Drawings in Process (Garden to Garden)
Several years ago, I made my way down the colonnade leading into the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. Her house is somewhat like a large and layered cube, a garden encrusted with objects d’art from far reaches of the earth and time. When I visit a museum, I will sometimes seek a signal that i can tune to: I come as a blank slate, and try to engage face to face with one single work, or space, or concept.
On that day, I was arrested on the ground floor by a worn limestone block on a heavy pedestal. It was a relief carving, the work of medieval French artisans. As a retable, or altarpiece, it was distinct because of its context—not being part of a chapel, or an outwardly professing house of worship. It was its own entity, a foreign relic, and to speak coarsely of something so beautiful, an amputation, displayed apart from its home body. And yet the nine foot block of stone commanded the colonnade, and drew my attention. It continues to do so.
The relief represents the passion of Christ in seven scenes from Jesus’s last day before his execution on a Roman cross. Now two millennia old, this history originated in an obscure outskirt of the Roman empire. This story was repackaged fifteen hundred years later in the cultural trappings of medieval France. In tights and pointed hats, the awkward figures are set in a fabric of narrative and gothic architecture. Through windows above each scene, like loopholes in time, appear the heads of more ancient storytellers and prophets, bearing written witness, or comparing notes to what was described in the relief below. To offset this vertical layering, the carving was bookended left and right, by images of the patrons. The French couple who commissioned this retable had themselves carved into the first and ninth panels. Standing with each was a patron saint, who seems to commission, narrate, and interpret the story as it was visualized in the limestone.
The workshop collaboration; the layers of patronage; the power of a story that endured thousands of years, cutting through cultural tides, living within them, and still speaking on our shore; all these impressed me deeply, as if the retable had just arrived in the 21st century, to the city of Boston, and now was before me.
Those carved limestone grottos tell a story that I am both separated from and connected to—an event from the near middle east, retold in French, has also imprinted my own culture. My response was to make a number of thumbnail paintings that reflected the figures in each panel in their relief composition as cartoons. They existed in a separate space from me, and so I painted them as if seen through a keyhole, a glimpse from one room to another, and separated by a wall of tallies, codes, marks and inscriptions. As I continued to consider these panels, I decided to invest myself in them not only as from a distance, but from within, as if I could have material engagement with them. I re-explored each panel as a charcoal drawing to process the narrative progression of the sequence, and think through the questions that they presented about culture, story, ownership, patronage, truth, participation, and time.