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!"

A Seat at the Table: Pinocchio Comes Alive

My next painting for my upcoming group exhibition, "A Seat at the Table: The Chair as Aesthetic and Social Construct," was based upon an actual scene at an Italian restaurant not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The name of the restaurant now escapes me (I don’t have my husband’s acumen for cognitive retention of personal culinary history - he remembers the time and location of just about every place he has eaten!), but the atmosphere was memorable. There was a wooden flag embellishing what looked like an enormous old fireplace. It took me a moment to recognize this as an American flag, as the stripes were blue and white instead of red and white. High above the flag, resting upon the mantel, or perhaps a very fancy wainscotting, was a wooden pinocchio. He cut a fine figure with his long nose and his painted eyes. He was dressed in red shoes and a blue shirt with red buttons. On his head he sported a tall, white pointed cap.

I was instantly taken by this wooden pinocchio, so while waiting for my meal, pulled out my sketchbook and made a quick drawing of him. The marionette seemed to have some age, which gave him some added quaintness. A quick Google search pointed to him being perhaps a vintage item from the 1960's.

As I worked with pencil on paper I wondered if there was a sardonic statement being made with this long nosed Pinocchio hovering over a blue American flag. I noticed that Pinocchio was dressed in red, white and blue as well. Certainly contemporary politics and media wars would make this juxtaposition rather apt, although not knowing the restaurant manager’s inclinations it would be difficult to ascertain whether right or left wing was being satirized here.

It took me a few months to finally paint this scene -I first saw it in August of this year. Apart from the delays of having other work ahead of this one in my studio pipeline, I just could not settle on whether this should be a drawing or a painting. I finally settled on a compromise by making a mostly black and white painting with black outlines. I thought of the muted tones and black outlines in the paintings of my former teacher, Leland Bell here.

While finishing up this painting, I listened to Bach Cantatas on Youtube. Perhaps fitting for a painting about duplicities, the Youtube cantatas were frequently interrupted by annoying ads from Epoch News. I guess their ad space that was revoked from social media platforms was reallocated to Youtube. It almost made me want to paint Pinocchio’s smile upside down.

I kept Pinocchio’s silly grin, however, but did change his eye, albeit partly by an uncoordinated accident. The eye, originally looking blankly forward, now cast a sidelong, furtive glance at the viewer. It was amazing how this tiny detail changed the entire tone of the work. Originally the painting was about chicanery - a nation fooled. With that eye upon the viewer, Pinocchio seems to now say, "And you as well, yes?"

The tall chair seen here was adapted from a work of art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's furniture collection: The chair designed by Charles Rohlfs  (1853 - 1936) and Anna Katherine Green (1846 - 1935).  According to the museum sign, the pierced decoration on the tall back of the chair represents the cellular structure of oak - a bit of truth at the core of an otherwise duplicitous painting.

A Seat At the Table - Small Preparations

In preparation for my upcoming group exhibition, A Seat at the Table: The Chair as Aesthetic and Social construct, I am beginning by working on small previously completed paintings that could use an addition of a chair or an embellishment upon an existing one.

To this end I added a chair, as well as a small cat, to a painting of a woman seated at a table. The chair is an historic one, based upon my studies of wooden chairs from ancient Egypt. The chair was part of the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I thought that its black and white starkness would play out well against the black and white cat. In order to understand the structure of this particular chair, I spent some time at the museum sketching it, adoring this ancient object more and more the longer I studied it.

The small painting of the man with the large black down jacket was completed many years ago at a museum in Germany. He was seated across from a small, uninspiring stool, but with an intriguing glimpse into a small alcove with a stained glass window.

I began my hunt for exotic chairs at the Ontario Museum of Art in Toronto and was not disappointed by what I found. The African art collection housed an elaborately carved beaded Yoruba throne chair. This made its way into the small painting, almost overshadowing everything, yet curiously having a relationship to the colors in the stained glass window towards the interior of the painting.

Lastly, a painting that I had made of an attic interior in a British cottage beckoned for a better chair. For this chair I looked no further than my own home, and an old oak office chair that I had carefully refinished with hours of sanding and applications of teng oil. I painted this from life directly into the painting.

A Seat at the Table, Drawing Two: The Roebling Chair

A Seat at the Table: The Chair as Aesthetic and Social Construct

Drawing Number Two: Puppets  Charcoal and pastel on paper

The recently completed drawing above began as a poorly executed study of a male model reclining on a settee. This drawing remained in a storage portfolio literally for decades. For the most part this was due to my frugality and not wanting to discard a perfectly good piece of high quality drawing paper. I was also somewhat intrigued by the possibility of some day reinventing this foreshortened figure.

An exhibition opportunity, scheduled for January, 2020, in Spartanburg, called this drawing back out of retirement. Because this exhibition is based upon the theme of chairs, the first change I made in the composition was to turn the settee into a large chair. My source of inspiration was no ordinary chair, however. I reinterpreted a special chair that my father had stored in his basement, which then made its way some time later to a sibling's attic.

It was the chair I knew as the Roebling chair.  The manufacturer, according to my brother's research was the early Morris company.  This particular chair was a fancy version of this recliner, replete with carved lion's heads.  The  story I was originally told, which may or may not be apocryphal, was that this chair was commissioned either by or for the young Augustus Roebling. He was returning from London and the chair was to be a comfortable place of respite for him in his New York home. Unfortunately, Augustus never made it back to New York, because the ship he boarded in London was the fateful Titanic! 

