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Conflict and Visual Culture Project: Featured Artist, 2010Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, Bryn Mawr, PAThe"Nagasaki Prayerwheel" project.
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A Plea For Mercy In A Time Of War: John Lyon Paul's Work In ProgressBy Paul SawyerIn the center of the workshop, three pale, massive wooden shapes hover together, bound by iron. They are shackled by hoops, pierced by spikes, garlanded by chains, overtopped by clamps and a shape that looks like a scythe. One of the tree trunks has been sawn asunder, its two halves standing eternally ajar. The sense of constriction is reinforced by the base: six visible iron wheels enclosing six others within, which if they moved could only move in an endless circle, like an infernal machine.More than any of his other works, this sculpture reveals John Lyon Paul's gift for endowing abstract forms with metaphorical richness and uncanny affective power. The iron elements seem to gesture to all experiences of public torture and huddles pain. One thinks of Northrop Frye's catalogue of demonic imagery in literature: engines of torture, weapons of war, armor, and images of a dead mechanism which, because it does not humanize nature, is unnatural as well as inhuman Here too are the sinister counterparts of geometrical images: the sinister spiralthe sinister cross, the sinister circle, the wheel of fate or fortune. By contrast, the three shapes, sanded and smooth and gently undulating, seem to be made of human flesh (even the knots look all-too-human, like blemishes of bruises). Are they victims bound on a cart headed for the guillotine? Or are they enduring an endless imprisonment? When only two shapes are visible, they unmistakably resemble the Twin Towers.In fact John conceived "Many Thousands Gone" during a visit to New York City but eighteen months ago well before September 11. As the accompanying sketch shows, he scribbled out the basic design on hotel stationery. His title is the famous, haunting refrain of the Negro spiritual "No More Auction Block"; the primary reference, therefore, is to the American national tragedy of slavery, and the trunks suggest a family shackled together. Thus, while the iron elements suggest all forms of bondage and torture, the whole structure suggests the public side of victimization the body offered up to view. Most broadly, as John describes the work in a portfolio, it stands as a remembrance of and tribute to all those named and unnamed individuals who were victims of anothers violence.In its emotional eloquence, "Many Thousands Gone" recalls a number of Johns earlier works. Next door, for example, is "Momento Mori (Moment of Death)" a pair of rough-hewn beams mounted on an iron platform and secured at the ends by iron hoops; there too, the pathos derives from the formal contrast between iron and wood (see Bookpress, February 2002, pp 6-7). And in "St. Francis' Shrine", the central figure constructed, among other things, out of a target used for rifle practice, with an exploding crimson orbit in the area of the hear confronts the viewer who in turn confronts the saint through a glass plate etched with cross-hairs. Subtly, John positions the viewer as potential participant in the endless cycle of violence. (The "Shrine," though dedicated to peace, bristles with arrows and dances with the red dots of the stigmata.)"Many Thousands Gone" also positions the viewer, but in a more dramatic way. The work is in fact unfinished. In its final form, the bare tree-trunks will be covered with a ruddy pelt of nails. John in inviting each visitor to his studio to drive a nail into the wood using specially prepared hammers, to be forged from actual artifacts of violence hand guns, land mines, animal traps, a shard of the World Trade Center, a piece of a Nazi submarine, and so forth. Visitors will therefore participate in a double action: completing the sculpture, and performing a ritual that is central to the total aesthetic experience. That gesture is as rich in metaphor suggestion as the artwork itself. The act of hammering a nail into flesh obviously recalls the Crucifixion, but at the same time, the vast number of nails needed to cover the work about half a million points not to a single emblematic event, but to the sheer multitude of historys victims, the unnumbered who have gone before. John writes: Each nail may be driven as a prayer, a blessing, a vow, or in remembrance of an individual, a group, or an event in which there was a willful violation of another being. Thus, in its monumental