Rethinking the Pre-Raphaelites

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I had the chance to watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. Watching Frodo and his friends linger with the elves in Rivendell, ride with the horsemen of Rohan, or fight Orcs and Balrogs and other dark foes, I found myself both entranced and in a state of cognitive dissonance. The ethereal women in long, flowing gowns; the slightly disheveled, handsome swordsmen in cloaks and boots; the earthy dwarves and mysterious sorcerers all inhabited a world that was first envisioned by a group of artists who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Schooled in a minimal, rational Modernist aesthetic, I was taught to disdain the florid, overwrought emotionalism of the Pre-Raphaelites. The writers of my art history books put these Englishmen, yearning for a medieval world that never was, outside the mainstream of progressive art, their movement a misshapen eddy that died out as rapidly as it arose. And, like the good student that I was, I accepted the storyline that marginalized them while putting their French contemporaries, Corot and Courbet, at the center.

It was easy to do that because I really do thrill to the ascetic emptiness of Barnett Newman’s zips, the un-nameable depths of Rothko’s color fields, the hard-edged logic of Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings. But as I learned to articulate the goals and glories of Modernism, my equally passionate taste for excess never went away. It just went on flowing silently underground, watering my own work, which never quite looks like the spare, austere paintings that I so much admire.

What I realized as I watched the Lord of the Rings is that my own work draws from the same well that inspired William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, and, yes, J.R.R. Tolkien. The graceful curves, fanciful animals, dense patterning, and formalized flowers and vines that glow out of the pages of illuminated manuscripts inform my imagination as much as it did theirs. The medieval world, with all its spiritual mysteries, is an endless source of images and ideas for me, as much as it was for them.

And so I must begin to reconsider the Pre-Raphaelites, to learn what they have to teach me about looking, about art, about myself. What an adventure!  

Learning to Print

first print from plex plate

Two weeks ago, I went to the first session of a two-part class in drypoint at Pyramid Atlantic. The knowledgeable, patient, good-humored instructor showed us five students how to make marks on plates using gravers, roulettes, and drypoint needles; how to bevel the edges with a file so to protect both our hands and the paper from being sliced by sharp corners; and how to ink a plate, wet the paper, and run them through the etching press. Sending us home with a small plexiglas plate, a larger one of copper, and a wood-handled drypoint needle, he told us to come back the following week ready to print.

second print from plex plate after reworking

Since then, I've spent hours scratching lines into both plates, trying to figure out how to adapt my hard-won understanding of color and paint into a new language of value and line. I started by working on the plex, which is both softer and more brittle than copper. It also has the virtue of being transparent, so placing it over a white piece of paper allows me to see a shadow of the image as it emerges at the end of the needle. Still, since I have never worked in this way before, I don't really know how deeply I need to cut into the plate, or how much cross-hatching is really needed to make some areas as dark as I hope they will be.

first print from copper plate

The copper is both easier and more difficult than the plex. I love its warm glow and the solid feel it has in my hands. As I draw, the copper sometimes seems to part, allowing the needle to move smoothly in the direction I intend. But at other moments, some irregularity in the metal catches the point, and a line I see in my mind as a smooth, elegant curve becomes in reality a crooked, harsh barb that cannot be erased. Like sin, which can be forgiven but still changes the course of one's life, these ugly lines will never disappear, but can be incorporated with grace into the final image.

print from reworked copper plate 

The shiny surface makes it impossible to see the entire image all at once. I move the plate around, but at every angle some of the lines reflect the light brightly while others sink invisibly into the surface. I keep on working, alternating between frustration and delight, allowing the rhythm of repetitive, short strokes to take me into a meditative state.

Last week, the results of these experiments were be revealed by the pressure of the press, forcing the soft, wet paper into the ink-filled lines of the plate. I was surprised by the range of tones, by the reversal that I had failed to take account of, and by the appearance of lines in the print that I had not seen on the plate. Having done this much, I can see just the faintest outlines of how much more there is to do. It feels like a good start to a very long journey. The question is, is it a journey that I really want to take?

