Paths of Memory and Painting:
when the foreground and the background merged
c2009 Judy Malloy
To navigate this work, wait for the text to advance, or click on the lexia you
want to follow. The work begins with a series of lines of poetry from the
narrative. After
the narrative begins, the cadence of the work
is best experienced by waiting for the text to change, but readers are
also welcome to proceed at their own pace by clicking on the texts. To allow
time for reading, the text changes slowly; one way to experience the work
would be to click through at your own pace and then click on scene one and
watch it unfold in a more filmic way
About This Work
Probably it was the restaurant
where with fellow students
I had celebrated my birthday
that reminded me of Gus.
It was the place I had last seen him.
Chosen perhaps with some subconscious wish
that he might magically return.
It is May 1944. Artist Dorothy Abrona McCrae and Gus, a US Army officer
whom she met while painting in the Berkeley hills, are having dinner.
It is not really a War time romance. Dorothy's husband Luke was killed
only the year before at Tarawa; Gus will soon be on his way to the
European Front. Yet it is an event that Dorothy has always remembered.
She tells the story over fifty years later in a series of three
recollected scenes that all take place at the same dinner. Each scene
represents different directions in the conversation, but the time frame
of the narrative also includes her memories of her own work and the work
of other artists, both at the time of the dinner and a few years later while
she is an art student at Berkeley. As in
its name was Penelope,
as is the case in real life,
memory is not always disclosed chronologically.
The reader enters the story where Dorothy begins it, although he or she
is welcome to continue in any of the places offered in the interface menu.
In
scene one, the lexias on the left are
Dorothy's recollection
of things that influenced her painting in the 1940's; the lexias on the right
are her recollections of her meeting with Gus.
In
scene two, their discussion of Douglas Tilden's sculpture,
The Football Players, plays on the right, while Dorothy's memories
of the recent past play in the background on the left.
"I am writing this in the 21st century.
If the time shifts are not always obvious,
so it is with my memory of the events.
Layers of memory.
Painting in the hills in 1944.
Dinner with Gus in 1944.
Painting in my studio at Cal in 1946
or was it 1947?
Back and forth motion of the paintbrush."
In
scene three,
books that -- as they sometimes have in the course of my own writing --
appear in the environment of both Dorothy and Gus, who speak, or do not speak
of what they are reading. Scene three is structured in the same way as scene one.
Background
About ten years ago, when I began the story of
Dorothy Abrona McCrae in the
work of that name, I was thinking of the path through my own life,
of how I became a new media poet, although my original vision of my life was
that of a visual artist.
I am -- with no regrets -- a poet, one of the seminal figures in new media
literature. But there has always remained a sense of loss in my life, that I
was not primarily a painter. Thus I decided that I would write about a woman
who, in another era, became who I had originally set out to be.
Since Dorothy first made her appearance, she has been a part of many of my
works -- a favorite character. Writing her voice has often been a pleasure.
It has even brought painting back into my life, while as a poet, I continue
to write about the lives of artists -- expressing years of experience in
the art world with narrative poetry.
In
where every luminous landscape, the work that precedes
when the foreground and the background merged, Dorothy recollects her
early work as a landscape painter, as well as the lives of California artist adventurers.
Her narrative is displayed in eight parallel lexia tracks, creating a reading experience
that both complex but seductive in its counterparted recitative and arioso texts.
when the foreground and the background merged is an interlude between
where every luminous landscape and a third work, paths of memory
and painting that will focus on her emergence as a Bay Area Figurative painter.
The design and interfaces and authoring software I created for
scene one,
scene two,
and
scene three
of when the foreground and the background merged are
somewhat based on the DHTML software and interface I designed for
where every luminous landscape
and somewhat based on the software and
interface, I designed for Interlude - Dorothy and Sid (The Blue Moon
Review, 2001)
The whole is a record of an artist's quest to situate her work in her era
while at the same time exploring art history and maintaining her own vision.
"Working with color and composition in ways different from what I was used to,"
she writes. The vision of how I could paint -- not yet sure of how to fulfill it."
Notes for
scene one
"In the summer of 1311, when it was completed,
a public holiday was declared.
In candle light procession,
Duccio's alterpiece was carried to the Cathedral.
Bells rang, and the whole town
walked to the Church
with the painting."
