchess of Lists." Like the lists on her page, the poem also spilled out onto a second page. This left a blank area in need of a second illustration. For that I made a second detail drawing of the Duchess’ sleeve. But if you look carefully, Edvard Munch’s "Scream" is hidden up her sleeve.

A few lines from the Duchess:

The Duchess of Lists
is the sorceress of the clock’s hours.
She ties strings to your ankles,
adding weights for good measure
that hold you back to slow you down
as she speeds up time.

To reserve your copy of "My Women, My Monsters" follow the link to Finishing Line Press:  https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/my-women-my-monsters-by-janet-kozachek/

The Woman With Two Expressions: A Halloween Portrait

I once knew a woman named Frankie. Now, that sounds like the opening line of a limerick. So before I tell my story I must first get that out of the way:

I once knew a woman called Frankie

who would smile when she gave you a spanky

For the tears that you’ld shed, she’ld just shake her head

and not even offer a hanky

The real and not the literal Frankie was someone I knew decades ago as an ex-patriot. She had a peculiar habit of paying a compliment, then she would immediately follow the compliment with a second observation that would completely nullify the previous positive remarks. It would go something like this:

Compliment: "You know, I think that you are an exquisitely beautiful person, both physically and intellectually."

The Downer: "But I’m often told that I have bad taste and am a poor judge of character."

But Frankie would not leave it at that. She would follow this antithetical couplet with a look - a look that I would not have thought humanly possible had I not seen it with my own eyes. After delivering this dual observation, she would look you right in the eye and smile, but with only one side of her face. The other side would sport a grimace. Seeing both sides at once was confusing to process. Who could tell which side was for you? Both perhaps. Today I tried to immortalize that look with this little portrait that seems appropriate for Halloween. Scary, yes?

In order to see the two expressions clearly, cover one half of the face at a time with a piece of paper.

The Book of Marvelous Cats New Activity

One benefit of publishing a second book is that it rekindles interest in the first one.  This next book signing event is for a benefit:

The Book of Marvelous Cats is supporting Authors for Literacy, a fundraiser for Turning Pages adult literacy tutoring at Lexington County Library. For this special one day event, The Book of Marvelous Cats will be available at the bargain price of just ten dollars a copy. Come and meet the author, Janet Kozachek, who will personally sign and dedicate each book to you or to a designated recipient.

Where: Lexington Library 5440 Augusta Rd. Lexington, SC

When: 11 am - 2 pm Saturday, Dec. 7.

There will be twenty other authors there as well who will personally autograph their books for you or someone you want to give the books to.

My Women, My Monsters now available at Finishing Line Press

After numerous revisions, polishing of drawings, and a bit of luck, my illustrated chapbook, My Women, My Monsters, is now available through Finishing Line Press. The book is now available through their website. Follow the link here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/my-women-my-monsters-by-janet-kozachek/  If you have trouble placing an order, then email the publisher at: flpbookstore@aol.com

A Seat at the Table: Crime Scene

Why would I name a painting of what looks like an innocent, even tranquil domestic interior, Crime Scene? My reasons are in three parts: a discovery, an epiphany, and a question concerning an annoying disappointment.

Part One: Discovery

I discovered a book about crimes some time ago in a bookstore in New York. I had not sought this book out. I had merely picked it off a shelf while I was waiting for my husband to arrive from another store. I started reading it and was struck by a strange crime story called "The Measure Man." The peculiar story was about a man who would break in to people’s homes with a tape measure and "measure" them. No one quite knew what to make of it. I can imagine the police questions and report:

"Did the suspect take anything?"
"No."
"Did he injure you?"
"No."
"Were you struck anywhere?"
"No."
"Did the suspect touch you inappropriately?"
"Hard to say."
"What happened exactly?"
"He measured me."

Even though the perpetrator had not assaulted the victims, apart from trespassing into their homes, the victims knew instinctively that there was something seriously wrong about Measure Man’s actions. And they were right. The story went on to relate how Measure Man eventually began to dispatch with his victims. One can only conclude that he was in fact "measuring them up" for the kill.

