Traveler Upon The Hill

I decided after a bit of thought to name the painting Traveler Upon The Hill and it deserved a blog posting. The series is called Maps & Legends and each piece should have some sort of narrative.
Maps trigger the memory of a place long lost, but still crystal clear; a grandfather's yarn beginning with "I remember when my Daddy and I used to go...."

I've toyed with the idea of putting verse, phrases or word oddities in a painting and the time seemed right.  After I thought the painting was finished it seemed slightly off balance and it nagged me.  Every time I looked it seemed off.   I had an idea for a phrase (more about that later) and  thought of painting it directly on the piece.  After 20 years of painting I've learned to take it slow so I printed it out as a test for proper sizing.    The mockup phrase looked good just laying across the panel so instead of painting it on, I affixed it using matte medium.  I had used medium on the map to adhere it to panel.   A note about that since it borrows from collage techniques... I use custom cut birch panels and seal them using a polymer sealant followed by multiple iterations of gesso and sanding.  In combination with this and the multiple coats of matte medium to affix and seal the maps,  I apply a final coat of gloss medium once the painting is complete.   I can insure the piece to have a life expectancy exceeding 100 years with proper care.

Why the map of DeFuniak and the Mockingbird?  The property we had south of DeFuniak was on a bit of hill with a great view of Rock Hill to the south.  Dad always referred to it as "the hill."  It was his piece of heaven on earth and where he was most happy; Zen and the art of hobby farming.   We always had a family or two of Mockingbirds and our cat Max learned to give them a wide berth.  Of all the critters Max grappled with over the years, Mockingbirds were ones he could never catch. Whenever I see 'em  today I'm reminded of that time.  If Dad has an avian familiar surely it's a Mockingbird; steely grey, stately and protective of family.

2016 was my 30th high school reunion.  A long trail has been traveled so far and there's a significant fault line across that landscape in 1987 with my Dad's death.  It's defining and I wouldn't be the man I am today without it, but sometimes I wish that kid back there would've had some warning to the snakes and arrows he's heir to.  Perhaps the phrase (borrowed from a R.E.M. lyric and changed to fit my use for the painting) is meant to be something like that; a veiled admonition and a statement of purpose to my 1986 self.   Down the way the road's divided, Paint me the places you will see.

Click for a larger view

The obligatory artist statement...

This exhibit is called In Fine Feather, but it was almost called Swan Swan Hummingbird after a song by R.E.M. from the Lifes Rich Pageant* album.   Each summer I’m compelled to obsessively play Lifes Rich Pageant.  It came out in July 1986.   I had not only the vinyl LP, but also a cassette.  During the summer of '86, I worked in the southern end of Walton County, Florida for Rivard Realty.  I started work two days after I graduated from Walton Senior High in Defuniak Springs.  I painted signs, cut brush from around larger highway signs, and maintained the odd property or two.   At the end of the day I'd swing out to the beach for a swim in the Gulf of Mexico.  It was an idyllic town and period before the events of life got carried away.   The cassette was always in my Walkman while I worked and as a result it is now ingrained with the sights, the smells and the promise of summer.

The song (Swan Swan H) is full of obtuse imagery about the South.   Growing up in the rural South you develop a different set of natural rhythms since there are only two seasons....three if you count love bug season.   For some the cycle is centered on farming while others it’s when the mullet run, but for me it seemed to be the birds.  They are fragments of the absorbed minutiae of the region and are part of the tapestry of "me."  It sets a time and place; the diving swoosh of the Common Nighthawk (my Dad called them Bull Bats) late in the evening right at sundown before the heat of the day breaks, the call of the Blue Jay after a thunderstorm with leaves still dripping, the sight of egrets in the pasture as a tractor cut hay, and the ever present chatter of the Mockingbird at dawn.  Even now birds lead the natural patterns I notice and they became the focus of my art in 2012 and will be going forward.

I present my birds on a complementary or neutral background while drastically simplifying its environment.  This isolates the bird and puts the viewer eye to eye on equal footing; a portrait of sorts.   Part of the simplification process extends to the animals themselves.  There aren’t represented photo realistically, but enough hints of feather pattern, color and highlight are given to form the gestalt.     

The medium I use is acrylic, sometimes called synthetic polymer.  It’s considered a water-based media and dries quickly.  I’ve developed a method to store my paints and mixtures using wax paper over moist paper towels.  This allows me to work at a varying pace and not waste paint.

Whenever possible I’ve used reclaimed wood, grape vine trimmings, or cane for the frames.  I only stain or paint the frame when necessary or if dictated by the composition. This provides a more natural, sustainable and attractive frame.

*Note:  the apostrophe was deliberately left of the album title by the band.  R.E.M. did this with nearly all contractions, though this case is a possessive.

Reckoning

Last year I was asked by my former boss, who’s the current CIO at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, if I was interested in a commission piece. She prefaced the offer that it was a particular subject as well as size.    The subject would be outside of my current comfort zone.  I suspect she knew it would be good for me.  When she was my boss at University of Rochester she always encouraged me to push my boundaries and seek outside my comfort area. 

The subject was just this: Ox, Man, Eagle, and Lion.  It was to be poster size or similar and was for a campus religious organization that wished to remain nameless. I accepted with a healthy dose of fear. 

Now I'll admit I haven't always had the best relationship with God.  We haven't often seen eye-to-eye since my Dad died when I was 18 and in its aftermath my Mom nearly killed herself with alcoholism.   I guess you could say the relationship has evolved from being quite contentious to now perhaps suspicious.  But from what I've seen every great artist does at least one religious piece and maybe this was just what I needed to come in from the wilderness.