simplicity, "Many Thousands Gone", like "St. Francis' Shrine", focuses on the intersection of love and destruction; violence, symbolically re-enacted, turns into its opposite, and a monument of pain slowly metamorphoses into a prayer for peace. The work therefore surveys all time, but belongs urgently to our dangerous present moment. The words incised on the steel base read: "May the closed fist of violence become the open hand of mercy".Several people have begun to record the strong emotions evoked during their visits. Helene Hembrooke wrote: "The physical force and motion [of the hammer] coupled with my own anger, felt momentarily like retaliationswhich was at once both sickening and satisfying. Those blows were for my pain. With successive blows I was reminded of all the others who would drive their nails to represent their stories of violence. Driving my nail was a statement of permanence, recognition, and, ultimately, forgiveness." Carri Jean, another visitor, wrote: "Blow after blow I felt some sense of atonement as the nail pierced deeper and deeper into the soft tissue of the massive trunk. Acknowledgement. Sadness. Release. Relief. Like a deep cry all cried out that leaves nothing left, but room for Grace."In its final form, John plans to surround the present structure by six witness figures of similar design, also perhaps covered by nails, in a hexagonal room whose walls will bear five Peace Tablets (a door will be in the sixth wall). The tablets are already in place. These five low-relief sculptures of black concrete, shaped like gravestones and decorated with varying patterns of circles and extending rods, form a stark contrast to the overpowering expressionism of the central group. In their somber beauty and classical understatement, the "Peace Tablets" seem at once to denote and confer the peace that passeth all understanding.Bookpress, vol. 12, No. 6, October 2002, Ithaca, N.Y.
Instrument of Peace: John Lyon Paul uses art to comfort those affected by violenceBy Vanessa SchneiderThe idea for the massive sculpture came to John Lyon Paul in a split second. His brother-in-law had just undergone brain surgery and was bed-ridden at a hospital in Manhattan. Paul sat in the room with him while he slept, keeping unwanted visitors away.Using a small piece of white hotel stationery, Paul took form the Royal Regency in Yonkers, he began scribbling around 10 pencil sketches. He drew a bound, flat base and lined the outside with large, upright wheels. Three solid tree trunks joined by heavy, steel bands huddled in the center. He wrote the title, "Many Thousands Gone," from a post Civil War song called "No More Auction Block," at the top of the stationery.He made the sketch five weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, and the New York University Hospital where he sat was within sight of the World Trade Center. When he returned to his studio in Ithaca, Paul got to work. If the wheels were actually turning, it could only go in the same place again and again and again like our cycle of violence where somebody hits you, and you want retribution, he said. You hit back, then they hit you harder, then you hit them harder.Since its completion in June of 2003, the sculptures large wooden trunks, each about 7-feet tall, have been covered by almost 400 nails, some bent and others dug deep. Each nail represents a victim of another persons violence. Paul invites all the visitors that come to his studio to pick up a hammer and a nail.Its out of my hands, he said. I made a blackboard and other people are drawing on it. Carri Jean, a local artist and friend of Pauls, said "the power and compassion of the piece is so profound, the viewer can only be humbled I its presence. I made my prayer and pounded a nail into the flesh of a trunk in just the right place, my place," Jean said. "That hammer drove my prayer deep into the heart of something with an enormous voice." On a small table in the corner, several pages of a black sketchbook are filled with stories from people, even children, who have driven nails and wanted to express themselves on paper. "For the cow in the dumpster," one person wrote, "I witnessed her suffering. "Paul, now 61, flipped through the book and walked around the sculpture slowly, recalling the nails he's driven into the piece. "Everyone has at least one nail to drive," he said, "and some of us have hundreds."On Pauls 27-acre property at the end of Sodom Road in Ithaca, theres an A-frame house on the left, a pond on the right and, at the end of the driveway is his studio, a 3,000 square-foot building he built himself. The studio