Inferno XVIII: Fecal Matter

Inferno XVIII: Fecal Matter

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

Dante has arrived in the eighth circle of Inferno, in the first of ten pouches (ditches) called the malebolge (translated as “evil pouches”). Here he witnesses a band of panderers (pimps, flatterers, et al), tormented by demons as they move in procession along the floor of the valley His gaze is arrested by the sight of one pathetic sinner whom he recognizes, covered with a thick layer of excrement.

*    *    *

Dante’s cruel sarcasm is on full display in his exchange with Alessio Interminei of Lucca, a flatterer who asks Dante why he feels compelled to stare him down more than the others. The retort is mean-spirited and antagonistic:

"Why, if I remember,

I saw you once before with dry hair.

You are Alessio Interminei of Lucca,

so I study you more than all the others.”

Dante’s towering literary reputation sometimes overshadows his arrogance and cruelty. He can be a tool, but he’s still funny as shit.

This is a shitty drawing in more ways than one. I’m pleased enough with the bottom half, but the top surrenders itself to whimsy, my eternal predilection. Not that whimsy can't be terrifying. Just ask the two foolish children who, lured by promises of treacle tarts by the androgynous, superficially mirthful Child Catcher, met sudden, horrifying entrapment in Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang. The bottom of my drawing is certainly whimsical, but there is to me more perversity in the characterizations and the way lines, visual hierarchy, and other formal/design decisions contribute to a sense of severe agony in its figures. I need to do something about the demons—they’re a bit more like characters from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show than the fierce antagonists they’re meant to be. Maybe I’ll simply obfuscate them in an inky cloud. Things are scarier when you can’t quite see them.

I need to study how imagery evolves this way for me, how some parts go wrong while other parts seem to fall in place almost effortlessly (although I should be careful to say that nothing ever feels effortless); how sketches sometimes seem more essential and honest than finished drawings or, conversely, how finished drawings finesse the seeds of simple ideas into more sophisticated form. I had a wonderful student once, Matt Leines, who had undertaken an independent study project with me. We met every week to discuss his ideas, and I recall at one point he came to me with an expression of frustration. He had a sketch—small and in a notebook—and he had a finished illustration—a bit larger. His question was simple: “why doesn’t this look like that?” In other words, what was it about the sketch that he had been unable to apprehend in the finished image? We went round and round and—apart from the typical technical explanations (eg.: perhaps his use of mediums didn’t translate well at larger scale and on a different substrate?) I think we ultimately decided that sometimes the honest impulse for mark-making, the exploration of form and meaning in its most naive, open and meandering mode of drawing and painting, is impossible to replicate.

So, some things turn to shit.

Introduction to Inferno: Una Selva Oscura

Introduction to Inferno: Una Selva Oscura

Ink on paper. 2016

22 x 15”

In the opening canto of L’ Inferno, Dante finds himself in a dark wood (una selva oscura) having lost his way in life, both morally and intellectually. Thus begins the journey to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, before returning to life a saved man.

*   *   *

For a couple of years, I taught a class with a brilliant RISD colleague—Mark Sherman, a medievalist in the Literary Arts and Studies Department. I learned a great deal from our experience, and particularly from Mark, who was not only a knowledgeable scholar but also a perfectly competent critic of visual communication. The class, "Illustrating Dante's Comedy," encouraged deeper reflection on the poem in its entirety, with the challenging premise of total immersion in both scholarly and studio investigation. We met for eight hours each week and talked constantly about the poem, its metaphorical and historical richness and how best to visualize it. I do think it was important for most of the students, as their apprehension of the content—written 700 years ago—was made more meaningful by their attempts at illustrating it, while their literary interpretation deepened their relationship to the content as artists. This was the goal, realized with exactitude through a huge investment of sweat and brain work.

It affected me too, and I remain grateful to Mark for resurrecting the poem for me. I don't think that any other teaching experience—at RISD or elsewhere—has more strongly influenced my own creative trajectory. I began by sketching in class as we discussed the poem and these little drawings eventually took shape as a project that's been consuming my attention for the past several months. Most of us read L'Inferno in high school or freshman lit classes in college, and its pulpy, phantasmal imagery appeals universally to youthful sensibilities. I last encountered L'Inferno (sans the rest of the poem) at age 19, my mind mired in newfound pleasures of freely available sex and beer and (finally, after 12 years of public school in which art class was shoved to the periphery) full-time dedication to art making. But in middle age I suspect the poem resonates more profoundly as it mirrors the preoccupations of people (like myself) whose paths in life are pondered with affection, regret, lost love, resentment and a desire to clarify, once and for all, the rest of the journey. Pick up Dante at age 50 and it will be a different literary experience. Spend many hours translating and drawing its tercets of terza rima and you'll realize how much you have in common with a 14th century poet, despite the hundreds of years and linguistic traditions that separate you.

