(I’m a) Stranger to Kindness: The Drawings of Norma Hoffmann

Go, pencil! Faithful to thy master’s sighs!

   Go-tell the Goddess of the fairy scene…

-Anne Radcliffe

Cabin, 3.75 x 5.875″

Like an apparition out of a Victorian Gothic novel, Norma Hoffmann’s fey, unsettling presence haunted the farmlands and banks of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts during the last decades of the 19^th century.  Aside from an occasional police report for trespassing and public drunkenness (erroneously – in reality her erratic behavior was due to her emerging psychotic breakdown and possible schizophrenia), and a single line obituary in the Concord Enterprise from 1904, there is very little on record to confirm that Norma Hoffmann ever existed.  What we are left with is a small, remarkable trove of drawings done in graphite, none of which exceeds 8 x 10 inches in size.

Although there is no extant birth certificate, town records show a “Nora Hoffman” born in 1872 to German-Austrian parents who probably arrived as part of the large influx of German immigrants during the second half of the 19^th century. By 1870, German-born farmers made up about one third of agricultural industry in the Northeast.  These included the Hoffmann family (an extremely common name literally meaning “landed farmer”).  Her parents were probably among the hundreds of thousand Germans who endured long, circuitous, but cheap routes through Great Britain to the US in the years following the German Revolutions of 1848, ultimately landing at Castle Garden Immigration Depot in lower Manhattan, just across the bay from what was to become Ellis Island a few decades later.

Comprised almost entirely of Protestants, these German immigrants came to embody the disposition today referred to as the New England work ethic.  This can be loosely characterized by staunch, physical labor combined with a dour, Yankee piety (originating with the humorless fervor of the Massachusetts puritans nearly two centuries prior), and with the first generation immigrant’s wariness of domestic politics and public involvement.  It was for the latter reason, combined with a fairly lax system of record-keeping on the part of the town for servants and farmhands, that Norma’s birth was not recorded until she began attending school in 1881.  Along with her two brothers, Moritz and Hermann, and a sister Lotte, Norma is listed as being born to Dörthe and Hermann Hoffmann in 1872.  The date’s accuracy is dubious.  It is highly unlikely that all four children were born within the same year, as recorded nine years later.  For one, the arrival of quadruplets in the small county would almost certainly have been noted in local papers or highlighted in town records.  Furthermore, it was not unusual for city clerks, overwhelmed by the boom in immigrant births, to lump children of the same family, or even different families from the same farms together under one birth date as a time cutting measure.  At best, the date helps place Norma’s birth somewhere between 1869 and the “official” date of 1872.

Photograph thought to be Norma Hoffmann, circa 1898 (courtesy Concord Town Archives)

Nothing is known of Norma’s childhood or early adulthood excepting the death of her sister Lotte from Pneumonia in the winter of 1880 as recorded in town records.  Most likely she lived and worked on one of the six active farms in Concord together with her entire family.  No written records of her exist before 1896, when she was somewhere between 24 and 27 years old.  At this point a few small notes in the constabulary broadsheets of the Concord Enterprise and the Middlesex Patriot appear recording the above-mentioned complaints of trespassing and “drunkenness” by local landowners.  None of these led to arrest, however, as it seems she would always retire when asked.  She soon became a local fixture, and was generally regarded as a harmless, if unsound, eccentric.  Her presence was generally tolerated or ignored altogether.

The turn of the century saw a rapid decline in her mental health.  By her late twenties her increasingly unkempt appearance and erratic behavior (including incoherent rants, and a penchant for walking barefoot in all weather) began to arouse wariness – if not outright fear – in her neighbors.  So too did her habit or appearing unexpectedly in private yards and farmlands at any hour, day or night, with pencil, paper, and a small wooden box on which she would sit and diligently sketch for hours on end. According to one complaint, she was seen sketching outside a private residence on a November evening “past the stroke of midnight wearing nothing but a filthy white gown and no shoes to cover her feet.”

In examining her drawings, it is worth dividing them into categories, as her style, and later her subject matter, shifted over the course of her short-lived output.

The Small Drawings

By far the most numerous examples of Hoffmann’s work are small drawings, ranging in size from 3 ½ x 6” to 5 ½ x 8”.  Many of the scenes can be positively identified as landscapes and homesteads within Middlesex County.  These include houses, cabins and streams; pastoral views of Walden Pond, and hybrid landscapes featuring humble local architecture adorned with decidedly non-native, likely invented craggy mountainous growths and backgrounds of massive rolling hills. Hoffmann probably began these drawings in situ, adding the adornments both for compositional effect and to gratify her own taste for Romantic landscape (a popular subject at the time).  The scenes are sometimes peopled with farmers or household servants in moments of repose and communion: a woman stands in front of a family farm holding her infant, accompanied by another young girl; a man stands outside his modest log cabin and regards a flock of geese with familiarity; a mother and daughter walk along the yard of a lakeshore home holding hands.  As an unmarried and by all scant accounts solitary (and possibly celibate) woman, these scenes of familial bliss take on an added poignancy, imbued as they are with a distant tenderness where even lone figures find company with wildlife outside their door.

Cabin with Man and Geese, 5.125 x 8.25″

Landscape with Pond and Chimneys, 5.125 x 8.25″

The drawings in this group vary both in style and quality.  In some cases a hard, sharpened pencil yields tremendous detail and depth through an economy of silvery marks.  In others a soft, dull tip produces dirty, uniform patches.   Hoffmann’s sense of depth and perspective can be misleading and frequently faulty, such as in Villa, where a lone figure stands in such relation to the house as to suggest he is not more than three feet tall, while the wispy grass in the background towers to the height of small trees.  It cannot be known whether such inaccuracies were done intentionally in service to composition, or are the result of a naïve hand with little grasp on perspective.  Though untrained, Hoffmann was a tireless practitioner, and the former seems the likelier possibility.  In the same piece, a lapse of continuity occurs where the faded – and definitely invented – mountain moves from right to left across the background and suddenly vanishes when it reaches the tall tree behind the house, leaving an empty void where reality dictates that it should continue. Does this visual hieroglyph suggest that Norma thought its compositional purpose adequately served, or just a clumsy oversight?  Much of the charm lies in that viewers are left to determine these inconsistencies for themselves.  However, so effortlessly do they serve the harmony of the overall pieces that they may go unnoticed altogether.

Villa with Mountains, 5.5 x 7.125″

The Large Drawings

The larger drawings measure 8 x 10” and are dated around 1902 (the year preceding Hoffmann’s breakdown and commitment to the Danvers State Hospital).  Here she eschews the strait forward landscape for visual vignettes consisting of three or four landscape or architectural elements lovingly arranged with a keen attention to composition.  Present also is a newfound confidence and ability in the use of graphite, with sharper, harder pencils producing finer, surer lines and a controlled touch yielding wider tonal ranges. Gone are the direct, occasionally clumsy architectural portraits.  They are replaced now by isolated, often elaborate details fairly dripping with the Gothic and Romantic devices of austere stonework, arches, knotty trees, secluded knolls, gloomy ruins and abandoned shacks.

