This is not at all how I expected to spend any of my time today -- not at all.
No, I was really on a self-indulgent, argumentative quest, which just goes to show that one never knows what may appear, while one searches for something entirely different.
So. I'm slated to teach a drawing class, beginning in January, for the local community college. As the students with whom I'll work have already had one semester of drawing, I want to construct a course focused more on concept and self-knowledge, than on using a pencil to depict an egg on a sheet of paper. Trying to arrive at a coherent set of progressively challenging assignments, I kept on asking myself the same question: what, exactly, is drawing?
As is the norm these days, I went to my computer for insights and overviews, from other artists and educators, to help guide me to a place of greater clarity, regarding to the discipline of drawing, and the various shapes it can take. At random, I selected an essay 'Drawing vs Painting', posted in April of 2021, by Eden Gallery (whether this is the name of a person, or the title of an organization, isn't clear). I hoped this work might provide a jumping-off point, and shed some light on the basic question of what separates the act of drawing from its allied creative disciplines.
Sadly, this essay added little in the way of the clarity I sought. Perhaps I should have been alerted by the title -- 'Drawing vs Painting'. As though this were a prize fight that would only be over when one combatant is lying unconscious in the ring. Through the rest of the essay, though, this hint at adversarial practices seemed forgotten.
But by page three, the essay took a strange, and for me an alienating turn. In a brief paragraph defining 'painting', the author made a puzzling assertion -- first letting us know that artists who use paint are... painters (who would have thought?) -- and then that some painters are now household names. Like, for instance... Yoel Benharrouche.
Maybe my household -- which has included professional artists and educators for the past twenty years -- is lacking the more soigne of art connections, but (with all due respect) I've never heard of Yoel Benharrouche. And I suspect that few, if any, of my colleagues, professional artists and educators all, would consider Yoel Benharrouche a household name.
So I looked up Yoel Benharrouche, expecting to find at least a Wikipedia article on him. Of which there wasn't one. But there was a biography, presented by a different gallery, and including a' key' to understanding the meanings in his work: the top quarter represents the divine, the left half represents receiving things, etc. And there were illustrations of his manifestly derivative paintings, evocative of Picasso's figurative abstractions, though generally in much brighter colors. (Oh, and there was one painting featuring a fractured version of da Vinci's "Woman with a Ferret'. Or Genevra de Benchi, I forget which) Handsome, eminently above-the-sofa-worthy work from Mr. Benharrouche, without question, but not nearly on a par with such legitimate household names as Lucien Freud, or Francis Bacon, or the late Chuck Close, to scratch the surface.
Assured that my lack of awareness of Yoel Benharrouche hadn't resulted from my having lapsed, unconsciously, into an art-world coma, I forged my way through the rest of the article, hoping against hope. But, among other art-historical errors, the author cited Henri Matisse among practitioners of 'the painterly style', working in the first half of the 19th century. But Matisse wasn't born until the 1890's, and was, in fact, closely identified with the Fauvist movement. Clearly, the essay's author had only the most tenuous of grasps on the topic at hand. And there it could have ended.
But...
Having looked up Mr. Benharrouche, I couldn't resist indulging in one of the modern world's mortal sins -- I Googled myself. Just to compare my web presence, if any -- and is there any weightier determinant of contemporary significance? -- with that of the aforementioned Israeli painter. I searched for 'Walter Zimmerman glass artist' -- there's also Walter Zimmermann the German violinist, and a Walter Zimmerman elementary school somewhere in California, poor kids. Voila -- there I popped up, along with the usual assortment of other pictorial material having nothing to do with me. What I found of particular interest were two images from my 'Incident' series, which work rarely shows up in these venues. I decided to investigate the source of these photographs. Which, really, is why I'm writing all of this in the first place.
Some years ago, I was invited to show some work at the Chicago SOFA exposition, at the request of Kate Elliott. I was teaching in Philadelphia at the time, and was thrilled that my decidedly undecorative work would be on display, among the glamour and gleam and glitz usually associated with all things glass. I sent off an assortment of these 'Incident' pieces -- first shown in a small gallery space in a small Philadelphia craft shop on Pine Street -- as my contributions to the event, and arranged to be present at the opening.
Needless to say, my work created a silent dissonance, as it usually does. So, after taking in the thrill of seeing an actual installation of my wall-mounted pieces at SOFA Chicago, I set off to see what other work -- especially glass work -- was on hand. I shouldn't have been surprised. I found mostly the same artists represented, exhibiting the work one would expect of them, only bigger and more expensive. In this context, my work did indeed seem to have broken through some dimensional barrier, separating things decoratively reassuring, from works with a totally different agenda.
So I suppose I should be flattered, that the essayist (I'm really not sure who actually did the writing) chose to include two images from this series of ten which I shipped to Chicago. The essayist has posted the pictures, wondering why they were there, and what they were about, and suggested that, no matter what any literal reference might be, it must certainly be 'something no man would want to experience'.
I have tried, as a general rule, not to talk about the antecedents of my work. When I've broken my own rule, I've been sadly disappointed, because although I may feel driven to use some particular event or experience as a jumping-off point, I invariably find that the responses of viewers are, almost without exception, far more poignant and resonant than the mere facts of my own life.
That said, however -- and since the exhibit in question is but a dim memory, but the question posted under the image of my work still stands, unanswered -- I thought I would once again break my rule of silence. When I began the pieces that make up the 'Incident' series, I was, for some reason, still haunted by accounts that had surfaced in the press, from time to time, reporting on what Americans sometimes faced, fighting in Africa and the Middle East, especially in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. In particular, my attention had been arrested by abbreviated mentions of men, brutally murdered, then dragged through dirt streets, or left, dismembered and burnt beyond recognition, to dangle on bridges.
'Something no man would want to experience'.
It's not as though I exult in having such topics from which to pick, to make the kind of work that I do. But when -- as I have -- I see someone crossing the room, rather than look more closely at some assemblage I've made (which, always, is cold, inert, non-contagious, allusive instead of diagrammatic), I want to ask -- so which is worse, to confront and to know, or to remain ignorant, and by extension, complacent, and perhaps even complicit?
The answers are not easy, but I don't believe this means that the questions don't need to be asked.
And all this, from an essay about drawing vs painting. Isn't the world a wonderful place?
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