Author: ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

https://www.instagram.com/wolvesofgray This blog is a refugee and a survivor of the Great Tumblr Inquisition of December 17th, 2018. I am gay artist, who received training at the Rhode Island School of Design, and now, a retired high-end fine art framer living in Maryland, USA. My interests and studies in life run a wide gamut from art to history and from the scientific to the esoteric. I have been building this blog of images and texts for the last eight years. My wish is that my posts pique the interest of viewers and encourage them to experience more.

Kenneth Pobo: “I Colored the Paper Lavender”

Photographers Unknown, Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Fifteen

After Langston Hughes

Professor, you tell us about
your nice wife and two children.
People should be nice. I’m nice.
Sometimes I’m smug. I have
bad days. You’re straight,
a perfectly fitted back door.
Gay, I don’t fit. Is it good
to fit? You say tonight
I should write a poem
about myself. I’ve written
a few before. They stay in
my notebook like condoms
in a wallet. I’ll pull one out.
It won’t be about wives
and kids and fitting in.
Is that OK? I could fake it
for an A. You wouldn’t
dock me for following
instructions, right?

So here’s my poem-
I colored the paper lavender
just for you.

Kenneth Pobo, Theme for English C, The Antlantis Hit Parade, American Journal of Poetry, 2019

Born in August of 1954 in suburban Chicago, Kenneth Pobo is a poet, essayist, critic and story writer. The only child of Louis Pobo, a chemist, and Myrtle Pobo, a housewife active in church activities and later.very supportive of her gay son and his partner. Both of Pobo’s parents were enthusiastic gardeners, a trait which he later emulated in his adult life.

Kenneth Pobo began his early poetic work, influenced by his love of 1960s popular music, as an outlet for emotions he could not express as a gay child in the contemporary society. His first poem, written on July 4th of 1970, was an imitation of the 1969 song “Crystal Blue Persuasion” by Tommy James and the Shondells. As Pobo stated in the introduction to his 2002 collection entitled “Greatest Hits” , he used the bubblegum imagery of pop music as an overlay for emerging sexual feelings.

Pobo received his Bachelor of Arts in 1976 from Wheaton College in Illinois. In 1979, he earned his Master of Arts in English at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee where he studied under James Liddy, a poet both Irish Catholic and gay, who is best known for his collections, “A Blue Smoke” and “Blue Mountain”. Pobo’s creative writing thesis, later published with changes as a chapbook in 1981, was entitled “Billions of Lit Cigarettes”. Pobo was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1983; his creative writing dissertation was entitled “A Vision Tested in the Flower: The Aaron Stern Poems”.

Kenneth Pobo writes in a wide variety of styles and poetic forms. His work contains references from all the things that enthuse his life, including music, gardening, his friends, astronomy, movie stars, naps, and martinis, among others. Pobo’s poetry covers many topics including politics and popular culture, as well as contemporary gay life with its love and passions. The majority of his poems are of medium length; however, great attention is paid to the smallest detail even though it might at first seem mundane.

The first collection of poetry by Pobo was the 1979 “Musings from the Porchlit Sea”. In this volume, he uses his knowledge of past literary verse and, by the addition of popular cultural models such as disco, gives the verse a new voice for contemporary culture. A prominent example is his poem “The Disco Version of the Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” which took T. S. Eliot’s 1915 canonical poem and molded it into a campy exposé of contemporary life.

Pobo’s second volume of poetry, “Evergreen”, was published as a chapbook in 1985. Inspired again by Tommy James and the Shondells, the collection takes its title from a song on their 1969 “Cellophane Symphony” album. “Evergreen” features poems about plants, places, and people he admires; the volume includes the poem “Cass” about Mama Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas band. A fictional poem set during the Civil War is also included in this collection. Entitled “Joshua to Andy, Appomatox, 1865”, the poem tells the story of two soldiers who were lovers and, ironically, parted with the end of hostilities. Within this homage to previous war poems by such poets as Whitman and Melville, Pobo placed homosexual love and tenderness inside the world of warfare.

Kenneth Pobo’s 1986 chapbook “A Pause Inside Duck” contains overtly political poems that are composed in traditional poetic form. Contained in the 1991 “Ferns on Fire” is his angriest gay political poem, “Shasta”, which connects the centuries-long holocaust of Native Americans peoples with the lives of contemporary gay men. The 1996 “A Barbaric Yawp on the Rocks” contains the usual mundane details and pop references, such as The Cowsills and the Rolling Stones; however, Pobo uses these references more sharply in his depictions of both political and romantic modern gay life experiences.

Pobo is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. His most recent works include the 2011 chapbook “Ice and Gaywings” which won the Qarrtsiluni Chapbook Contest; the 2012 chapbook “Save My Place”; a collection of both prose and traditionally composed poems entitled “The Antlantis Hit Parade” and “Dindi Expecting Snow”, both published in 2019; and the 2020 “Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose” which won the Stonewall Chapbook Competition.

In addition to poetry, Pobo also writes fiction and essays which include “The Gay/Lesbian Teacher as a Role Model” for the March/April 1999 edition of “The Humanist” magazine and “But Can You Dance to It? Musical Imagery in the Poetry of Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, and David Trinidad” for the October edition of the “Intercultural Writer’s Review”.

Kenneth Pobo taught English and Creative Writing at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, for thirty years until his retirement in 2020. He shares his life with his husband, Stanley Slater, in Media, Pennsylvania.

Note: A reading by Kenneth Pobo of his poem “Sudden Fear”, titled after the 1952 Joan Crawford movie, can be found at the online crime poetry weekly, “The Five-Two”, located at: https://poemsoncrime.blogspot.com/2015/09/kenneth-pobo.html

Luchita Hurtado

The Artwork of Luchita Hurtado

Born in Maiquetia, Venezuela in November of 1920, Luchita Hurtado was a painter whose work, with its strong feminist and environmental themes, crossed many different cultures and art movements. Although her career spanned over eight decades, she only received wide recognition for her art towards the end of her life.

In her early years, Luchita Hurtado lived in New York City with her mother, older sister and aunts. She studied Fine Art at the Art Student League and volunteered at “La Prensa”, the largest and oldest daily Spanish-language newspaper in the United States, where she met her first husband, Chilean journalist Daniel de Solar. In 1938 at the age of eighteen, Hurtado married Daniel de Solar and had two children together. The family relocated to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic after an invitation with a request to start a newspaper arrived from Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic.

Returning to the United States, Hurtado and her family settled back in New York City where they associated with many artists and journalists, among whom were Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, artist and landscape designer Isamu Noguchi, surrealist artist and collector Wolfgang Paalen, and Japanese-American dancer Ailes Gilmour, who was Noguchi’s half-sister. In 1942, Hurtado divorced de Solar and subsequently married Wolfgang Paalen. Beginning in 1944, Luchita Hurtado produced window displays and painted murals for Bloomingdale’s, a luxury department store in New York City. She also did freelance work as an illustrator for the mass media company Condé Nast and worked as a muralist for the Lord and Taylor department store in the city.

In 1946, Luchita Hurtado and husband Wolfgang Paalen traveled to Mexico to research pre-Columbian art. A research article by Paaalen, with photographs taken by Hurtado, was published in the 1952 edition of the French literary and artistic journal “Cahiers d’Art”. After her divorce from Wolfgang Paalen, Hurtado moved to Los Angeles in 1951 with fellow painter Lee Mullican, whom she married in the late 1950s. Lee Mullican would remain with her until his death in 1998.

