Touchstones (for Jay)

Dear Jay,

 

When we spoke about this exhibition, neither of us knew that you would not live to see it. While deeply sorrowful, I am buoyed by bringing together a handful of touchstones—artists whose printmaking and drawing you held in high regard. A few of them we never discussed, but I think they are relevant. Your audacity, inventiveness, and mastery of materials put you in their august company.

 

Some of these individuals are referred to in various catalog essays about your artmaking, but you’ve never shared wall space with William Blake and Albrecht Dürer, and it’s about time. Blake’s engraving Then the Lord Answered Job Out of the Whirlwind is paired with your woodcut Last Summer in Kentucky, both works animated by swirling bodies and language. Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil is not far away, a reminder of how you both employ controlled lines, dense compositions, rich shadows, and precise highlights.

 

I agree with writer and cultural critic, Ilan Stavans (you made the haunting animated film, The Silence Of Professor Tösla, together), who states that like Thomas Hart Benton, your images are “defined by undulations.” I’ve put Benton’s 1938 lithograph, Homestead or In the Ozarks, next to your 1983 woodcut, A Mortal Pilgrimage III (Storm of the Heart-Shaped Chair/Passion of Another Wisdom) to prove the point.

 

Two prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, picturing Roman ruins and an imaginary prison, are in keeping with your habit of exaggerating scale and manipulating perspective. Piranesi said, “I need to produce great ideas, and I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it.” This could be you talking!

 

Honoré Daumier, Natalie Frank, Käthe Kollwitz, Barry Moser, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Ben Shahn, among others, explore human agency and vulnerability with great sensitivity.  I hope that viewers will see in their historical or contemporary works echoes of your own and vice versa.  

 

Thank you for everything.

 

Stuart

 

Thanks to Dr. Jonas Hurley and Mrs. Julia Hurley for their generous loan of works in this exhibition.  

IMAGE: Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death, and the Devil, 1513, copper plate engraving on paper. Collection of the UK Art Museum, purchase: Gaines Challenge Fund.