six ways of worldmaking
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The Mythopians Artist GroupTRANSCRIPT
Six Ways of Worldmaking
The Mythopians Artist Group
September 8 – October 23, 2004
“Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worldsalready on hand; the making is a remaking. ...(It) begins
with one version and ends with another.”
—Nelson Goodman (1906-1998), American Philosopher
Cobbled together from bits and pieces
borrowed from the worlds of others,
the worlds we remake as our own
come from those old and new, distant
and near, imperfect and ideal. We
embellish our versions freely and
edit them judiciously. In doing so,
each one becomes a rich, densely
woven fabric of symbols with multiple
intertwined meanings from which
we fashion stories that may impart
a moral, recount a history, or simply
entertain.
Storytelling is integral to worldmaking.
It is the center from which we build.
It is also essential to the unique work
created by The Mythopians Artist
Group, a coalition of six stylistically
distinct artists - Nancy Jean Carrigan,
Robert Kameczura, Diane Levesque,
James McNeill Mesple’, Christine
O’Connor and Steve Sherrell - who
exhibit their work collectively “out of a
mutual love of figurative and narrative
art and a fondness for the Romantic
tradition.”
The Mythopians are accomplished
artists and storytellers who move
easily between ancient mythologies,
daily newspaper headlines and
fanciful invention. The worlds they
create are beautiful, complex and
diverse. In them, we are as likely
to encounter Eros dreaming of a
love triangle, Penelope weaving her
tapestry, or satyrs playing their pipes,
as we are likely to meet Jack Kerouac
sipping a drink, Sigmund Freud sitting
in a swamp, or Victorian ladies in
distress. Theirs are extraordinary
worlds where the logic of time,
place, subject and action does not
hold - worlds that have been remade
wondrous and sublime.
“Six Ways of Worldmaking,” the
Mythopians current exhibition at the
H.F. Johnson Art Gallery, Carthage
College, Kenosha, takes its title from
Nelson Goodman’s influential book,
“Ways of Worldmaking”(1978). It
is an engaging mix of varied and
sometimes contradictory styles.
Despite the affinities that have brought
these six artists together, they remain
caretakers of their own dissimilar, yet
intermingled worlds.
Six Ways of Worldmaking
Carrigan’s painting, “Il Cigno e
La Sirena” (2003), depicts an intimate
embrace between a mermaid and a
swan. In it, the same sensual curve
used to delineate the contour of the
mermaid’s golden hair is repeated in the
mermaid’s curled tail and arm, as well
as in the neck of the swan, (which joins
the mermaid’s arm to complete a heart-
like shape). Spiral forms comprising the
mermaid’s breast, her scales and the
picture’s roiling nebulous background
reinforce the picture’s curve motif.
While Carrigan does not offer
any clues to assist in the interpretation
of the image, the story of Zeus taking
the form of a swan as Leda’s lover
comes to mind. Since Leda was not a
mermaid, however, this explanation
provides only vague associations.
Carrigan, who enjoys the ambiguity
of the image, invites the viewer to
fill in the blanks with any number of
fascinating scenarios.
Not so in “The Burden of the
Phoenix (9/11)” (2002), for which
the artist has chosen the legend of the
fabulous giant bird who is reborn from
its own ashes, as her response to the
destruction of the World Trade Center.
Carrigan has given the Phoenix a
stylish female face with almond-
shaped eyes that cry blood-red tears,
whose shape and color are restated
in flames issuing from the Twin Towers
tucked beneath the Phoenix’ brilliant
red wings, wings which also enfold a
child within its womb. Here there is no
ambiguity as Carrigan deftly retools
the age-old myth of rebirth—of life
from death—into a message of hope
for today.
NANCY JEAN CARRIGAN
A playful and inventive line, fantastical shapes and deep vivid colors obtained by painting on
sheets of layered acrylic film are the hallmarks of Nancy Jean Carrigan’s art. Her images, with
their graceful sweeping curves, intricate spatial fills and other complex and delicate patterns,
possess a bold graphic look.
Some of the worlds Kameczura
creates are complete inventions.
Others, such as“Pluto and Persephone
in the Underworld” (2004), with
its phosphorescent glimpse into the
domain of the dead, are drawn from
classical literature and myth. The
painting “What We Are, What We
Think We Are, What Other People
Think We Are” (2004) comes by its title
through a simplification of a phrase by
Voltaire. It is an ambitious discourse on
how people see themselves and others
and how they are seen and perceived
by others in turn.