In 1970, Hurtado founded the feminist group, Los Angeles Council of Women Artists. She participated in their first exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art, “Invisible/Visible”, which was organized by multi-media artist Judy Chicago and sculptress Dextra Frankel. In 1974, Hurtado had a solo exhibition at the Woman’s Building, a non-profit arts and education center which focused the women’s movement and feminist art.

Except for her two exhibitions and work produced for Bloomingdale’s and Conde Nast, Luchita Hurtado’s artwork was largely unknown until 2015. Ryan Good, who was cataloguing the estate of Hurtado’s deceased husband Lee Mullican, found paintings signed “LH” among others in the collection. He showed these paintings to Paul Soto, founder of Los Angeles’s Park View Gallery, who gave Hurtado her second ever solo exhibition, “Luchita Hurtado: Selected Works, 1942-1952”, a two-month show which opened in November of 2016. Hurtado was ninety-six years old at the opening of the show.

With the recognition generated by the solo exhibition, Luchita Hurtado’s career erupted. Her work was included in the Hammer Museum’s 2018 “Made in L. A.” exhibition and received a good review from the L.A. Times and favorable critical reception. Hurtado’s paintings caught the attention of Hans Ulrich Obrich, a Swiss art curator and the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, two prestigious galleries located in central London. He gave Hurtado her first international solo exhibition entitled “Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn”.

Luchita Hurtado’s work contain elements from the avant-garde and modernist movements of the twentieth-century, including magical realism, abstraction, and surrealism. She used womb imagery in her works long before it appeared in the feminist art movement of the late 1970s. One of Hurtado’s best known series of works is the “I Am” images of the 1960s, self-portraits painted by her looking down at her own body. Taking up the issue of climate change, Hurtado painted more specific environmental themes, some of which contained block-lettered texts such as “Mother Earth” and “We Are Just a Species”.

Hurtado’s artwork depicting nude women contain loosely surrealistic forms that draw inspiration from pre-Columbian art, cave paintings, and abstraction in sculpture and paintings. Through her work, she focused attention on the edges of the body and the language used to bridge the gap between ourselves and others. Hurtado expressed this connection through images that coupled the intimate gestures of the body with the vastness of the sky and earth.

In February of 2020, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held a retrospective of Luchita Hurtado’s work. She remained active in the arts until her death, at the age of ninety-nine, in August of 2020. Hurtado was named as one of ‘Time” magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2019. Her work is in many private collections and public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Note: An interesting article on the life of Luchita Hurtado, which includes early photographs and video of Hurtado discussing her life , can be found at the Whipple Russell Architects site located at: https://whipplerussell.com/blog/critically-acclaimed-in-her-90s-modernist-luchita-hurtado

Second Inser Image: Luchita Hurtado, “Birth”, 2019, Acrylic on Linen, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Luchita Hurtado, “Encounter”, 1971, Detail, Oil on Canvas, 12 x 243 cm, Hauser and Wirth Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Oresti Tsonopoulos, “Luchita Hurtado”, 2018

Sergio Cerchi

Paintings by Sergio Cerchi

Born in Florence in 1957, Sergio Cerchi is an Italian painter and musician. Beginning in his teenage years, he started to study in his two passions, the visual arts and music, by attending workshops held by Florence’s artists and playing in musical groups. Cerchi received his Bachelor of Arts from Florence’s Istituto D’Arte of Porta Romana and attended courses at the prestigious Luigi Cherubini Conservatory of Music.

Sergio Cerchi worked through a process of experimentation with various art techniques to develop his own personal style. His influences range from primitive art to the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Cerchi’s figurative and still life works are set in flattened and realist tableaux, similar to theater sets, within which are contained references to popular culture, art history and personal experience.

In Cerchi’s paintings, the pictorial surface as a whole is fractured into multiple quadrants whose portion of the image is rendered with different coloring and lighting. Through this technique, figures and objects are segmented and reconstructed in collages composed from their angled fragments. The resulting canvas, with its shifting, peeling surface and fading horizon planes, presents a unique version of cubist art.

Sergio Cerchi’s paintings are mostly executed in different shades of a dominant hue. Depending on the angle of each fragmented quadrant, the tone of that part of the image may appear softer or bolder. The palette of Cerchi’s oil paints range from warm undertones of red carmine, mixed with shades of green, ocher and blues, to tones of brown and gray. A prominent feature of his work is the use of bold, dramatic shading in the compositions.

Since 2011, Sergio Cerchi has been represented by Galleria Gagliardi located in San Gimignano, Siena, Italy. He presented his work at a 2013 curated exhibition, entitled “Art in Therapy”, held at the Chiesa di Sant’Agala, a national archeological site in Spoleto, Italy.

Note: Images of Sergio Cerchi’s work and information on exhibitions can be found through Galleria Gagliardi’s website located at: https://www.galleriagagliardi.com/en/artist-works/cerchi-sergio

Bottom Insert Image: Sergio Cerchi, “Supereroe”, 2017, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 100 cm, Private Collection

Douglas Alain Powell: “The Earth Has Asserted Itself”

Photographers Unknown, The Earth Has Asserted Itself

had no direction to go but up: and this, the shattery road
its surface graining, trickle in late thaw—is nothing amiss?
—this melt, the sign assures us, natural cycle
and whoosh, the water a dream of forgotten white

past aspens colored in sulfur, they trembled, would
—poor sinners in redemption song—shed their tainted leaves

I tell you what boy I was, writing lyrics to reflect my passions:
the smell of a bare neck in summer
a thin trail of hairs disappearing below the top button of cut-offs
the lean, arched back of a cyclist straining to ascend a hill

in the starlight I wandered: streets no better than fields
the cul-de-sacs of suburbia just as treacherous, just as empty

if wood doves sang in the branches of the acacias, I could not hear them
anyone lost in that same night was lost in another tract

the air pulsed and dandelion pollen blew from green stalks
—that was all

and yes, someone took me in his car. and another against the low fence
in the park at the end of our block. under the willow branches
where gnats made a furious cloud at dawn and chased us away

I knew how it felt to lie in a patch of marigolds: golden stains
the way morning swarmed a hidden rooftop, the catbirds singing
the feel of ruin upon lips rubbed raw throughout the night

granite peaks: here, the earth has asserted itself. and the ice asserted
and human intimacies conspired to keep us low and apart

for an ice age I knew you only as an idea of longing:
a voice in the next yard, whispering through the chink
a vagabond outlined against the sky, among the drying grass

we journey this day to darkness: the chasm walls lift us on their scaly backs
the glaciers relinquish their secrets: that sound is the ice bowing
and the sound underneath, the trickle: the past released, disappearing

you pinnacle of my life, stand with me on this brink
half-clouded basin caked in flat grays, the very demise of green

you have surmounted the craggy boundary between us.

you open a place for me in earth, receiving my song

—for Haines Eason

D. A. Powell, continental divide, Chronic, 2009, Graywolf Press

Born in Albany, Georgia in May of 1963, Douglas Alain Powell is an American poet whose work is experimental in form. Growing up in Georgia and Tennessee, he relocated, after his parents’ divorce, with his brother to live in California with their mother and new stepfather. Powell lived on and off the streets in his teen years, often running away from home and working odd jobs to support himself. He graduated from Lindhurst High School and made several attempts at colleges, including a short term at San Jose State University.

At the age of twenty-two, Powell entered Sonoma State University where he began to write poetry under the tutorage of poet David Bromige. During his years in Sonoma County, he organized poetry readings and co-founded “Avec”, which became a major journal of the post-Language Poetry avant-garde. Powell received his Bachelor of Arts in English in 1991 and his Masters in English in 1993, both from Sonoma State University.

