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.

Land of Ice.

Video from our short trip to Iceland in early February.

Another Stonington Island.

Another iteration.

It's slightly out of focus—just didn't have what I needed to shoot it well—but you get the idea.

Stonington Islander.

This isn't translating well in the photo, unfortunately, and I can't get a good shot with the camera and lighting I have here. 

The islands off of Stonington, Maine have these abundant bouquets of trees. I wanted to make something for Lorraine, who loaned me the place for the week. 

Be yourself.

I start my first class today after an all-too-brief summer. Most of June was consumed by the ICON7 conference we hosted at RISD, the alumni show we'd pulled together, and the ensuing post-event business. Before I knew it I was gearing up for another busy year. For about 20 years, I've tried to free myself up just before the start of school as a way to recharge and tap inspiration before giving it all I've got in class for 13 weeks.

In an effort to claim that vital sense of authority and calm, I spent last weekend in Manhattan. In addition to some great museums, theater, food and music—we did our customary run in the park on Sunday morning. This is always such a delight, because, unlike any other city I know, New York is so teeming with runners that the critical mass really energizes me. We entered the park in the southwest corner and trotted clockwise along the outer paths and roads, passing thousands of ambulatory souls—runners, cyclists, walkers, strollers—all traveling in the opposite direction.

Clearly, we were doing it wrong. While our unspoken recognition of this amused me, John later told me that we'd garnered plenty of dirty looks. I didn't notice that (and anyone who knows me will know that I am always on the lookout for disapproval) but I did feel alternately rebellious and sheepish that we were disrupting the flow of so many people's highly prized enjoyment of the outdoors in such a busy town. We were never physically in the way, no one seemed alarmed or inconvenienced by our mistake, but there must have been a sort of psychic frustration that we brought to such a galvanized, consensual group act that it was bound to be annoying. One enormous wave of collective energy was traveling counter clockwise, its bits and pieces all silently agreeing to move in one direction, at about the same speed, breathing rhythmically like a big locomotive, its energy concentrated several yards in the distance. And here we were, screwing it up, their accordance denied by a pair of guys who didn't know the rules. We didn't do this on purpose. It's just that by the time we'd concluded that we were definitely going the wrong direction, it was too late. I'm a full-circle kind of guy and doing an out and back run on a looping course seemed more wrong than traveling in the opposite direction of the throng.

At the end of the run we passed a family of tourists who may as well have stepped out of a cartoon. It was easy to see that they were visitors, but the most noticeable among them was a girl of about eleven. She was blond, with braids and thick-lensed glasses. She seemed too big to be carrying a doll, whose head and arms drooped limply over her left elbow while the legs hung loose at her waist. While her family squinted in the morning sun, their tired faces pivoting from sidewalk to rooftops, to horse drawn carriage to hot dog stand, the little girl seemed completely oblivious to her surroundings, in another place entirely. More than anything, I noticed her shirt. Her shirt was the juice. The words, "Be Yourself" consumed just about every inch of its surface, spelled out in rhinestones and glitter. She was smiling beatifically, her head tilting a bit, side-to-side. She appeared to be enjoying a little song or a snatch of imaginary dialogue.

I'm a terrible cynic. My immediate reaction was to scoff internally. "Silly, naive little girl with braids and a stupid t-shirt." But within seconds that cynicism softened. I was more taken by her apparent contentment, the weird bliss that seemed to carry her along, trailing behind her family. I felt pretty good about her confidence in wearing that pithy shirt. I wanted to tell her that I liked her message—all of it.

*   *   * 

I know what you're thinking. This sounds like it's going to wind up with an inevitable correlation between my own counter-clockwisedness and the mandate to "be myself," issued forth in glittery grandeur on an 11-year-old's T-shirt in Central Park. While that comparison may be convenient and even a little touching, I'm more interested in expressing my hope for my sophomore students, whom I'll meet today in class. This will be their foray into illustration. The product of loving homes, they will most certainly have been told to "be themselves" at some point in life. In their first year at RISD they'll have been coached to "find their voices." Illustration, both the field of study and the profession, will challenge them to do just that: to be original—to be themselves—but to do so by way of a common visual language. They'll need to be true to personal instinct while cognizant of shared knowledge and experience, to utter new truths which are founded in age-old vocabulary of complex cultural signs.  They'll have to enjoy the process or risk intense unhappiness, and the only way to do this is to attain a sense of self-fulfillment and authorship, not only in the acting of making, but in service to messages which are sometimes the product of others' imagination and cognition. The field will ask them to say things in a new way, but with a ring of familiarity that allows a reader to wholly own the content they are absorbing, to feel a sense of marvelous discovery shared with the illustrator. My message to them today: the best illustration exposes truths we didn't know we knew, and when we can manage that much we'll have attained some semblance of originality. The illustrator must be himself, but that self is a messenger with singular voice which reaches the consciousness of others. No mean feat.

Photos from my week at the dune shack.

Spring break.

No electricity, no running water. 
Just mute isolation in the dunes.

Sono tornato.

