Confusion will be My Epitaph

For those of you concerned about post-modernism's effect on your immortal soul (or transient corporeal life) there is an intriguing lecture at Grace Memorial Episcopal Church this week. I've cribbed the press release for you to peruse. . .

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Confusion will be My Epitaph: Cultural Disorientation, Social Fragmentation and the Post-Modern Experience— What Does Christianity Have to Offer?

In this inaugural lecture of Grace's Seminary-for-a-Night, Steve Clarke will take us on a journey beginning with the thoughts of 18th century moral philosopher Andrew Fletcher and 1960's rock band, King Crimson, through contemporary film and art, to pause before the canvasses of Edvard Munch, Andy Warhol, and Rembrandt van Rijn. Focusing on the signs of post-modern cultural disorientation and the resultant confusion experienced by many, particularly young people, Steve will explore ways in which the Christian story speaks to our time.

The Rev. Steve Clarke is currently the Ministry Development Officer in the Anglican Diocese of Willochra (Australia), Senior Lecturer of Theology and Mission at Flinders University, South Australia, and Visiting Fellow at St John's College, Durham University (UK)

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Grace Seminary-for-a-Night

Wednesday, October 28, 7:00-8:30pm

Grace House, 1511 NE 17th Ave.

Portland, Oregon

Titling Artwork, Pt. II

Passing Through the Dust, 2009

acrylic, toner, and graphite on panel

10.5" x 10.5"

While I can't speak for any other artist, or for artists in general,* I can share with you my approach to titling artworks. Over the years I've found that my titles can be primarily categorized into two types: the simple explanatory and the obliquely narrative. Today, I will just deal with the first type. . .

1. The Simple Explanatory Title

In many ways, this is the easier of the two types as it requires only a word or two to convey meaning. In essence, this sort of title seems to state what the work seeks to depict: Orchard, Mirror, and Baubles are all titles I've employed before. But with the exception of Orchard, which is actually a drawing of an orchard, the title isn't a strictly literal interpretation of the artwork. Mirror is a drawn self-portrait derived from a photograph I took in the mirror. As such, it serves as a double entendre. Baubles illustrates a strand of globular beads on a necklace. The word 'necklace' would have provided a more literal title, but baubles alludes to something precious, beautiful, and rounded. With English boasting at least half a million words it isn't difficult to conjure up a host of synonyms that might offer a subtler statement than the prosaic declarative word.

Sometimes the simple explanatory title is anything but. There are many drawings I've created where the subject of the work is simply a foil for some sort of emotional or religious resonance. Interlude, which captures the sun setting behind a copse of trees as witnessed through a rain soaked window, doesn't need a title explaining the image, it needs a title explaining a confluence of moments: the fleeting moment of sunset, the wistful moment of staring out the window, the inspired moment of releasing the shutter, etc. The real magic of such a simple title is that it leaves the artwork open to the viewers interpretation while, at the same time, whispering a little something into their subconscious.

I recently finished a small piece called Weep that shows a tree that has been carved into and is oozing sap. If it was hanging on a gallery wall and you asked someone to describe it I doubt you'd get a much more narrative explanation than the one I just provided. But I have a tremendous amount of context that I want to share about that image and the title has to provide part of the means for that communication of context. Admittedly, a title is not going to help the viewer determine that this tree was outside a crypt at the Santa Barbara Mission and that I'd just been contemplating statues of Christ and Mary prior to encountering this desecrated trunk in the mission's garden. But they may understand the idea of violation of the natural world. They may consider how certain attempts for immortality can be destructive and, ultimately, somewhat futile. They may sense suffering, on some level, and the recognition of human suffering is paramount to the mission of the Christian tradition. And this, in turn, creates some small connection between the removed act of considering a drawing on a gallery wall and the spiritual impulse of Christianity.

Ultimately, the simple explanatory title offers the artist a quick way to either explain the image and/or invite the viewer into sharing in a more complex reading of the work. I think that the only one-word-title which fails to do either is the ever popular Untitled.**

Next up, the obliquely narrative title. . .

