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I conceived of this grouping of three drawings as I was beginning to experiment with markers late in 2014. The new, slightly faster work pace got me thinking that different subjects might now be possible. And so began what would turn into a kind of personal “origin story.”

 

First the subject. The woman in Pastiche and Picture Books is the same woman, Helen Douglas Alexander (1897-1984) She was the sister of my father’s father and the woman I knew as my great aunt “Henny.” She and her bachelor brother Douglas (whom I knew as “Butch”) lived together for almost their entire lives in the capacious, 19th century, Stamford, Connecticut house bequeathed to them by their father. My grandparents lived close enough to them such that almost every childhood visit of mine would also include visits with Henny and Butch. They were both incredibly sweet people and I miss them to this day; however, they were from a world very much removed from the 1970s suburbia I usually inhabited. Their mannerisms seemed oddly formal to me. The Sunday mid day meal was not lunch, but rather dinner. Other than 2 Latin professors they were the only people who have ever addressed me directly as Douglas (my actual first name) I can remember being astonished at a large family dinner when Butch brought up some passage he had been rereading in Pepys’ Diary in the manner one might now discuss an episode of Breaking Bad. I was 14 and newly introduced to the existence of this text, so I had two simultaneous reactions: 1) Oh my God! You mean you actually read that crap for fun?! and 2) Wow, maybe I should go back and check that out a bit more. And that kind of encapsulates my childhood experiences with them: drawn to them but struggling to figure out where they were coming from exactly.

 

As an adult who is now getting on a bit I have long since begun to see them differently. And I think I can remember the day that began to change.

 

It was during the Christmas break of my college sophomore year that I drove down to see my my now widowed grandmother Mera. It was 1981 and, still, she had Marcelled hair. Yes, she was of that older generation too; but I knew how to horse around with her. As was customary, we went off to see Henny and Butch; but she threw me a curve ball. She was going to drop me off and go run errands or some such thing. It seemed an obvious pretext. Mera was a bit of a busy body, teeming with opinions both solicited and not. This was to be her way of generously allowing them a young visitor to their private, secluded lives. When she peppered me with questions after picking me up I realized that she may have also hoped to learn something about their comings and goings that they would let slip to tell me but not tell her. 

 

The early part of the visit is a blur but I can remember Butch retrieving from the catacomb like cellar an obscure British ale (served warm!) After all, at 19 I was now an adult and ready for such things. I also remember their chimney catching fire!! I had no idea such a situation was even possible; but, of course, in a house that old it happened all the time. They were both in their early 80s but, nevertheless, displayed extraordinary athleticism in rushing about to extinguish it. The conversation was about college, my possible majors, other family members, etc., - all the topics I expected. But Mera dropped a bombshell as she went out the front door. “And Gill is AN ARTIST. He has been doing some wonderfully imaginative things. Be sure to ask him about it.”

 

I had not yet become the loud mouthed individual willing to go on about art projects to anyone unfortunate enough to probe too deeply. Sure, I would casually share what I did with friends but I was sheepishly beginning to realize my drawing was essentially unserious. And if anything would make me feel that more deeply, it was going to be having to describe my artwork to Henny. Thanks Mera! 

 

You see, Henny was a REAL artist. It was true that she rarely if ever mentioned it. In fact she seemed to have cast the whole thing aside at around the time I was born. But I had seen many examples of her paintings and drawings hanging on the walls of my older family members. I could tell she really knew what she was doing. I would later learn that she had in fact studied with the somewhat renowned late impressionist portrait painter Celia Beaux. As it turned out (to my great surprise) Henny was quite interested. I started out struggling to describe my drawings. I had no examples with me (Thank God!) But I soon warmed up to the discussion when she asked me directly about what I had most recently finished. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I was too intimidated to even attempt to draw people. This had led me to draw more idiosyncratic scenes. My latest had been a crude technical pen ink drawing of the interior of a car and the view through the windshield. I was fearing the inevitable question, “Why?” But it never came. Instead she described to me how she too used to like to sketch street scenes in Manhattan from the privacy of the front seat of a car. I remember her opening up to the topic and describing some of the things that she liked to try to capture, the kinds of juxtaposed relationships of pedestrians sharing for a moment the same city street. We eventually went to a table close by where there were several books of paintings. There is a certain strange phenomenon that I suspect most artists are familiar with: standing side by side with another person looking at the same painting or drawing and beginning to sense the other person’s reaction. I can remember absorbing these sensations in waves as Henny and I looked at various books. There were various impressionists but I remember her taking time with Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. The whole exchange was so intense that it is hard for me to pluck out too many particular assertions from Henny. I do recall her enjoying the color palette of Morisot. She had a book about the influence of Japanese print making on the French impressionists that particularly interested me. I was drawn to the use of pattern in some of the Cassatt prints I had never seen before. It was then that she started to describe how she admired the way that Cassatt could capture something ineffable between mother and child. No surprise. This is what Cassatt is known for. But what I took away from these moments was the way that Henny was willing to deliberatively describe how she had tried to go about capturing similar things in her paintings and drawings. There is even a bit of poignancy to the whole topic as she herself never had children. Yet, here she was passing something to me, 2 generations on.

