Caterina’s keys

In the spring of 2008 while working on a sculpture based my open-heart surgery that took place January of 2006, an idea took hold and since then has taken root. Never the less several more months would need to pass before I started searching for the various elements. Though a few elements are still missing, I have the foundation along with a couple of other essential objects in this assemblage. The base is an old wooden desk drawer that since has had a layer of golden foil added to it, changing the meaning from a utilitarian object to a personal shrine.

Spring 2008 at Diablo Valley College art department

The concept, like a pot of tea which has been slowly brewing, taking on colour, releasing its essence and filling the room with fragrance, so to has the mind contemplated the various aspects as to the artworks technical issues and final appearance. While time can become ones worst antagonist by altering the original course upon which one had set out on, the idea is too deeply entrenched for this to occur. This does not mean there is no room for allowing plenty of alternative paths to branch off into, without being unfaithful to the concept.

Another traveled one of these meandering paths after a story was shared and a comment exchanged, who then with great care and love placed two keys into an envelope, sending it by the hands of many unknown strangers participating in the mission, so that upon my trip home from southern California I would find waiting on the kitchen table a small package.

The packet had also two old fashioned keys drawn on it, along with the words “Art is Key” and “Art saves lives.” I carefully cut open the left side and gentle retrieved its content. With great anticipation and equal excitement I unfolded the antique gold tissue paper until the keys emerged from its safe keeping. Each key with its distinctive appearance and individual customized tag, offered a unique interpretation in the assemblages meaning. For now that decision would have to wait.

Yet after reading her enclosed note, I could not help but begin to ponder what Catering’s influence on the artwork, its impact or for that matter, its outcome would be. There would certainly be a shift in the artwork’s meaning, despite remaining truthful to the original concept and John Fowles' 1963 book, “The Collector.”

Caterina’s gift to me represents the very symbol of unlocking the personal mythology that a key represents and in the end it needed to come from another or it’s meaning could not be true to the idea of the artwork. Though the assemblage is far from complete, the artwork still remains in the gathering stage, but with either one of these keys, it has made a significant progress. For this I remain deeply indebted to Caterina and for helping me upon my journey.

Postscript: For those of you, who do not know Caterina Giglio’s blog La Dolce Vita, please have a look, as she combines various techniques in her multi-medium art.

For a review of Fowles’ first book "The Collector". He is also the author of "The French Lieutenant’s Woman."

A keeper of memories — part two

There are thirteen photographs in my possession out of a possible forty and all of a wedding. The only reason I know there are forty images is because the printer had numbered them by hand with a ball point pen on the back side, along with the studios contact information. These hand produced 4.5/8 x 3.5/8 inch prints have a sepia appearance because they were printed on sturdy Portralure Paper Y by Kodak and developed with Selectol. This would insure the prints having a warm brown to black tone appearance. However the paper itself also added to the allure of richness, with its pearl like reflective surface composed of a fine satin grain, softening any detail or imperfection.

The numbers that appear on the back of each print in no way can be associated with the sequence of the event the prints pictured. They appear randomized with no connection possible to a negative roll or the films exposure frame. One is left to speculate this to have been a smaller order for a guest or distant family member who was to receive only a selection of prints. However there are far more important mysteries to be unfolded, since none of the prints have any pertinent information other than who was hired to document the event.

The Bergé Studio, which was hired to cover the event, was located in Westlake, a district of Daly City, next to Lake Merced, where I grew up during 1960 to ‘63, just before we moved to the Eichler Highlands. Since photograph marked number three is of the church and there is a car parked in front, I am able to identify the vehicle as a Buick from anywhere in between 1959 to 1962. Regrettable though, the license plate is only a rectangle of solid colour due to the grain of the paper.

Apart from the visual evidence, the Bergé’s studio number was Plaza 5-0884, a system that was abandoned mid-1960’s in favor of an all numeric system. For those who cannot remember, the first two letters of a word referred to part of the number, in this case PL and one would dial PL5-0884 to reach Bergé Studio. Today 75 Fairway Drive is known as the Merchant Circle and the business at that location is GM Electric. According to property records, it last changed ownership on November 19, 1972 for $38.5000.

At least a narrow time frame has been established and now the focus is on the individuals in those photographs. Print number two marked seven, shows the bride and groom, now husband and wife, along with the three bridesmaid and their escorts. The bridesmaids are wearing matching gowns, veils, and gloves, while the men are in their black tuxedos, all have a carnation in the lapel, but not everyone is displaying a handkerchief in the jackets upper pocket.

