Sick as a dog all weekend

Fever dreams in Italian and bedsheets soaked with sweat. I think I am over it now.

Thursday

Went to Saint Peters with John Matteo.

looked at repairs, soft pastel colors, and the ceilings

Then walked to Quirinale and did some drawings

Aventine

Strolled over the Isola and up the Aventine to see Santa Sabina.

Very quite and calm space. A view across the river that I hadn't seen before from the Aventine. Saw the lines of tourists waiting to put their hands in the Bocca di Verita.

Figured out how to get to Piazza Navona and the shops I wanted to return to. then over Ponte Sisto and up the hill with almost no doubling back. Just lucky I guess.

In Rome With Cigar

A week into the American Academy. 

On Friday I worked in the morning and then went to Trastevere with John Matteo to find the art supply store. Saw Bramante’s Tempietto which was quiet, small and beautiful. Elegant and simple proportions, the kind of thing that could be built in a couple of months, finished in a few more but which changed the world. It is so simple and complex.

It is within the Spanish quadrant of the Janiculum. The Royal Spanish Academy is outside, the church was funded by Ferdinand and Isabella and the tempietto is within the courtyard. Its halfway up the hill. A pleasant respite from the walk and walk. I have to try to take the buses now as my feet are starting to hurt.

After that we stopped at Santa Maria in Trastevere. This is where Rome retreated when Aleric broke the aquaduct and starved the Palantine of fresh water. The population shrunk from 1000000 to 20000 or less. It has a small town Medieval feeling, more Verona than Milano and, except for the steep climb, a pleasant neighborhood to live in. It takes a while to learn Rome, I am still taking baby steps. Getting lost constantly but beginning to locate certain landmarks and find myself on streets for the second or third time. It will take a while but I like it. The weather is cool and pleasant, warm in the sun, brisk in the morning or evening.

Santa Maria in Trastevere is ancient, recycled granite columns of unequal height and girth. Central core with 2 side allees. Beautiful mosaics in the nave and on the exterior over the loggia before the entrance.  12 cent restoration over 8^th, 5^th and original 4^th cent. church. Forgot camera.

Saturday morning went with David Pearson to Palantine to measure section for his proposal to redesign the entrance to the site. He was very knowledgeable about the construction of the ancient Roman center. I have been reading histories and have begun to understand bits and pieces of the history so to actually see the places was astonishing.  The via Sacra turns and spins around each temple and monument. Wide enough for a procession but narrow enough to be confining. The building scale was enormous.  The Venus and Rome (AMOR-ROMA) temple a full city block long and emensely tall. The  Maxentius and Constantine Basilica (from the Greek Basilike, King’s, therefore the throne room and seat of state.) with aisles and now fallen concrete dome.

Past the small house of Augustus is the Imperial Palace. It was atop the hill, looking down on all, and topped out only by the water level of the aqueduct, which essentially established the highest point in Rome.

Sunday was a walk all over the city. Headed to Belvedere, did s drawing, then lots of strolling over lots of territory. Rome is a big small town and, little by little, it is starting to come together.

Beautiful day here

Spent the morning in the library researching my topic. found some references in 19th century Italian tracts that may provide some starting points. Read several papers on archeological isotope and other means of identifying quarry sources but it is clear that this can only give a very general source for stone (Pentalic or Carrara) but is not useful for finding specific stone locations within a quarry as there is not enough of a data base to check against. Still, beautiful quiet and peaceful morning.

Spend afternoon walking around Rome. some touristy pictures of touristy places. it is all much cleaner than I recal, due, mostly I think, to the sprucing up that it got for the millenium jubilee. It is a beautiful city, rough around the edges but the hills make it feel very sensible (look for the river or the hill).  Also a nice workout. Probably strolled only a couple of miles but it felt like a hike. Maybe its just me.

some pictures.

Bureaucracy and wandering

Applied to the state for a Permisso di Sogorno. Apparently one can receive a visa from the State Department that allows one to enter Italy for a period but then needs another one from the Dept. of the Interior to approve your stay. I don't know, it takes almost as long as my stay is likely to last but it is what it is.

Met Adele DeCruz who showed me her new Er:YAG laser, not only lower energy that one in common use but, because of the wavelength, has the capacity to ablate organics and OH molecules and not only dark materials. uses a 1 mm wand, kind of slow for monuments but ideal for murals.

Got lost looking for the art supply store so came back to planet AA Rome defeated but then met some more lovely interesting people, got oriented to the library which I will start to use tomorrow and submitted my application for the Permisso.  Went with Tom, the architectural historian working on Rapuanno, the Fellow who designed lots of Robert Moses era buildings at NYC parks. We had a lark at the post office, trying to file the forms.

At first I asked if we were in the right line to file the permisso forms and she looked at a copy of a paper I had and asked what was this? I said it was the form I thought, I don't know. It was a COPY of the form and she couldn't use it but, once she found the original in the folder it was ok. Fortunately my Italian was good enough to be nice to the clerk and smile and tante grazie. Tom then started with another clerk (both women) and she efficiently filled in everything. A client threw a fit that we were served immediately while he had waited a half hour. The supervisor was called. She explained that they were the clerks to handle this matter and the others were the ones to do what he wanted. But there are 20 people waiting and only 2 of those clerks but only the 2 of us and 2 clerks for us.  But we were in a different line with different service she explained. Oh, thank you! that makes it completely clear! he stormed out and I thought we would end up in an international incident.