The story of how my father came to acquire this chair was a little murky, but seemed to involve a partial payment from one of his clients. My mother was always a little frightened of this chair, and I must confess that some of that trepidation rubbed off on my psyche as well. It was an unspoken feeling between us that the chair was somehow bad karma. Keeping it might entice the ghost of Augustus to come and sit in it. I have to laugh at myself here to have also been so affected because if I were to rate my level of mysticism and spirituality on a scale of one to ten, it might be about .5. Yet such is the power of the history that an object carries, with or without actual ghosts.

In changing what was originally bed- like in to something more chair -like, the figure was immediately dwarfed. Oddly, the figure seemed to change gender as well. Then she lost her personhood and became merely a puppet, with strings attached. I added another little puppet in the background as well, so that the scene took on an aura of a backstage event. Then things got a little eerie as I changed the open mouthed lion heads originally on the Roebling chair into hands - hands pleading for rescue from the frigid sea? It is indeed haunting.

Another curious addition to the drawing is the shoe, obviously too large for the puppet on the chair. I often think bilingually when using imagery and the shoe is no exception. For in Chinese, one of my adopted languages, the word for shoe is a homophone for the word for disaster.  Yet is also a homophone for harmony and rhymes, as well as slanting and being in the company of someone or something else.  Changing the tone, xie for shoe can also mean a place of rest - a rest that poor Augustus would never find in this chair.

Transformations and Translations: Rising Heart

I. P. Stanback Museum
Transformations and Translations: The Art of Una Kim and Janet Kozachek, Part 2
On view August 11 - September 30, 2019
Meet the Artists September 19, 5:30 - 7PM
The Mixed Media Work, Rising Heart

There are art works that are intentional, and others in which one simply applies intent on to an accidental finding.  Much of my work falls in to the latter category.  When I worked with found object mosaic assemblage, it was the object itself that was re-purposed into art. In recent years, due to space limitations, I often borrow objects that inspire art work .  Or in the case of the art work Rising Heart, find something, then give it away.

The mixed media work, Rising Heart, previously labeled Soaring, was the result of finding a peculiar piece of wood on my walk in a nearby park.  The piece of wood appeared to be a knot that had fallen off a tree.  I took the peculiarly shaped knot and placed it on a rock.  It bore an uncanny resemblance to a bird with its’ head tossed back and wings extended.  I took some photos then brought it back home to show my husband.

     “Why didn’t you just bring the piece back home?”  He asked.  I mumbled something about feeling that I was unworthy of it because it looked like something ethereal.  Fortunately, my husband convinced me to bring the piece back in order to study it more carefully.  I did and set the piece up in my sun room/photo studio to take some interesting shots.  These shots are of either side of the piece positioned on a rock.  I posted the photos on Facebook and they caught the attention of another artist, Tyrone Geter, who expressed interest in having this object after I finished with it.  I agreed, which meant now I had to do something with it before giving it up. 

I was inspired to paint loosely, with splattered ink and spontaneously rendered spots of oil pastels.  The bird in the painting rose off the rock, as if flying.  So I named it Soaring.  I then packed the wooden knot up and shipped it off to Tyrone, who claimed that there was something almost frightening about the intense look of this crying bird. 

I did not find the wooden knot frightening but felt something poignant and sad about the hole in its center, a hole that I retained in my drawing because it seemed a necessary part of this piece - the hollow in one’s heart.  Did it signify loss?  Freedom?  It did strike me at one point as being like a Buddhist relinquishing of earthly desires.  Yet despite this, I eventually did decide to fill that empty void in the bird’s chest.  I filled it with a stamped design after listening to an interview of a student activist survivor of the Tian An Men massacre of thirty years ago. 

For weeks I had been fearing this anniversary.  I recalled the anxiety I felt all those years ago as the students gathered in Tian An Men square in 1989.  I was in graduate school at the time at Parsons School of Design.  But I had come to New York from a previous life in the People’s Republic of China, where I had completed several years of study in Chinese art and language, two of those years at the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Art.  In 1989, the large Goddess of Democracy that was wheeling about the square, had been created by the sculpture department of that school.   
The terrible, bloody crackdown that followed the protests made me fear for the lives of people I might have known.  On television, I thought I saw two people I recognized, running away from bullets!  Two years later, after returning to China, and to my old alma mater, I did come across those two - they had survived!  My professors had survived as well.  And many of the students who I knew may have survived as well, since I knew them back in 1985.  But I will never know for certain and it always remained a hollow in my heart, as did the fact that in the early 1990's the old CAFA on Wang Fu Jing street was torn down and moved to a place on the outskirts of Beijing.  That remained something of a sentimental void as well - no old haunt to go back to - that scrappy old place around the corner from the Beijing Opera School.   Today, if you look on their website, of course there is no mention of the old location and of course no mention of the school’s involvement in the uprising of 1989 - it feels like a hole torn out of cultural and personal history.

It is 2019, and all those old activists of 1989 looked so much older in their interviews, which made me feel my age as well.  But there was one thing that an aged protester said in her interview that somehow gave me hope.  When asked if the risks and sacrifices made so many years ago were worth it, she replied “Yes.”  After hearing this,  I took up my carving tools and carved a little stamp out of soft linoleum.  I put red ink on it and stamped it onto the hollow space in the bird’s chest in my drawing.  It reads “heart.”

   

A Seat at the Table: Group Exhibition at Main Street Gallery in Spartanburg

Good news!  My proposal for a group exhibition on the theme of chairs has been accepted by Main Street Artists, a gallery in Spartanburg, South Carolina.  The exhibition, A Seat at the Table: The Chair as Physical and Social Construct, will feature the work of Nathaniel Wallace, Lee Malerich, Janet Orselli, and myself.  This will open in January, 2020.  Looks like I will be busy exploring the structure and concept of a chair all this autumn.  Above: The Vertigo Day, charcoal and pastel on paper.
*I will post more specific times and dates in a few weeks.