The odd story stuck with me, even many years later one evening when I was alone at home and resting on the couch. I was recovering from a bad virus and did not have the strength to make much art work. Yet my artistic eye was still active. Across the room from the couch I saw two chairs and a red tape measure stretched across them. The red tape measure worked well to unify the red threads of design in the upholstery of the foot at the base of the second chair. Everything was so nicely tied together. So I mustered up the energy to find my camera and took a photograph. I snapped the shutter and then shuttered slightly myself when the thought of Measure Man floated through my head.

Part Two: Epiphany

A few years later, I finished a small book and my publisher asked me to post it on Facebook. I replied that I was not on Facebook. ( I was on it for a few months back in 2008, decided I didn’t like it and left). But I acquiesced and opened an account. The year was 2016 and I found that I still had great doubts about social media and at times found it mortifying! But I attributed the spikes of stunning incivility to it being a tense election year. I subsequently remained on social media despite the occasional sniping because I decided that the benefits outweighed the negatives. I established a good network of artists, writers and scholars who have enriched my life, and I reconnected with old friends and relatives. So the benefits of Facebook outweighed the negatives, despite the fact that it turned out not to be especially commercially successful.

But do the benefits of social media outweigh the risks? Given a choice, I would much rather pay a monthly fee to Facebook than have my personal data harvested and sold to entities that wish to pester me with items to sell me and groups for me to join. And can we really be certain that our data might not ultimately be used for more nefarious purposes? We offer ourselves, body and soul, in our posts on social media and in return are... measured? So we continue to post our likes, our dislikes, and our preferences - all the while having some tamped down reservations in the backs of our minds, like the victims of Measure Man knowing instinctively that there was something dangerous about being physically tabulated. Does Measure Man now enter our lives through our computer screen instead of an unlocked door? I thought of my photograph and determined that I could allude to this when I finally painted it.

Part Three: What is the Measure of an Artist?

I painted "Crime Scene" in the same year as an incident involving an unfair measurement. The incident involved an art event that I discovered was allowing (mostly) male artists to price their work any way they pleased while limiting (mostly) female artists to rules restricting them to works of small sizes and cheap prices. They were obliged to essentially take a back seat to their (mostly) male peers. In my artistic response, I made a smaller, background chair in my final painting composition that alludes to this.

In my more official complaint I conceded that if the organizing party wished to have a divided exhibition, with one room for cheaper art and another for specifically honored artists, that they had every right to do so, but that this would have to be articulated in clearly defined written guidelines at the outset, rather than the somewhat nebulous statement that there could be some exceptions to the rules. Otherwise all artist should be treated equally. To do less would unfortunately reinforce a stereotype that female artists (and others simply less popular) are not as valuable or competent as their popular male peers who can command higher prices - especially since the venue was a well attended, prestigious event.

The unfairness did make me disappointed and somewhat cynical. I mentioned to a friend that perhaps I should turn up at their party with a tape measure to see if any artists were breaking the rules of their proscribed presentations. Then I immediately caught a chill thinking of Measure Man!

Rest assured that I took measured steps to address the inequity directly to the organizers involved rather than with surreptitious physical yardsticks and tape measures. Hopefully this will result in greater parity next year, with equal measures of space and remuneration.

　

My Women, My Monsters is about to be published

My illustrated chapbook, My Women, My Monsters, is being put together at Finishing Line Press as I write this. It is a short chapbook if you don’t count the illustrations. But it took a long time to write on account of the elaborate illustrations. These were completed with tightly woven pencil patterns in a broad tonal range. This required using a large array of pencils from 6H to 9B. It was time consuming but I got the effect that I wanted - designs that look similar to the graded ink painting that I learned long ago in the People’s Republic of China.

Most of the illustrations are designed to fit on the page opposite the poem which describes it. But some of the poetry stretched beyond the usual one page format. This created a conundrum for my first graphic designer who was helping me create PDF files for my book. What was to be done for the page opposite the remainder of a poem? The solution, also a bit painstaking, was to extract a detail from the original drawing and make a new, smaller drawing from that.  In redrawing the detail view, as seen here at right, I chose to embellish slightly so this is not an exact copy of the original.

An example of the overwritten page and the extra drawing can be found in my illustration for the poem, "Twinkle Tinsel Toe Fairy," a sardonic verse about magical thinking. Because the last verse describes the fairy’s magic wand, I decided to focus on that. And here is a fitting end to the line "....and "poof" they all are gone!"