It's been far too long and a great deal has happened since my last entry, but I'm back in the saddle, having moved home to the US. What a great two years in Rome and the rest of Europe. I have many photos from my travels and will post them soon, but meanwhile I'm including here some stirrings of new paintings. This group is about icebergs, the metaphorical partner to volcanoes. 

Maroc.

In late April and early May, I fulfilled a longtime dream to visit Morocco. My parents met there in 1953-54 and through my father's old photos and my mom's colorful stories of "French Morocco" I gained an enthusiasm for its exotic appeal.

My friend John and I spent about 10 days traveling in the western portion of the country. In retrospect I wish we'd explored the mountains as they're great for trekking, but we opted to stay in cities to better appreciate the energy of daily life. We flew from Rome to Barcelona and landed first in Marrakech. Essaouira, Rabat and Tangier followed and each city definitely possessed distinctive character. The whole trip (about 10 days) was relatively inexpensive, and I suppose we each spent about €600, including all meals, lodging and travel. It's very inexpensive to eat in Morocco, with large meals costing the equivalent of about €5-10, but there's not a tremendous variety on the menus. Riads—tranquil respite from the chaos of the streets—are also pretty cheap, and for the most part we stayed in these converted houses with inner courtyards and gardens instead of hotels.

Marrakech was fascinating. It's a pretty smelly place—lots of piss-soaked streets—but the people were extremely warm and hospitable. We stayed at a nice Riad in the Medina, and it was very inexpensive and nicely furnished, with beautifully carved plaster ceilings in the room. The souks and Djemaa el Fna square were teeming with life and it was truly an amazing place to be from dusk until dark. The mounting energy is brought to a crescendo by drums and horns in the early evening and I can only compare it to waiting for a thunderstorm to begin. By the time the sun sets the whole square is absolutely electric, with music and smoke filling the sky and crowds of people sharing meals at huge steel tables spread across the enormous square. Acrobats, snake charmers, belly dancers, the works.

Someone's always pestering you to buy something and they're very eager to take you for a fool when it comes to bargaining, but if you have a sense of humor you'll really enjoy it. It DOES grind you down, however, and I'm glad we started—rather than ended—there. We got lost in the souks at night and that was a bit scary, as people were coming out of some pretty dark and smelly places to hound us for money or "guide" us to where we needed to go. Beauty in Marrakech is in details, rather than in the big picture. Colors and textures and the remarkable plaster carving in architectural moulding, etc. is really impressive. We spent an afternoon at the Bahia Palace—really nice. One evening, we took a great run along the outside of the old city walls, with the sun setting over the olive groves and thousands of swallows careening around us.

Essaouira was a nice switch—lots of whitewashed walls and some great views of the sea. Again, we were in a nice Riad in the Medina. The food was excellent in several places although there's not a lot of variety in most restaurants. The ubiquitous mint tea, tajines and couscous were the fare on almost every menu, along with some simple but unimpressive pizzas. Unfortunately, John got pretty sick with an intestinal infection here and had to get antibiotics from a local doctor, so he was out of commission much of the time. You have to be pretty careful what you eat or drink in these places, (including the coffee, a lukewarm cup of which is what may have dogged John). While John and I consumed almost exactly the same meals, I wasn't affected for some reason. We had a pleasant time watching a soccer game on the very windy beach among a group of local men, walking in the medina and exploring the ramparts which were used as the setting for Orson Welles' Othello. Despite the elegance of our riad the maze of streets around our building smelled a lot like raw sewage, and there was significant poverty right next door—places with no electricity or running water. Still, the people were very gentle and warm and I was impressed by how content they seemed despite their hardship.

Rabat was an elegant city and I was so happy to arrive there after so many years of romantic imagination. It's a much more European place with some of the most impressive Art Deco architecture I have seen—stylized in reductive ways by Islamic motifs. In my parents' day it must have been stunning, as it has exceptionally refined and consistent architecture, resulting in a truly unusual and very nicely laid out urban environment. The best part of Rabat for me was the kasbah, which has a gorgeous Andalusian garden and museum inside, along with some beautiful, cobalt blue dwellings. The museums in Morocco are underfunded, so they don't compare to the contrived grandeur of western Europe, but they're extremely inexpensive and worth a look. I liked Rabat a lot, both for sentimental reasons and as a fascinating city whose cross-cultural history is evidenced in its buildings, food and language.

Tangier was an immense disappointment, and I won't waste too much energy recounting the unpleasant encounters we had there, most of which were tied to our demoralizing stay in a riad run by fundamentalist whackos. It's an extremely dirty city with every other person offering us drugs through toothless grins and urine-steeped pants. We stayed two days there and while the scenery along the shore was visually pleasant, it smelled like shit with the runoff from sewers, which we could see cascading into the ocean as we explored the coast. Despite this cruddy ending, we had a fantastic trip—more educative than relaxing, but everything I expected and more. I have absolutely no regrets and returned home exhausted and still buzzing from the cacophony of a strange land.

Resurfacing

I've received messages from people asking about updates. My apologies. I've been very busy lately with both travel and finishing up with teaching and work for my show. My journey in italy is coming to a close and I suppose I'm getting a little distracted.