After completing his graduate studies, Douglas Powell entered the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and received his Masters in Fine Arts in 1996. For his work during the Writer’s Workshop, he received an Academy of American Poets prize. While in Iowa, Powell wrote his first full-length poetry collection, “Tea”, which focused on AIDS in particular and the gay subculture in general. The poems in this collection examine pain, loss, abuse, rejection and suffering; however, the essence of the volume is one of survival. Published in 1998 after Powell’s return to California. this first work generated a great deal of excitement. Powell’s openness about his HIV-positive status contributed to interest in the book and readers’ response to it.

The writers cited by Powell as influences on his work cover a wide range; he uses their writings as a litmus test for his own work. These writers include t. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, and the Black Mountain poets, among others. Known for his syntactically inventive, longer lined and sometimes untitled work, Powell creates poems that are almost collage-like in form, where fragmentary elements of allusions and references are joined together into mosaic compositions. The source list for his 1998 volume of poems, “Tea”, include the following: Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, the Supremes, Tennessee Williams, mid-1980s disco divas, gay slang, Batman’s sidekick Robin, and “The Exorcist”, among others.

Settled in California, Powell began doing work in San Francisco’s new media industry. In 1997, he was awarded a Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation. In addition to his career as a poet, Powell was a university professor with teaching positions at Columbia University, Sonoma State University, San Francisco State University and Harvard University, where he was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry, a prestigious five-year position.

In 2000, Douglas Powell’s second collection of poetry, entitled “Lunch”, was published by the Wesleyan University Press. This volume built on the survival aspect in “Tea” and directed it onward to restoration and rejuvenation. While again examining the issue of AIDS, the poems were not about dying from the virus, but about living with it and through it. “Lunch” was more eclectic, both in its formality and theme, and contained biblical and mythological allusions, such as the stories of King Midas and the birth of Aphrodite. The lines in the poems were shorter than those in “Tea”, almost conventional, while the poems were generally longer in length, with a greater variety.

Powell’s next collection of poems, “Cocktails”, was published in 2004 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. His 2009 “Chronic” won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and also was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. The 2012 “Useless Landscapes, or a Guide for Boys” was a witty and emotional collection of poems which examined the occupied spaces of boonies, backstages, bathhouses, and bars. This fifth volume of poetry by Powell won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. His poetry can also be found in the 2008 anthology “Best American Poetry” and “American Hybrid”, an anthology published in 2009.

Note: A collection of twenty-six poems by Douglas Alain Powell, including a reading of his poem “continental divide”, can be found at the Poetry Foundation. The link to the recorded reading is: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51144/continental-divide

Justin Liam O’Brien

Paintings by Justin Liam O’Brien

Born in Flushing, New York in 1991, Justin Liam O’Brien is a painter and digital artist. In his early years, he was interested in drawing concept art, graphic novels, and modeling video games, whose construction became a serious occupation until his early twenties. After attending Long Island’s Suffolk County Community College, O’Brien earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Digital Arts and 3D Animation from the Pratt Institute in 2016.

In 2017, O’Brien started producing paintings with figurative elements and gradually developed a style which combined his skills at animation with his identity as a queer person. Impressed by the works of Diego Rivera and Leger, O’Brien strived to achieve their simplicity in his early figurative paintings; his focus gradually changed to more complex, narrative works which expressed his personal life and relationships. With his technical painting skill, O’Brien is able to express an exploration of issues centered on a very clear, delineated community of people.

Justin Liam O’Brien’s figurative paintings emerge from his experiences of queer affection, tenderness, longing, and loneliness. The male figures are archetypal, fashioned with soft edges and placed in carefully crafted tableaux, which reflect his technical training in the digital arts. While drawing on personal experiences, O’Brien portrays universal, relatable narratives, often tinged with tension or poignancy, that speak to our feelings of self-doubt and powerlessness. Through these visual communications, he hopes to clarify to its viewers our shared experiences and feelings, and in this way strengthen the communal bond.

In November of 2019, O’Brien had his debut solo exhibition, entitled “Losing in the Form of Darkness”, at New York’s Monya Rowe Gallery on West 30th Street. The figurative compositions in this show depicted unidentified male characters, with blurred features, engaged solitarily or entangled in moments of leisure and passion, as well as, boredom and loneliness. In conjunction with the exhibition, O’Brien developed a book of sketches, executed in the previous year, which contained a more personal side of his work.

In May of 2020, Justin Liam O’Brien left his position as a 3D modeler for a real estate company and began to concentrate full time on his studio painting. He exhibited his paintings in two shows that year. The first was entitled “Damned by the Rainbow” and was held in July at the GNYP Gallery in Berlin; the title of this show was suggested by a verse from French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The exhibited work reflected O’Brien’s exploration of intimacy and the emotions that emerge in shared personal space.

In November of 2020, O’Brien’s solo show “When Acting as a Wave” opened at Los Angeles’s Richard Heller Gallery. His paintings frequently examine the effects of being close to people, which can be wonderful or terrible depending on circumstances. O’Brien’s paintings in this show, executed during the period of covid quarantine and isolation, showed these opposing feelings at their balance point. His 2020 “Bread on a Seder Plate” shows a gathering of friends with a lone figure almost blending into the wall. Another painting in the show, “I’m Afraid of How This Ends”, shows a room, suggestive of a prison cell, with two figures together, each alone except for the other, with seemingly no means of escape.

In September of 2021, Justin Liam O’Brien returned to the Monya Rowe Gallery for an exhibition entitled “Dreams”, the centerpiece of which was a large canvas, “NYC Inferno”, an ode to a sex party in Brooklyn, New York. Other works in the exhibition derived from references in queer cinema and literature, and the religious art of Italian Early-Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca. O’Brien’s other 2021 shows at the gallery included “Me, Myself and I” and “Equal Affections”.

O’Brien’s works have been exhibited in many group exhibitions including presentations at Galerie LJ in Paris; Chart Gallery and the High Line Nine, both galleries in New York City; the contemporary Kapp Kapp Gallery in Philadelphia; and Galerie Tanja Wagner in Berlin, among others.

“I had been damned by the rainbow. Happiness was my fatality, my remorse, my worm: my life would forever be too immense to be devoted to strength and beauty.”

– Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), 1873

Notes: More images and information on Justin Liam O’Brien’s work can be found at the artist’s site located at: http://justinliamobrien.com

Justin Liam O’Brien’s sketchbook “Losing in the Form of Darkness”, which was published in conjunction of his exhibition of the same name, can be found at the online Raw Meat Collective located at: https://rawmeatcollective.com/shop/losing-in-the-form-of-darkness-by-justin-liam-obrien

Top Insert Image: Laura June Kirsch, “Justin Liam O’Brien”, 2020, Juxtapoz Magazine

Second Insert Image: James Liam O’Brien, “Fais Comme Si J’Avais Pris La Mer”, 2021, Oil on Linen, 175 x 139.7 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Justin Liam O’Brien, “Stay in My Arms, If You Dare?, 2018, Oil on Canvas, Monya Rowe Gallery

Bottom Insert Image: Justin Liam O’Brien, “Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves”, 2021, Oil on Linen, 152.4 x 152.4 cm, Monya Rowe Gallery

Alejandro Amenábar: Film History Series

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Thirteen Men

Born in Santiago in March of 1972, Alejandro Fernando Amenábar Cantos is a Spanish-Chilean film director, composer, and screenwriter. In August of 1973, his family relocated to Spain where they settled in Madrid, initially living in a camper-van and later moving to a complex in Madrid’s outer neighborhoods. From the age of fifteen, Amenábar was passionate about cinematic art; he also wrote stories and musical compositions for the guitar and keyboard.