 Although Tom's clerk started later he was done ahead of me. I gently chided my helper that the other was quicker. There is no prize for speed here she said, but not in a nasty way. it was very Italian, hunch your shoulders, roll your eyes and go on.

Pictures of Adele and the view from her 3rd floor studio.

Starting to feel like myself

Spend the morning writing and then walked all over the area around the Teatro Macello in what is the oldest part of Rome, the section of the Tiber near the island.


To get there walked into Trastevere down the steep steps in front of the Academy. They go by a lovely fountain by Pope Sixtus and past the Academy Arcad from which Galileo trudged up the hill to the Academy grounds to demonstrate his telescope.

Walked around the Palantine hill to the Forum and then back to the Tiber. some pictures along the way.

Even found the first example of the kind of deterioration I was looking for on Trajan's Column base.

First Day at Academy

Arrived somewhat dazed after little sleep at the American Academy. More beautiful and more overwhelming than I thought. I am a bit out of kilter but hope to find my feet eventually. so far just soaking it in.

View from my window

My studio interior

Around the corner, the Janiculum looking towards the Vatican

Front door

View towards Victor Emmanuel Monument

Installed

Completed the instation of the column. All seem to feel it looks just right.
Hectic work at a beautiful site, all very pleasant. Snow outside beautiful light within.

Erections

An obvious title but, apt enough I suppose.

Test fitting a marble column that was found at a Catholic school in New Jersey where it had laid for decades after being salvaged from a New York City building; LaGrange Terrace. Hoisted, from the school, cleaned, cut to size, stood right side up and ready to be returned ton New York to be installed in a museum.

Rome

Beginning on of the new year. I am off to Rome in a month. lots to organize, a great deal of excitement and, well, pride to be marshaled, An equal amount of trepidation and concern to be held in bay. The pile of daily sequences weigh heavily when one images how on earth they will continue without one. Who will check the furnace light, oil tank level, shovel the snow, make the coffee, manage the office, kiss the wife? If I am not here to hold the forces of chaos off for just a few more hours how will it be accomplished?

Facade Figures

Next week we will start conserving the figures on the facade of a major museum. These limestone guardians, 18 ft tall repositories of the virtues of our culture, frequently look gangly or insignificant from the ground but, up close, their forms, stretched to overcome the viewer's perspective, have a power and surprising intimacy. On their lonely perches for so very long, these forlorn souls look to be crying for the company that we will provide them for the few weeks we are there. Its a sweet task, despite the pigeon crap and accumulated atmospheric soiling, but I am approaching it with dread.

The last time I did this was on the Brooklyn Museum of Art. I worked on all of the pieces, many allegorical figures posed by Audrey Muson before she went mad, and many by the fine sculptors of the period. Daniel Chester French's program for the 30 figures and pediment group included images representing the cultures whose contributions to world culture were ensconced within the building. There are figures that represented in the Beaux Arts mind the cultures of exotic foreign lands and times on one side of the central group, and those that represent the Classical tradition and our culture on the other. Its a ambitious and expansive program for a lot of sculpture while remaining remarkably innocent in its underlying beliefs. From many sources, times and peoples, a common thread of art, science, creativity; humanity, can be found and these silent giants literally embodied the hopeful sense that the then dawning 20th Century was reaching the culmination of this glowing past in a hopeful American future.

It was from there atop the scaffolding, at what was the highest point in the borough, that I watched the World Trade Towers burn and fall. On that September day I was working on the figure of Mohammed, a blasphemy I know but, in the context of the program meant as an homage. An innocent tribute to a foreign culture, an open hand of admiration, yes in a colonialist context, but no less honest for it.

Now that culture was killing thousands of innocent neighbors and friends while I watched. I won't go into reliving the horror of that day and the days afterwards but, instead want to consider the meaning of that innocent tolerance for a religion and culture which, still, we hold as a legitimate difference from our own. After 4 years of study has shown the arrogance, perfidy, lies and cruelty that underlies much of the current expressions of Islamist culture; the death cult celebrations of violence, the beheading pornography, the insane cruelty of sending children to blow themselves to pieces in order to kill other children, we still carry a delusion that there are admirable cultural differences that we should respect.

Well, whether there are those admirable traits, and no one will gainsay the lasting virtue of the poetry and mathematics that has came from Islamic cultures, what I am mostly struck with is the nobility of OUR culture to find virtues where they may or may not lie. I can guarantee you that there are NO figures celebrating the awesome beauty of Jesus’ teachings, or the majesty of Moses’ stern directives, not to mention monuments to Confucius, Buddha or Plato erected in a Moslem country. Nor will one find the celebration in another culture but its own anywhere but in America. We have always sought the good in others because the essence of ourselves is the seeking of the good within us.