is bigger than his home. On the second level of his studio, theres a room for Paul's colorful abstract paintings. The space is modeled after a kindergarten classroom. Theres a large sink, an open area to make messes (Nobody will tell you not to), and there's even a couch covered with pillows for naptime. Its kind of a wacky room, he said.Paul, with a fuzzy gray beard and thick, rough hands and dirty nails, never had any formal art training. He studied English at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, focusing on his writing talents. Around 1970 Paul began to sculpt.Early in his art career, Paul only created sculptures, until he had a very beautiful, very powerful dream. In the dream, Paul had in his hands a mason jar, and, when he unscrewed the top. Out flew hundreds of colorful butterflies. The next day he began to paint. Throughout Pauls painting room, blond maple frames are stacked in long rows, of 15 or 20 colorful, abstract pieces. Paul spends half the year painting and half the year sculpting. Many of his sculptures are displayed in an airy, ground level room that he heats with a woodstove.James LaVeck, a friend of Pauls for 12 years, said what first struck him about Paul was the fact that "he was equally talented as a sculptor and painter, a rare combination in the art world. You just don[t hear stories of someone picking up a hammer and chisel and spontaneously creating a beautiful, figurative sculpture out of a piece of oak with no training in the art of carving," LaVeck said.Paul works on his art full-time, while his wife, Katy Gottschalk, teaches English and Writing at Cornell University. He says he spends most of the day in quiet, with only Molly, their standard poodle, as a companion. So, when Gottschalk comes home, hes ready for conversation. Im human, too, he said, smiling. I can talk. Gottschalk smirked at him. I talk all day, she said. I come home and dont want to talk.Art Through MeditationIn 1976, Paul took a vow of silence for seven months. He wanted to explore what he could learn my immersing himself in silence. During his time, Paul lived alone in Burdett, N.Y. When he would run errands and people would talk to him, he responded with simple gestures or, occasionally, by writing a note.Meditation lays at the foundation of Paul's life. Though he does not practice a particular religion, much of his work refers to spiritual paths. For a piece called "Catacomb Self-Portrait" (1983), Paul carved the body of a monk out of steel, wrapped the body in a robe made of concrete and tied a rope of steel with three knots around its waist. (Each knot represents a vow: poverty, chastity, and silence.) It took him about eight months of 16-hour days to complete. In a lot of my work, I actually both honor and borrow from different religious traditions, and make them my own and try to reach in and pull out something thats universal, he said. LaVeck said one of the things he has "learned to appreciate about Paul over the years is the intricate depth of Paul's work. Every time I talk to John about any aspect of one of his sculptures, from the nature of the raw materials, the methods used to shape those materials, the symbolism of the structure or even the specific inspiration that came to him to make a particular work, I am amazed at the level of mindfulness and precision that goes into every detail," he said.The same thoughtfulness went into the creation of Paul's "Many Thousands Gone" sculpture, from the large nails driven into the tree trunks for people like Jesus, Martin Luther King, jr., and Gandhi to the six witness figures that surround the main piece. The figures, mini versions of the central piece, allow the space between the person driving the nail and the central vehicle to be a protected, sacred space."Many Thousands Gone" has received hundreds of visitors since its creation, but Paul doesn't believe the installation belongs in his studio-in-the-woods forever. He'd like to see the piece travel to cities and countries all over the world so millions of people who know victims of violence can drive nails.Paul said the message of this piece boils down to the message engraved in the steel base: "May the closed fist of violence become the open hand of mercy." "When people drive nails, they wrap their hand around a hammer in a kind of fist. Once the person drives the nail, he or she puts down the hammer and opens their fist into an open hand. ... There have been a lot of tears in this room, he said. There have been a lot of experiences shared here."The Ithacan, Vol 72, Issue 19, Feb. 17, 2005, Ithaca, NY