Amenábar began his education at The Immaculate Piarist Fathers, a parochial multi-discipline school in Madrid, and later transferred to the secular Alameda de Osuna Institute, one of Madrid’s prominent private schools. After graduating, Amenábar enrolled at the sciences faculty of Madrid’s historic, public research Complutense University where he studied cinema and directing. There he met people who would lend support to his career in cinema including Argentine journalist Carlos Montero, actor Eduardo Noriega and Mateo Gil Rodriguez, a filmmaker who would co-write most of Amenábar’s films.

In 1991, Alejandro Amenábar released the first of his short films, “La Cabeza (Head)”. The script, based on an urban legend, was written by Mateo Rodriquez and Amenábar, who also composed the musical score in collaboration with Alfredo Alonso. This film earned Amenábar a prize from the Amateur Independent Film Association. His second short film, the 1992 “Himenóptero”, was shot on location at Alameda de Osuna Institute, his former high school. Amenábar wrote the script and music for the horror suspense film, was director and editor, and performed the only male role. (Note: Hymenoptera is a large order of insects which includes wasps, bees, sawflies and ants.)

At the age of twenty-two, Amenábar released his first full-length film, the 1996 “Tésis (Thesis)”, which secured his reputation as one of Spain’s most promising cinematographers. This film, which commented on the Spanish film industry, Hollywood’s influence on the industry and the voyeurism of the horror genre, was nominated for eight Goya awards, of which it won seven including Best Film. In 1997, Amenábar released the science-fiction based, psychological thriller, “Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes)”, which starred Penelope Cruz and Eduardo Noriega. The rights to this movie were later acquired by actor Tom Cruise who directed and starred in the American remake entitled “Vanilla Sky”, with Penelope Cruz playing the same role of the original film.

Alejandro Amenábar followed his success with an English language movie in 2001, entitled “The Others”, a psychological, gothic horror film. Written and directed by Amenábar, the supernatural film relied on tension built during disturbing scenes for its horror rather than the use of special effects. “The Others”, with its film score by Amenábar, was a box-office success and won seven Goya Awards, including Best Film and Best Director. It also won three Saturn Awards for Best Horror Film, Best Actress for Nicole Kidman, and Best Supporting Actress for Fionnula Flanagan, who played the housekeeper Bertha Mills.

In 2004, Amenábar had another success with his “Mar Adentro (The Sea Inside)”, based on the true life story of Ramón Sampedro. Paralyzed from the neck down, Sampedro fought a thirty-year campaign to win the right to end his life with dignity.The film won fourteen Goya Awards, including Best Film and Best Director, and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

In 2008, Amenábar released the historical drama “Agora”. Written by Mateo Gil and Amenábar, the biopic told the life story of Hypatia, the fourth-century female mathematician and astronomer who investigated the flaws of the geocentric Ptolemaic system of the solar system and the heliocentric model that challenged it. Winning seven Goya Awards, the film had limited release in the United States but was Spain’s highest grossing film of 2009.

After a seven year hiatus, Alejandro Amenábar released his psychological horror mystery film “Regression” in 2015. The film premiered at the 2015 San Sebastián International Film Festival. In 2019, he released the Spanish-Argentine historical drama “While at War”, the plot of which tracks the plight of writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in 1936 Salamanca, a city controlled during the Spanish Civil War by the Rebel faction.

In addition to composing the scores of his own films, he laid the sound tracks for Josè Luis Cuerda’s 1999 coming-of-age film“Butterfly’s Tongue” and Mateo Gil’s 1999 mystery film “Nobody Known Anybody”, among others.

Top Insert Image: Mateo Gil, “Alejandro Amenábar, Himenóptero”, 1992

Third Insert Image: Javier Aguirresarobe, “Alakina Mann, The Others”, 1992, Written and Directed by Alejandro Amenábar, Warner Brothers

Corrado Cagli

The Artwork of Corrado Cagli

Born in the city of Ancona in February of 1910, Corrado Cagli was an Italian painter of Jewish heritage. Little information on his formative years is available; however, it is known that, at the age of five, his family relocated to Rome. Cagli grew up in a largely assimilated secular family, who had come to terms with its Jewish religion as antisemitism became more aggressive in Fascist Italy. His ties to his Italian heritage were always strong; even in his later years of exile from Italy, it was important for him to maintain a tie with his homeland.

Corrado Cagli’s first commissioned work was a 1927 mural painted on a building in Via Sistina, the street at the top of Rome’s Spanish Steps. In the following year, Cagli received another commission in Rome for a mural in Via Vantaggio. He had a remarkably early success in Italy; still in his twenties in the early 1930s, he was already famous nationally. Cagli had his first solo exhibition in 1932 at Rome’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna and showed at the Milan Triennale in 1936.

Along with other artists such as Emanuele Cavalli and Giuseppe Capogrossi, Cagli was a member of the Scuola Romana, an art movement of Expressionist painters in Rome who were active between 1928 and 1945. A rising star of the Scuola Romana, Cagli was supported by Italy’s Fascist regime despite being both Jewish and a homosexual. He was chosen to represent Italy at the 1930 Paris Exposition, the Venice Biennale, and other prestigious expositions.

In 1938, the Leggi Razzial were promulgated by the Fascist government; this series of laws enforced racial discrimination in Italy, directed mainly against Jewish Italians and inhabitants of Italy’s colonies. Two of Corrado Cagli’s murals were censored by the government as they did not fit with the regime’s rhetoric and stylistic preferences. With the enactment of the Racial Laws, Cagli was forced into exile, first to Paris, a place he had visited as a young star painter from Italy, and then to the United States, where he later became a citizen. His first showing was at the Julien Levy Gallery, a source for surrealist work.

Corrado Cagli rarely had a proper studio during his exile years, which made painting difficult. Most of his work done in the United States is on paper. Cagli had always valued drawing as an art form; in his exile, they became the primary instrument of his artistic search. His use of paper as a medium was also the result of a crisis he went through with his idea of painting. In the 1930s, despite having been forced into exile, Cagli still retained the artistic ambitions of Italy and saw painting as a public art essential to constructing an Italian national identity.

Cagli enlisted in the United States Army and was recognized for his artistic talent. During his training he painted barracks, made his own drawings, and illustrated a military magazine. Later during the war, he worked as a military artist drawing scenes from the campaigns. Cagli fought at the 1944 Normandy landings and, later, in Belgium and Germany. Near the end of the war, he drew a series of dramatic drawings based on the liberation of the Buschenwald concentration camp.

After the war, Cagli returned in 1948 to Rome and made it his permanent residence. Because of his past as a former regime-endorsed artist and a Jewish exile from Fascism, Cagli did not fit into any of the factions of Italy’s post-war heated cultural disputes. He arrived into Italy’s art world with a metaphysical route towards abstraction which was opposite to the Neo-Cubist trend that dominated postwar Italian painting. Settled in Italy, Cagli began a series of experimental works in multiple mediums, including ceramics, mosaics, tapestries, architectural decoration, ballet scenery, and costumes.

Corrado Cagli helped organize the Galleria La Cometa in Rome and, along with poet Libero De Libero, created an artistic circle of musicians, writers, architects, painters and sculptors. He was involved with New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s 1949 exhibition, “20th Century Italian Art” and facilitated the 1950 opening of the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York City. In August of 1972, Cagli was commissioned as the official banner painter for the Palio di Siena, the twice yearly equestrian competition held in Siena, Italy.

Cagli was awarded the Guggenheim Prize in 1946 and, in 1954, the Marzotto Prize, given by the Marzotto fashion company for his contributions to the cultural rebirth of Italy after the war. Corrado Cagli died in Rome in 1976.

