The Storytellers
“The Storytellers” is my print for the 2012 PNCA Printmaking Portfolio Exchange. This is the fourth PNCA exchange in which I’ve had the pleasure to participate. It might be my last, and represents a milestone for the printmaking department: this is also the last year of teaching for Christy Wyckoff and Tom Prochaska, two teachers who have been with the department for many years. Change is inevitable, and not necessarily bad, but there is a little part of me that is sad about their retirement. The printmaking department has been like a second home to me for the last few years, and it’s hard to know that it will change. I’ve been very lucky to be Tom’s teaching assistant this academic year; I will be there for the last class he will teach.
Perhaps this kind of melancholy is partially responsible for the mood of my print, though the direct influence is the collection of Slavic folktales that caught my eye some months ago. Each of the three women has a distinct personality, as if each woman is reacting to the same stimulus in her own way. I imagine that they are the storytellers who shared those dark, funny, and cynical folk tales with a curious Englishman. The translation isn’t very good, but it gives the text the feeling of having been told in another language. Traditionally, folk tales are handed down orally from one generation to the next, picking up the lint of changing times and the personality of the teller. Some parts are emphasized, others left out, embellishments are thrown in on a whim. These women represent the link between one generation and the next through oral storytelling.
The theme for the exchange is “fact or fiction” (paper size is 9″ x 12″). Oral traditions occupy a nebulous space that is not fact or entirely fiction. They are by their very nature subjective; the stories express some kind of truth (the character and concerns of a given culture), but certainly do not relate historical facts. As a story changes from one teller to the next, does it lose integrity? I believe that in our world of empirical knowledge, we often lose sight of the value inherent in the non-factual realm of story.
This is why we have people insisting, against all evidence and common-sense, that the Bible hasn’t changed since it was first penned (despite multiple translations, typos, and varying editions). People fear that if it is not factual that is has no meaning or value. This leads people to insist, very irrationally, that the Bible is a history book full of facts. The Bible really is a collection of stories, told orally for generations, that were eventually written down for sharing and preservation.
These women in my print certainly didn’t tell the stories in the Bible, but I imagine them telling me folk tales, many of which revolve around characters from the Bible and other important mythologies. I wouldn’t mind sitting in a room with them as they share and spin their tales. I’m also looking forward to the exchange, when I will get to see everyone else’s prints, and hear them tell the stories of how those prints came to be.
Art by Sargent Johnson, Berkeley’s Loss, Is Museum’s Gain – NYTimes.com
Art by Sargent Johnson, Berkeley’s Loss, Is Museum’s Gain – NYTimes.com.
Everybody misplaces something sometime. But it is not easy for the University of California, Berkeley, to explain how it lost a 22-foot-long carved panel by a celebrated African-American sculptor, or how, three years ago, it mistakenly sold this work, valued at more than a million dollars, for $150 plus tax.
Ah, the foibles of the art world are never-ending! I am pleased to hear that this misplaced and cheaply-sold work was acquired by the Huntington Library, at least. Their collection of books and other paper articles is mind-boggling! I didn’t even make it over to see the art because I was so seduced by the book collection. It is on my list of museums to visit again, and I encourage everyone to visit the place if the opportunity arises.
Click the link at the top to read the article from the New York Times.
test proof: Bonfire on Fiesta Island
A few weeks ago, I flew down to San Diego so I could spend some time with Rachelle Houle-Maiser (of Five Feet of Dynamite). She is a very dear and long-time friend of mine, and it was wonderful to spend a weekend with her in Southern California, even if I managed to bring the overcast skies with me. (I was hoping to go home with just enough of a tan to make all my vitamin D deficient friends jealous. Tant pis.)
When I went down, I took a grounded copper plate with me. Why I did that when I couldn’t bring any of my very pointy drawing tools with me (I only packed a carry-on), I couldn’t say. I suppose I hoped I would find something suitable, but I didn’t look very hard.
This image is from a sketch I did from memory. I used absolutely no reference of any kind (a sort of scary situation for me), and just scribbled out a few marks. I won’t even show you the initial sketch because there was so little information in it.
When I landed back in Portland and got home to my etching tools, I finally got to draw on the plate. I redrew the sketch and added more detail. The image you see above is the first print I pulled from the first etch on the plate. There is more to be done, but I’m not going to invest too much in it.
This is my first embarkation into a world of sketchy, less-planned etchings. I will continue to make my meticulous ones too, but this approach allows me to stretch different muscles and exercise different skills.
I cannot leave this unsaid: I write backwards in cursive rather well. It is a trifle of a skill, but one that gives me joy to do well. Not many can do it; I suspect it’s because hardly anyone has a reason even to try, though I do suspect that the likelihood of being able to write backwards is higher among printmakers.