In this, the 9th work of poetic new media narrative that I have written
in which Dorothy figures, I looked once again at my own experience
of painting. In
where every luminous landscape, I had recreated the feeling
of painting outdoors in the New England countryside. Now for
this work, when the foreground and the background merged, I returned
to the childhood weekends when my Mother took me to the Gardner Museum
in Boston, and we listened to music, looked at painting. As a child and
young woman, I was particularly attracted to the 14th century Sienese paintings
at the Gardner. My Mother also had had a lifelong love for Sienese painting,
and in the basement of our home, she showed me a paper she once written (I think
when she was at Radcliffe) about a Sienese alter. Later, a friend and I visited
Siena. We saw the Madonna from Duccio's La Maestà in the Museum, and we
visited the Cathedral where it once was the central alterpiece.
In scene one of when the foreground and the background merged, Dorothy
and Gus share childhood memories of visiting the Gardner Museum, and
Dorothy tells him what she knows about Duccio's La Maestà.
A few excerpts from the lexias in this part of scene one:
"Told him how Duccio had refused to swear allegiance
to the Military commander. Refused to fight
in a local war."
"'Oh.' I paused and then said:
'It was commissioned in October, 1308,
the year after the Templars were arrested.'
In all the time I had spent studying La Maestà
it wasn't until that very moment,
telling Gus the story,
that I recognized that the date
when the painting was commissioned
was almost exactly a year from October 13, 1307
the day when the Knights Templar were arrested."
"The large amount of money paid for the alter.
The significance of the date.
Deep blue. Aquamarine. Gold and red.
A sea of gold haloes. Filmic narrative.
'Perhaps some of the treasure of the Templars
was spent on La Maestà,' I said.
'If so, it was a magnificent memorial
for the Knights whose lives were taken,' he replied."
As so often has happened in these narratives, the story had now taken an
unexpected turn with -- as the title of the work. which is based on "push pull"
techniques in abstract painting, suggests -- the background of the writer's life merging
with the foreground of the narrative, for I suppose that I would not have thought
about the possible connection between the arrest of the Knights Templar, their
missing treasure and the Duccio alterpiece, if it had not been for a library book
published in Florence, and the fact that I remembered how in the sixties, in a small
town on the Northern Coast of Italy, not too far from Siena, I was camping with
Jim Malloy -- who was not against the draft but believed that the Vietnam War was
wrong -- when he received a Draft notice, forwarded from West Virginia to an
American Express office in Italy. Thus my story about the merging of background
and foreground in abstract art, the legacy of the Templar Grand Master
Jacques de Molay and my childhood connection with Sienese art come together as
Dorothy sits in a restaurant in 1944 in the days before the D-Day Invasion and
tells an Army officer she met while painting in the hills the story of
Duccio's La Maestà.
Resources for Scene One:
Native American Artists
KQED Spark, Julia Parker
Native Basketry: Survival, Beauty
Rick Hill, Creativity is Our Tradition, Three Decades of
Contemporary Indian Art at the Institute of American Indian Arts,
Santa Fe, NM, 1992
Sienese Painters
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Cecilia Jannella, Duccio Di Buoninsegna, Florence, Italy: Scala, 1991
Cecilia Jannella, Simone Martini, Florence, Italy: Scala: 1989
Edward Hutton, The Sienese School, London, Boston: The Medici Society,
1925. Preface: R. Langton Douglas
The Maestà by Duccio - Web Gallery of Art
Gudrid The Far-Traveler
Nancy Marie Brown, The Far Traveler, Voyages of a Viking Woman,
Orlando, FL, Harcourt, 2007
California Artists
Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-1980,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985
Xavier Timoteo Martinez
Early Artists of the Bohemian Club
Moraga, CA: Hearst Art Gallery, St Mary's College of California, 2002
Essay by Ann Harlow, exhibition curated by Julie Armistead and Nancy Ferreira.
The Dance in the Latin Quarter (1900-1910, Collection of the Mills
College Art Museum) is reproduced on page 5.
Margaret Peterson
Margaret Peterson - Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
UC History Project, The Center for Studies in Higher Education,
The University Loyalty Oath
__
Margaret Peterson Art Exhibit
The Loyalty Oath Controversy - University of California, 1949-1951
Notes and Resources for
scene two
Douglas Tilden
"One Hundred Years of Art" - UC Berkeley
Football History
Although the players who modeled for Tilden's sculpture were probably
French, the uniforms were not disimilar from some of the American uniforms
of the time, as illustrated by this photograph of the 1903 Dartmouth
team that defeated Harvard at the game that opened the Harvard Stadium.