With thirteen photographs, I hold only one-third of the puzzle. My first real question is about the collection itself and their previous owner. What was the person’s relationship to anyone pictured, for that matter, are they in any of these pictures? If so, who then?

I wish I had at some handwritten comments on the back of any of the photographs, at least a first name of the key characters, but even the lack of this kind of evidence reveals a clue. From the photograph taken during the vows I am able to estimate the number of guests being between forty-five and sixty, a moderate size depending upon your views. At first it would appear this to be an all ‘white’ wedding, but in one photograph were the guest are being greeted at the reception by the couple and the bridesmaid and their escorts, the face of an African American woman. It looks as though she came alone.

Studying the facial features of the two women next to each other, it appears with almost certainty that the maid of honour is also the daughter of the bride. This then raises further speculation as to the bride’s prior marriage. Had she been a widow or was her single status due to a divorce? If she was a widow, how did her husband die and when or how? The Korean War had started June 25, 1950 and lasted until July 1953, the daughter would have been between ten and thirteen years of age, if one estimates her age in the photographs to be about twenty-two.

I am leaning towards the bride having been a widow, based upon that there were 36,574 US military personnel killed in the Korean War and divorce was difficult up to the late sixties since California did not have a ‘no-fault’ policy. I also include into this synopsis that the mother would have mourned for one to two years, followed by about five years before actively dating again and only when her daughter had graduated from high school, possible in 1958. Adding two to three years on top of that for a courtship, I am right back at 1960-1961.

Obviously this is all highly speculative. Yet such information and more can be gleaned from such photographs and with a fertile imagination, can be woven into a tale, a short story or a perhaps, even a novel. Photographs have the power to entrap us with their silence. Especially photographs that are about to be lost forever because of a death, for they seem to cry out the loudest.

The Native American believed a photograph had the capability to steal a persons soul and that person would then doomed to roam endlessly the landscape, searching for peace. Possible they were right after all, as I continue to collect these old black & white photographs, not only for their intrinsic beauty or the mysteries they hold, but for those voices longing to be heard.

Postscript:

The next posting will be part three, the conclusion of Painting 101: Creating a distress background and will be available on the September 20. I am also announcing the development of my third blog, A Portrait in Time, to be launched beginning of the year. Further details will be shared in subsequent posts.

A treasure trove of a find

In the last week there have been numerous distractions which have kept me from accomplishing some of the things that were planned, considering I was going to have a few days to myself in which to do so. If I were to tell you that these distractions were not welcomed, well I would be telling you a gross and deliberate, outright, deceitful, lie.

There are certainly undesirable distractions, but these were not part of the unwanted, not like the robot-phone calls, which seem to arrive just when one is sitting down for dinner. No, this was about connecting with like-minded individuals and trusts me; it was like each one was sitting in the kitchen and having tea and coffee cake. So now a balance needs to be struck between being with friends and colleagues, while devoting still ample time to either blogs, therefore a decision needed to be made and it has but first, let me share with you a wonderful find of a treasure.

Digital duo-tone photograph, September 5, 2009

Earlier today I stopped off at my favorite haunts, searching for collage material, including other items of interest and to my surprise discovered a 1901 Cram’s Superior Family Atlas in questionable condition. The hardcover volume was far from perfect, it was in three pieces, but what matters were the pages, the maps. At ten Dollars, the price was right, but would I ever make use of these pages for collage, considering I love to collect maps?

Besides the atlas, I was rummaging through in a flat filling drawers, finding further back under all the more recent additions, a number of National Geographic maps from 1954 through 1957. Over the years the papers prominence had softened, started the process of aging. Another National Geographic map was far more brittle and already heavily damaged had turned it to a deep amber tone as if soaked by a dark Kusmi tea from Kousmichoff.

There were two other maps, more modern but still distinctive, of areas less traveled to by most non-Europeans. The larger of the two maps covers Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, a city whose seal is very similar to that of my hometown and birthplace, Hamburg. The other chart I purchased is of the town Bayeux in Normandy, France.

Back home everything was once more carefully inspected before setting up near a window a tabletop arrangement with today’s treasures, including a circular object already on hand, to help out with compositional balance. After a number of exposures, the composition was slightly altered and adjustments were made in order to control how the light traveled across each surface of each item. A small, but wide enough form core reflector was placed near the camera to bounce any light back and soften any shadows.

Digital duo-tone photograph, September 5, 2009

Now the hour is late, candlelight fills the room, and there is music in the background. My cat is curled up in her small basket that rests next to me and I review my notes logged earlier in a buff coloured Moleskine notebook. Within the pages I recorded a number of concepts for the blog, like a list of topic ideas I might wish to cover along with a ‘Give Away’ idea and further customization to the sidebar.