Notes: An article on Corrado Cagli’s 1936 mural “The Battle of San Marino”, now housed in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, can be found in a previous posting on this site.

An interview between author Raffaele Bedarida and Alessandro Cassin, Director of Centro Primo Levi, entitled “Corrado Cagli, the American Years” can be found online at Printed_Matter located at: http://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/corrado-cagli-the-american-years/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Corrado Cagli”, Circa 1930s

Second Insert Image: Corrado Cagli, “Ritmi Cellulari in Chiave di Giallo, 1949, Mised Media on Canvas on Paper, 90 x 70 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Corrado Cagli, “narcissus”, Date Unknown, Silkscreen Print, Edition of 50,, Sheet Size 90 x 85 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Corrado Cagli in His Studio in Rome”, December 1969, Radiocorriere Magazine, Gelatin Silver Print

Justin Chin: “What Measures Eternity?”

Photographers Unknown, What Measures Eternity?

Oh blameless innocent victim
What measures a lifetime?

I used to have this theory about how
much life a human body could hold.
It all had to do with the number
of heartbeats. Each human is assigned a number
determined by an unknown power cascading
over the dark waters of an unformed Earth.

For some, it was a magnificently high number
seen only in Ritchie Rich comics, and for others,
it was frightfully low, like twenty-six.
No bargaining, no coupons,
no White Flower Day sale, no specials. Once
you hit your number, you croak.
I imagined the angels in heaven
and the demons in hell gathering to watch
the counters turn, like how I enjoyed watching
the speedometer line up to a row of similar
numbers, and especially when the row of
nines turned into
the row of zeros.

Oh Blameless innocent victim
What measures eternity?

Justin Chin, Excerpt from the Poem “Grave”, Harmless Medicine, 2001

Born in September of 1969, Justin Chin was a Malaysian-American poet, essayist, and performance artist. In his works, he dealt with identity categories that influenced his life: Asian-American, Gay Writer and Queer. Chin’s work sought to give a voice to marginalized groups of racial, national, and sexual minorities, Acknowledging that everyone one has an individual self-identity, he also questioned the usefulness of categories that dominate the language of today.

Justin Chin was educated in Singapore’s British colonial system where he developed his love for poetry and prose in English literature. In 1991 after graduating, he left home to attend Honolulu’s University of Hawaii at Mānoa where he studied creative writing. Chin trained under poet and visual artist Faye Kicknosway, who encouraged his writing and introduced him to poet and playwright R. Zamora Linmark and visual artist and poet Lisa Asagi. These two artists remained important supporters of Chin’s work throughout his life.

In 1990 in San Francisco, Chin attended the first annual Outwrite Conference, which played a pivotal role in encouraging and shaping the LBGTQ literary culture in the United States. Relocating to San Francisco in 1991, he transferred to the journalistic program at San Francisco State University. Feeling restrained by the journalistic format, Chin began to write essays, poems, fiction, and performance pieces to express his views. In 1995 and 1996, Chin was a member of San Francisco’s team for the National Poetry Slam, an annual performance poetry competition.

Justin Chin published his first collection of poetry, the 1997 “Bite Hard”, which received nominations for both the Lambda Literary Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award. This mix of poems and short performance pieces, done in unflinching, harsh honesty and biting humor, dealt with AIDS, sexual tourism, racial stereotypes, Asian identity and bathroom sex. The prvading sense of loneliness in this volume culminates in its last poem, “Refuging”, where Chin discloses the pain of losing one’s cultural identity and examines the loss of lovers and its subsequent effect on one’s self.

In 1999, Chin published a collection of opinion and biographical essays from 1994 to 1997 in a volume entitled “Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks”, which received positive reviews. A second collection of poetry, “Harmless Medicine” followed in 2001 and received nominations for the Lambda Literary Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award. This second collection is different than the first in tone; it is more serious and poignant in its discussion of homophobia, mortality, the American culture and AIDS. Its long and complex poems explore the meanings and effects of illness as well as the hatred of a xenophobic society hiding behind and seeking justification in religion.

Justin Chin published a collection of more personal and revealing essays in 2002 entitled “Burden of Ashes”. The first twelve essays dealt with his childhood family life, the abuse by an aunt, and growing up in a repressive society; the second part of the collection focused on his coming to terms with his sexuality and his mostly unfulfilling love life. Chin’s third volume of poetry, “Gutted” was published in 2006; it became a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, that honors gay male poetry.

Other prose works by Chin include the 2005 “Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms”, a collection of documents and scripts from his performance work, and “98 Wounds” published in 2011. In addition to his published work, Chin created eight full-length solo performance works and several shorter works that he performed throughout the United States. An anthology of writings from Chin’s seven published books, entitled “Justin Chin: Selected Works”, was published in 2016.

In his career, Justin Chin enlivened the poetry scenes of both San Francisco’s Paradise Lounge and its spoken word and performance art collective Sister Spit , as well as open microphones at various clubs. He was a respected presence at the Outwrite Conferences and at Litquake, San Francisco’s Bay Area literary festival. Justin Chin’s life ended tragically, at the age of forty-six, with a stroke related to complications from AIDS on December 24th of 2015.

Corrado Cagli: “The Battle of San Marino”

Corrado Cagli, “The battle of San Marino”, 1936, Encaustic Tempera on Hollow-Core Wood, 545 x 651 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Corrado Cagli helped organize the Gallleria La Cometa in Rome and, along with poet Libero De Libero, created an artistic circle of musicians, writers, architects, painters and sculptors. He was involved with New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s 1949 exhibition, “20th Century Italian Art” and facilitated the 1950 opening of the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York City. Cagli was awarded the Guggenheim Prize in 1946 and, in 1954, the Marzotto Prize, given by the Marzotto fashion company for his contributions to the cultural rebirth of Italy after the war. Corrado Cagli died in Rome in 1976.

Corrado Cagli’s “Battle of San Marino” depicts the final battle of the Second War of Independence in which the Piedmont army, directed by King Vittorio Emanuele and supported by the French troops of Napoleon III, defeated in a fierce battle the Austrian forces commanded by Emperor Franz Joseph I. The battle is considered the founding moment of the Italian Risorgimento, the period leading to unification and the formation of the new state of Italy.

The battle scene, depicted from a bird’s eye perspective, with the hectic confusion of weapons, horses, infantry and knights crushed together amid the surrounding hillsides, clearly highlights Cagli’s relationship with traditional painting styles, with influences ranging from Paolo Uccello to Piero della Francesca. Owned by Francesco Muzzi, secretary of the Cagli Foundation, and graciously loaned to the Uffizi in 1978, it was finally donated to the Uffizi Gallery in 2003.

Note: An interview between author Raffaele Bedarida and Alessandro Cassin, Director of Centro Primo Levi, entitled “Corrado Cagli, the American Years” can be found online at Printed_Matter located at: http://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/corrado-cagli-the-american-years/

Don Herron

The Photography of Don Herron

Born in Brenham, Texas in 1941, Don Herron was an American photographer. Upon graduating from high school in 1959, he served four years in the United States Air Force. Herron received his Bachelor of Arts, and later in 1972, his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught studio classes. He moved to San Francisco in the latter part of 1972.

Inspired by medieval sculptures set in niches and largely self-taught, he began a series of portraits of people posed in bathtubs, which became known as the “Tub Shots”. Herron collaborated with his subjects and allowed them to stage the images. Some of his subjects simply sat in their empty bathtubs, while others wore costumes and created tableaux. The tubs were sometimes filled with water or styrofoam peanuts used for packing. Many of the subjects posed nude; others concealed themselves with bubbles or the limbs of mannequins.