The last player on the right in the first row, is my Grandfather,
W. Huston Lillard, who was head coach at Dartmouth in 1909 and later,
while he was at Oxford, travelled around England speaking about
American football.
The African American player in the third row is Mat Bullock, one of the
first African American players in the Ivy League.
The photo is from W. Huston Lillard 05, Left End, "How the 'Big' was
Added to Green", Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, October 1965.
Allison Danzig, Oh, How They Played The Game, The Early Days of
Football and the Heroes Who Made it Great, NY: Macmillan, 1971.
A description of the 1894 Harvard Yale Game is in John Kieran, "Harvard vs. Yale, Old
Style", in pp. 62-64.
Also of Interest:
"Dwight Eisenhower: My Football Days at West Point", pp. 288-292
"Walter Camp, Father of American Football", pp. 9-26
"Amos Alonzo Stagg, Patriarch of Football", pp. 48-58
Erle Loran
Erle Loran - George Krevsky Gallery
Erle Loran, Painter, Printmaker, Teacher, 1905-1999 - Modern Art West
Granville Redmond
Granville Richard Seymour Redmond - The Irvine Museum
Holly Wermiel, "Deaf Artists: A brief consideration of the works
of roommates Granville Redmond and Douglas Tilden", ASL University
Notes and Resources for
scene three
D-Day Prayer - by President Franklin D. Roosevelt from the White House
- June 6, 1944 , Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum
Gregg Herken,
"
Brotherhood of the Bomb - The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer,
Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller, NY: Henry Holt and Co, 2002.
Peter Goodchild, Edward Teller: the Real Dr. Strangelove, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004.
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, NY: Bantam, 1981
originally published in 1889.
Dorothy L Sayers, The Five Red Herrings, NY: Harper and Row, 1986.
first published in England in 1931 under that title.
First published in the US under the title Suspicious Characters.
Readers may speculate on what did happen when British writer Dorothy Sayers
and her Scottish husband Captain Mac Fleming (author of How to See the
Battlefields) spent a summer in an artists colony in the strategic
Borderlands, resulting in a book in which a Scottish painter is found dead
on the rocks of a stream. But whatever Sayers' intention at the time,
it now leads us to a resurgence of interest in the work of the artists
of Kirkcudbright.
In the Artists' Footsteps
Dorothy L Sayers in Galloway
Artist Dorothy Abrona McCrae's reaction to The Five Red Herrings
may be somewhat explained by Sayers' not terribly flattering treatment of
the main characters, many of whom are Scottish painters. Sayers is much
more interesting when writing about women academics at Oxford in
Gaudy Night.
Perhaps this is a good time to mention that although he does not tell Dorothy
(and is not spying on her) Gus is with US Army Intelligence. It is not unlikely
that he will show up later in the story..
Hopefully, the relevance of the title The Five Red Herrings to events
in Berkeley while the Manhattan project was being staffed and the fact that in
Kirkcudbright Sayers' next door neighbor was the artist Charles Oppenheimer
are coincidences.
At any rate, it is just as well that Dorothy Abrona McCrae does not mention
this book to Gus. This *is* an artist's story, and there may be many stories
within stories (in the events that led to the writing of The Five Red
Herrings, in Sayers' layered plotting and in the histories of Scotland)
but at this moment, its introduction in itself is -- as if it is purposefully
laid in front of the narrator for that purpose -- a distraction from the
more cogent analogy to the Manhattan Project of Twain's A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
If you are going to ride into the Borderlands with an English author, choose
instead H. V. Morton's In Search of Scotland. (published in 1929, only
two years earlier than The Five Red Herrings) in which Morton writes of
"...the spell of a country wild and untameable, where every nook and corner
is marked down on the map of romance":
"There can be no wild place in the world which men have embroidered more
richly with daring deeds. It shares with all places in which generations
of men have loved or hated an arresting importance, almost as if some part
of their passion had soaked itself into the grass and into the hard surface
of the rocks, making them different from other grass and other rocks."
H.V. Morton, In Search of Scotland, London: Methuen & CO, 1929. p. 5.
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when the foreground and the background merged
Judy Malloy
