Inferno XXII: The Falling Man.

Inferno XXII: Ciampolo and the Malebranche

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

Their tour of the eighth circle continues in Canto XXII, and Dante and Virgil attempt to stall the brutal mauling of a sinner, plucked from the tarry pitch below, by asking questions about his background. While Virgil quizzes him, the antagonistic demons cut bits of flesh from the pitiful soul, but he ultimately escapes their escalating torture when he distracts them sufficiently—leaping from the cliffs to the black goo below. The scene is summed up at the end of the canto:

  

The Navarrese chose his time well;

He planted his feet on the ground, and in an instant

He leapt and escaped their designs.

*    *    *

I remember having dreams as a kid in which I was hiding from something—a monster or some other menace (Blacula, or Charles Manson, glaring with his coal black eyes as he did in news photographs, were perennial threats). In these dreams I was always wedged in the triangle of space behind an open door, looking through the crack on the hinged side. While safe for the moment, the threat was imminent and I was terrified of being discovered, and then God-knows-what. The primal instinct to flee overpowered the rational need to remain in hiding and the decisive moment always came. As the perp came closer I would leap from my hiding place, arms and limbs flailing in self-defense, screaming like mad to scare him off. I would then find myself awake.

The last bit of Canto XXII of L'Inferno evoked immediately a now famous image from 9-11 known as The Falling Man. Having lingo ago reached meme status, I'm a little sheepish about my exploitation of it for this drawing, but it remains potent to me so I wanted to refer to it. The image is that of a man plummeting head first from the World Trade Center tower, his arms to his sides, his left leg elegantly crooked to lend graceful proportion. The beauty of the image belies its horrific narrative. Moments before, the man was on the ledge of the building, undoubtedly agonizing in the face of a terrifying decision: jump or suffer an excruciating death by incineration. 

I like illustrating most when I am able to anticipate the visual literacy shared by most people and yet leave a few secrets to be discovered in the process of deciphering an image. Depending on this for dialogue with a viewer's memory and expecting their semiotic response system to engage, enabling them to answer the questions I am posing, can be deeply gratifying. This image unfolded that way, and—despite its tedious making—I really enjoyed all phases of its development.

Inferno XIII: The Forest of Suicides

Inferno XIII: The Forest of Suicides

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

In the second ring of the seventh circle of hell, Virgil encourages Dante to pluck a twig from a thorn tree. Our hero is shocked to discover that the tree is an unnamed suicide, whose plaintive cries and oozing black blood reveal the collective fate of the entire forest.

*    *    *

As Dante and Virgil enter the second of three rings in the Circle of the Violent, they encounter the fate of those who do violence to themselves. Disembodied moans surround them and Virgil tells Dante that if he were to pluck a twig from one of the mangled trees, he might learn the story.

Dante does so, and—weeping with despair and oozing black blood—the tree ultimately unravels his story. He walked the earth as Pier della Vigna, counselor to the Emperor Frederick II. Vigna’s fated suicide was in a strange way the result of his fierce dedication and love for Frederick. His contemporaries grew envious of their close relationship and they circulated ugly rumors, causing him great shame, despair and—ultimately—death by his own hand.

In search of a different language for this drawing, I’ve developed something more of a design. 

Inferno XII: The Minotaur

Inferno XII: The Minotaur

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

In Canto XII, Dante and Virgil descend a steep slope and encounter at the bottom the mythic Minotaur, a beast with the head of a bull and body of a man. They are in the first ring of the Circle of the Violent, that which holds those who have committed violence against others.

*    *    *

The carnal essence of the Minotaur has alternately thrilled and terrified me since my earliest years. If there's an embodiment of the anxiety I experienced in a sexually repressed childhood (and much of adulthood) it would be this creature, with the physique of a dangerously muscled, hyper-masculine man, topped off with a smoky black bull's head, its dark features obscured by shadows and fur. The half-man/half-beast trope permeated my already anxious brain in many incarnations—including that of a lizard-man known as a Gorn, battling Captain Kirk on Star Trek. It was also fodder for a shitload of bad dreams. In retrospect, it's ridiculous that I would have been afraid of a guy in a plastic reptile suit, gingerly tossing fake punches at William Shatner, but it really did terrify me as a five year-old. 

A little history: I grew up with crippling self-consciousness about my body. I thought that my morbid shyness about it was in some way an index to inferior masculinity, and it remained with me until I first had sex in college. I dreaded going to the beach, turned down many a pool party invitation.  It's dissipated over the years and these days I'm pretty relaxed about my body (although there's certainly a ridiculously flawed logic to feeling less self-conscious about the body I have at 54). 

It started with my budding awareness of myself as a sexual being, I think, and that must have been at about age seven or eight. Growing up in a working class neighborhood in the South, I was at all times surrounded by boys who ran shirtless, dirty and unashamed of their bodies, and I both admired and feared their masculinity. Our equality (or perhaps my sense of intellectual superiority—I had what most of them didn't have, or at least I thought I did) existed only above the shoulders. No qualms about showing my head—it was a nice head, not bad looking, and it had nothing to do with sexuality. Funny things came out of my mouth from time-to-time, and I liked to show off with my face. The anxiety reached its peak in middle and high school years, when the same boys began to regard themselves as post-pubescent studs, exacerbating my insecurities.

But when you put a fecund, ferocious animal's head on an already sexualized, brutal body—primed to do violence against sensitive men—you eradicate intellect. Its mind has been supplanted with thoughtless force, and that's pretty scary.

When I began this drawing, I was reminded of the many depictions I had seen over the years, all of which used the body of the Minotaur to echo beastly savagery, a fitting partner to the bull's head. But, from the start, my impulse was to allow the body to be gently erotic, youthful and delicately drawn with lines that virtually disappear into the page. A grateful nod to Aubrey Beardsley, absolutely, but I hope it's more than imitation of a stylistic convention. I suppose it could have been driven by a latent enjoyment of male nudity, or maybe it's a taming of the beast that scared me so much as a boy. Not sure.

Inferno XI: The Circle of the Violent

Inferno XI: The Circle of the Violent

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

Canto XI is one of the more pedantic parts of L'Inferno. Dante and Virgil descend to the seventh circle, housing those who have committed violent acts in life. It is subdivided into three smaller rings to accommodate sinners who are guilty of various classifications of violence.

*    *    *

The violent are punished in a variety of ways, depending on the transgressions they committed on earth. The seventh circle is sub-divided into three rings, each of which metes out a unique punishment. In the first ring, flooded by a river of blood, those who have committed violence against God and nature languish eternally. These are the plunderers, murderers and thieves who once corrupted the earth. The second ring is reserved for those who committed violence against themselves. Ingeniously, Dante conceives of a forest of suicides, wherein sinners have been transmogrified into talking, thorny threes, oozing blood. The third ring is for those who have perpetrated violence against their neighbors, including blasphemers and usurers, who suffer eternally in a desert of burning sands. Virgil explains that fraud is the greatest of sins in this circle, because it is the transgression most unique to mankind.

The eleventh canto is unique in its instructive tone, with a large portion devoted to Virgil's explanation of how the circle is subdivided, classified and populated. I had a couple of goals in mind in structuring this picture: depiction of dialogue as key to its substance (the face-to-face, plain as day positioning of the two heroes), and a didactic representation of the three rings concentrically arranged—the river of blood, the suicide trees and the burning sands. I liken it to a conversation between teacher and pupil, poised before a diagram.