Rocks on rocks piled, as if by magic spell;

Here scorch’d by lightnings, there with ivy green.

Large Drawing: Cottage Studies, 8.375 x 10.5″

As an untrained “outsider”, it is worth noting that for much of the 19^th century, drawing was considered an essential part of a female education among the upper classes (along with numerous other skills such as piano and embroidery), honed in order to charm potential suitors. Fashionable ladies’ social clubs in which drawing was taught (usually under the tutelage of a mediocre male instructor) provided a social forum under the pretext of practicing line and perspective.  This was a world completely alien to Hoffmann. Her anti-social behavior, to say nothing of her low social standing and impoverishment, excluded her completely from any opportunity to join such society, let alone a formal art class.  She was, however, familiar with many of the customs and mores of the Victorian upper class through her fanatical obsession with literature.  She was a great devotee of Radcliff, Dickens, Sheridan Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins.  The latter, of whose lesser-known novel No Name about a young woman unfairly disinherited of her fortune upon her parents’ deaths who sets about to regain it from the very lowest social strata was (not surprisingly) among her favorites, and her copy of the 1873 edition still survives.  We can only imagine the frustration and painful sense of insignificance she must have felt as she diligently taught herself to draw while learning the manners and customs of the upper classes in solitude through Gothic Bildungsromans.  In these popular, sometimes-formulaic novels, destitute and persecuted heroines undergo a series of trials and setbacks to ultimately rise triumphant over their tormentors.

A keen observer of nature, Hoffmann was also highly attuned to reproductions and the contemporary work being done by the very circles from which she was excluded.  Examples of these were often on view in windows of social clubs or gallery-style boutiques.  Without exception they were copies of classic European works or staid landscapes.  As European vistas become fashionable with the proliferation of tours abroad, the European landscape became a wildly popular subject for its combination of the familiar and the exotic.  Hoffmann was quick to pick up on this trend, purchasing both cheap lithographic reproductions of European scenes and novels by European authors, at that time being translated en mass.  From the formulaic best-selling parlor novels that have vanished over time to the gritty realism of Emil Zola and the penetrating moral and religious existentialism of Dostoyevsky, Hoffmann read whatever she could acquire.  By such means she could in some sense absorb these various sites of Old World decay along with a cosmopolitan knowledge of European culture. While parts of the large drawings depict details observed through local observation, there is no question that many were copied from reproductions of the European vistas she would never see firsthand.  Some were likely invented altogether.

Large Drawing: Lewes Castle, 8.375 x 10.5″

It is worth noting that while she followed these trends with a careful eye, she generally eschewed the predictable and fashionable illustrational approach to the subject matter. Instead she focused on unusual, fragmented compositions and separate, isolated elements.  Excepting a few examples, including a rendering of Lewes Castle in Sussex, England, (certainly copied from a reproduction), or a somewhat clumsily drawn mounted cavalier strait out of Alexandre Dumas (probably invented), these works are all presented in this odd but harmonious manner.  They occupy the sheet not as sketches or disparate studies, but as finished drawings in their own right.

Large Drawing: Fences and Windows, 8.375 x 10.5″

Large Drawing: Romantic Rider, 10.5 x 8.375″

It is the larger work, full of invention and wanderlust that seems to have preceded a mental breakdown for which she became hospitalized in the now-infamous Danvers State Hospital.

Danvers State Hospital

“It’s a pretty simple layout, if you consider a giant flying bat. The main staff building in the middle, the bat body, and slanting off to each side are these crooked bat wings: one for female patients, the other for male.

-Session 9

In 1902 Hoffmann suffered a bout of what would today be likely recognized as severe Bipolar Disorder (typically alternating manic periods consisting of sleepless, euphoric mood elevation followed by periods of suicidal depression).  This condition was complicated by violent fits that, at the turn of the century, were categorized under the blanket moniker of hysteria (or specifically, in her day, “secondary dementia”, roughly akin to schizophrenia).  Contemporary psychiatry would probably apply the label Conversion Disorder to Hoffmann‘s case, where symptoms included loud, violent sobbing and frantic, incessant pacing coupled with the above-mentioned sleeplessness. These episodes were interspersed with near comatose periods during which she confined herself to her bed for days at a time.  In late November Norma’s brother Moritz had her committed.  It is difficult to say if she would have been shielded from this confinement had she come from a more privileged background.

Danvers State Hospital was opened in 1878 in what was then a rural city thirty miles north of Boston.  The town where most of the drowning, stoning and torture took place during the Salem Witch Trials two centuries prior, Danvers is now home to giant shopping malls and endless stretches of retail chains.

In its day the hospital was the largest psychiatric facility in the Greater Boston area, treating extreme psychotic cases such as schizophrenia and catatonia as well as milder forms of mental illness including depression, mania and “hysteria”.  The monstrous red brick Gothic structure is reputed to have inspired H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Asylum (which in turn became the model for the asylum-prison that held the deranged villains of the Batman comics.)  Built in 1874 and opened in 1878, the hospital is famously credited as the birthplace of the pre-frontal lobotomy in the 1930’s. In the 1960’s, amidst reports of inhumane treatment and overcrowding, the facility was permanently closed.

Historical attitudes toward depression and mental illness in general underwent a massive shift at the turn of the century. Since the late 1700’s depression (or melancholy as it was termed until the first decades of the 20^th century) had been associated almost exclusively with brilliant men – the burden and curse resulting from an over-abundance of intellect, creativity and sensitivity. In the late 19^th century, the theory shifted to a view of the malady as a hallmark of the “instability of the fairer sex” (It is worth noting that the word hysteria, dating from the early 17^th century, has it’s roots in the Latin term for “of the womb.”)  In Vienna during the late 1880’s Freud was developing his inflexible doctrine linking all cases of hysteria to sexual trauma, repression, and inhibition. While this may speak more to the patriarchal zeitgeist of the Victorian era than to an accurate sexual demographic of mental illness, it was nonetheless for this reason that over two thirds of mental hospital patients – both extreme and mild cases – were female. As the 19^th century came to a close (almost three decades before the advent of Electro Convulsive Therapy), the most common treatment for females suffering from hysteria was genital massage – either by the physician’s hand, vibrators or water sprays.  The goal was to cause orgasm in the patient in order provide a release from pent-up sexual repression thought to be causing the psychosis.  Alas, we have not a single detail pertaining to Hoffmann’s sexual life outside of the fact that she never married. If there were any sexual relationships, early traumatic encounters or repressed sexual urges, they are forever lost to history and open only to pointless, dubious theorizing based solely on the work.  It is safe to say that such speculation would be a futile exercise.  Further adding to the mystery is that we know nothing of Hoffmann’s stay at the facility.  In 2002 an asbestos removal crew inadvertently disposed of thousands of pages of patient records, eradicating the stories, experiences and treatment histories of thousands of individuals (including Hoffmann). With the disappearance of these records the world has also lost an invaluable insight into the history of American psychiatry seven years before Freud unleashed his theories to an astonished American public at Clark University, permanently altering the course of psychiatric treatment.  We can take heart that the hospital’s superintendent at the turn of the century, Dr. Charles Page, famously declared the routine mechanical restraint of patients cruel, unnecessary and harmful in cases of mental illness.  We can only hope that this assured Hoffmann’s (and countless other individuals’) relatively humane treatment during her confinement.