The Laughter at the Heart of Being: the Art of John Lyon PaulBy Paul SawyerOn the wall, a long stain of brilliant copper light, shaded and tempered by verdigris, surrounds and highlights a soaring shaft, capped at the top and bottom by identical copper pendulums. The upper one is mounted like a spear, the lower suspended freely. One thinks of Brancusi’s “Bird in Space,†except here the main thrust is downward: copper lines stream alongside the central spine, like a vertical wake, the entire plunging force concentrated delicately at the tear-shaped tip. The tip seems motionless though, in fact, it is all the time describing minute circles: it is a Foucault’s pendulum, aimed at the earth’s center (the seven feet of the central column is the minimum length for a suspended copper wire to register the movements of the earth). For all its blinding energy, the actual shape of the work is a rectangle, a stabilizing form that modifies the downward thrust and anchors it by a horizontal checkerboard of copper wires that rib the surface and lap gently over the central furrow. Is this mounted oblong a spear-tipped shield or body-armor for a god? Or is it a topography, incised with the four main directions? The sheer splendor of the work – classic in its economy and concentration of energy – makes one “hear†it like a hymn.“Heart Sutra†is on a wall of the second studio if you enter the complex by the left porch. By this time you will have passed some two dozen sculptures in an enormous variety of forms, ranging from the figurative to the abstract and from the austerely minimal to the intricate and ingenious. There are a hesitant but resolute child-ballerina, carved out of rosewood; a pair of winged raptors – or rather, a single raptor and its reflection – seizing a fish in its beak, pulling apart from its double, yet still sealed at the wing-tips; an intricate copper construction called “Spirit Trembling On the Face of the Deep.†Five “Peace Tablets†of black concrete, shaped like gravestones, range across an inner wall in solemn silence. On the outer wall, three constructions of rice-paper and wood (“Morning Star,†“Day Star,†and “Evening Starâ€) whirl playfully like pinwheels or kites designed for giant children, though the third, with its repeated circles suggesting a star broken and reflected across spoke-like surfaces, seems somber. In a corner is a three-wheeled cart bearing some kind of shrine, its interior dimly lit by the flicker of twenty electric candles.Upstairs are the paintings – scores of huge canvases and smaller framed paper works stacked in every available corner. (The unfinished “Pilgrimage†series now contains over ninety items.)John Lyon Paul is an upstate New York painter and sculptor who lives with his wife, Katherine Gottschalk, at Frog Heaven, 27 acres outside of Ithaca that contain woods, three ponds, and the studio complex he built in the 1980s. How can one describe a body of work as prodigious and many-sided as his? The rigidities of the current art-system, dominated by competing signature styles and a rapid succession of trends, become apparent the moment one encounters an artist who does not define himself by a single variable image, and whose works belong to the nineties no more than the eighties or the seventies. He seems unmoved by the urgent, contradictory demand of today’s art-world: to make something both “new†and commodifiable. Instead, his direction is inward – a long-term fidelity to the truth of his work as he sees it, which he calls “integrity†– though the works themselves look outward, as it were, eager to communicate. In some ways his art is traditional: it re-affirms the aesthetic values, subject to powerful challenge in recent years, of sensuousness and intimacy, and it uses materials that are pre-industrial and ready-to-hand (instead of, say, polyethylene or fluorescent tubing). Yet it is complex and audacious enough to challenge and expand what one thought before about the possibilities of art. Moreover, John has so studied the achievement of sculptors and painters before him that his own work belongs, if not to a trend or a decade or a school, then very much to art history. And if one cannot locate a single signature style in this eclectic multitude, one can still describe some features of the imagined world they inhabit – a world that enlarges and interprets the world we know. John’s inventiveness obviously inherits the liberation of sculptural form at the beginning of the last century. In the years since Picasso and Duchamps and Nevelson and Beuys and Calder and Eva Hesse, sculptures are not (as they largely were in Rodin’s time) limited to freestanding human figures: nor are they even limited to objects on bases. As John’s work shows, they can hang on the wall like rugs, or belly out like three-dimensional paintings, or crank like machines, or hover in space. His own definition is appropriately wide: “Sculptures take their place among us in our world. We relate to them with our bodies. Mine are magnetized by silence. Their presence witnesses. Their stillness invites us to listen.