I'm on sabbatical from teaching Illustration at RISD. My proposal, which was submitted in earnest many months ago, boldly (and with naive, puppy-dog enthusiasm, I will admit it) involved completion of 100 drawings based on La Commedia, an ambitious undertaking, to say the least. I've knocked a dent in it but I have a long way to go, of course. I still have time, and—as I near the ninth circle of hell in my efforts to illustrate this huge masterpiece—I'm probably about as intimidated as our hero was just before he encountered Lucifer, embedded in ice and chomping away on three sinners.

Recently (and I'm surprised that I never bothered to research this before) I took a look at relevant dates for the poem's creation. It took Dante, politically and socially exiled from Florence and couch surfing in other Italian cities, twelve years to complete the poem—from 1308-1320. He was, during its creation, between the ages of 43-and 55 years old. Coincidentally  (or perhaps not) at age 43 I came out to my kids, friends and colleagues after almost 20 years of marriage to a beautiful, wise and forgiving woman and found myself in a dark wood: una selva oscura. Desperate for jarring change and a fresh start, I moved to Rome to teach for RISD and enjoyed the departure from routine for two transformative years. This was certainly a momentous turning point in life and the beginning of a period of introspection and self-awareness that has culminated in innumerable life changes. During the past eleven years I have experienced a protracted awakening. I stopped drinking. I enjoyed a seven-year relationship with a man I met in Rome. I became vegetarian. I tried to steer my kids from harm as they teetered on the cusp of adulthood. I lost my mother, a beautiful force of nature, who passed away a month ago at age 96. I looked back on the countless mistakes and losses I experienced along the way. I became a more courageous man.

I'm not presumptuous enough to liken my own artistic pursuits to those of Dante, but I've been awed by the richness of experience this project has afforded me. I have undertaken it analogously, approaching each canto, from beginning to end, in the proper sequence. Like Dante, I begin in the dark wood, wondering how the hell I got here, grateful for so much but cursing myself for squandering some unusual gifts. The project has been deliberately structured as time-consuming (and occasionally maddening, especially when my own lack of resourcefulness or other obstacles slow me down). And, more than any other aspect of learning it has afforded me, I have been allowed to study my own processes—intellectual, formal and technical—and this is precisely what the gift of sabbatical is about. 

I'm including below the opening lines to L'Inferno, no doubt mirroring the experience of many of my brothers and sisters in mid-life, along with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1867 translation:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

—

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

David Warner: Illuminated

A tribute to David Warner. Professor of History at RISD, who passed away in May 2013.

David's friends have assembled a collection of reminiscences and touching words about his indelible character, powerful sense of goodwill and his highly respected work as a medieval historian. 

EHP Poster Design

A poster designed for RISD's European Honors Program in Rome.

Praise, Criticism and Humility.

"When praise comes, don’t let yourself be swept away by it. If you do, you will as surely be swept away by the criticism that life inevitably brings."

-Eknath Easwaran

*   *   *

Sometimes it's easy to mistake self-deprecation for humility. I've gotten a little better at accepting compliments graciously in recent years, but I can easily trace absurdly poignant evidence of self-deprecation back to childhood, to the near pathological auto-under-valuing that was interwoven through daily life. A memory from age 7 or so has stuck with me for quite a while. I had a boyhood friend named Eddie and in the summers we spent countless hours digging, playing games and building forts in the woods which separated our backyards. One day, deeply immersed in an excavation straight through the center of the earth to China with little more than a couple of garden trowels, I heard his mother calling out to us in her gracious Virginia lilt, 

"Eddddddddie, it's lunchtime! Robert, would you like a sandwich too?"

Struck dumb with vague embarrassment, I replied with great discomfort and characteristic crypticism, "I don't care." 

What the hell kind of answer is that? I'm sure it puzzled or maybe even irritated her, but if it did she was too kind to let me notice. She was a really nice lady. We liked each other.

I can't fully explain why questions like that of Eddie's mom made me so uncomfortable but I struggled to accept the goodwill of others for my entire childhood and well into adulthood. I suppose it had something to do with a misplaced aversion to making myself in any way burdensome. This inability to accept gifts from others—whether in the form of kind words or something of material value—is a character flaw, something I've had to come to terms with in recent years. And while it may seem that this sort of chin-to-chest self-deprecation is active evidence of humility, I've come to realize it's not. I've learned that undervaluing oneself is the exquisite complement to boastfulness and bluster, classic enemies of humility. A closer look reveals that it's egocentric behavior masquerading as humbleness, a self-perception that one's every action has some consequential effect on others; that accepting a sandwich would in some way might ruin someone's day; a perception that you are important enough to have a disproportionate impact on everyone and everything around you.