The Last Drawings

“Bats, rats birds, insects will as soon nest inside a house as out; it is to them a normal growth of the eternal jungle…”

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

Upon her release from the Danvers State Hospital in 1904, where she had stayed for about 18 months, Hoffmann turned almost exclusively to renderings of animals and plants, her days roaming Concord’s farmlands with pencil in hand forever behind her.  Whether this was due to debasing, traumatic treatment at the hands of hospital staff or exposure to physical illness from other patients we will never know.  Her body significantly weakened and her health failing rapidly, she died in June of the following year.  No cause of death is given on her certificate.  Her last drawings consist of subjects she could observe exclusively within the confines of her home:  insects and small rodents (including a rat who seems to have been a pet as she scrawled the moniker “Doc” under his image), tree stumps, rabbits and squirrels (probably observed through her window).  Also among these drawings we find sea lions, penguins and polar bears striking majestic poses, or fossils of extinct paleographic species complete with a budding scientist’s notations of scale.  Without doubt these were copied from books.  The gap in stature between the common, diminutive animals she observed first hand and the foreign, wholly unfamiliar creatures she would never see in her lifetime is dramatic, presenting vast extremes of the exotic and the commonplace.  A shakiness of line and a loss in her ability to render are apparent as well – we are miles away from the controlled shades and sensitive tones of the Large Drawings only two years earlier.  Sadly, this brings strong evidence to a deterioration of motor functioning.  Whether this resulted from administrations preformed during her hospitalization, or a dependence on now outdated psychiatric palliatives such as laudanum or morphine we will never know, although one or both of these possibilities seems likely.  The subject of each drawing is diligently written under its image in a child’s careful hand or a distressingly unsteady scrawl.  Her penchant for compositional organization as seen in the Large Drawings now combines both subject matter and the labeling devices of an amateur naturalist using frequently loopy, demented, or child-like penmanship.  Nevertheless she imparts the same care – complete with fastidious line and a high level of concern with placement on the page – to these drawings as to her earlier work.  For these drawings both sides of the paper were utilized – Hoffmann appears to have became ever more parsimonious in her use of materials.  Of these late drawings, not more than ten examples are known to exist.  They are charming in their earnestness, but present a heartbreaking record of the severe dissolution of motor and mental facilities.

Late Drawing: Paleolithic Creatures, 6.875 x 7.75″

Late Drawing: Paleolithic Creatures (verso)

Late Drawing: “A Sea Lion”, 6.875 x 7.75″

Late Drawing: “A Sea Lion” (verso)

One can talk circles in an attempt to explain Hoffmann’s shift from diligent landscapes and Romantic, pastoral studies to these varied creatures – sniffing and buzzing with life outside her window, or millions of years extinct.  It is tempting, in light of her painfully solitary existence, to ascribe this shift to a yearning attempt at communion with the animal world after having been rejected, ostracized and mentally brutalized by the human one.  But it is equally plausible that these final drawings are the product of a soul weakened, injured, and broken by life, wherein her final energies were employed in service to the habitual, automatic depiction of worlds – however miniscule, insignificant or long-since vanished.

House by a Lake, 5.5 x 8.25″

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Black Valentine

“Love comes in spurts/in dangerous flirts/and it murders your heart/they don’t tell you that part.”

-Richard Hell

“Pleasure has already killed me, transformed and translated me… I am the drunken bee wandered into your household.  You may with courage eject me through the window; or by accident step on me.  Be assured, I’ll feel no pain.”

-Patricia Highsmith

At the beginning of this year I was commissioned by the excellent team of Anne Barrett and Todd Dunton of 30E Design to create a series of works to be sent out as Valentine’s Day gifts for clients, design firms, curators and magazines in New York.  This has become something of a tradition for them and is in its third year (with as many artists having participated – each year they choose someone new).  Suffice it to say that my first impulse was flattery to be chosen, and I readily accepted.  My second impulse was bemusement, as I see little in my work that could inspire the perfunctory, knee-jerk sentiments associated with love demanded of the day.  Of all “holidays”, there is no other that so inspires guilt and shame (in the single or coupled) and throws people (mostly men) into last minute panics of preparation around a day named for some saint (I say somesaint because there were dozens of St. Valentines and it is unclear which holds the honor of the eponymous day, though of all of them were known far more for their sacrifices and martyrdoms than for romantic love).  However, the late 18th century (and there are earlier references in The Canturbury Tales and Hamlet) saw the day gradually associated with sentimental romanticism, and by the 20th century has been shamelessly propagated by the greeting card and candy industries.  Of course it is very fashionable to deride Valentine’s day as a “Hallmark Holiday”, but I believe the derision is well founded.  There are activities surrounding the 14th of February more depressing in their ability to rouse half-hearted yet maniacally compulsive acts of appeasement than the worst commercial aspects of Christmas.  Here are a few examples:

• On-line floral delivery arrangements which always cost more than promised as the vase inlcuded in the “deal” is unacceptable in any circumstance – to say nothing of the numerous hidden charges associated with ordering flowers this way (I admit I speak from experience here).   Additionally, most of the flowers come from Central American sweatshops where a job smuggling heroin in one’s ass to be digested later seems like the better gig (as attested in the 2004 film “Maria Full of Grace”).
• Restaurants contending with pleading men for last minute reservations and scrambling to divide the entire house into a series of dueces, each adorned with the token rose (or worse, a carnation) and creating annoying desserts for two.  (On the upside, for the restaurant industry at least – the men are quite free witht their money on this night.)
• Public radio making insidious but transparent attempts at tricking listeners into believing that a torturous, guild-laden fund drive is actually a lucky opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by ordering flowers for an exorbitant rate to “help support the news.”  (I think they pull this on Mother’s Day as well.)
• CVS and Wallgreen’s lining their shelves with heart-shaped boxes of candy and offering buy-one-get-one-free deals (which seem especially puzzling given the circumstance, although my friend Ed has suggested that one is for the intended sweetheart, while the other is for the slob who bought them to consume on the car ride home).