â€A sign on one step of the stairway to the upper floor of the studio announces: “Warning: Rude Mechanical at Work.†The punning reference to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream†is especially appropriate since Shakespeare’s tradesmen are, of course, crafting a play (one of them is even made love to by the Queen of the Fairies and plans to compose a poem on the subject, called “Bottom’s Dream†because is has no bottom). Bottom would have enjoyed the first sculpture one sees on the top floor, “Eight Crows Rumba with the Gibbous Moon.†One winter, looking out at the nearby pond, John saw a crow flick snow on another crow, which began what was clearly an avian game; but the work this incident inspired bears little trace of crows. Within a drably painted open box or case on the wall are eight croquet mallets angled at each other beneath a toilet float “moon.†The mallets come from an abandoned John found among some weeds. The balls do not appear in this work, but do turn up as the main spherical elements in another work, “Laughter Prayer Net,†in which objects are “written into†and suspended in a grid-like armature, which is in turn encased in a glass box. John explained to me that this work captures the experience of coming out of a deep meditative state – and bursting into laughter at the banality of the first thought that came to his waking mind. Combining a lost croquet set with the memory of crows playing in the snow and then again, using the balls to make a point about religious meditation, are both classic John Paul “strokes†(many of his works carry a double reference to the world without and the world within). By rewriting bird behavior as a human game (not to mention the lunar toilet float), he asks us to think of play as a law of nature, just as the oxymoron title “Laughter Prayer Net†asks us to think of laughter as a portion of the spiritual. Both works locate the child-like at the heart of artistic creation, in this case perhaps as a Whitmanic laugh at all human pretentions and decorums. To “read†these and other works like them is to participate in that Whitmanic spirit – one that is democratic, generous, and accepting – but also to understand looking in a new way: to grasp how reading a work of art is at once like entering a meditative trance and enjoying a good joke.Literary theorists traditionally define “wit†as the faculty of seeing resemblances; it brings together differences on the basis of sameness, and re-contextualizes the old in order to make it new. The effect is always in some way surprising or startling – often comical, though it may be cerebral or even tragic. In the twentieth century, cubist and surrealist artists made sculpture a supremely witty form; they played with volumes and shapes, heads and limbs and breasts and guitars, and made ingenious visual puns based on found objects (the famous toy car, for example, that forms the muzzle of the mother ape in the sculpture at MOMA). John Paul’s found objects obviously belong to this tradition, but his wit works in other ways as well. Very typically, his works “pun†on their own forms by proposing resemblances between sculptures and other objects. “Prayer Door (Mezuzah),†like “Laughter Prayer Net,†suspends objects in a metal grid, but here the “door†resembles a metal mattress-frame, strung with wires that are occasionally wavy, like script. John’s three “Prayer Wheels†(objects for transmitting prayers to the gods) are mounted vertically on walls and can be turned by moving the wheels at the base, like barber poles; one of them produces a calligraphic infinite loop that ascends and descends as one turns the wheel. His “Desert Prayer Rug†is not a wall-hanging, but an intricate assemblage of sunny blond wooden puzzle-like pieces, notched into semi-circles and drilled with holds and “cross-stitched†by undulating copper bands. One thinks of beaches and sunlight perhaps more than of God, but also, as the eye moves over the voluptuous intricacies of textile patterns, and then, maybe, of the idea of pattern itself. Art history is, of course, full of religious objects like prayer rugs (stoles, chalices, altars, gravestones, censors, candlesticks, to cite only instances from the Christian tradition), which we do not normally think of a sculpture, but which John joyfully, appropriates to his own purposes. Strikingly, John sometimes calls his works, “tools.