*Although I did it yesterday— "Most professional artists, when pressed, will state that titling is important."

**And I recognize that this is a contentious statement for any MFA students or philosophy majors, as it could be argued (usually after a few beers) that it is the very fact that it is a non-statement that makes it such a powerful statement. To which I say, "Meh." I see your post-modern drivel and raise you one example of preemptive self-aware retort!

The Lord's Gyre

Gustave Dore's depection of Dante's Paradisio, Canto 31

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Last night I dreamt that I was standing on a sidewalk in an empty night. 

From the impenetrable darkness I heard a child's voice begin the Lord's Prayer. Each word seemed to gather whispers off the sidewalk, and these whispers, speaking in time with the child, multiplied and magnified as the prayer continued, entwining my feet in a vortex of sound. The air around me quickened as the ever-widening spiral of voices gained a stormy momentum, and it seemed the whole of humanity was aiding and assisting this one child's words. In a moment the prayer had wrapped about my knees, and then it encompassed my sternum, until the tempest of voices, in ever expanding numbers and circles, rose over my head and into the darkness above.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Here then, is my confession: I never once looked up in the dream to witness the prayer's trajectory. My eyes remained rooted to where my feet contacted the Earth; at that spot where the first murmurings of prayers voiced for twenty centuries rose to support a lone child in the dark. My cells were expanding and my lungs no longer supported me. My heart felt like an organ pumping life down a million passages into the surrounding dark. But I never looked up. 

And so I remain tethered; to be greeted by another grey dawn.

Borrello Black

I love the work of Brian Borrello. My first years of art school I struggled with the seeming inferiority of charcoal, my preferred art medium. Charcoal had none of the cache of oil, the "nowness" of acrylic, or the elitist credibility of mixed media. In fact, it was looked upon as a colorless tool for helping artist newbies learn the fundamentals of shading and contour line work. Relegated to a perfunctory role in the design of a larger artwork, charcoal never took center stage. I made many excuses for its use in my pieces those first years until I came across Brian Borrello. With one look at his stark motor oil and charcoal botanicals I knew that, from that point on, I had an irrefutable argument for charcoal.

Borrello, like many a Pacific Northwest artist, creates unashamedly beautiful work inspired by the forms of regional flora. As Portland likes to tout itself as a mighty progressive city, it comes as no surprise that Borrello uses the presentation of his iconography to critique the pollution of our natural resources. His drawings are stark silhouettes of leaves, twigs, roots, vines, and the like. They are shaped with a velvety black derived from a combination of india ink and charcoal. It is a living black, for it rolls and broils with tiny plumes and clouds that suggest a depth beyond the surface of the paper. It is a black that captures the imagination, and I've often thought about it when letting my mind wander at the studio. Perhaps the closest equivalent in nature might be the charred remains of a recently burned forest. That is Brian Borrello's black.

Many of Borrello's botanical forms are centered upon a stark white substrate— this comforts the eye with a composition everyone equates with stability, comfort, and religious importance. But that comfort can be short lived when one considers the brownish halo that surrounds the dark forms. This unnatural brown serves as an irregular median strip between the clean white of the canvas/paper surface and the black vacuum of the imagery. The brown is derived from motor oil and as it surrounds the drawn form a peculiar effect occurs. Suddenly, your eye perceives the image as a burned impression; as if the paper had been branded or the natural item had grown so hot it had scorched its way through the substrate and left a charred opening into a vast inky space. Simultaneously beautiful and unsettling, an entire show of such imagery tends to remind me of the reliquary room at the El Santuario de Chimayo in New Mexico. While Borrello's chapel is far more austere and aesthetically micro-managed there is, in my mind, a similar sentiment: hand-made representations of the affliction are put up on the walls with the hope of a miracle. 