No patrons of insipid sentimentality, Anne and Todd made it clear that they had no intention of sending out anything containing the traditional drek associated with a normal Valentine.  I give them great credit for the idea itself: a Valentine as a professional gift is far more clever, unexpected, and likely to be viewed than the perfunctory Christmas card (with which most companies find themselves inundated each December with words and gifts carefully skirting any denominational references and simply offering good tidings for the new year).  As to Valentine’s Day and my obvious contempt for the holiday, I should admit – so as not to be too disingenuous – that I make free use of hearts, flowers, and other trappings of Victorian schoolgirl embroidery, folk art and benign, simplistic symbols or icons associated with love and pretty-ness throughout my work (can I argue that this is ironic?  Probably not).  For this reason, perhaps their choice in me as their artist was not so far off.  In the interest of clarity, however, one of the first things I asked Anne was if she was aware that my work was becoming increasingly laced with imagery including razor blades, bear traps and prescription drugs (mostly of the Benzodiazepine and SSRI variety), as well as healthy doses of profanity (including the occasional reference to pussy hair and girls peeing).  She told me she was, and that that is why she chose me.  It was in this way we came up with what we began to refer to as the anti-Valentines.

I realize that there is little that is groundbreaking or original in this idea.  A quick browse on etsy will yield endless offerings that cleverly turn any and all traditional sentiments on their heads – throw pillows with phrases like “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me” (my hands are trembling in the temptation to insert a winking emoticon here) or tea-towels eschewing embroidered floral patterns for spread-eagle centerfolds.  There is no dearth of enterprising card companies creating sentiments for jilted lovers, jealous boyfriends, and a variety of sad, frustrated singles sent to by smug coupled friends (the very same people who go to the restaurants with the carnations, surprise each other with FTD deliveries at work and exchange  pajamagrams) who may or may not realize that the whole idea of a gag card of this sort is a cruel means of reaffirming their own tenuous bond.  Nevertheless, on the heels of a divorce, my current mood wavers between general misanthropy and and a bristling confidence in the future (I say this so as not to come across as a complete cynic – I am not).  However, I can say emphatically that as I have and always will shudder at a designated day to acknowledge romantic feelings using chocolate or stuffed animals (often stuffed with chocolate), I could not resist the opportunity to create my own small series of for this odious day.

I began with a walk through the pink card isles of Target and Walgreen’s, where I was saddened but not surprised to see the usual simpering declarations in rhyme along with odd cards featuring puppies (no doubt neutered, conveying a kind of desperate, non-sexual fidelity) and old-timey photos of small children kissing (also calling forth an incongruent portrayal of asexual innocence).  So, finding only disgust as fodder for my project, I set down to work by creating an ultra-traditional border of roses made from etching and woodcut to serve as the framing device for each piece.  Then I set my mind to the content.

Most of the quotes are either paraphrased or ripped off directly from various sources.  My days of writing rhymes are not over, but they are long, irrelevant to the occasion, and probably also pretty bad.   Figuring prominent among the chosen phrases are bits culled mainly from Leonard Cohen and Phillip Roth.  The general vibe I sought out was initially crude (bordering on the pornographic) and wholly cynical.  Anne put the kibosh on the former but not the latter, and it is true than some clients might be put off by a few of my proposed phrases, for which I wouldn’t blame them (Henry Miller’s phrase “I feel like the little boy who had to stop the break in the dike and had nothing but his finger” was just a bit too suggestive, to say nothing of “Your whore’s mouth whispers words you have said a thousand times before to a thousand men.  But that doesn’t matter.  Before me there were no men, and after me there will be none.”  However, “It is enough that you feel”, taken out of context, managed to make the cut*).  Other choices of authors were dismissed early on (by me) for various reasons: Baudelaire just seemed too predictable and histrionic.  The bits from plays by Socrates I was reading at the time had too many incest references, and no one wants to be reminded of any aspect the Oedipus saga when carnal or romantic love is on the table.  Sappho and – as I mentioned – Henry Miller, I’d expected to be shoo-ins, but found in both such unbridled love of life that it detracted from a cryptic mood of gloom and Weltschmerz I wanted to bear down upon the recipients.  And now to the specifics:

Q:  How were they done?  How big are they?  etc.

A: These pieces – I show five examples below – were done using etching and woodcut to create the flower border (as I mentioned above) on 9 x 6″ sheets of gampi “double-sided” paper.  The imagery was embroidered, and I stuck exclusively to bear traps, shackles and hand cuffs, and pharmaceuticals – objects one might (or should) associate with danger, bodily harm, bondage (not necessarily of a sexual variety), and quite, passive addiction.   Some of the text was embroidered, while some was written in ink over banners painted with gouache.

Oh Innocent Beloved, you fail to understand and I can't tell you... but within a year my passion will be dead."

“Sometimes our secrets are all we got (our lies we must defend).”

"Love is the admixture of the merciless with the tender."

"Give me absolute control over every living soul, and lie beside me, baby, that's an order."

"Are You The One That I've Been Waiting For?"

So as the leaden skies and cimmerian gloom of February hangs over us, the hot pinks and reds that build up to February 14th may be Hallmark’s way of reminding us of our real priorities in life.  Whether those are love, spending, or the mollifying of our own lonely souls with dinner with a sweetheart, remains up for a debate I suppose will not be resolved (or really questioned for that matter).

*The quotes by Henry Miller were taken from Opus Pistorum, also called Under the Roofs of Paris, published in 1941 by a Los Angeles bookseller and pornographer who paid Miller a dollar a page to write “an erotic novel.”

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The Memento Mori and Jane Rainwater’s Evil Flowers

“When the cities are on fire with the burning flesh of men, just remember that death is not the end.”

-Bob Dylan

“…and tell ‘em to bring some of them sweet smelling roses/so they can’t smell me as we ride along.”