In 1978, Don Herron relocated to New York City where he became part of the East Village art scene. He continued his series of black and white images by photographing the members of its underground, bohemian community of artists. The “Tub Shots” series contains such personalities as painter Keith Haring, photographers Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, filmmaker Peter Berlin, playwrights and drag performers Charles Busch and Ethyl Eichelberger, and actress and Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, among others. Through this work, Herron captured both the glamour and camp, as well as the joy and tragedy, that the community experienced in the 1970s.

Herron relocated in the middle of the 1980s to Newburgh, New York, where he became an active member of the Historical Society of Newburgh Bay and the Highlands. He settled in a historical 1836 Federal townhouse which had been designed by Thornton McNess Niven, a Scottish-American architect and master stonecutter who gained fame for his Gothic Revival and Italianate styles. Herron created accurate drawings of his and other historical buildings in the Newburgh area for publication in tour booklets. He also provided artwork for non-profit groups including Habitat for Humanity.

Don Herron also wrote newsprint articles for the Times Herald Record and the Mid-Hudson Times; his writings drew on his personal experiences, including his childhood in Texas and his confrontation with cancer. Don Lee Herron died on December 25th of 2012 at the Castle Point Veterans Administration Hospital surrounded by his many friends.

Herron’s “Tub Shots” series has been published in New York’s Village Voice, the New York Magazine and in the art journal, Art Forum. In 2018, the Daniel Cooney Gallery in the Chelsea district of Manhattan held a two month exhibition of Herron’s series which displayed sixty-five black and white photographs dated from 1978 to 1993. Herron’s work is in the collections of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia; Connecticut’s Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; New York’s Tang Teaching Art Museum in Saratoga Springs; and the museums of the Universities of Texas, Louisiana, and Toronto.

Note: Three articles on “Tub Shots” and Don Herron can be found at New York essayist and television producer Brian Ferrari’s informative blog site located at: https://brianferrarinyc.com

Top Insert Image: Don Herron, “Performer Winston Fong, San Francisco”, circa 1972-78, Tub Shots Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Middle Insert Image: Don Herron, Self Portrait, 1993, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Don Herron, “Actor Ethyl Sichelberger, NYC”, 1982, Tub Shot Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Donald Britton: “These Things Have No Beginning”

Photographers Unknown, These Things Have No Beginning

The start of a new era
Of desperation is starting over.

Meanwhile you and your bronze friend
Run naked through the yellowed broom sage,
Suspended vaporously above life
Like high pressure systems. A redolent
Cascade of voices from the lawn
As the next new hope something will happen
Ascends the orangerie steps, an endless
Unpunctuated sentence that seems at the time
To illuminate everything, as if a giant
Had stepped between you and the sun,
Sucking the light and punching a hole
In space, revealing infinite vistas
Of anticipation and delay.

These things have no beginning, or rather
Were set in motion long before we became
Their facsimile, thinking ourselves privileged
To secret information, not sensible
Of how the world contrives with enormous
Duplication of labor to rid itself of us
And perform its little routines
Solo in the galactic swimming pool
That is at last a total stage. It is
The amusing notion life might someday
Not be confusing that coordinates
Our award-winning sentiments these last days
Of summer, preparatory to the paint-by-number
Rush of autumn, the colors balking
Within their lines, which as a kid
Was the hardest part and apparently still is.
You must do something, though, not caring
What it is, so long as when the day ends,
You’re able to claim that this thing
has been accomplished, brought nearer
The perfection toward which it ludicrously
Aspires, then put aside to be resumed
At a point just over the next rise yonder
Where suddenly pertinent trees now loom.

Donald Britton, Here and Now, In the Empire of the Air, 2016

Born in San Angelo, Texas in 1951, Donald Eugene Britton earned his Bachelor of Arts and his Master of Arts in American Literature at the Austin campus of the University of Texas in 1976. He earned his Doctorate in Literary Studies in 1979 from the American University in Washington DC; his dissertation was on modernist poet Hart Crane’s poetics of praise.

Britton lived in New York City and became part of a circle of avant-garde artists and poets, later known as the third-generation of New York poets, which included Dennis Cooper, Joe Brainard, Tim Dlugos, Brad Gooch, and Bernard Weh, among others. After several years in the city, he moved to Los Angeles where he worked for the advertising firm of Brierly and Partners.

Donald Britton was not a prolific poet; as a self-depreciating perfectionist, he spent a great length of time and effort on each of his poems. In his poems there is the lack of a defined self; the poems are not personalized in the traditional sense of confessional poetry but are more abstracted and generalized. Britton’s poems are not subject-centered nor do they have topics in the conventional sense. He writes more about the states of mind, in which he follows the wandering of a particular consciousness as it encounters bodily experiences.

Britton’s work was published in the gay-oriented New York magazine “Christopher Street”, Cornell University’s EPOCH magazine, and the literary journal “The Paris Review”, among others. They also appeared in several anthologies including “The Sons of the Male Muse”, “Coming Attractions: An Anthology of American Poets in Their Twenties”, and “Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Poems”.

Donald Britton essentially stopped writing poetry in the late 1980s. The only collection of his work published during his lifetime was the 1981 “Italy” which featured short introductions by novelist Edmund White and poet John Ashbery. Britton was to publish a second collection of his work, entitled “In the Empire of the Air”; however, due to financial difficulties, it was never published in his lifetime. The collection was edited by poet Reginald Shepherd and author Philip Clark, and finally published in 2016 by NightBoat Books .

Britton wrote a two-part essay, entitled “The Dark Side of Disneyland”, on the death imagery of some of its rides, in which he argues that Disneyland is a monumental artwork memorializing dead children. This essay appeared in the art magazine “Issue”, now online, and later in his friend Bernard Welt’s 1996 essay book, “Mythomania”. Four of Britton’s poems were included in the 2010 “Persistent Voices”, a compilation of poetry by writers lost to AIDS.

Donald Eugene Britton died, at the age of forty-three, of complications from AIDS in 1994. He was survived by his partner, David Cobb Craig, whom Britton met in 1983.

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Donald Britton (Third from the Left) at New York City’s Ear Inn”, Early 1980s, Gelatin Silver Print

Notes: A short memoir written by David Cobb Craig entitled “Life and Times with Poet Donald Britton”, which includes their first meeting in 1983, can be found at the Gay & Lesbian Review site located at: https://glreview.org/article/life-and-times-with-poet-donald-britton/

Donald Britton’s doctorate dissertation on Hart Crane’s poetics of praise can be read at the American Library’s Digital Research Archive located at: https://auislandora-stage.wrlc.org/islandora/object/thesesdissertations%3A791

I wish to acknowledge poet and author Reginald Shepherd as the source for most of the information in this article on Donald Britton’s life and work. The author of many essays on gay poets and writers, Shepherd passed away in the fall of 2008. His blog site with its wealth of material is still available online at: http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com

Komail Aijazuddin

Paintings by Komail Aijazuddin

Komail Aijazuddin is a visual artist and writer, whose practice includes drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation work. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Studio Art from New York University and a Master of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute. A strong influence on Aijazuddin’s art is the figurative work of Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, considered today a pioneer of modern Indian art and one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early twentieth century.

Drawing from his exploration of both the iconography of Shia Islam and the art of Catholicism, Aijazuddin works in the visual vocabulary of traditional religious art. Hie art is the outcome of the internal journey he has undertaken and includes paintings, illuminations, scrolls, altar pieces and votive objects, and the medium of gold leafing. Through these mediums, Aijazaddin investigates contemporary ideas of religion, belief and worship, divinity, statehood, and one’s sense of belonging and personal faith.

