This is a photograph of a video. I took video of a collage executed in 1998 by Maya Poran. Though untitled, I call the collage “Maya’s Vase” because it was executed over the entire surface of a terra cotta pot. I was so taken with the design that I video-taped it (this is the late nineties) and then, watching the tape in a darkened room and fiddling with the various “dials” on the “television” I photographed the images on screen. Or rather I photographed the phantoms I saw in the collage. I then chose some of the photographs to use as reference material for a series of paintings. I exhibited the paintings in a show at Noah’s Underground Gallery in Ann Arbor in early 2000. The show was called, “Images From Maya’s Vase.”
The above from-video photograph was used as reference for a painting called “The Ark’s Abandoned.” The colorful drapery-seeming thing at the top center of the image I took to be the Biblical ark. To the front of it on the right, in the rising flood waters a man shelters himself with a tarp. Between the man and the ark, drowned or low-flying birds.
Though in the Bible’s account the ark is painted with bitumen-pitch-asphalt (?) I treated the designs on the ark’s drapery like calligraphy and quoted chapter and verse the saddest line in the whole Noah story (Gen. 6:6) I wrote it without vowels, as was the fashion:
One of the things I liked most about Maya’s Vase was that it collaged different kinds of figuration, as seen above: a photo-centric (what the camera could record) depiction of water is overlaid with a conventional line drawing of waves. In other places conventional crescent moons hung over naturalistic twilight gatherings, the geometrical stars and stripes of an American Flag transformed into the gossamerest gossamer of angel’s wings. The angel herself seen in the conventional way, as a nude human being with wings, had the most naked, human of flesh, livid and goose-pimpled.
This is a straight-forward photograph of the portion of the collage seen altered by video above. Just a detail of it, not the whole, and turned on it’s side so that you can see that the image of the man covering himself with the tarp arose, ironically enough, from the drawing of a fish.
A pen and ink study of the man who used to be a fish. And a second study, painted in soupy acrylics:
Here the fish is oriented as it was in the original and in the video so that you can better compare it to the man.
To show a little more how generative this process of video-taping and photographing Maya’s collaged elements was, here is another example. It is the same section of the collage as above, this time photographed as reference for a different painting, this one entitled: “None of the Sentinels Know.” (Actually I just changed the title here. This version is close enough and has a more natural ring than the original title.) Here again are the fish and the birds and the drapery. But now I see two sentinels standing watch in front of a typical death’s head.
This is ten years ago and more. My art practices have changed. Up until 2000 many of my paintings took shape in a way similar to the “images from Maya’s Vase.” At the time, I searched for compositions by a kind of divination. I was always photographing videos or video-taping photographs, zooming in, raising the contrast. There was a Rorshach-y Ink-blotty quality to my discoveries. My mind made sense where there was none. It was very much like bumping into a dream image. I found the process bracing and cleansing. Today, the vase is still on display in our “play room.” I value it most of the objects from that time. The photographs I value next. Now though, I value them for their surface qualities, the strange harmonies of the colors, still this mix of the conventional and the naturalistic, the atmospheric effects. These surface qualities demand no explanation, and communicate a charge of meaning as powerful to any viewer as my original interpretations were to me alone.
I developed this exercise to demonstrate how complex pretty patterns can be built up out of simple shapes. I start talking about composition and mural design with simple ideas about pattern, repetition, positive and negative space, trying to get participants to see the graphic effect of what they are producing. I developed this exercise out of my love for kolam drawings. For the simple elements I went to my favorite drawing by a four year old. Below is a drawing by Nick (now probably 14) who was obsessed with King Arthur and Knights. I love that castle and horse. I think a t-shirt with that castle and horse on it would be great.
Below is what I produced. About a third of it was freehand: it turned out it was speedier than Photoshop. But for things like Nick’s horse I had to share the original, so I cut and pasted. Participants were then given the organizing rings of circles and squares and asked to fill them in with the simple shapes like hearts, stars, diamonds, dollar signs etc., which were listed on the survey they took as designs people at the drop-in center would like to see in the mural.