-old folk ballad (“St. James Hospital”)

 

Memento Mori roughly translates as “Remember you will die.”.  While likely originating in ancient Rome and having concomitant developments in Eastern art, we find its strongest roots (not surprisingly) in Christianity, where fear of Divine Judgement and the and the ever-important salvation of the soul lay at the forefront of everybody‘s mind. This fear-driven mode of thought (which finds parallels in countless insipid, contemporary Evangelical faiths and has wormed its way into contemporary politics) served as a moralizing tool to keep the masses (poor and rich alike – though mostly poor) in line. In days when life was short and lives were cheap, one of life’s few certitudes was a vast, seemingly endless expanse of toil and woe.  With such grim prospects, death was often anticipated as a deliverance from suffering, a reminder of the brevity and meaninglessness of earthly pleasures, luxuries, and achievements, and a promise of the glories and bliss that await on the other side.  For evidence of the tenacity of of this mode of thought in popular culture, see little Todd Burbo’s book “Heaven is for Real” detailing his bullshit brief but wondrous trip to heaven – or more to the point, see the #1 spot on the New York Times best seller list the book holds as of this writing (under non-fiction no less.)   In any case, the image of the memento mori served as an invitation to meditate on the promise of the afterlife, and the importance of piety during this one.  The popularity of books such as these – an entire genre of “coming back” and “Left Behind” titles that smugly warn us to set thy house in order as the day of judgement is nigh – can be read as evidence of a new mode of old fear tactics.

In its mid millenium developments, the genre took many forms – maidens in the flush of life and beauty menaced by Death in the form of skeletons (a theme referred to as Death and the Maiden); depictions of skulls propped upon symbols of earthly wisdom with sands rushing through hourglasses (a heavy-handed reminder of time’s quick passing); scales (serving to remind us of  the balance of Earthly vs. Heavenly priorities); skeletal armies carrying off the living (a theme referred to as Danse Macabre); and less bombastic but no less obvious symbols such as clocks (tempus fugit – “time flies”), candles being snuffed out, or flowers losing their petals as the cold hand of death creeps in.

Memento Mori - Finis Coronat Opus; engraving by Matthaeus Merian 1649. This image contains numerous symbols of death and life's brevity.

Jumping ahead through an 18th century ever-vigilant and obsessed with death and figuring out ever-more creative means of skirting true piety (Goya’s  los Caprichos probably being the crowning achievement during this time), the Romantic age saw a turn towards a more meditative, contemplative view of humanity and life’s transience by placing it in the vast, overwhelming context of the natural world and the cosmos (the work of the painter Caspar David Friedrich being a particularly good example of this).  Largely influenced by Anne Radcliff’s Romantic, proto-Victorian novels in which she seems to have single-handedly invented the trappings of modern Gothicism (locked rooms in labyrinthine castles, hidden corpses and locked-away orphans – see particularly The Mysteries of Udolpho), the Victorian age saw a return of these themes in art (among countless examples I list Edvard Munch, James Ensor and Felician Rops), literature (e.g. Dicken’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood of 1870 and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray of 1898) and music (e.g. Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden of 1824).  Speculations can abound as to the causes for this as the Age of Enlightenment and Industrial Age gave way to a regressive Puritanical fear of the afterlife.  Death held a particular fascination for the Victorians, with their morbid obsession with mourning rituals, and mortality in general.  In fin de siecle Europe, new bohemian theories of free-love brought about rampant syphilis and alcoholism,  causing a backlash both in Europe and the US turning the focus once again to the transience and futility of earthly pleasures.  The advent of psychoanalysis placed particularly heavy interest on the death instinct (thanatos), and the means by which is holds sway over every facet of our lives.

A turn of the century Edwardian photograph depicting "Death and the Maiden"

With the advent of photography, early twentieth century America saw a  proliferation of the mourning portrait photographer.  Often preformed by itinerant tradesmen, early examples of post-mortem photography attempted to divest death of its horrors and sadness, taking great pains to pose the deceased in naturalistic, life-like poses so as to make them appear alive (photographers sometimes even painted the eyes to appear open and alert.)

A Victorian era mourning portrait wherein the dead subject is propped up

Modern medicine and the funerary industry has almost entirely relegated death and dying (once the responsibility of the family, who tended from everything from washing and dressing the dead to making all of the burial arrangements), to designated venues: hospitals, funeral homes, and hospices.  Symbols have come to replace graphic, blunt images of death: sympathy cards;  photos of the deceased when alive and well; and – by far most common during the mourning stage – the ultimate embodiment of life and vitality: flowers.

And this is where the work of Jane Rainwater comes in.  She takes the subject matter of flowers and examines them in their more sinister context – as representations of death, abuse, pillage and colonialism.  Of course, the tradition of flowers as funerary adornments began as fragrant distractions to overpower the smell of decay, and, while modern morticians have obviated the need for olfactory cover-up, the tradition itself has remained, as flowers continue to embody life and rebirth, – independent of their role in death and mourning.

Jane Rainwater "Memento Mori: Spray" woodcut on bleached Thai Mulberry paper, 29 x 22", 2011

Our contact with death today is largely through the media and entertainment.  The majority of wide-release films involve guns, quick, stun-double deaths and exploding cars that would in reality reveal charred corpses among the rubble.  Real death – particularly but not limited to our wars abroad (we can include domestic murders, suicide and accidental deaths as well) has its realities obfuscated through statistics, sterilized in news reports and sublimated in horror films and thriller fiction (which seems to be extending to a younger sector at a staggering pace.)  The new picture of death doesn’t look like death at all.  Every town newspaper has daily reports of local men and women who have died in service, and we are left with a cheery snapshot of a high school student or brand new cadet with the dates of their birth and death below it.

Jane Rainwater "Memento Mori" 2011, gouache on paper 30 x 22"

Jane Rainwater recognizes that what attracts is art that appeals to our sense of comfort or beauty.  Of her work she says “decorative objects are collected and exhibited in the home as status symbols of affluence and refinement. My work engages the viewer with its seemingly innocent decorative delight; yet upon closer examination the work challenges and questions our attraction by revealing darker truths.”  These beautiful, memento mori, initially appearing as complex floral arrangements, reveal themselves upon closer inspection to be writhing strands of barbed wire, bayonets, knives and axes, and guns of every make.  It is a fitting, ironic tribute to the lives destroyed daily in our culture of war – especially one where in the imagery we get is already heavily edited, watered down and finally sugar-coated.  Here we have a new version of Beaudelair’s Fleurs du mal – the “Flowers of Evil” and their “horrible beauty.”

Jane Rainwater "Buttercup Globe", 2010 ink and gouache on paper

The work in her Botanical Tyranny series are often presented as traditional botanical illustrations, though again their content (grenades, bombs and guns) belie an interest in how we came to be familiar with some foreign flora, and the often violent lengths to which colonialists would go to obtain these specimens of beauty.  Once again we see the terror present in the beautiful, and how anyone, from the media strait through Rainwater’s own ironic drawings, can dress up death, war and pillage as something innocuous – or even beautiful.

A Note on the Woodcut

The woodcut (“Spray”, picture above) was carved from a single block measuring 22 x 28 inches (see the photo of the block below.)  It was printed in black Graphic Chemical Perfect Palette black ink on beach Thai Mulberry paper (the sheets measuring 29 x 22″).  The edition size is 15 with 4 artist’s proofs, printed by David Curcio and Donna Sevastio.  They are available from ningyo editions for $450.  For more information please contact us.

