This
folio of eight etchings is the culmination of a project that
has approached almost three years in the making. It
was initiated
at the behest of a dealer who suggested that I might
want to pursue the theme of an “adult” children’s
book. At that time I had just discovered a list of
over 200 titles
of tales transcribed and collected by the Brothers
Grimm. Right from
the beginning, I found these to be marvelously evocative
and suggestive. Who could resist the imaginative
provocations of such titles as “The Singing Bone”, “One-Eye,
Two-Eyes and Three-Eyes”, and “The Glass
Coffin”,
not to mention one of my favorites, “The Straw,
the Coal and the Bean”. I saw in all this an
opportunity, not to illustrate the Brothers Grimm,
but to use their work as a point
of departure from which the imagination could spin
its own tales.
My solution to the problem of which titles to select
was to ask a group of seven friends and couples, comprised
of artists, writers,
musicians and collectors, to each pick five of their favorite
titles from the list of 200. I would then select the
first unique title
from each of them. The personality and interest that each
participant exhibited in their approach to this request
became a part of the
work itself. The final results were the following titles:
The Glass Coffin
The Peasant and the Devil
Death’s Messengers
The Black Bride and the White One
The Rose
The
Lord’s Animals and the Devil’s
The Bremen Town-Musicians
Later on it became evident that a title page was needed,
one that would serve to crystallize a context in which
the other seven images
could flourish; thus the eighth image.
In reviewing my colleagues’ submissions, I was struck by the
frequency with which the themes of death and the devil appeared,
quite out of proportion
to their presence in the original list of tales, and the reasons for
this must remain best known those responsible. However, as I began
to ponder the images
that would result from these selections, the most prominent theme to
emerge was that of
opposition—life/death, black/white, good/evil, just to mention
a few examples. The allure of this motif, combined with the imaginative
character of the material in question, engaged me both consciously
and unconsciously in
a complex interaction with the nature of opposing concepts, sometimes
approached literally, sometimes turned inside out, and sometimes
transposed into new, equally
unexplainable relationships.
As a result of the mode I chose for selecting ideas, this project
ended up moving towards a more collaborative activity, and it was
interesting
to discover that
the original materials that the Bros Grimm utilized in their fairytale
transpositions (with, of course, all overt sexual and Oedipal references
expurgated) were derived
from oral folk traditions created for adults by adults in communal
work situations. The adult usage and nature of these tales seems
in keeping
with my theme of an “adult” children’s
book, and their communal origins reflect the asking of my collaborators
to “spin
a yarn” of titles from which to invoke a work of art.
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