As in much of his work,
Kameczura packs this imaginative
diptych, edge to edge—foreground
to background, with images and
events, leaving no empty space,
or any place in the painting where
something is not happening. Featured
among the many vignettes he stages
is a woman holding a mask up to her
face, as if confronting her “false” and
“true” selves. Another woman primps
in a mirror even though her face is
partially veiled. There is a couple
wearing sunglasses embracing before
a fire, a woman carrying a torch and
a painter working on a picture.
Every figure in Kameczura’s
painting has a role to play. There are
artists, actors, dancers and lovers,
each representing a variation/degree
of seeing, or being seen. Every
object—every action has a meaning
that enhances the believability of his
strange and beautiful worlds.
ROBERT KAMECZURA
There is an atmosphere of enchantment that permeates Robert Kameczura’s acrylic paintings,
as if he opens windows into timeless worlds where the mundane assumes the aura of magic
and theater. Like characters in a costume play, the men in his paintings have full beards and
wear robes or tunics. The women are dressed in diaphanous gowns. His lighting, which exudes
an otherworldly glow, is dramatic and stage-like, accentuated by a kind of broken color that is
alternately warm and cool.
Levesque’s art is heady and
evocative. It allows the artist to
transform Beat poet Jack Kerouac into
Oedipus of Thebes and herself into
Oedipus’/Kerouac’s mother/wife in
“All Things Being Equal: Oedipus and
Jocasta” (2003), a cautionary tale of
incest. Her art is often inspired by a
line of poetry or a phrase in a book,
as is the painting “In the Country of
the Marvelous” (2003), whose title
was gleaned from a book by Pierre
Mabille. The canvas, which was
begun the day after war with Iraq
began, is a poignant indictment of
religious extremism and the grasping
for political prizes.
In “James Joyce: He Domesticated
His Metaphysics” (2004), one in a
series of portraits focusing on writers and
painters whom she considers influential
to her own work, Levesque ingeniously
recasts Joyce’s retelling of Homer’s epic
poem “The Odyssey” into a board game
with playing spaces that wind around
the picture’s surface like Joyce’s stream-
of-consciousness prose winds around
the page of a book.
In Levesque’s version the
viewer encounters a profusion of
images, including a doll in a jar,
a rooster pitcher filled with roses,
a figure falling from a stone tower,
Greek sirens and a large button.
Each encapsulates an emotion or
experience Joyce’s main character
undergoes as he wanders through
the city of Dublin. An extremely
articulate painter, Levesque imbues
the seeming chaos and irrationality
of Joyce’s art with her own arresting
form and artistry.
DIANE LEVESQUE
A great deal of psychological complexity is packed into the shallow, rather claustrophobic spaces
of Diane Levesque’s provocative acrylic portrait paintings. Her subjects, whether of friends or
strangers, are characterized as much by her faithful likenesses, as they are by the surreal-like
accumulations of objects she brings into their orbit - objects which retain the residue of memory
and which hold the clues to her subject’s identity and place in time.
But Mesple’s paintings, executed
in egg tempera and oil glazes made
from pigments he prepares himself
according to formulas rooted in the
Middle Ages, are always a surprise.
Marvelously inventive and seamless in
their melding of ancient and modern
imagery, the genuineness of the
worlds he creates is never in doubt.
The disparate images in “Dune
Music” (2004), for instance, should
not make sense, but in Mesple’s world
they do. In it a pair of reed flutes is
played by the slender green fingers
of an unseen musician, two classical
heads litter the ground and a couple of
exotically dressed figures play alongside
a pond. In the background are the
Indiana Dunes, Chicago’s skyline and a
wooden ship sailing on Lake Michigan.
It is a curious and improbable
idyll from Mesple’s unconventional
imagination that permits myth and
magic to enter into the everyday.
Most of Mesple’s works are
faithful, if somewhat tweaked versions
of legend and myth, like that of
Arachne who bests Athena in a
weaving contest and is changed into a
spider. Yet some of his work is purely
lyrical, as is the hauntingly beautiful
“Rain Goddess” (2004). Here the
ethereal face of a woman appears
in gray storm clouds, the strands
of her hair mingling with streaks of
rain falling on an iris flower that has
blossomed in a rainbow of colors.
Mesple’s painting has the delicacy of
a Renaissance botanical rendering
infused with poetry. His art is nothing
short of magical.