†In fashioning occasions for meditation out of cast-off objects (brass wheels, iron frames, rusty screens, lost croquet balls, and so forth), John suggests another sense of the word “toolâ€: something that aids reflection, that puts one into relationship with the spiritual world. The pendulum-like objects in “Heart Sutra†are actually tools in the literal sense – they are plumbobs, which are weights suspended by construction workers to assure that the building walls are “plumb.†According to John, all buildings are based on the use of the plumbob and its horizontal relative, the spirit level – the vertical and horizontal axes by which humans locate themselves. In this sense, “Heart Sutra†is a mammoth compass, orienting the viewer to the earth’s heart.Some of these meditative aids illustrate the processes of meditation itself – another way John draws upon the artistic tradition. Cubist and surrealist sculptors experimented with breaking up three-dimensional monumentality by suffusing objects with space: linking shapes along welded lines, like thought-associations, or creating scrawl-like strings in the air that resembled an aerial calligraphy (for example, David Smith’s “Hudson River Landscape,†also at MOMA). John’s beautiful “Pilgrimage Scroll†is an intensely lyrical example of mock-calligraphy. Mounted on a pedestal and enclosed in a glass box, like a display case from a museum of antiquities, the “Scroll†is an unrolled copper sheet inscribed on both sides with flowing copper lines and geometrical ornaments. The shining surface is both a map and a record of a journey, which we may also think of as the journey of artistic creation. (The metaphor of creation-as-a-journey gives the “Pilgrimage†series of paintings its title.) An example at the opposite extreme – all heavy, murky, and enclosed – is a particularly audacious piece, called “Slipping Through Dream,†in which John uses lead (of all materials) to represent thought without an object. A pair of hollow gray masses mounted on six poles and slightly waved like a half-open book (the color of the cerebral hemispheres), almost meet at their knobbed and knotted inner surfaces. But on the smooth outer surfaces, a series of puckered, raised elements flow and ripple in an endless circle – in ambiguous relationship to the inner gap from which they may or may not emerge. The viewing here is odd, because one circles the piece, enjoying the quiet surging of the dream-thoughts, but one can never see fully into the occluded inner surfaces. Thought without an object, as John told me, is the corollary of a fire without a wick. There is a meditation practice in which our attention slips snake-like through the stone wall of the phenomenal world, as through the spaces between words or the pauses between breaths.As the metaphysics of this meditation practice suggests, knowledge arises from meditative vacancy – just as creation arises from a void and as being itself, according to Buddhist scripture, is but a transient manifestation of nothingness. A fascination with negation, wit the disembodied, even with non-existence, is the opposite pole of an artistic impulse that I have been describing as exuberant, abundant and energized. John’s few figurative sculptures are oddly reticent, tentative, blunt-featured. The most extreme example is the monk in “Catacomb Self-Portrait,†whose limp and abject body all but dissolves into the clothes in which he hangs. But the most stunning representation in John’s work of the nothingness just beyond life started with a pair of shoemaker’s lathes he found in a ditch.The lathes are sectioned frames that hold polish, brushes, and other implements. John removed the sections, keeping the frames, and inserted steel rods to form a scaffold or support for a pair of white, tapered wooden slabs which he then suspended horizontally, about one inch apart. Somber, hushed, and mysterious, “Momento Mori (Moment of Death)†hovers weightlessly before us (a musician friend called it a single note sounded so deeply that one can not so much hear it as one can feel its vibration). Ingeniously, the piece is shaped like a body on a bier, but it represents a motion or process, which is almost the opposite; the loosening of the spirit from its bonds. The separation appears to yawn wider as we gaze, though still (for a second longer) bound by a pair of steel hoops that encircle the ends without touching them and, so, seem to float as well. The illusion if unearthly, yet the work is uncompromising in its absolute bareness. Like the rock cliff in New Hampshire that “looks†like a human profile, the sculpture is also just its material elements: rusty steel and rough-hewn wood. “Momento Mori†is a severe visual reduction, apprehended all-at-once.The “Saint Francis’ Shrine†is the most complex of John’s works, in tis detail and conception; it is also the only work in his oeuvre composed of an assemblage of images. The cart bearing these images is, as John’s notes point out, at once “shrine, hearse, and circus wagon.