Dell Ruins: a center for the crow head plate
Finally, a drawing that looks like it belongs there! In my dream, it might have been the bust of a man sporting a Hulihee, but I could never quite get that to pan out. Perhaps that’s why when I dreamed the image, I was struggling to make the drawing fit with the etching.
I still feel a certain obligation to my subconscious to make the image with the portrait bust as well, and I want to play with multiple color printing. So I will have three plates: one with the crow heads, one with the dell, and one with the portrait bust, and I will get to mix and match them at my leisure. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?
To see a digital merge of the crow heads and the dell sketch, visit my Flickr site here.
Dorothea Tanning, 1910–2012
Jerry Saltz on Dorothea Tanning, 1910–2012 — Vulture.
I would like to take a moment to remember Dorothea Tanning, who just passed away at the ripe age of 101. I’ve long admired her wit, sense of humor, paintings, and (my favorite) her thoughts on being an artist who happens to have been born female. Why are we still saddled with the label “woman artist”? Can’t we just be artists?
Tanning’s Birthday painting is one of my favorites, and it’s a goal of mine to see it in person. It was one of the few influential works that I discussed in my thesis paper at PNCA.
That is all I’m going to say, because so many others will say whatever else I could wish much more eloquently. I’ll leave you instead with an interview from 1990 that I quite like:
Dorothea Tanning by Carlo McCormick – BOMB 33/Fall 1990.
Birthday by Dorothea Tanning, 1942. In the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Reflections on Death and Monuments
Daniel and I wandered in to Reading Frenzy today, and picked up a new book, The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses by Paul Koudounaris. It’s beautiful, macabre, interesting, and full of European history. I’ve wanted to see the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic for years. I knew about the catacombs in Paris and Rome. When I was working on my thesis last year, I stumbled across the Capuchin mummies, at the monastery of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome. I had no idea that so many ossuaries across Europe were preserved, and knew nothing about those in Cambodia, Ecuador and Peru. More than sixty sites are discussed in the book, with detailed photographs throughout and site locations mapped in the back of the book.
The relationship that the living have with the dead fascinates me. Americans, in my experience, fear death. Our history is short, we shy away from talking about the uncomfortable times in that history, and our culture values eternal youth. Death is uncomfortable; we don’t know how to mourn, and we don’t know how to deal with people who are mourning. I learned this early, but the reality of it is affirmed periodically. Today is the second anniversary of the death of a friend, Dante, and even I – who has spent time examining death and the cultural rituals surrounding death – don’t know what to say.
Memento mori tattoo on my chest.
Just over two years ago, I got my first tattoo. Part of it is a shaded heart in a decorative frame, tattooed on my chest above my left breast. The design was adapted from a piece of Victorian memento mori jewelry. I imagine it containing all my memories of the people I’ve known who have died, a constant memorial that acknowledges death and affirms life (my life, at least). I got it for my father, my grandmother, my cousin, my friend’s mother, and others. I remember when I found out that Dante had died. My hand when to my heart – my second heart, the new one needled into my skin. I remember thinking that I got it to remind me, but I hadn’t expected to add any more memories to it so soon after getting it.
In The Empire of Death, the author mentions how the living would visit the dead in the ossuaries. Families would bring flowers and periodically redress their dead loved ones in new clothes. In Hallstatt, Austria, the ossuary at the Chapel of St. Michael houses a collection of decorated skulls, where the names and death dates were recorded on the foreheads in elegant scripts (the most recent from the 1990′s). Some of them were made for more practical and far less sentimental reasons; one pile of bones was made because the local gentry wanted to reclaim the land of the dead for hunting.
I like the idea of a more hands-on relationship with death. Remembering our mortality (memento mori) does not seem bleak to me. The minutiae of life is more beautiful when one knows it is fleeting; gestures carry more meaning when they must end. Rituals that acknowledge death and help us find beauty is the suffering of loss are rituals that help us to live because they help us move through necessary experiences.
A lot of the imagery from Stories From the Stone House danced around these ideas, sometimes directly and sometimes less so. The print “She was blinded by her will,” was directly influenced by the Capuchin cemetery. The more recent print “Kmotřička Smrt” is about Death as Godmother (which is what the title generally translates as). It’s from a folk tale of the same title; I was enchanted by the picture of Death filling the role of a fairy godmother because it flies in the face of my cultural concept of the figure of Death as a merciless, scythe-weilding figure of doom.
Death is hard on the living. I like the idea of allowing death to come closer, to accept it into our lives. I think it helps dull the ache, though it’s certainly no cure. I also like the idea of Death as capable of mercy and kindness, because it is that version of Death I hope collects my loved ones, both passed and still living.
Oh, MoMA: that’s not printmaking
MoMA | Opening Day at Print Studio.