In a future post I'll try to include some photographs from a recent trip to North Africa. My parents lived and met in Rabat, Morocco, in 1952-53. That, coupled with my longstanding, earnest desire to see a way of life quite distinct from my own, stimulated my thinking about a trip many years ago. I first made plans in 1984, but had to ditch them when I learned how expensive the trip would be. 

So I went to Marrakech, Essaouira, Rabat and Tangier for 10 days. While I encountered some bleak modes of existence, it was pretty much as I expected: extreme poverty in some places, countered by unparalleled beauty in details and some of the most pleasant people on earth, even when they were trying to talk you out of 1000 dirhams. It was more educative than relaxing, that's for sure, but I got a good tan from wandering outside everyday for hours on end.

Anyway, I finally made it there, with the linguistic help and warm companionship of my friend John.

Progress.

Things are in a happy state of flux so instead of uploading pictures of new paintings I am presenting evidence of my latest object of desire: the isle of Stromboli, a bump in the sea just above Sicily; little more than a village at the foot of an active volcano. I want to be in Stromboli my last week in Italy. It makes perfect sense that I should end up there, after I move out of the apartment and before I board the flight to the US after two wonderful years here.  What a way to quietly reflect on the work I have done and all the blessings that have come my way.

I put off painting yesterday for some easy things: letter writing among them. This marks the beginning of the most challenging phase of this series of paintings. I am working toward completing nine in total, each 100 x 100 cm. I've taken six to an acceptable level of finish and I began the seventh yesterday. But the longer I paint in a series, the more likely I am to discover new forms—new visual language—thus calling into question everything I have done in the earlier work. While I'm happy to say that each new painting seems an improvement in some way on the last, this also compels me to reconsider what I have done earlier. It's both exciting and maddening! Progress is welcome, but every new discovery makes its predecessors appear somehow inferior. Today I found a way to represent something—some smoke and lava, which I had painted many times before in a different way—that really excited me. But suddenly this new bit of progress made the new painting feel unrelated in some way to the others in the group.

Now the images I posted earlier are things of the past—they no longer exist. Yesterday, after arriving at this new vocabulary of form, I painted over parts of a few of the earlier paintings in order to take care of some things that have been bothering me: the balance of color and contrast; some compositional issues. I knew this would happen, and I'm not the least bit upset by it, but it does make me more conscious of the time I have remaining to finish them. It's the way it always goes. It's a balancing act, trying to keep myself from completely destroying things in this search for some cohesiveness with the series.

I have a busy week ahead, with meetings with students, a lecture and crits by a guest artist, and my trip to Madrid Thursday through Sunday. I think the best thing to do will be to work extremely hard every day and then leave things alone for the weekend, allowing the machinations, the successes and failures to steep a bit without action. I'm giddy about visiting the Museums in Madrid: work I have waited my entire adult life to see. What a gift.

The Cenci.

I've long wanted to visit the sad town of Petrella Salto in Abruzzo, as it's the site of an infamous murder with an association to our program in Rome. Since 1960 we've been housed in Palazzetto Cenci near the Jewish Ghetto, a Renaissance building built by the wealthy Cenci family.

Perched on a wicked, rocky hill overlooking the small town is "La Rocca Cenci," the skeletal remains of a castle tower. It was here that Francesco Cenci met his gruesome demise in 1598. His family first poisoned him then bludgeoned him to death, and threw his body over a balcony, where it toppled to the foot of the hill.  The crime was discovered and the family members were tortured into confession. Among them was his 21-year-old daughter Beatrice, the most tragic of the cast of characters since she had been brutalized by her father and—along with her step-mother—held captive in the castle. "I'm taking you here to die," he told them. 

Francesco was a real creep and many believed he deserved his fate, having terrorized Rome and his own family for years. Yet the subsequent trial and execution of Beatrice, her step-mother and her brother became one of the most controversial in history as the papacy wanted to make an example of the nobles to send a message to all: no one is above the law. Their executions were attended by thousands, and it's often said that Caravaggio's reiteration of decapitations was probably stimulated by his inevitable presence there.

Reminders of Beatrice are everywhere in Rome. I often find myself coincidentally  in places which define her geography—the jailhouse in which she spent her last days, the spot at the end of Ponte St. Angelo where she was beheaded, the church on the Gianicolo where she is buried but which seems to contain no marker. There's a decent reproduction of Guido Reni's haunting portrait of her hanging in our main lecture hall: a tragic plea for clemency which has endured for hundreds of years. Students say they can sense her presence in our building with the dimming of the day. Like Reni, Hawthorne, Shelley and many others I'm moved by Beatrice as an emblem of soured justice. Her delicate beauty adds to this.

In the pictures above you can see Guido Reni's portrait of Beatrice Cenci (now in Palazzo Barberini) along with an awkward, depressing mural which welcomes you to Petrella Salto. In the third picture, La Rocca Cenci looms over the lonesome little town and then there's me, seated in front of the ruins on a rainy Saturday in the dead of winter.