So, ok, perhaps I will overcome the lingering dread and say "Yes" let me polish the ideals of our American hope that these sculptures represent. Innocent, wrong-headed perhaps, certainly naive, we do remain a people of infinite goodness and optimism. And it is why we also remain the beacon of the world. And why I think that these slowly dissolving limestone piles MUST be kept whole, at least for the bit of time I can help to give them. They represent enough to warrant all the care I can give.

Artists and Models and Film Noir

My sister is telling me the story of the Black Dahlia, an as yet unsolved gruesome murder in LA in the late 40's that was explored by a detective, the author, who ultimately came to the conclusion that it was his own father who committed the crime! A tale of incestuous criminal doings in the blank time after the end of WW II when the Greatest Generation returned in stunned silence to the changed world of their bitter past and tried to create lives shrouded in the silence of their shell shocked souls. Most of the tales were kept hidden, and horror was only made worse by the giddy prosperity and mindlessness of the next decades. Within this contrast, the traumatic Depression and war ravaged past and the shiny Formica future, lies the fertile soil for Noir. Settings are always tied to artist's studios and department stores, places she says are public places of dress and undress.

In this story, Black Dahlia, the artists are John Huston, Man Ray, and a third tier fellow who, it turns out, was someone my mother studied with when she was a 26 year old zaftig hottie living out of Brooklyn for the first time in her life. She looked just like the victim then, and this book claims that this artist was one of the perpetrators in this ring of sick murderers, killing this woman and others.

"I don't believe it" my mother says, denying lots about her past in that statement.

I recall my own brush with artists, models and murders.

There was the pair in the 70's who I worked with at the art supply store, selling paints to Salvador Dali and helping to create his then degenerate canvases while he tottered around the Saint Regis in his leopard print bathrobe. I later learned while reading page 3 of the NY Post over someone's shoulder on a crowded 6 train that they were found hanging upside down in an abandoned warehouse in New Jersey, drained of all blood in their bodies. Still unsolved.

And there was Amy.

THE LIFE MODEL

We said good night the evening before

the news reported that Amy was killed.

She modeled at the drawing session while

I silently sat trying to preserve her young body

in lines and measured tones on paper sheets.

The sessions move at a ritualized pace.

The poses are quick at first to loosen the hand but then, increasingly, they become longer, and slower until the model, Amy, lay hardly moving

like fruit on the rumpled cloth of a well laid table

not life drawing but nature morte.

It was probably a mugging gone bad. She lay still surrounded by spilling bags, stopped forever while innocently heading home. The sidewalk was unstained with blood, her heavy shrouding coat caught the flow.

The night had turned bitterly cold, she accepted a ride wedged beside me on the collapsed bench of the pick-up, her bicycle stowed in the back.

We talked of her efforts to help battered women in the Bronx

by painting a mural and my work restoring public statues

but polite ideals of justice, healing and virtue expressed through art

were unable to deflect the forces moving a 10 inch kitchen knife

on its cruel path.

Amy's death leaves worthless eddies of contradictory feelings

Our few moments of conversation made us acquaintances only,

hardly more than strangers

yet the exposure of her nakedness, rightly reserved for lovers,

produced a semblence of intimacy I reexperience

in the photos of her smiling eyes that accompany the news reports of the killing.

I've tried to look at the drawings again but can't find her in them.

Real gestures are replaced by her imagined final pose

and I was only able to represent my own limits in the

graphite and conte crayon stains spread like evidence across pages

in a book of her now stilled life.

Florida thoughts

Morning in Miami. My stuff is spread around in this white carpeted and painted concrete room. Out the window, the International Bank of Miami building, a very nicely designed modern office tower that looks like a 1920’s Spanish revival structure but 15 stories tall and taking up an entire city block, catches strong sunlight against a sky the color of Curatrix’s eyes.

Strange day yesterday. We traveled to Curatrix’s old work colleagues for a kid’s birthday party. Not very interesting, then drove through Palm Beach, Delray Beach and back to Miami. Saw charming small courtyards by Meizner, via Roma, Via Parigi. Venetian flavor but beautifully small scaled. Wood bracketed eaves and arcades. Small porches and flying walkways. Fancy stores filled with god awful yellow and orange clothes (why do the rich always dress in the most hideous tones?) and lot of diamonds.

On the way back, passed a pick up filled with Rednecks with an immense alligator in the bed, tail gate down. I tell Curatrix to slow down and we let it pass us so we can see it. Its monstrous, perhaps 12 ft long, its mouth and eyes covered with electrical tape. I assume it is alive but there are no signs of movement until we both see a hind leg move and then the beast rolls over, twisting in its thin ropes and losing some of the tape from its mouth. Not only is it alive but it is about to get loose, I can see the huge bastard rolling off the truck bed and onto Curatrix’s Volvo, crushing the hood and breaking through the windshield and we veer off to get away from this disaster about to happen. Cletis and Homer pull off to the side of the road as we continue on our way. Florida.

Hello

I thought that this would be a place to post thoughts, ideas, work in progress, its public and well, out there.