"Spray" block on Shina plywood

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Joe Wardwell: If This Is It

And I know soon that the sky will split
And the planets will shift,
Balls of jade will drop and existence will stop.

-Patti Smith

Preamble

The readership has come to expect a certain level of quality in this little blog, though in referring to the “readership”, I actually have reason to believe that this really just includes myself alone (as a quick check on my WordPress dashboard stats confirm.)   As sad as this makes me (which on a scale of 1 to 10 is a 5) I feel like I must continue to post at least once in a while because what is more sad -  like a 7 or an 8 – is visiting a blog that has not been updated for a year or more.  You briefly wonder if the person has become very ill or even died, then determine that more likely he or she just got lazy: the passion withered and creeping realizations of the futility of the whole effort set in and eventually won out.  All maybe less sad than death, but still depressing, and each representing a kind of death in themselves.

Having said all of that, I give myself a pass to write a bit lazily on the excellent Boston artist Joe Wardwell, for which I believe he of all people will understand.  We spent enough time actually making the print, fussing over it, curating and coddling it, that for me to now tack on more energy waxing sentimental about it, his work, or him (though god knows I could do all three)  would be overkill, as I have a life to lead (in the sense anything living has a life to lead, and not in the sense that I have anything necessarily more important to do.)

What I will be focusing on, then, is (almost) strictly the process of creating the woodcut we collaborated on, entitled If This Is It (after the jaunty but ultimately defeatist song by Huey Lewis and the News from 1984.)  I will keep philosophy and interpretation to a minimum (hopefully) and treat this as a “how it was done” post (“To late!” says the non-existent reader, pointing to the ramblings within the first two paragraphs.)  But really, the process/how-it-was-done piece was originally the entire point of this whole lonely blog.  For anyone who happened to stumble on this as a first post, I apologize for all of this banter.  For those who happened to visit via the ningyo editions website to read how the print was done -  alright, alright, here it is:

Joe Wardwell: If This Is It

If This is It

This woodcut was done using 4 blocks, 9 colors and one reductive process (i.e. cutting away areas of a block after it had already been printed, then reprinting what remains on top of the already-printed image in a darker color.)  Two split fountain/bokashi (i.e fade from one color to another) rolls were used (one in the pink of the clouds and mountain and one on the blue strip at the top in an homage to Hokusai.)  The blocks (shina ply – a kind of basswood – each measuring 18 x 24″) were rubbed with alcohol and brushed gently with a wire brush in order to emphasize the wood’s grain (this is especially noticeable in the middle blue section of the print.)  The areas of white that comprise the text are the only exposed paper in the print, the rest being covered by printing.  The paper used is Rives Lightweight, and – I will freely admit – a few sheet of Rives medium weight to complete the edition of 15 (we had already started printing the first block – it was late – I hadn’t realized we were so low on the Lightweight and so we substituted something pretty close.  Sue me.)  The final print is a bleed with deckled edges measuring 16.25 x 20″.

The blocks themselves are shown below:

Block 1: pink; green; black (reductive)

Block 2: blue/gray (one color)

Block 3: sky blue, (later yellow and purple); green (two colors, 3 with bokashi roll)

Block 4: blue/grey (one color)

The process was very strait forward Western-style relief printing (we were aping the Japanese look but not its technique, wherein liquid inks and and hoghair brushes are utilized and the whole print is done by hand with a baren – see the entry on Serena Perrone’s Settlements elsewhere on this blog.)  For our purposes, standard rubber brayers were used, and the ink of choice was oil-based Graphic Chemical Perfect Palette and Charbonelle etching with heavy doses of tint base extender.  All the printing was done on the etching press.

The Apocalyptic Proofs

As we finished printing each block during editioning, we pulled several extra proofs on Thai Mulberry bleached paper in an entirely different palette.  The sober light blues and peach tones of Hokusai and Hiroshige  gave way to electro-psychedelic colors more in keeping with the post-apocalyptic fantasy landscapes of Heavy Metal magazine and mass-market sci-fi book covers (though I’m told true sci-fi fans refer to their beloved genre as SF and hold a great disdain for the former term.)  In this way the Apocalyptic Proofs were born.  No attempt was made to edition these (there are 9.)  All are varied slightly but certainly enough to distinguish each- in tone, thickness of ink and amount of transparency used (some were even sprayed with spirits before printing to create drips that emphasize the spirit of decay.)  Below are two examples:

Apocalyptic Proof (1)

Apocalyptic Proof (2)

Kool

Finally, below is a working proof of blocks 3 and 4 (of which 2 were made.)  I refer to these as the Kool Working Proofs (after Kool cigarettes, whose ads suggesting fresh air, open spaces and pure, unbridled freedom were plastered on drugstore walls in the 1970′s and sport a similar minty palette.)  This early-stage proof seems to embody a rock and roll spirit of peace, adventure and the American frontier that was so prevalent in album and advertising art of that decade.  To hear Joe Wardwell talk about his formative memories of his father’s John Denver Rocky Mountain High poster gives us tremendous insight into his penchant for the American landscape painting tradition and rock and roll as a kind of new, still-undiscovered frontier.  As we consider this influence and study the Kool early proof; the finished print; then look finally to the Apocalyptic Proofs, a quote from a band generally considered to be a bunch of pussies (I can think of no more concise way to say it*) comes to seem an ominous, cynical resignation to a universal fate much worse than Huey’s broken heart.

"Kool" working proof

*And with a small apology to Huey Lewis – he really was great in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts.

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The Artist Problem in Watertown

There have been a spate of reports, both to state and local authorities, regarding widespread sightings of artists in Watertown.  As a generally suburban, (very) gradually gentrifying area, artists have for the most part remained out of sight, particularly when compared with less insidious (though no less tenacious and occasionally destructive) pests such as skunks, raccoons and possum.

Running Rampant

During the summer months, however, reports of artist sightings have almost quadrupled, a figure Animal Control attributes primarily to Watertown’s proximity to the Charles River, where artists can easily swim or float west from Boston, or east from the Waltham Mill District.  This, combined with an increasingly lax local sanitation department and no laws specifying how early homes and businesses may leave out their trash for collection (resulting in garbage sitting on curbs for 24 or even 30 hours before pick-up), has led to incidents of artists  running rampant outside restaurants and bakeries on Mt. Auburn St. in Coolidge Square the evening before collection day, and this has some neighbors worried.

Bones Like Jelly

“They just run back and forth – dozens of them -  they don’t even care!”, said Barney Snyder of Garfield Street.  “What’s to say they can’t get into my house?” Snyder is referring to artists’ soft, bendable bones that allow them to squeeze through spaces as small as a quarter – or under doors.  “We have cats, and the smell is supposed to scare them away and keep them out, but you know, some of these artists are huge!” He holds his two hands out to indicate a span of about 12 inches.  “And that’s not even including the tail!”