Komail Aijazuddin’s 2015 collection, entitled “Grace in Hand”, was initially shown at the Khaas Gallery in Islamabad. For these simplified works, he used silhouettes rather than detailed figures and, instead of complicated background patterns, used solid fields of color with washed-out highlights or gold leafing.

Aijazuddin’s solo exhibition, entitled “Secret History”, was held in 2019 at the Canvas Gallery in Karachi. This collection consisted of life-sized canvases which theorized on a figurative tradition of Islamic art. Influenced by the Christian religious art of Giotto and Duccio, Aijazuddin’s employed the repetitive element of the halo and combined it with elements from traditional Mughal miniature paintings and medieval illuminated manuscripts. His lattice patterned backgrounds taken from the culture of Persia were executed with dry pigments, whose contrasting texture highlighted the images’ figures.

Note: An interesting 2018 discussion between Komail Aijazuddin and figurative artist Salman Toor, also from Lahore, on issues regarding their art practice can be found at the Herald’s online site located at: https://herald.dawn.com/news/1154032

Bottom Insert Image: Komail Aijazuddin, “Angry Icon”, 2018, Oil and Gold Leaf on Panel, 91.4 x 61 cm, Private Collection

Will Barnet

The Artwork of Will Barnet

Born in Beverly, Massachusetts in May of 1911, Will Barnet was an American artist whose career spanned nearly nine decades. He is known for his prints, watercolors, paintings and drawings which elegantly depicted figures seen in daily life and dream-like scenes. Barnet’s works were laden with symbolic meaning; his paintings often presented solitary figures with birds set amidst portentous landscapes or interiors.

Will Barnet studied at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts under Impressionist artist and writer Philip Leslie Hale whose brushwork and palette were influenced by the paintings of Claude Monet. Beginning in 1930, Will Barnet studied at the Art Students League of New York under early Modernist painter Stuart Davis and Charles Locke, an accomplished painter and printmaker who taught lithography at the League.

In the mid-1930s, Barnet taught at the New School for Social Research and, beginning in 1936, began a long professional association with the Arts Student League when he was appointed the official printer for the school. He later became an instructor in graphic arts at the school and influenced a generation of artists including sculptor and painter Knox Martin, pop art painter James Rosenquist, abstract-impressionist painter Ether Fisher, woodworker Emil Milan, and Cy Twombly, known for his calligraphic, large scale works.

As with many of the American painters in his generation, Barnet observed the evolving trends in European art and integrated them into his own vocabulary. He was formal though, in accordance with his teachings, to the basic elements that form any work of art: the principles of color use, composition, and subject matter. Barnet’s works encompassed the different art movements of his era, from his early works in social realism to his minimalist works of carefully placed solid colors.

Will Barnet was one of the few artists, along with Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso, who produced inspired work over a continuous, decades-long period through a logical progression of different artistic phases. His early social realist work, produced for the graphic arts division of the WPA’s Federal Art Project in New York, were lithographs and etchings of farm laborers, factory workers, and urban dwellers. These sullen dark-toned portraits depicted the struggle of the depression era and the simple love of family life; they reflected the popular Ashcan School style, also seen in the contemporary works of etcher John Sloan and painter George Bellows.

Well known as a painter and prolific graphic artist by the 1940s, Barnet began to experiment with Abstraction and added more vibrant color to his work. His work, though, never became fully abstract; there was always some presence of figuration in the composition. Barnet became a prominent figure in the 1940s New York art movement called Indian Space Painting, which based their abstract work on the art of Native Americans. Through the 1950s, Barnet’s moved more towards Abstract Expressionism and created more studied, formal works of shapes and color. Near the end of the 1950s, his work incorporated more gestural forms and his attention became more drawn to domestic scenes, which became a major element in his later work.

Will Barnet’s style had matured by the mid-1960s. Influenced by traditional Japanese color woodcuts, Renaissance paintings, and the newly arrived American Pop Art, his work evolved again into more figurative work with silhouetted forms set against geometrically designed backgrounds. Barnet is probably best known for his enigmatic portraits of family, such as his 1969 “Silent Seasons” series, a suite of figurative work comprising four prints for each season. He continued to experiment with these harmonious compositions of domestic tranquility and produced work in this style for the next fifty years.

Barnet, in addition to his teaching positions at the New School for Social Research and the Art Students League, also held positions at Yale University, New York City’s Cooper Union, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was a member of the National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London. In 2011, Barnet received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama in Washington DC.

Will Barnet’s work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Vatican Museum in Rome, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others. Barnet died of cardiac arrest on November 13, 2012, at the age of 101, in New York City, his home for twenty-eight years.

Top Insert Image: Sidney J. Waintrob, “Will Barnet”, 1966, Gelatin Silver Print, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Second Insert Image: Will Barnet, “Big Grey”, 1987, Lithograph, 32.4 x 24.9 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art

Third Insert Image: Will Barnet, “Gladys”, 1936, Lithograph, 37.5 x 25.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Marc Royce, “Will Barnet”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Edward Field: “This Man Is Not Dangerous”

Photographers Unknown, This Man Is Not Dangerous

The poster with my picture on it
is hanging on the bulletin board in the Post Offive.

I stand by it hoping to be recognized
Posing first full face and then in profile

But everybody passes by and I have to admit
The photograph was taken some years ago.

I was unwanted then and I’m unwanted now
Ah guess ah’ll go up echo mountain and crah.

I wish someone would find my fingerprints somewhere
Maybe on a corpse and say, You’re it.

Description: Male, or reasonably so
White, but not lily-white and usually deep-red

Thirty-fivish, and looks it lately
Five-feet-nine and one-hundred-thirty pounds: no physique

Black hair going gray, hairline receding fast
What used to be curly, now fuzzy

Brown eyes starey under the beetling brow
Mole on chin, probably will become a wen

It is perfectly obvious that he was not popular at school
No good at baseball, and wet his bed.

His aliases tell his story: Dumbell, Good-for nothing,
Jewboy, Fieldinsky, Skinny, Fierce Face, Greaseball, Sissy.

Warning: This man is not dangerous, answers to any name
Responds to love, don’t call him or he will come.

Edward Field, Unwanted, Stand Up, Friend, With Me, 1962

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in June of 1924 to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Edward Field is an American poet and author. He spent his formative years living in Long Island, where as a cello player he played on the Field Family Trio, a weekly radio program on Freeport’s WGBB. Field enlisted in 1942 and did basic training with the U.S. Army’s Air Force division. During the training, a Red Cross worked handed Field an anthology of American poet Louis Untermeyer’s poems, which spurred his decision to be a poet: he would later credit poet Constantine Cavafy as another source of inspiration for his writings.

In the years of World War II, Field served in the Eighth Army Air Force, stationed in both England and France, from which he flew twenty-five missions over Germany as a B-17 bomber’s navigator. On a February 1945 mission over Berlin, Field’s plane, crippled by enemy anti-aircraft fire, crashed into the North Sea. After rescue by a British air-boat, the surviving crew members were sent to a town near the Liverpool area of London.

During his time in basic training and his military service, Edward Field came to terms with his identity as a gay person; however, he kept it very private during this time. Knowledge by military authorities of a enlisted person’s homosexuality would have resulted in a blue charge which, while neither honorable or dishonorable, gave military commanders authority to remove such person from the ranks. A person’s military dismissal by a blue charge enabled the Veterans Administration to deny benefits of the G.I. Bill and, as employers were aware of its negative connotations. made employment after discharge difficult.

