"Cape Cod Sand Dunes" by Grace Martin Taylor

I've been thinking about making a landscape for almost two years now. Still haven't done it. It is merely a desire, opposed to an impulse. I can neither explain why I want to make one nor say why I'm blocked any time I attempt to realize this desire.

Today I was revisiting work by Grace Martin Taylor and was struck by this image, I suspect because it can help me answer those questions. A lot of woodblock printmakers and some painters in the 1930's made these sort of swoopy landscapes with outlines that seem to describe wind and sound more than solid ground. Most of those, unless they are also grounded by animals or structures in the scene, strike me as too airy to hold my interest.

But this image, for whatever reason, has my attention. There's something subtly bizarre about the use of color, the weight imbalance in the foreground tree, and the scale of the birds. I sort of feel like this image is a siren's song in the far-off distance, slowly drawing me to my doom.

"Two People. The Lonely Ones" by Edvard Munch

She stands alone, draped in white, a lantern placed firmly at the water's edge.

He approaches and breaks through the waters at a height equal to hers. But he is dark as the sand and rocks of the landscape, and so quiet as a whisper.

Maybe she wants his company. Maybe she doesn't.

"Tree Blossoms" by Hajime Namiki

These are but whispers
Throng of ghostly butterflies
So fleeting, so fair

"The Saga of Frankie & Johnny" by John Held, Jr.

Live long, drink deep, be jolly, Ye most illustrious votaries of folly !
-Desiderius Erasmus 

For anyone who loves rough, expressive, black and white woodcuts that tell a good story of the common people, a copy of John Held, Jr.'s The Saga of Frankie and Johnny is a must-have.

If readers are not already familiar with the popular American ballad Frankie and Johnny, it's a story that dates back to the turn of the last century about a woman who catches her man cheating, shoots him dead, and is subsequently tried and executed for murder. 


John Held, Jr. created his woodcut illustrations of the ballad in 1915 when he was 26 years old and living in NYC during the Jazz Age In the book's preface, Held writes:

"Versions in the hundreds have been turned up, but basically the saga is the same. Versions have been evolved to fit the locality, but the story of the eternal triangle remains identical. Details are rearranged to fit geographic conditions. In this illustrated edition, I have taken only the rudimentary verses. I have tried to keep off of local tangents."  

I've had this book in my possession and been enjoying it on many occasions over the past nearly two years. The intense mix of humor with pathos never fades. I don't linger over the right or wrong of the choices made and consequences endured by the characters. All at once they somehow seem farcical archetypes and real people to both pity and admire. This is driven home by the artist's ambivalence toward consistency in the details of the visual narrative.

For example, the three images from the book I present in this post all illustrate the moments when Frankie is shooting Johnny. In the first in the sequence, Frankie looks and points the gun directly at Johnny's punctured heart, which he grasps. He stands at the top of a stairway, suggesting he may fall backward and tumble down the steps. The smoke from the gun is thick and black. It is an image of aggressive violence stemming from sudden rage. However, in the very next image in the sequence, the mood has dramatically changed. Here Frankie stands over the fallen Johnny, still alive, but clearly dying. His black blazer is now white, as if he has now paid for his sins in full. The stairs are gone, replaced by a jagged tear in the top of the wall above Johnny that is mimicked by the zig-zag line of smoke coming from Frankie's gun. She has turned away, too horrified by her lover's suffering to watch. Her cross necklace is gone, her shoes have changed, and her one breast exposed in the first image is now discreetly covered by her bodice, as if to drive home that though only a moment has passed, already this is not quite the same Frankie.


The third image presented here does not come until much later in the sequence, after Frankie has mourned Johnny's death and repented her actions. At this point she is on trial for the murder, and the image, like the song lyric paired with it, is pure comic relief: "I didn't shoot him in the third degree. I shot him in the ass." But if she literally shot him in the ass, why do the images paired with the actual moment of this crime of passion have him shot in the heart? The obvious answer is that to get across the seriousness of Frankie's rage, horror, and Johnny's suffering, being shot in the heart was the greater truth. What is consistent in the narrative is the characters' types, their patterns of behavior, their utter humanness. What transpires seems not only predictable, but inevitable. The details that matter are not the literal minutiae, but the subjective truth of any given moment. 

Frankie and Johnny are the votaries of folly they are, no more, no less. We must laugh at, pity, and ultimately love them for who they are, just as we must love our foolish selves. 

Three "Vanities" by Julianna Joos

These are three woodcuts from a series titled Vanities by Julianna Joos. Learn more about Joos, her work, and the entire series of 7 Vanities at the artist's website.

I felt drawn to this series and these three images in particular initially because something feels erased, or rather, cut out and removed from each. Yet they are not ghostly. The removal feels almost surgical, or perhaps predatory.

A knotted loop encircles each of these creatures. The turtle glides through the knot as if it is a hoop and he is doing a trick for us. All the same, he is vanishing, dissolving into a field of bright white, right before our eyes.


The nautilus, too, has a shell, but unlike the turtle, she is using it (not that such a hiding place could stop this sort of snare.) Then again, maybe there is nothing of her left but the hallow shell. It floats casually, and the rope wiggles loosely around, mimicking the striped pattern on the shell's surface. There will be no struggle.


Last of all, there is the parrot. The knot seems most tightly wrapped around this creature - a bit like a slowly stalking python - though the bird doesn't seem to realize. Something else has caught its gaze.

As a side note, now I have the terrifying image of a python eating a parrot stuck in my mind.

"Small Horned Owl on Maple Branch under Full Moon" by Utagawa Hiroshige

The moon swells, taut, like a great balloon lighting up the blue-streaked sky. It's shape echoed by the spots encircling the sleeping bird's eyes and the form of his curled body. I hear marbles crack and roll across the wood floor. Your grip must be tight, little owl, or else you'd roll right away into the lower branches embrace.

"Spring Melt" by Rick Allen

When sunlight shines through water vapor that hovers just over a crystal-clear pool of refreshing drink, it is impossible to turn back and see what has been. 

I discovered the wonderful artist/illustrator Rick Allen just today while perusing books at a local bookstore. Specifically, I pulled Winter Bees & Other Poems of the Cold off the shelf, a picture book of nature poetry written by Joyce Sidman and illustrated with Allen's colorful relief prints. I immediately looked up more of Allen's work after I came home. There were too many lovely prints I'd love to feature on this blog, so I quickly settled on something seasonally appropriate and depicting an animal that happens to be my favorite color.

Reproductions, cards, books, and calendars featuring Allen's work can be found and purchased here.