Epiphany at the I.P. Stanback Museum

A new exhibition on the theme of epiphany will open this week at the I.P. Stanback Art Museum at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. The exhibition will be on view through December, 2018. A number of my drawings and mosaics will be included. Here is a selection:
Annunciation
Pencil on Paper, 5" x 8.5"


An annunciation by its very nature evokes epiphany. A life is there that previously was not and all will change as a consequence. This drawing was based upon a fragment of a faded wall painting, the details worn away. I added the sumptuous decorations.


Faith Healer
Pencil on Paper,8" x 10"
Faith Healer is a drawing that was reworked after an experience. The initial sketch was a drawing after a religious icon. I had muscle spasms in the waiting room of a doctor’s office that were so severe as to cause a seizure like reaction. A kind woman came forward and claimed to be a faith healer. She laid her hands on me and my body did feel a flow of something that I can only describe as "grace." That a complete stranger would express empathy for another stranger enough to take action was profoundly moving. When I returned home, I picked up the drawing of the icon that I was working on and included those hands.







The Empty RoomCharcoal on Paper, 9" x 12"

My poetry book, Moments in Light and Shadow, is written in Euroboric style, with the last poem a mirror of the first one. The first poem, First Step, depicts a woman in a room with an embroidered foot on the table in front of her. What follows is a series of poems about single people alone in interiors. The final poem, The Empty Room, repeats the motif of the foot, a trace within a trace.












Three Intruding Fanatics One Throwing a Rock
Ceramic, Metal, Glass, Stone, 14" x 18"
The compositional figure - ground relationships in my mosaics has roots in both eastern and western academic art training. Many of the small hand made tiles in my mosaics have an ancient form of Chinese writing, call zhuan shu, stamped on them. These are stamped from stone seals that I learned how to carve while a graduate student in Beijing. Many of these have pithy yet poignant messages on them in a script that at one time was thought to have apotropaic powers. The two stamped tiles in this mosaic read "With a Home" and "Without a Home." Jia, or "home" in Chinese characters can have a second meaning that refers to a school of thought, or an ideology. Read in this sense, one could interpret the tiles as signifying opposing ideologies. This mosaic was in fact originally created after being exposed to excessively volatile rhetoric over two opposing ideas about the purpose of an art exhibition.

Links:
http://www.scsu.edu/researchoutreach/ipstanbackmuseumandplanetarium.aspx