After his return to the United States, Field studied for a short period at New York University, where he met the eccentric writer Alfred Chester whose later novel “The Exquisite Corpse” was published in 1967. Field traveled to Paris in June of 1948 and focused on his career as a writer and poet. On the ocean voyage over to Europe, he met the slightly-older Robert Friend, a poet who had already published in several small presses in the United States. They stayed in Paris’s Hotel Jacob and soon became friends with author and poet Ralph Pomeroy and Frederick Kuh, who later became a well-known restaurateur and cabaret owner in 1950-1980s San Francisco .

Edward Field’s time in Paris was productive, both in his writing and his cultural development. He wrote for hours in the cafés, and exchanged poems with Robert Friend, which led to a critique of each others work. Encouraged by Friend’s praise, Field submitted his work to all the major journals in the United States. One work was accepted by an English journal, and the next spring, a number of his works were published in the magazine “Botteghe Obscure”. For his social activities, Field went frequently to the opera and theater; he also, accompanied with his friends, attended gatherings of artists and intellectuals at such places as the Paris residence of Monroe Wheeler, the director of publications and exhibitions for New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

After his return to the United States in the winter of 1949, Field supported himself with various jobs, including doing art production and working as a machinist, warehouse laborer and clerk-typist. In 1956, he studied acting with the Russian-born actress Vera Soloviova of the Moscow Art Theater, who was a student of theater practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski. Field applied his new acting techniques to his poetry readings and supported himself this way throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In New York City in 1959, he met writer Neil Derrick at the Museum of Modern Art, where Derrick had a position. They became lifelong partners for fifty-eight years, and co-author many writing projects,

Edward Field’s poetry is eclectic and highly personal, being written in the first person; they are also deceptively simple in form. He used his personal experience and his knowledge of the mythologies of our collective history to explore his Jewish ancestry and the issues of alienation, oppression, city life, his experiences in the military, and alternative sexualities. Field’s first published collection of poems was the 1962 “Stand Up, Friend, With Me”, which drew connections between modern America and ancient Greece. In this work, both comic and tragic, he rewrote the mythologies of such figures as Icarus, Aladdin and Fidel Castro.

Field’s second work was the 1967 “Variety Photoplays”, a continuation of his rewritten mythologies. Poems included in this work are “Frankenstein”, a commentary on the alienation of a gay male and his desire for male companionship, and “Bride of Frankenstein”, which examines ungratified sexual desire. In this collection, Field published a memoir inspired work, “World War II”, a long, harrowing account of a crashed military plane into the North Sea. Field followed this collection with five more works, including the 1973 “Eskimo Songs and Stories’, the 1981 “Full Heart’, and “After the Fall: Poems Old and New” published in 2007.

Edward Field has also edited two anthologies, the 1979 “A Geography of Poets”, and co-edited its sequel, “A New Geography of Poets”, in 1992. He won an Academy Award for his written narration for the 1965 documentary “To Be Alive”. Field’s other awards include the Lambda Literary Award, the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Since 1972, Edward Field and his husband, Neil Derrick, were artists in residence at the Westbeth Artist Colony in the West Village area of New York City. They were a familiar sight in the city, walking side by side; Derrick, blind since 1971, would alway keep his hand on Field’s shoulder. Neil Derrick, co-author with Field of the bestselling 1980 novel “The Villagers”, died in March of 2018 at the age of eighty-seven. Edward Field is currently still living at the Westbeth Artist Colony.

Notes: The Edward Field Papers, including personal and professional correspondence, drafts of poems, press clippings and personal journals, are housed in the Special Collections Archive of the University of Delaware.

A collection of Edward Field’s poems, read by the poet, can be found at VOCA, the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center website, located at: https://voca.arizona.edu/voca-search?rendered_item_1=edward+field

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Edward Field (Left) and Neil Derrick (Right)”, Date Unknown, Washington Square Park, New York City

John O’Reilly

The Montage Work of John O’Reilly

Born in February of 1930 in Orange, New Jersey, John O’Reilly was an American artist whose intricate assemblages combine art, literature, history, and autobiography. His works of montage, both paper and photographic, investigate the issues of religion, violence and eroticism in society. O’Reilly studied at Syracuse University in New York where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1952. After serving in the Army, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which he graduated in 1956 with a Master of Fine Arts. While at the Art Institute, he met sculptor James Tellin, who became his lifelong partner and, later, husband in 2013.

Upon graduation, O’Reilly supported himself as an art therapist at the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts for twenty-seven years. He made small, intricate photo-collages in private for many years, only sharing them with close friends. In O’Reilly’s work, foreground and background are merged together to form the plane on which are placed fragmented images: Greek statues, Titian paintings, heads of World War Two soldiers, self-portraits, clippings from gay porn magazines, and works by Cézanne, Caravaggio and Vermeer, among others. O’Reilly’s works are in the same tradition as that of the boxed found-object assemblages created by Joseph Cornell, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage.

One of John O’Reilly’s first works was his 1965 “Self Portrait”, in which he combined polaroid images of himself with astronomic images and details from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. During the 1970s, he combined in his collages images of California’s west-coast modern architecture with works by Poussin, Titian and other historical art references. O’Reilly first started publicly exhibiting his photo montages at the age of fifty. One of his first exhibition was in 1983 at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. O’Reilly exhibited his work multiple times through the 1980s, including solo shows at New York’s Alan Stone Gallery and Boston’s Howard Yezerski Gallery, and a 1985 group show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

John O’Reilly’s main subject in his 1900s work was the topic of war which he felt was a great obscenity. Exhibitions during the period included group shows at the John Weber Gallery and the Wessel & O’Connor Gallery in New York, a solo exhibition at New York’s Julie Saul Gallery, and another group show at MOMA. In 1995, art dealer and curator Klaus Kertess, the owner of New York’s Bykert Gallery, selected a number of O’Reilly’s images for inclusion in the Whitney Museum’s Biennial. Works during this period of the 1990s included stage dioramas from his series “Occupied Territories”, which featured bodies from gay porn magazines collaged to the heads of German soldiers from World War II; these newly eroticized figures were then attached to scenes from painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s landscapes.

Starting in the early 2000s, O’Reilly began to remove his image from his photo montages. The collages became more dense in appearance, fragmented and austere with his only appearance being one reflected in images of glass shards. Endlessly suggestive, the montages contain shadows drifting from bodies and body parts wafting out of open mouths. Discarding the seamlessness of his previous works’ backgrounds, O’Reilly began using complex, intersecting lines at the edges of his collage work which pushed his work closer to abstraction.

John O’Reilly, at the age of ninety-one, died of a stroke on May 20th of 2021 in the Briarwood retirement community of Worcester. He was survived by his husband, James Tellin, and his brother Edward. The majority of O’Reilly’s work, a collection in excess of thirteen-hundred works, is now housed at the Addison Gallery of the Phillips Academy. His work is included in the collections of many museums including Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

“I have to fight intellect — my work needs to look like one unit without looking like a collage. It starts with an idea, then I go through book after book until I find something, over a long period of time. I call them montages, where one thing logically flows into another.”—John O’Reilly, The Brooklyn Rail, 2017

Note: A collection of twelve black and white photomontages by John O’Reilly can be found at the online Queer Arts Resource located at: http://www.queer-arts.org/archive/jun_98/oreilly/oreilly.html

Top Insert Image: Seth David Ruben, “John O’Reilly”, 2021

Second Insert Image: John O’Reilly, “Tears”, 1999, Polaroid Montage, 20 x 17.1 cm

Third Insert Image: John O’Reilly, “Umbrella”, 1981, Paper Montage, 20.3 x 20.3 cm

Bottom Insert Image: John O’Reilly, “A Constellation”, 1982, Caseine and Halftone Montage, 25.4 x 17.3 cm