To maintain six posts a month and two on ‘The Artist Within Us’, will in the end only suffer in the quality of what is published. The decision to cut back by a third has been most difficult, especially since I love to write. As the other blog already has a publication schedule, then ‘Four Seasons in a Life’ should have its own timetable, this way neither sites will be in conflict and you will know when to expect the next posting. I guess we call this ‘learning on the job’, considering I did not think of it when starting this blog.

Obscure objects of desire

Over the year’s cherished treasures that have been hidden or accidentally misplaced, end up lost without explanation. These obscure objects of desire have a memory that lingers on, seemingly forever, surfacing unexpectedly just as in a recent conversation, when the memory set into motion the hands of time reversing the hours with a steady swiftness. Going back into the early years of my childhood, when at the age of ten or eleven we visited England, almost fifty years ago. Though I faintly recall Piccadilly Circus, the London Bridge, before it was dismantled and moved to Arizona, the underground and of course the Queens Palace with the changing of the Guards. However it was a British copper penny that I treasured most and for many years the coin was kept safe in various places until it finally was no more to be seen, yet I never forgot the beauty and wonder the coin imparted upon a very young mind.

In those indelible years I probably believed the penny possessed mysterious powers that I would have garnished from it, believing these to have made me invincible whenever I must have felt threatened from real or imaginary evil forces. On the other hand, memory faintly recalls the penny and other foreign currency to have been my secrete stash, a pirate’s bounty, kept with stamps and other perceived valuables in a small cigar box.

Yesterday I received a light brown envelope, upon which were affixed two British Revenue stamps, contained within was a package of about one hundred foreign stamps, a cigar package wrapping, and a 1939 British copper penny. These items my friend Ian had sent me from England after I had told him about the penny and how much I have missed it all these years. Now that I held the coin in my hand once again, it appeared much smaller then what I remembered, only realizing later that after almost fifty years my hand has tripled in size from that of a child.

Yet as I look at the penny, I cannot help but think about the many hands that it has passed through these last seventy-three years and the history it witnessed during that span. The detail of the coin has little wear, absent are also any visible nicks and scratches, that I begin to wonder if this penny might have been kept by a child who also had it part of his pirate booty. But as the years passed, the coin was lost to him, finding its way through other hands, eventually arriving in my hand, through the intervention of a friend. In regards to the stamps, that story is saved for another time.

A keeper of memories

The last couple of days I have been feeling nostalgic, along with a good dosage of melancholy. Thought I should be excited for having come into the possession of a large number of Black & White including sepia-toned photographs dating from about 1890’s through the late 60’s, including a number of negative, several receipts from a trip to Europe, a letter from a father to his son in camp and plenty of ephemeral material; I cannot help but feel sad.


There are school portraits commemorating graduation of ones fourth or fifth year from an elementary school in the late forties and early fifties, Boy Scouts of America merit badges, even a driving citation for speeding in a school zone with a comment by the police officer that the ticket holder is to bring his parents to court.

As I look at all the items, carefully separating them into different stacks, I cannot help but begin to wonder about these people who’s ‘bits and pieces’ I now hold in my hand, asking why all this and more was it being discarded? Even though my ‘treasure throve’ came from a number of different sources, the thought of so many previous lives having been tossed into oblivion, to be forgotten, erased as if they never existed in the first place, pains me, despite receiving a reprieve from the garbage dump.

Some of the photographs clearly date back to the depression era and even earlier, while others show men in uniforms serving as a police officer or the armed forces during World War Two, there are pictures of a child riding his first tricycle and looking back at mom or the few other ones of grandma holding her first grandchild, while beaming with joy.



So what happened to all these people? Was the previous owner the last survivor of the family line? What causes these individuals, the keepers of these last memories to be themselves the lost souls whose death brings to an end a rich and complex life?

Like most other artists, I too am a collector, but when it comes to letters and photographs it is not about collecting, rather I see myself as gathering the memories of previous lives, a ‘keeper of a fragmented unknown history’ if you will, whose own survival is uncertain with each passing year.


Over the last several years the number of photographs have grown to over one hundred and eighty or more, and among these I do have my favorites, in particular those of a families spanning a couple of years or decades, revealing a glimpse into their daily activities, their relations with one another.

In their silence each photograph weaves a story that beckons to be told and whether you come across an entire album or a single photograph, do not look at it as a possession to be had, but rather to cherish the honour of being a keeper of memories.