Since he occupies such a venerable place on my personal path to becoming an artist it was hard for me to admit that there was something amiss at his most recent show. Ars Brevis, Vita Longa at Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery was just as lovely an exhibit as Borrello has always put on, and I suppose that was the problem. This show seemed not at all dissimilar from the first Borrello exhibit I saw over seven years ago. If anything, the current work had a more diminutive scale by comparison. The imagery was indecipherable from pieces done nearly a decade ago and the only obvious evidence of Borrello branching out existed in the unsettling use of an eerie yellow-green as the background color for a few paintings. I left the show disappointed with the work for not providing the same sort of elation it had in the past. What had seemed important in terms of medium and message then seemed safe and predictable now. The motor oil had lost its burn and the forms had become simply decorative silhouettes instead of openings to the void. To be fair though, perhaps what bothered me the most had little to do with Borrello's work, for it hadn't changed over the years— what bothered me was that I had.

* An amateur interviewer is saved by Borrello's expressiveness and enthusiasm. This video is worth watching if you've never seen any of Borrello's work before, but isn't recommended for people who find morning talk show-like questions to be the scourge of journalism.

Storm

The storm came to me in a dream. In this dream I was at my teenage home again and the whole world had dropped into black and white. The house was dramatically lit from above but all around it was a great expanse of darkness. I wished to tell my father that I was going to walk a friend home but, for some undecipherable reason, felt slightly afraid of doing so. I opened the screen door to call into the house but then shut it. Working up my nerve I opened it again, and promptly shut it. The air was warm and damp outside. From far off in the darkness I could hear claps of thunder closing in on the house. A third time I pulled on the screen and my father, alerted to some noise at the door and perhaps suspecting one of the cats wished to be let in, appeared in the kitchen with an inquisitive look. I told him that I would walk my friend home and be right back. He nodded ascent and went back to work on his project.

I do not know which friend it was that waited for me on the lawn; her head up watching the sky as it flashed intermittently around us. The thunder came closer. She was familiar and yet unidentifiable as any person from my past or present. I walked this woman into the dark and out of the light illuminating my house. After some time I returned from the darkness alone. Somewhere in the darkness my friend had returned home safe just as I now was.

I entered the house and my father beckoned me to sit down on the sofa. He had made something for me— fashioned it out of clay. It would be an aid to me in the days to come. Whatever it was glowed brightly in his cupped hands, and he told me a brief recounting of the creation of the world as he held this strange light. It wasn’t a creation myth from any culture I recognized but, somehow, it seemed plausible. My father is an unfailingly honest man and I knew that this story must have been something he’d encountered in his studies.

He walked carefully with his gift over to the sofa and set it down on the cushion next to me. It seemed to glow from an inner light as it lay on the couch: a living light that flickered in strength. Here was a tiny sculpted baby such as you might see in a seasonal creche with closed eyes and rounded terra cotta form. But unlike those static devotional sculptures this one held its own light within it. I looked closer. There was something else. . .

It seemed that the storm was on top of us now. The thunder rattled the branches of trees and shook the windows of the house. The muggy air had become a conduit of electrical current.

It was breathing.

In the flash and snap of lightning I could see the little chest rise up and down. What sort of gift was this that my father had fashioned? I could hear the wall of rain coming out of the darkness, moving across the neighborhood roofs towards our house; carried on a wave of sound and energy.

I woke with that dream rattling about my mind and the old Victorian house I call home creaking and popping under the power of a summer storm breaking the night.

The Cartographer

Consider this situation.

There is a cartographer with the power to obliterate places from the physical world by erasing them from a map of Earth in his possession.* Topography dismissed from the world becomes a blank nothingness; a flat wasteland of paper-white with remnants of natural color and form where the eraser failed to fully eradicate existence.

When asked to consider this by one of my students I affirmed that it was an intriguing image but I wasn’t quite sure whether I was only to focus my imagining on seeing this situation, or remedying it. As a teacher you often try to suss out what the real question being asked might be.

Could I consider such a situation. Yes. Would I, or could I, do anything about it? No. I don’t pit myself against divinity: real or imagined.

*Note that I immediately associate an all-powerful figure with masculinity. The subconscious force of a Christian upbringing is very strong. . .