Welcome to the Fights

There are always battles when you engage in an artform: knowledge versus childlikeness, black stroke versus white space, opacity versus transparency, a thick, oily surface versus absorbed subtlety, lost versus found, white versus yellow, color versus monochrome, beauty versus passion, self-expression versus communication, God versus man.

 … do not corrupt yourselves by making a graven image, the likeness of any figure, male or female, the likeness of any beast on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flies in the air, the likeness of any thing that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters …  –Deuteronomy 4

I was taught painting by the son of a Lithuanian rabbi. A Jewish visual artist has to wrestle in the night with these words. And if he’s to go on, he proceeds with some kind of resignation. Something remains a bit out of joint, if you will.

It’s Not Two-Thirty Any More

Why were they keeping this from me? About 2010 I found out about the paintings at Dura-Europos. They’d been discovered between 1920 and 1930, but the significance for me was lost on me. Here were somewhat preserved the oldest discovered synagogue and house-church (c. 230 CE). And these buildings (two doors away from each other) were floor-to-ceiling covered in figurative paintings. This means, at least, that very near the beginnings of these two institutions, figurative painting was not proscribed, but embraced as a means of communication and decoration. And the differences between synagogue and church were only in the stories they picked, not in the medium or style.

I think I found the answer to why nobody told me abut Dura-Europos in the work of Joseph Gutmann. Gutmann tried in the ’60s and ’70s to correct the dismissive labeling of the paintings as amateurish and so not worthy of interest by artists, only by archaeologists, anthropologists, etc.

At the Crossroads

So my work, since the time it dawned on me what I was seeing, has been to try and understand the Dura-Europos painters’s decision-making, and let its influence work on me. Dura-Europos was (it was bombed to oblivion in 2016 by ISIS; the paintings are rescued at Damascus and Yale) on the Euphrates and was a Roman settlement, a Parthian city and a Roman military outpost, before being wiped off the map in about 254 CE by a Sasanian invasion. Because Dura-Europos changed cultures and because of its location, it was a melting-pot — a bridge between, as Leo Bronstein terms it, Northern (Parthian/Persian) and Southern (Greek/Roman) cultures. And the art of the synagogue and house-church reflect this.

Dura-Europos has gotten under my skin. Not that I work like I’m from that time and place. I was schooled in the Greco-Roman-Southern-Western culture way, loving Picasso, Velasquez, Manet, Beethoven, the Beatles, Dr Seuss, Lewis Carroll, Bob Dylan. But some of the Northern and uniquely Dura-Europos elements have begun to enter my work: story-telling, the palette, decoration, subject matter, sense of space, basis of composition.

Thank you for your interest in my work. If you have any thoughts, please contact me.