Remember that post I wrote about how describing a reproduction as a print is a pet peeve? Well, the link above got my hackles up about the term printmaking. It’s possible that there is some essential information missing from that little article that would soothe my sense of wrong; I do not, however, see how scanning in a digitally-created image, digitally manipulating it, printing it out on an Inkjet or Xerox machine, then gluing on “vibrant additions” of yarn, colored sticks, paper, and–yes!–stickers, constitutes in any way a “printmaking process”. That doesn’t even fit liberal definitions of printmaking.
MoMA! What are you doing? Calling this interactive installation “Print Studio” I get; okay, participants are at some point printing images using printers–but distinctly not through anything that could be called a printmaking process. I was really excited about this article until I read it. I know that printmaking is a bit esoteric, but it’s far from dead! Is it unreasonable to expect fine art institutions to use the correct terminology when naming techniques and processes?
And now I am off to help teach an actual printmaking class, where students will learn how to set an etching press and ink up a plate.
Blog for Choice
I didn’t create this blog with the intention of using it as a platform to discuss my personal political beliefs. There are, however, a couple of things I feel very strongly about that I would feel, as a U.S. citizen, remiss in neglecting to bring up. You saw my participation in the Internet Blackout, to protest SOPA and PIPA. (If you still don’t know what those bills are, or why so many people who use the Internet are opposed to them, click on the black banner at the upper right of my blog to learn more and take action.)
I have also pledged to participate in Blog for Choice day. There are two issues that will determine who I support in the polls; the first is Internet freedom, and the second is abortion rights. I am an unapologetic and avid supporter of a woman’s right to choose, not the least because it is an issue that belongs between a woman and her doctor(s), NOT a largely white, older, affluent, male body of representatives who cannot know what a doctor knows, and certainly can have no idea of what women go through when they experience unwanted pregnancy.
If you’re a United States citizen on the fence about the issue, take a good look at the info chart below. If you believe that a person of normal mental and emotional health has a fundamental right to make monumental choices about their health and life course without a body of politicians intervening; if you believe that someone else’s religion should not determine what options for personal health and well-being are available to you; if you believe that women and their partners are capable of determining when and whether having children is an appropriate path at any given time, you must stand on the side of choice.
We are facing the biggest opposition to abortion rights this country has seen since the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade made abortion a national legal right; the last ten years have shown a worrying trend of whittling away that right. Republicans in Congress are increasingly entertaining extreme views that do not reflect the beliefs and values of the majority of Americans. We have contenders for the Republican nomination to run for President who are openly against birth control (Santorum-whose own wife underwent a life-saving abortion procedure with his full knowledge and consent), openly declaring that they will defy the Supreme Court based on personal whim (Gingrich), and a candidate declaring he will do everything to fight against the right to choose, despite having sought endorsement from Planned Parenthood in previous campaigns (Romney).
The world seems like it’s gone insane, and it is up to us, fellow citizens, to do our part to ensure a restoration of sanity and valuable discourse. We are desperately in want of political leaders who serve our interests, rather than the selective and narrow-minded goals of private interests.
I stand with Planned Parenthood, as much for their open support for the right to choose as for their excellent, affordable and necessary medical services. Women need Planned Parenthood, particularly low-income women (like me). I am blogging for choice in solidarity with NARAL Pro-Choice America. Please speak out and let your representatives know that the right to choose is important to preserve. I wouldn’t ask it of you if it wasn’t important.
Smidgeon Press protests SOPA and PIPA.
Smidgeon Press joins the strike. Visit: http://sopastrike.com/
Smidgeon Press will go dark on January 18th from 8am to 8pm in support of the movement to protest SOPA and PIPA, two anti-piracy acts that will, if passed, result in an unprecedented censoring of the Internet. If you are a U.S. citizen, please contact Congress now: http://sopastrike.com/strike/
Kmotřička Smrt – First edition of 2012
Kmotřička Smrt by H. L. Birdsong
This print was conceived for a print exchange organized by the proprietor of San Lucia Press here in Portland, Oregon (check out the fan page on Facebook). The theme was “V.S.”, and could be interpreted as verses or versus. Many of the folk tales I’ve been reading are about a common man’s wits against the wiles of a supernatural being, whether god, the devil or a culturally-specific creature that occupies a morally ambiguous (and therefore much more human) place. One story, about a peasant man and Death (Smrt in Czech), caught my interest; it’s a gentler tale than many of the stories I’ve read recently.
Many–let’s say most–of my prints begin with stories. This edition is no different, so let me share the story with you. I have my own way of telling it, but since this blog is full of writing and not speaking, I will share the story as I first read it in that magical old fairy tale book that I stumbled across at Powell’s back in November.
You can read the text in a digitized book form HERE, or in plain text form after the jump. I broke the text in a few places, for ease of reading.
