A Return to the Crypt of Palermo

The pile of unfinished work on my easel from December 2017 is now finished. So I’ve turned once again to other projects. Yesterday that entailed returning to my father’s WW2 photo album. I have been reinterpreting these photographs from 1944 in to large charcoal drawings. Some of these photographs are sublime. Others are sad and frightening.

While in Sicily during the Mediterranean campaign, my father visited the Capuchin crypt in Palermo. There he took several photographs of the mummies hung on the wall. This week, I am peering in to that crypt from 1944. I asked my father recently why he took those photographs. His answer was a characteristic no nonsense one: "Because they were ugly."

Indeed they were. The mummies were hung upright against the walls of the crypt, and, in a fashion making them even more ghoulish, dressed in formal clothing. These mummies can still be seen in Palermo and are apparently an offbeat tourist attraction. I checked their holdings on line and saw some familiar figures. They look like their environment has been spruced up a bit since 1944. My father’s photographs from that time show some crumbling in the walls and what looks like wire barriers.

As I began my crypt series, I retained the damaged look and the wire barriers by drawing in splattered ink on a large crisp piece of ivory drawing paper with a nice deckle edge. I selected a figure that was particularly gruesome looking to me. It is one I remembered coming across over fifty years ago in the photo album I discovered as a child as an intrepid explorer of other people’s closets.

To my surprise, as I worked on this piece, it engendered the same discomfort that I experienced all those years ago and I wondered if I would even be able to finish it. Like most art works, though, working continuously on the composition caused the subject to diminish and the medium to grow. The charcoals made nice scratch marks as they stumbled over the ink. The oil in the Chinese ink I used caught the light at different angles and livened the drawing with reflective properties. Pastels added some softness and modulations. Stepping back from the finished work, though, I have to agree with my father’s assessment "they were ugly."
http://www.palermocatacombs.com/

Bottles...Continued

More paintings from stone and linoleum blocks. The inspiration came from looking at collections of ancient glass bottles in the Princeton University Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Although I studied these collections, none of the bottles were exactly represented in the paintings. The closest representation is the Persian bottle that I saw in the Philadelphia Museum.

This one at right is only four inches square.  The stamped design, which is barely visible, is the word for "honesty" in Chinese.  Some others include this painting with a background stamped several times with the word for "flying."  The stopper on the bottle reads "Good Health."  I imagine the bottle must contain some curative elixir.  Thinking of elixir, and Valentine's Day quickly approaching, I started thinking of that old song from the 1960's "Love Potion Number Nine."  With that, I began to carve heart shapes out of linoleum and print those of paintings of little bottles.  These too are small, no larger than 5" x 7."  This would, however, make these little bottles actually life size, for the ancient perfume bottles that inspired them were about that size.

The Belated Answer to a Dialogue Across Media with Susan Lenz

Ten years ago, I had a pleasant visit with the fiber artist Susan Lenz. We were trying something unusual for western artists - an art dialogue across media but on the same page. I had always wanted to try something like this as I was familiar with art dialogues in China; one artist creates a painting and another artist writes on it, or sometimes they paint on the same piece of paper. But the rugged individualism of American art would make such a process almost unheard of here. Yet we persisted. I brought out some abstract paintings and Susan attached embroideries. I came across these things again and realized that the dialogue was never finished. I made the art statement. Susan commented on it with an embroidery. Only now I realized that in keeping with the tradition I had learned, it was up to me to answer the embroidered comment. So this week I have - one decade after the fact. (Speed is not something I count as one of my feature qualities. )

The embroidered comments in my abstract paintings I found, as I revisited them, were rich with shapes, textures and details. My answers to these embroidered comments, then, was to work those shapes and details back in to the paintings. In the first work this was accomplished through stamped designs and textured surfaces. Coppery looking threads were used in most of the fiber fragments so I threaded iridescent copper paint over the surface of the surrounding paintings. In the second completion, I added a square collage with a rubbing of a Chinese character from one of my previous carvings. The claw and whisker like additions prompted me to change the title of this work from "The Medal," to "Claws and Whiskers."


The last collaborative painting/embroidery was something of a challenge. It was an embroidery of a leaf over my painting of blue with red and white stripes. This collaborative work was entitled "Flag." My answer to the added leaf was to print stamped leaf designs in to the painted surface. Hidden in Susan’s embroidery were tiny designs in black thread almost like a cartouche. My answer to that was to write in Chinese characters on the flag using the same thin black thread like strokes. I believe all of these works are finally complete, unified and answered.

Enjoy the images of the challenge and these belated answers to the challenge.

Messages in Bottles

Happy New Year! At least it finally seems like New Year in my studio, for the large pile of unfinished work from December 2017 that was on and around my easel has finally been finished - twenty small paintings, one drawing, and three collages.

The work began with a homemade Christmas gift - a stone seal inscribed with Chinese seal script for a writer friend of mine. Every now and then I am inspired to carve one in the traditional techniques I learned years ago as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. Carving these blocks has always had a calming effect and it seemed a fitting way to end a tumultuous year.

In carving this last stone block, I decided to try the fancy method of carving the top and sides as well as the reverse image for printing on the bottom. Because my friend is an avid collector of all things cat, living and visages, I carved images of cats on the sides of the stone. Two sides were faces reminiscent of the tao tieh tiger masks found on ancient bronzes. The body of the cat embellished the remaining two sides.

I took prints of the sides of the stone, as well as a rubbing of the Chinese character "mao" on the top. I made ten sets each on white mulberry paper and golden bamboo paper. Getting ambitious about what else I might do with these images, I made prints on paper in variously colored acrylic paints. The piles of prints remained on my easel while I traveled north to visit friends, relatives, and museums.

On my museum trip, I made several studies of Byzantine, Persian, Greek and Roman glass bottles. They fascinated me. I knew that I could use these forms in some way when I returned home.

Back in my Orangeburg studio, I set to work painting the stone prints in to bottle shapes, sometimes using previously carved linoleum stamps for added embellishments.  I made about twenty of these. A nice collection of work, which I will post about in

increments.