*   *   *

It seems the older we get, the bigger our egos grow. As the expression goes, "the bigger they come, the harder they fall." Validation and praise mean everything to us and yet our worlds crumble the moment we experience rejection or marginalization. Enormous egos fight for central validation in creative circles, each with an insatiable desire for praise, and yet the most inadvertent slight sends us cursing bitterly in the shadows. We have to maintain perspective, to remain humble through darkness and light, praise and criticism. 

I endured a truly rough patch in my teaching a few years ago. Leading students outside the scope of my expertise in a special, two year, interdisciplinary appointment in Italy, I failed to reach all of my students, no matter how hard I tried. And I tried very hard. While not everyone was unhappy with my efforts (I tend to pay a bit more attention to criticism than praise), the acerbic barbs of a handful of students wounded me deeply for two years. I wasn't used to this brand of assessment, and I truly thought my career as a teacher was coming to a close. When I returned to my regular teaching duties back home, once again within the cozy realm of my personal competency, I expected everything to normalize, but I was quickly reminded of an unpleasant reality about teaching in our program: I had quite literally disappeared, and when I returned I felt like an absolute nobody. I was the new guy all over again, and it took me three full years to rebuild the confidence of an entirely new crop of students and my former reputation as a competent teacher. What a struggle that was, and there seemed to me no way to resolve it other than to ride it out or quit. I damn near did the latter, interviewing for and being offered jobs elsewhere, which would have had me doing things far from the world of studio education.

These days, my students amaze and inspire me, and I'm especially moved by their sensitivity when the occasional stressed out 19-year-old comes to see me in my office, soon in tears as they close the door for privacy. Crumbling under the workload, these beautiful people reveal themselves as completely human in their fragility,  shedding their classroom-wrought, strong, balanced, perfectly poised personae. In the presence of their peers they appear to accept praise and criticism with equally objective measure, seemingly unaffected on an emotional level by all the chatter about their work. Extraordinary accolades do not seem to puff them up, just as devastating criticism doesn't cut them down. Maybe I'm fooled by some resilient veneer, but they always seem to remain humble—asserting in their behavior that they're neither better nor worse, neither more or less deserving of respect than anyone else. They present as exceedingly gracious and level-headed beacons of hope in a world in which most adults bristle at criticism and stew savagely over minor professional slights one day and rattle off news of accomplishments on Facebook the next. 

Eknath Eswaran's quote at the top of this entry elegantly summarizes the most sound philosophy we can follow. We need to keep our egos in check not only when it comes to our accomplishments, but our failures as well. Personally, while things are good again (and I don't think I have ever enjoyed teaching as much as I have the past two years) I lately try a bit harder to catch myself before grandstanding when good things happen and I've tried even harder to give myself a break when I don't get it right. I'm still not very good at accepting either praise or criticism with measured objectivity, but I try to do so in an effort to exercise some of the humility I so admire in my students. I'm still grossly egocentric. More than anything I hope my students can remain humble—aware of their merits and flaws, but equally unfettered by either. Unfettered, that is, unless they truly need to close themselves in my office and cry.

From terror to fear to myth.

I wrote this on 15 April, after the bombings at the Boston Marathon. 

Yesterday we hosted what has become a springtime tradition at the house. In April, as every austere and stoic soul in New England is hanging by the thinnest of threads, cursing the bitter north wind and praying for just a hint of earthly delight, we invite friends over for an exchange of green things. People bring hopeful plants to share with one another and the idea is to offer a sense of renewed optimism after the grayness of winter, instilling a faint vision of metaphorical rebirth by planting saplings, seeds or bulbs, even if doing so is weeks away. Spring and then summer in New England are unparalleled—absolutely perfect—so the wretched winters here are bearable with a couple of reminders that the chill will soon go into hiding.

A couple of friends didn't make the party because they were running the Boston Marathon today. I envied them, mostly because they're about my age and are still giving it a go, while I've put aside those grand aspirations in recent years, always with the hope that I'll be running in top form again any day now (cue laugh track). One of these friends contacted me to say that he needed the rest, having scored a number at the last minute. He's run the race since he was a teenager growing up in Brockton, far eclipsing my own Boston experiences, which number two races in unseasonable and viscious heat—both pretty humbling experiences after qualifying and convincing myself that I'd do just as well on that infamously tricky Boston course.