†The phrase that borders the bottom of its single glass wall –“Instrument of Peaceâ€â€”is derived from the famous prayer of St. Francis, mounted inside on its own frame (“Lord, make me an instrument of Thy Peace … â€). The first item for the shrine John found in the window of a gun shop: an outline of the human form, composed of concentric rings spreading from the heart, which is used by the police for target practice. The rings now form the torso of St. Francis, (as is clear in the detail accompanying this article). The witty idea of saint-as-target generates a second transformation: birds, traditional symbols of peace that are associated with the saint because he ministered to them, here also appear as targets. John’s notes read: “Inside is a kind of shooting gallery filled with targets of haloed dancing figures, birds and animals, all of which appear ready to flip, spin or fall over if struck.†The addition of crosshairs etched across the glass surface reinforces the implied analogy between shooting and seeing, but they also “line up the viewer’s heart with the center of St. Francis’ own heart.†This puts the viewer in extraordinary relationship to the objects within, which “aligns†with us at the same time as they are open and vulnerable to the aggression of seeing.The figure of the circle organizes the interior. As the detail shows, the golden circles are both targets and haloes, but as globes they are also eggs, one of which hangs suspended above the heart of St. Francis. The birds in all their forms – the heavy wooden dove on the saint’s hand, the crow skeleton in its “reliquary,†the cut-outs spinning on the targets, and so forth – link up with the seven dancing figures at the bottom of the shrine, a dance of death borrowed from the celebrated final image of Bergman’s “Seventh Seal.†Taking this all in, one seems to behold the cycling of biological life itself, from egg to charred relics, which is no longer a purely “natural†cycle, but a self-destructive one, as the inconspicuous but ominous biomorphic mushroom could makes clear. The “Shrine,†in short, is about “the availability of vision o a planet where mankind threatens to create the death it fears,†offered as an “instrument of peace†for the world today.There are obvious reasons why St. Francis should stand at the4 center of such an instrument. It was Francis who affirmed the unity of life by addressing the natural elements as family members (and death itself as a “little sisterâ€); whose inner wealth grew from his physical poverty; who took upon himself the suffering of Christ by bearing His seven wounds. But John has radically re-conceived St. Francis for his purposes. The saint’s left side, composed of wood, bears the dove and sprouts a massive wing; the right side, composed of Masonite cut-outs, branches into seven arms like Shiva’s with seven gestures with seven spiritual meanings. (The meanings John has given them are … to shield, bless, suffer, receive, pray soothe, an be paralyzed.) The hands, moreover, bear the stigmata – the wounds, as it were, of the shooting gallery – which form their own poignant rhythm across the bodies of the birds and other figures. This Francis is a syncretistic angel-deity with, nevertheless, a human face which is also his most arresting element: the photograph of a black girl who confronts the viewer in a frontal stare. Her eyes “make no demand other than that you recognize her/his (our) humanity.â€The paradoxes increase as we look above. The little wooden structures topped by egg-shaped domes may, as the notes say, be a “housing project for living birds,†but this peaceful habitation bristles with “arrow-perchesâ€â€ (flagsticks taken from cemeteries) that point outward. The lower part of the “Shrine†is for aiming in, John explains, but the upper part aims out. If the “Shrine†is an “instrument†for peace, it is not itself a peaceful object; if anything, it appears to stage a “scene†of explosive energy – attack, defense, suffering, bleeding, regenerating, propitiating. What is the function of the Saint in this scene? John has given him the traditional attributes of Christ, the martyr-god who is our victim, but also our judge, and our healer; one also recalls that Shiva in the Hindu religion is the deity of destruction. The enigmas deepen as we return, again and again, to the stare of the child, who inhabits a body at once vulnerable and monumental. “It makes no judgments, asks no questions, and takes no prisoners,†John says of the figure. “Like a mirror, it leaves you to confront yourself.