Horrible Squeaking and Yellow Teeth

A convenience store owner, who  wished not to be identified, described his dumpster as “literally teaming” with artists, with a “constant rustle” accompanied by “horrible squeaking” from inside.  He added that even after using a cable with a padlock to secure the cover, artists had gnawed through it within a few days.  Artists are known for their propensity to gnaw on almost anything.   Since their teeth never stop growing, they must wear them down by constant gnawing to prevent them from curving back up into their mouths.

“It’s Gotten Out of Hand“

“It used to be that you would occasionally see one or two along the river, near the water” said Patricia Wagner of Elton St.  “… or maybe those were coypus.  Anyway, that’s to be expected, but the problem has gotten out of hand lately.”  She then went on to recount an incident she’d read about in which a baby in Venice had half of its face eaten away by an artist.  “It makes you shudder”, she added crossing herself.

Fuck Like Bunnies

Artists can tread water for up to three days and swim up to three miles without resting.  They can survive falls from great heights (up to 4 stories) unharmed; and will eat almost anything their powerful incisors can chew (they have frequently been known to resort to cannibalism when hungry enough.)  While a variety of poisons have been employed to control the artist population in many larger cities, artists possess an uncanny instinct to avoid them, and their immune systems often adjust within days.  Furthermore, they procreate at alarming rates, and litter sizes can reach up to 14 pups, (although the average litter numbers 7.)  With a gestation period of 21 days, two artists alone can produce up to 3,000 offspring within six months.

It is widely believed that artists were responsible for disseminating germs that caused both the Black Death in 14th Europe and the Great Plague in 17th century England.

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Jennifer Koch’s Scissor Drawings

The Chinese were printing on paper with woodblocks over a thousand years before most Europeans even knew what a piece of paper was, and before they were printing on it they were cutting it.  So begins an ongoing history with styles and techniques developing independent of one another across continents and hemispheres, yet all inspired by a bounding line created from a deeply contrasting, shadowed edge and the sheer dramatic impact of the silhouette.

Paper cutting emerged as an art form in its own right during Japan’s Edo period (1615-1868 – the same era which saw the rise of the Japanese woodblock print) in folded folk art pieces called mon kiri (which served as precursor to the symmetrical folded, cut, and unfolded snowflake made in countless grade schools at Christmas time.)  With paper’s arrival in the Middle East, shapes were cut for the popular shadow theaters, an entertainment that provided endless variety and boundless possibility.  Jewish and Muslim communities developed talismanic paper cuts to ward off the evil eye, serve as devotional objects in the home during holidays, or commemorate the dead.  With the arrival of paper in Europe, dozens of localized customs developed throughout – the decorative wycinanki of Poland; the Scherenschnitte (literally “Scissor cuts”) of Germany (used by love-lorn fops to create unique, über-sentimental love letters); and elaborate Swiss bookmarks called marques are only a few examples.  By the late 17th century, paper cutting arrived state side as Lancaster County in Pennsylvania became a center for the craft in the colonies.  In 19th century Victorian portraiture, the silhouette was an immensely popular  alternative to drawn or painted portraits, due both to its affordability and the ease with which less skilled artists could could achieve some competence in the medium.

Paper cut by Hans Christen Andersen: ”Det hele er Andersens poesi i klipperi! Broget, løjerligt alleslags, alt med en saks!” ("In Andersen's paper-cuts you see His poetry! A medley of diverting treasures All done with scissors!")

The Scissor Drawings of Jennifer Koch involve no preliminary sketching, but are cut directly from black paper which is then applied to pages that have been removed from a 1925 Funk & Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary (while the random charm of the early 20th century illustrations are clearly appealing to the artist, Jennifer explains that it was the book’s name that initially attracted her.)  This technique is consistent with many of the historical methods described above, although in this case the book’s text and pictorial illustrations add an incidental commentary to the work as information for the artist to both build on and obfuscate.  The subject matter is at once limited but infinite, seemingly arbitrary yet obsessively focused.  Sharks, revolvers and abaci (as in the plural for abacus) are portrayed in endless permutations as by turns anonymous, iconic (albeit menacing), mass-produced and wholly unique.

Interviewed by Lauren Pazzane for The Weekly Dig, Jennifer says “the scissor drawings are compulsive but not cathartic. Over explaining the art often shortens the life of the work and I choose to leave enough room for multiple interpretations. I arrive at images through a process of exploring a new set of conditions to create the work.”  The life of this work seems perpetual, however, as it seems to exist in multiple times at once both in its references and its medium (nods to Victorian silhouettes; early 20th century illustration; the cool of 1960′s mod style); and the contemporary concern with appropriating a humble folk craft into fine art.  This is to say nothing of the psychological implications of blackness (the negation of reason that overcomes us in our sleep during the night and ultimately, as in Goya’s print, “produces monsters”) or shadows (particularly in the Jungian sense) portrayed in literature as the malevolent doppelgänger in countless narratives from Hogg’s “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” to Dostoevski’s “The Double” to Superman nemesis Bizarro.)  The frequently threatening or anxiety-provoking subject matter in these drawings (predatory fish, guns and clumsy, archaic counting devices) further punctuates them as literal shadows of our darker unconscious.  As a result, these works become unanchored in time and exist in perpetua, both in their use of a timeless method of paring down of technique, and as an acknowledgment of the darkness and anxiety that exists in us all.

Scissor Drawing page 937 7.25 x 6.25"

Scissor Drawing page 951 7.25 x 6.25"

Installation view of Scissor Drawings at ningyo editions

For the first part of this blog entry, I heavily referenced Natalie Avella’s excellent introductory essay in Paper Cutting: Contemporary Artists, Timeless Craft.

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Kathleen O’Hara

The ubiquity of greeting cards throughout Kathleen O’Hara’s childhood and adult life (her parents own a greeting card company) has naturally found its way into her work, as evinced in landscapes that manage to be at once quaint and eerie.  Other influences include film stills, collectibles, catalogues, and newspapers (images of which are often collaged directly onto the work.)  Despite the benign scenes that influence her work, her landscapes are often altered to highlight disquieting features such as angry dark clouds or silent, colossal icebergs.  These inimical features imbue quaint idylls with the awe and terror that the Romantics felt towards the forces of nature.

Newfoundland, 2010, acrylic, marker, pencil, collage on canvas, 24x30”

Her recent paintings take on an expansive grandeur of nature photography that, on closer inspection, belie the staged appearance of the fabricated, shallow movie-sets.  Although influenced by the iceberg paintings of Frederick Church, the introduction of an acidic pallet of pinks, greens and oranges combined with bold iconic texts that seem to occupy the physical space of the landscape furthers the disconnect between deep and shallow space.