Today was horrific and for those of us who got the news remotely, it came upon us in nauseating waves, an all-too-familiar recognition, something sadly familiar and infuriating. John and I had just finished a five mile run on a hilly loop when we received simultaneous text messages asking if we were OK and begging assurance that we were nowhere near the race course. Back home, throughout the afternoon I checked confusing headlines and studied the same gory and chaotic photos online, turning over in my imagination the origins of something so vile, the filthy, small minds who devised the destruction.

The last stretch of the Boston Marathon, whether you finish strong or part of the zombie parade, is designed to be jubilant and for race qualifiers it's especially rewarding. If you're not running for charity or as a bandit, qualifying for Boston can be pretty challenging after months of obsessive training, earning an acceptable time in a previous marathon, and (more and more) a bit of fortunate timing when registration opens. Nevertheless, no matter how folks get there, with such an arduous process of self-discovery behind them, crossing the finish line concludes a journey much longer than 26.2 miles for many people. Reaching the end is a transformative moment, teeming with significance. So what more insidious, hateful way to upend that joy than to install ferocious bombs yards from the finish line—blowing the legs off spectators, mostly the families and friends of runners? As we listened to the confusing pieces of news and began to make sense of the event, I was immediately taken back to that beautiful, horrible day in 2001 when my kids (then all very young) came home one-by-one from school. With each, I tried to explain to them how a small group of perverse minds conspired with unfathomable loathing to crash four planes with the intention of killing 3000 people and forever scarring the lives of hundreds of millions more.

In all of this insanity I had a moment of clarity today. It came out of the blue, inexplicably. In the past several years I have seen many students with extraordinary gifts, complex minds and critical, creative perspectives invest a great deal of their talent in the rapidly expanding field of character design. In all honesty, the editorial illustrator in me finds this trend disheartening. In one portfolio after another young illustrators submit to the conventions of burgeoning industry, work which includes inventories of characters in costume and not much more. These are descriptive, objective studies, not images with individual perspective, circumstance or meaning beyond archetypal representation, and they feel empty—void of content or message—no matter how well they're drawn or painted, no matter how subtle the color palette. While I respect these endeavors, as I do any classification of applied illustration, these studies represent a significant disappointment after seeing such promise in these students in previous semesters. All along I've assumed that the students are merely pandering to a trending market. More than anything I hope for a more opinionated, vocal direction among our students, a return to the editorial voice which is more about chutzpa than costumes. 

Today I realized the origins of this fascination with heroic, mythic and fantastic characters in our nation's psyche and further indulged by students of art and design. In the same way that the Great Depression was the impetus for escapist cinema in the 1930s, terrorism has bred a desperate creative investment in superheroes, fairies and mythic dichotomies of good and evil. Today's young artist has known evil in ways my own generation never imagined. 

After a few years of frustration and (I'll admit it) a growing intolerance for escapist motives in young illustrators, today's realization is saddening.  A sympathetic, tragic chord has instead been struck. This generation of wonderfully creative people was raised in a culture of insidious fear, where no real life heroes can guarantee their safety, where economic collapse is at the whim of blustery, rogue financial institutions, and where bombs blow up people at one of the most celebrated, democratic sporting events in the world, turning the personal triumphs of hundreds of people into a nightmare, all over again. 

Challenges to Productive Discourse

In a previous entry I mused on the grandiose subjects of truth, beauty and goodness, asserting that these three great ideas of western philosophy are the bedrock of critical discourse in teaching and studying art. No big surprise there, but ask a group of students who have just pulled an all-nighter to consciously muse on these virtues and a slight panic ensues. While these are enormous topics, they comprise the metric of value judgements, guiding our opinions, our beliefs and our productive exchange with one another in studio critique. As definitive as that assertion may sound, I'll be the first to admit that digging deep takes patience and a genuine interest in at least trying to better understand our conceptions of these ideas as they relate to the art we make. That's sometimes hard to come by, for both students and their instructors.


I've been teaching for twenty-eight years. In this time, I have always been aware of the fragile veneer of professorial authority that exists in an age of relativism. Postmodern purists assert that there can be no truth (well, apart from math, and even that is questioned); that beauty is entirely a matter of individual taste (and that matters of taste are not worth discussing); and that goodness is likewise elusively relative, without definition. I envy the unflagging confidence of colleagues who render absolute judgments with ease, while to this day I still leave critique with a very heavy question: "why should they heed my opinion?"  This uncertainty has always made critique challenging for me, but I do think some acknowledgment of subjectivity—when and where it exists—is essential. The problem is that students sometimes want absolutes. They do not want "I don't know," and they've told me so.