â€Fascinating as these suggestions are, the “Shrine†is, finally, an experience of color and form. Its dazzling assemblage of objects and shapes vary and repeat, binding the disparate implications of the work into a densely energized unity. Circles of gold, as I have mentioned, form the main unifying devices, but another is the use of biomorphic cut-out shapes as a stylistic signature, visible here in the saint’s tonsure and beard but also the arms and other figures, all of which contribute an undulating motion to the vertiginous energy of the circles. Seen under ordinary conditions, the electric candles “cause shadows to dance and the central figure to floatâ€; but when Jon Reis backlit the structure in order to prepare his brilliant photograph, a surprisingly new effect occurs: the several planes of the interior flatten into a single surface, resembling in color as well as subject a Late Gothic painting. It is as though John has entered the mind of the late-medieval allegorical painter, producing for our times a loving meditation on an old artform.(I have limited myself to sculpture in this essay only because the paintings depend on resonances of color, which would be lost in any black-and-white reproduction. At their most ambitious, however, the swirling lines, swimming planes and symphonic color gradations bring an extraordinary number of elements into an apprehensible unity. The effect is voluptuous, and at least one of the paintings – the third canvas of the “Pilgrimage†series – is, I will dare to say, a timeless masterpiece. Many in the series are priced within the range of local purchasers.)I matters to me as an Ithacan that I can drive to the end of a country road in Tompkins County to a homestead called Frog Heaven, stop near a pond, and into a modest frame building to discover an entire imaginative world – and to leave it later with the mind dizzy with thought. As one enters the little upstairs bathroom and finds it cluttered with ready objects (a pair of king crabs in an unused urinal, an old telephone with its gracefully-hung receiver, a flamingo lawn ornament), they seem like beautiful raw materials about to enter another of John’s visions, like the “gibbous moonâ€/toilet float in the structure just outside the door, or the eerily haunting head of a “Muse†– her face a thin copper triangle, her hair blown by a silent storm – that broods above the staircase. If the closed eyes of this Muse were open, she could see beneath her the warning about the “rude mechanical.†The tow of them – sculpture and sign, the dream and the joke – suggest on of the fundamental polarities in John Paul’s imaginative would (the impersonal, transcendent, and cerebral; the makeshift, witty, and down-to-earth), opposites that are two sides of the same vision. I like to think that the artwork I own myself embodies some of that complex vision in a way distinctive enough to conclude this essay.“Krishna’s Mouth†is a gaily-colored abstraction, dancing with gilt paper, pastel paper triangles, and other elements emerging from a radiant turquoise and overlaid by a cover of shattered glass – the visual equivalent, one might think, of a cry. The story goes that Krishna’s human mother did not know her young child was anything but an ordinary mortal – until the day she began to spank him for some naughty deed. As he opened his mouth to cry, she looked in and saw the universe.Paul Sawyer is a professor of English at Cornell UniversityFrom The Bookpress, Vol. 12, No 1, February 2002, Ithaca, NY
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Many Thousands Gone 1
Many Thousands Gone 2
Many Thousands Gone 3
Many Thousands Gone 4
Many Thousands Gone 5
Selected Paintings
Studies on Mylar and Glass
Meditation Shawls and Shrouds
Pilgrimage on paper
Pilgrimage on collage
Pilgrimage on canvas
Sculpture
St Francis Shrine
Figurative sculpture
Floor Sculpture
Wall Sculpture
Prayerwheels
Drawings
Nagasaki Prayerwheel
Nagasaki Prayerwheel 2
Nagasaki Prayerwheel 3
Nagasaiki Prayerwheel 4
Nagasaki Prayerwheel 5
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