Seven Deadlies

Karen Swenholt, Gossip Tree (Envy),
2008, terra cotta and found wood

A few days ago, Karen Swenholt spoke to an overflow audience about her show, The Seven Deadlies, currently on exhibition in the Dadian Gallery. In Karen's visionary world, trees and people share juicy confidences, the earth is an angry woman with storm clouds gathering overhead, Adam creates himself without need of the divine hand or breath, and the crucified Lamb of God really is a lamb.

Karen Swenholt, Lamb of God (Redemption),
2002, terra cotta and steel

These elegant, attenuated figures seem to exist in some parallel universe, where nothing is quite what it seems to be and everything quivers on the edge of revelation. Each sculpture is simultaneously alluring and repugnant, the artist's sure hand grounding each pose in an knowing command of both anatomy and gravity, while defying both for expressive effect. Here, there are no easy answers, and grace, far from being cheap, is infinitely costly.

In her artist's talk, Karen said that we should not condemn those who commit the sins that she depicts, but rather see them, as Christ does, with compassion. In this show, the ugliness of sin is redeemed, transformed by the artist's hand and heart into moments of revelation.

To see more photographs of The Seven Deadlies in the Dadian Gallery's Flickr gallery, click here.

Here and Now

A few days ago, I went to Philadelphia to see the acclaimed show, Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus. This exhibition was inspiring and illuminating, filled with information about Rembrandt's technical achievements as well as his innovative depiction of Jesus as a portrait of a living human being rather than an instance of a received visual type. In the seven, small portrait sketches of a young man described as most likely a Jewish neighbor of the artist and the painting called "Head of Christ" derived from them, the humanity of Jesus overshadows his divinity. This is Jesus as sensitive, thoughtful, and vulnerable -- not an icon or an idea, but a person that one might encounter on the street. In this remarkable departure from tradition, Rembrandt changed the way that people imagine Jesus even today.

The Rembrandt show was not the only treasure in the museum, however. While I was waiting for my ticketed entrance time, I stopped in to a gallery on the lower level where they had a show called Here and Now: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs by Ten Philadelphia Artists. I was especially entranced with a set of prints called “Round Robin” by Astrid Magdalen Bowlby. The suite of six etchings were all made from the same plate, reworked over and over again until the initially spare, open image became a dense, dark black that pulsated with the nearly-invisible forms of the previous states. It seemed to be a metaphor for the way that everything that happens leaves traces in our lives, however obscure the past may become.

Another intriguing set of prints were Serena Perrone's  "Phantom Vessels and the Bastion of Memory V (fron the In the Realm of Reverie series I - VII, 2004-2008)". These large-scale woodcuts suggested some earlier, mythical, and slightly disturbing time, with serious-faced children playing in an unnatural landscape, or  appearing as disembodied heads peeking out of trees, . A large, open portion of the frosted mylar, left untouched by surrounding the dense black of the woodcut, suggested a dreamy river upon which floated delicate silverpoint drawings of sailing vessels in full rig. As I looked at it, it seemed to speak of the tension between the awareness of a current, all-too-real danger and the ethereal, entrancing memory or hope of a better time or place.

It seemed that no matter which way I turned in that space, yet another clever, technically excellent, visually seductive artwork caught both my eye and my imagination. I was surprised and oddly pleased that all the photographs had been printed, digitally and impeccably, in large formats that allowed close inspection of each detail without any visible grain. I was delighted by the inventiveness and playful seriousness of Mia Rosenthal's drawing that visually catalogued all the breakfast cereals found in a certain supermarket, or a watercolor painting by the Dufala brothers that depicted hundreds of liter-sized soft-drink bottles floating improbably in an indeterminate space. Mostly, I was excited to see that there in Philadelphia -- and, I suspect in pretty much any city -- there are so many artists who engage the eye and the mind in equal measure. Such artists invite us to follow them on a journey which, like Rembrandt's exploration of the face of Christ, honors tradition while departing from outworn forms that keep us from living in the present.