When I was a young child, I used to entertain myself by hiding in my parents’ closet to read books and explore interesting finds. To my parents these things of ten to twenty years ago were not particularly old, but to me they were ancient artifacts. My archeological digs produced my mother’s old nursing shoes - which I did actually recall her wearing a few years previously. Old photographs appeared of unfamiliar people. But the strangest album was my father’s book of the photographs he took during World War Two. I was terrified of them. Some of them looked like corpses hung on a wall.
After summoning up the courage I asked my mother what they were. She explained to me that they were from Italy and were mummies from a crypt. My father served on a Destroyer Escort following the Mediterranean Campaign during World War Two. This took him to the ports of Italy and Northern Africa so there must have been truth at least to the location. Nevertheless, I suggested to my mother that these scary things should be destroyed. Much to her credit, she told me that these pictures were something like the pictures I make with my crayons, and how would I feel if someone destroyed my art work? But the photographs did disappear and I was not to see them again until a half a century later.
My sister was the first to unearth this album and notice the carefully observed details and the natural aesthetic my father employed in composing these photographs. I offered to scan them all and restore them. Before doing that however, I sat down with my father in order for him to identify as many as he could. Surprisingly, he was able to pinpoint the time and location of a number of these. Others were vaguely referenced as "somewhere in North Africa." That was back in 2011.
Six years of life-changing events later and I am back on this project. Looking more closely at these photographs, the details amazed me. There were some which are indeed frightening. Others were sanguine and charming. Some captured the angst of war. My mother was correct in that despite the subject, these were little black and white miracles of art.
I have begun the process of creating drawings based upon these photographs. I was inspired to do so when I noticed a kinship with how my father, Walter Kozachek Sr., arranged the elements in a composition and also in his choices of subject matter. What we shared was the subject of ordinary people at work and the composition of placing objects of action or interest towards the periphery. An example was his photograph of a street scene in what appears to be southern Italy - maybe Sicily. The boys scrambling on top of the horse carriage entered stage left, a man with one leg hugged the far right. The scene in the middle had a certain taunting ambiguity to it. What was in the envelope that the woman handed the sailors riding in the carriage? The other woman in profile with her arms folded did not look particularly happy. What was she thinking?
In reinterpreting this composition as a large charcoal drawing, I brought the horizon line down, which necessitated drawing an imagined row of windows and other compositional elements in the upper part of the drawing. The drawing is thirty inches wide, and because I typically work no larger than eighteen inches this took me a while to execute. But these drawings need to be large, as World War Two had its own epic proportions.
With a book on the Mediterranean campaign on its way, and my father’s endorsement of this project, an homage in drawings is coming in to being.
I have been mining an unusual source of material for my large drawings - old black and white photographs that my father took of ports in North Africa and Italy during World War Two. I was fascinated by these photographs not only for their content and drama but for their composition as well. Although I have been altering the composition in my final drawings in order to make them more "my own," there is not much work I have to do other than get the gist of the scene on to paper and work from there.