JAMES McNEILL MESPLE’
It is not hard to imagine the paintings of James McNeill Mesple’ adorning the walls of a first
century Roman villa, even with their humorous quirks and allusions to contemporary culture. The
figures he paints are almost exclusively those of Greek or Roman mythology and their names, if
not their stories, are, for the most part, familiar to most everyone.
Friendship and professional
rivalry, for instance, are the
topics in O’Connor’s portrayal of
psychoanalysts Freud, Jung and Adler,
whom she situates in a fecund swamp.
Here Jung stands apart from the
group, while Freud sits next to Adler,
a rifle resting across his lap aimed at
his companion’s book on aggression.
Through setting and gesture, the
pointed painting speaks volumes
about the trio’s tangled relationship
and eventual estrangement.
Each of O’Connor’s works is
intricately detailed and richly colored.
Her painstaking technique imparts
an exceptional transparency and
luminosity that resemble the tempera
paint and oil glaze finishes of certain
Old Master paintings. “Venetian
Diptych, duality: woman/man” (2001)
is a particularly exquisite work. In it
O’Connor tells the story of the great
adventurer and lover, Casanova and
Henriette, the young French runaway
with whom he had a brief love affair.
Here Henriette and Casanova
face one another in profile from
opposite ends of the canvas. She is
dressed for a party. Pictured above
her is a pair of costume masks; one,
of which, has painted tears on its
cheek. He is seen against a stone wall
with a barred window through which
a Venice canal shimmers. It is a quite,
penetrating picture whose bittersweet
air is heavy with memory and loss.
The past often blurs with reverie
in O’Connor’s work and the images
in her paintings sometimes turn out
quite differently from those that initially
sparked her imagination. More
important to O’Connor is that some
type of experience and understanding
has taken place during the making
of the painting and the telling of the
story. It invariably does.
CHRISTINE O’CONNOR
Christine O’Connor paints portraits of famous people from history and literature, like the
astronomer Galileo Galilei and the missionaries Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa.
She presents her portraits within the context of stories that illuminate the relationships
between her subjects.
At the core of Sherrell’s work,
however, there is always a sense of
the fantastic steeped in melancholy.
It is present in his wistful, at times
playfully perverse collages of Victorian
women, and in fears of the Cold War
that he revisits in “Rumors from the
Rocket State” (nd), a work occasioned
by a Thomas Pynchon novel.
Such feelings are most prevalent,
however, in “Rimbaud” (2004), a
discerning homage to a quintessential
Romantic artist. In this mixed-media
work (graphite, acrylic and collage on
canvas), Sherrell envisions the French
Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud
(1854-91) as slightly rumpled and
unkempt, as if he were a vagrant
posing for a police line up, rather
than a prodigy who revolutionized
poetry before the age of 17. His
scratchy penciled likeness conveys a
nervousness and spent sensitivity.
Running along the edges of the
work are squares in which Sherrell
cubbyholes important dates, quotes
and events in the poet’s life. A bullet
in each of the work’s four corners
represents shooting attempts on his
life. Most curious is the extra pupil
Sherrell has tucked inside each of
Rimbaud’s “drunken” undulating
eyelids, perhaps symbolic of the gift,
or curse of prescience. Sherrell’s work
is an incisive portrait of a man who
lived his life in the extreme and who
sacrificed himself readily to myth.
STEVE SHERRELL
Working with the same assuredness in a variety of different media, from computer art to painting
to collage, Steve Sherrell moves with equal ease between a diverse range of styles, from the
abstract and figurative to the visionary, as in “A Gift from Time” (2003), (graphite, acrylic
collage on three canvases). A large (9’ x 7’) work representing a celestial meeting between
Beauty, (a woman clad in snake-skin), and Pegasus, the winged horse, it is elegant in both its
cool blue-green color scheme and concise decorative design.
In “Ways of Worldmaking,” Nelson Goodman wrote “We start, on any occasion, with some old
version or world that we have on hand and that we are stuck with until we have the determination
and skill to remake it into a new one.” The six artists who comprise the Mythopians Artist Group
have the determination and skill. Through their gifts of storytelling and art they create intriguing
worlds from which each of us might borrow something for our own worldmaking.
Garrett Holg, a former Chicago Sun-Times art critic, contributes to ARTnews magazine
2001 Alford Park DriveKenosha, WI 53140-1994
www.carthage.edu