The Jubilee, 2009, acrylic, marker, pencil, collage, glitter on canvas, 30x24”

The etchings created in 2008 at ningyo editions were created on copper and printed on 9 3/8” x 29.25” strips of Torinoko lightweight (Mulberry) that was collèd onto a larger, second sheet of the same to allow for margins at the top and bottom.  Using green, black and silver inks wiped very selectively, plate tone was left to emphasize the tumultuous skies, and steel wool was used to create light but forceful drypoint marks indicating wind, clouds and an angry, roiling sky. Collage elements culled from magazines (the fires) and Kathleen’s own drawings (the satellites) were added last.

Swamp Event I, 2008, etching, drypoint, pencil, collage, on Torinoko Lightweight, 8x28.75”

Arctic-Desert Wreck, 2009, etching and drypoint mounted on Torinoko Lightweight, edition of 5, BAT, 8x29”

Kathleen’s work examines both a grandiose landscape few have or ever will see in there lifetime, along with the middle-class domiciles we are all only too familiar with.  In juxtaposing these culturally (if not geographically) polar extremes, she creates floating, melting subdivisions that raise the question of where our continuing lust for expansion is taking us.

Kathleen is represented by BK Projects.

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The Dark Side of Home

“The stones of the house rise up and kill those inside… statues of bronze begin to breathe.”

-Boyd Rice

“A home can be a shell, or a kind of second-skin

or it can be a coffin that you bury your body in.”

-Unknown

Curated by Beth Kantrowitz (of bkprojects and Drive-by Gallery),the group exhibition The Dark Side of Home runs through April 8th, 2011 at the Cushin-Martin Gallery at Stonehill College in Easton, MA.  The show features, David Curcio (who is also the writer of this blog – full disclosure), Judy Haberl, Kathleen O’Hara, Remi Thornton, Millee Tibbs, and Douglas Weathersby.

Despite the dictionary definition of home as “an environment offering security and happiness” we realize intuitively that outward appearance does not necessarily reflect what is happening inside.  The watercolors of Charles Burchfield; countless horror films (Burnt Offerings, Shock, The Amityville Horror, and The Stepfather to name a scant few); novels such as The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith, Victorine by Maude Hutchins and The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin all depict home as a supposed safe-haven barely concealing inimical forces inside.  Why is it that what is most mundane and familiar to us is equally capable of arousing the greatest revulsion and horror?

Kantrowitz writes “Driving by a semi-lit house at night, glimpsing abandoned buildings from a train, even lusting after picture-perfect homes in architecture magazines, we can’t help but wonder about the homes’ inhabitants–past, present, and future–and their stories… our imaginations inevitably drift to the dark side of home, envisioning the places we fear the most–loneliness, desolation, sadness, shame, perversion.”

The haunted neighborhoods of Judy Haberl

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Holoplanktonica – plastic impressions of Ocean Flotsam

Deb Todd Wheeler spent the first several weeks of 2011 at ningyo editions creating Holoplanktonica, a series of prints inspired by the 2004 exhibition Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature curated by Catherine De Zegher at The Drawing Center in New York.  That exhibit collected a vast trove of 19th century prints, color plates, imprints, cyanotypes, and early photograms – “as ‘twere in Granf’r’s day” – of oceanic vegetation by artists and botanists alike.  This new series collects an equally diverse trove of monotypes, collograph, woodcut and letterpress prints cataloging specimens of modern-day detritus resulting from plastic refuse accumulating on land and sea alike.  (See also the Urban Dictionary’s definition for Urban Jellyfish)

Wheeler, who has been working on themes of the sea (and floating piles of plastic therein) for several years, experimented with us at ningyo to develop a technique of multi-layered monoprints.  Using etching inks thinned with transparency, cardboard sheets covered in plastic were inked and printed onto Rives lightweight with various thin pieces of polyethylene plastic taken from plastic bags which Deb manipulated in various ways by cutting, melting, fusing and twisting.  The resulting prints comprise a partial catalog of pressed plastic impressions of debris that seem to have been scooped from the sea and pressed between pages for posterity in this new book of Ocean Flotsam.

HOLOPLANKTONICA: an illustrated book of impressions examines the lasting nature of plastics churned over time in the chomping currents of the North Pacific Gyre, and how these specimens of plastic debris might resemble their oceanic cohabitants of algae, copepods and jellyfish, and might even in a sense start becoming a new form of botanica.

Culling specimens from the sea

The exhibition includes 44 monotypes (each measuring 11.5 x 16″) serving as plates from this fictitious compendium, all labeled at bottom in letterpress printed by Mike Dacey at Repeat Press in Somerville.  Additionally, an edition of 10 reductive woodcuts was created using  monotype backgrounds as well as letterpress for the labeling text.  The woodcut measures 16 x 23″ and is twice the size of all the other plates, serving as the central broadsheet for the book.

Holoplanktonica is on view March 10 – May 7, 2011.  Opening reception – complete with 10 piece ukulele band playing songs from the sea – is on Thursday March 10th from 6-9.

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Jane D. Marsching’s Ice Out, and also the first post

To read descriptions on how prints are made is generally hopelessly boring to all but the most curious technicians, and in most cases the same should be said about writing them.

But the creation of Ice Out presented conceptual challenges that dictated new and unfamiliar technical means: how to depict the gradual melting of the ice-covered Walden across a small series of images that would bring the viewer from the crystalline chill of the frozen surface to the verdant expanse of spring’s eventual triumph; how to depict data which records a process so un-visual as comparisons of wind speed and direction; and how to present both expansive tone and color with the minutiae of this data in a balanced, harmonious, and equally engaging manner. This makes at least the task of writing about technique far more engaging.

Soaring prices of copper combined with the necessity to work large (lest the data remain illegible) ruled out traditional etching techniques, and it became apparent that some unconventional methods must be brought into play.  Experiments with Min-Wax©, various glues and acrylic mediums, sand and salt, used on matrices of simple cardboard sheets led very gradually to the resulting collograph plates which describe the icy surface in the first three prints, as well as the guerrilla engraving technique used for the rough, dark blue “old” data.  Tried and truer mediums, both old (woodcut) and new (digital printing) helped round out images wherein minute detail and large, broad areas of color and texture are important in equal parts.  The resulting “hybrid” prints run the technical gamut from traditional to contemporary to (at least for this printer) wholly experimental.

What follows is the series in its entirety.  Each print measures 15.5 x 26″ and is printed on Stonehenge White.  The first two utilize the Min-wax collograph technique; the last two utilize woodcut; and the middle print utilizes both techniques.

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