I tend to research all my paintings heavily.  I MUST know the subject, but here I didn’t know where to really start.  I asked two of my friends who have a deeper, richer knowledge of religion than I for guidance and points of direction. I dove into the proffered texts.  I also started asking others about the subject and what they first thought of.  I also looked at historical pieces of art related to the subject.  Through My wife's Maternal Grandmother I had many books about Byzantine Art.    I received a volume of feedback across the spectrum of experience and it was most welcome.

I had a few early ideas and these “napkin” sketches proved fruitless and were essentially dead ends, but these are always good as they stir the pot.    They were singular and didn’t cover the richness of the subject.  I set it aside and went back to my current body of paintings about birds, which was entering crunch time for my show. 

When I paint I always have music playing…keeps the other part of the brain from interfering.  One day the shuffle went thru a collection of songs from U2 and one song jumped out called “Until the End of the World.”  The song's lyrics describe a fictional conversation between Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot. The first verse discusses The Last Supper; the second is about Judas identifying Jesus with a kiss on the cheek in the Garden of Gethsemane; and the final is about Judas' suicide after being overwhelmed with guilt and sadness. 

This time the other part of my brain did interfere.  It elbowed its way in and brought with it the album cover (“Achtung, Baby”) the song is from and demanded my attention.    Yep, this was the “eureka” moment all artists look for.  The cover was composed of 16 photographs.   This type of layout would work perfectly here given the various bits of feedback I’d received.  Each piece of correspondence yielded a slightly different interpretation or reminder of an image of the subject.  This would allow me to cover the conversations I had and approach different aspects of the narrative I was building. It also gave me some limits, but also allowed me to experiment with styles and symbolism for each of the four.

For the individual pieces I utilized pencil sketches, digital painting, photography, and photo manipulation.  The two applications I used were Photoshop and Art Rage 4.  Art Rage was great for mimicking chalky pastels and splatterly paint effects.  At times it was a nice diversion from the stress of my avian art show.

Painting & layout

Click on the image below for the complete painting.

A little background on each panel within the piece is order so following this layout there a description of each.

Matthew	I	II	III	IV
Mark	V	VI	VII	VII
Luke	IX	X	XI	XII
John	XIII	XIV	XV	XVI

 I:  Four small crosses and one large one.   Matthew is the author of the first gospel account, but all four symbolize some aspect of Jesus; the one.

II: Feathers.  Matthew was symbolized as the winged man.  I got a really good camera to help take reference photos of birds and it helped in more ways than one!

III: Cubist Matthew.  This was the final piece I completed.  I wanted a cubist influenced piece and couldn’t get a cubist Ox to work out.  I started doodling without much thought.  I scanned it and added color using a graphics package called Art Rage.

IV: Matthew stamp photo.  This was a nod to my wife’s Grandfather who was an Assyrian-Greek Orthodox Minister who handled several churches throughout Western New York in the mid-20^th Century. 

V: Celtic Lion.  This was from a cross-stitch pattern that caught my eye in a local quilt shop.

VI: Stained Glass Lion Graffiti.  A lot of reference material I received was about stained glass pictures.  My favorite was this one with a lot of repeating patterns.  I sketched a version in Photoshop and did an overlay of a brick to pattern.

XI: Winged Lion.  I love simple line art.  I once did a whole series around minimalist line art so I went back to the well one more time with this black and white piece.

XII: Venetian tradition states when St. Mark was traveling through Europe, he arrived at a lagoon in Venice where an angel appeared to him and said "Pax tibia Marce, evangelista mess.  Hi requisite corpus tuum."  (May peace be with you, Mark, my evangelist. Here your body will rest.)  I wanted to capture some of these words and settled on giving them the appearance of chiseled into marble.

IX:  Bloody Man Gazing Skyward.  Luke is symbolized by the ox; sacrifice. This piece is a loose painting which represents Jesus’ sacrifice.

X: By profession Luke was a physician.  The sciences sometimes try to quantify faith.   This piece shows that attempt with a painting of St. Luke done by Vladimir Borovikovsky which has been pixelated in Photoshop.  Overlaying it is a simple two color graph. 

XI:  Ox skull pastel.  It’s a simple pastel of an ox skull which started out as a cubist piece.   When I first started in art I fancied myself a pastelist and I guess one part of me thinks I still am!

XII: I adore the art from the Book of Kells.  I borrowed a bit for this as well as one for St. John.  I sketched it out and highly stylized it while hopefully maintaining its Celtic roots.  This is my favorite.

XIII:  Icon of St. John.  This is based on a 14^th century Serbian prototype from Chilander Monastery.

XIV: Eagle drawing.  The symbol for St. John is the Eagle.  An extreme close-up pencil sketch proved quick and satisfying. 

XV: Book of Kells Eagle. I used the Eagle from the Book of Kells as the basis. After some arrangement and color decisions, I created a wood-grained like “canvas” as an underlay.  As with the St. Luke Ox (see XII) I kept the original images I created in a large format so posters could one day be created if interested!

XVI: John the Revelator.  This was my one input to the project. I always think of Revelations in regards to St. John so I went with a simple, manipulated photo of the Bible open to Revelations.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to name the painting.  I settled on Reckoning⁴ for the painting’s title.  Back home (rural Northwest Florida) if you asked someone for their opinion, nine times out of ten it begins with a bit of reflection followed by “I reckon…”  I raised the term to the fourth power in regards to ox, man, lion, and eagle.  After a year of reflection I reckon it is done!  Feedback is always welcome and I’d like to come see it hanging and some point in the future.

It was printed on a 24-inch X 24-inch canvas by a trusty print shop in Los Angeles.   

After nearly a year it is done.