 

The whole visit was remarkable to me because it was the first time I had ever really related to Henny and Butch as an adult. And Henny and I were essentially relating to one another as adult artists, having a peer to peer moment of sorts. Yet, at the same time we were also having a moment in which something ineffable was being passed between US. We weren’t even really looking at one another as it was happening. If Mary Cassatt had somehow been there to sketch us, her depiction would have to include a third character, our focus. Of course, no one was there to capture us; however, some 17 years prior my father HAD been there to capture a similar moment only a few feet from where we were then. He had taken a photo of Henny and me on the floor of the sitting room looking at very large picture books. The original seems to have been an Ektachrome slide, now lost. The image I worked from is a well worn late 1960s print. Its colors have faded and the emulsion had become smeared over the years. The pattern of Henny’s (Chanel?) suit was near impossible to decipher from the print but it was important to me to present a huge block of pattern if only to emphasize how indivisible units would later become central to my own work.

 

I don’t think I immediately absorbed much aesthetically in this converstaion; but I do think I came away hardened in my resolve to take the whole enterprise of drawing much more seriously. 

 

So what is “Helen?” Yes, she is Henny. Apparently she also had a face that launched a thousand ships. She is the artist. She is the subject, the “beauty.” She is the connection to me of a number of influences not least of which is the very impulse to be an artist. 

 

I chose the dates to emphasize recurrence. They are each 50 years apart; however, they are the precise dates of the scenes depicted. I suppose I could have continued with 1864, the year Henny/Helen’s father was born, and the year Rossetti began work on Beata Beatrix after Elizabeth Siddal’s death. Rossetti saw the departed Siddal in Dante’s Beatrix. Fair enough. My departed muse with descending arm - or the idea of her - appeared to me in 2014 instead as a homeless woman on a highway overpass. Henny or Helen is 17 in 1914 as reaches down to the water below the dock. I suspect her mother, the photographer, posed this to ape a certain later iteration of Pre-Raphaelite grace. Think of the bare arms of an Edward Burne Jones or a greek goddess come to life as Jane Morris. The descending arm was the image that kept coming back to me. In 1981 I had been obsessed with the earliest of these very Pre-Raphaelites. The exquisite detail in Hunt and Millais appealed. Rossetti’s early work appealed less; but I suppose I admired his almost bratty attitude - that “thoroughly good pictures” could arise only outside doctrinaire art education. I had to cling to something to give me hope that my skills might someday improve. 

 

 

 

In 1964 Henny/Helen is 67. But she is in almost the same pose, on the left hip, legs to her right and reaching down. Her hair is now white, but it seems exactly the same style. In 1914 her face is almost black. She is almost an anonymous stand in propped up in a cliched Maxfield Parish pose. Hence, the title Pastiche. But in 1964 she is more specific and, despite looking down, her features are now visible. Benno Friedman once upon a time promoted a poster of a mother feeding a grade school age Jackson Pollack spaghetti with an apron loaded with tomato sauce splatter. I suppose this Chanel suit of pattern plays a similar role for me in this 1964 version of “Helen.” 

 

I have worked in essentially three styles. Each of these Helen pieces is meant to represent each of these. Pastiche is one of the fully framed marker drawings. Median is a stippling ink drawing. And Picture Books is in the style of the no background Figurine series. I also wanted the pattern of the clothing in Picture Books to kind of break down. While it is a marker drawing, the actual patterns are starting to resemble stippling. It is almost a transition from one style to the other. In 2014 the actual Helen that was Henny is now long gone. But still I can see her or, more properly, am reminded OF HER in the figure of that homeless crippled woman on the median; but maybe more to the point, I am reminded of her by engaging in the process of drawing the interior of a car and the view though the windshield, as I had done in 1981. Seeing elegance in the quotidian? Is there beauty in the silhouetted image of a crippled, mentally ill woman alone amidst society’s engines? Is this my Christina’s World? Can I possibly stuff this with more imitation? Is it sentimental and full of cliches? Yes; but they are my cliches. This may not be my best work (I am not in a position to judge) but it is the closest thing to an acknowledgement of how and why I came to be doing this work in the first place.