Illustration,

Elder Tales,

Retired Art Professor,

Design,

Collage,

Reliquary series

New Work

New Work

Illustration

People ask two questions when they see my work: What’s the story about? and How do you make something like that?

The first answer is easy to tell. Each piece is based on an elder tale. These pieces are like three-dimensional illustrations telling a story. An illustration is something designed to accompany something else. Most art history is all about artwork made to accompany something else. From cave painting telling of a hunt or asking for success in a hunt, to Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, artwork that refers to something beyond itself is always more interesting, more exciting, because it offers more to consider.

Elder Tales

Elder tales are stories that have been told, seemingly since the beginning of human gathering, that offer guidance to adults in developing wisdom in maturation as they progress through life. These tales seem to come from all cultures and they have common themes. It’s amazing to read about these tales in the work of authors like Dr. Allan Chinen. Two of his books have been very influential in my work: In the Ever After: Fairy Tales and the Second Half of Life, Chiron Publications, Wilmette, Illinois, 1989; and Beyond the Hero, Classic Stories of Men in Search of Soul, Xlibris, 1993.

Dr. Chinen is a psychiatrist and clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. These two books on elder tales are fun to read and reveal much that would be missed , at least by me, in merely reading a tale itself. Dr. Chinen states an elder tale, usually in four or five pages, and then gives us interpretation and analysis of what is really being said in the tale; some analysis runs for many pages more than the tale itself and is filled with incredible insight as to what the tale is all about. Many tales are very challenging as to what would be proper behavior; especially those involving a trickster. Sometimes we must confront our own feelings or attitudes that challenge us to become better humans – and to have to think about what it means to become a better human.

So, I’m grateful to Dr. Chinen’s work that allows me to select an elder tale and create a list of ingredients necessary for the story. I make drawings of those items and begin to sketch ideas for glass and for the porcelain figure(s). Here is an example of one tale: (Please remember that I have greatly condensed the tale and omitted much rich detail.)

The Old Man Who Made Withered Trees Flower

Synopsis by William Disbro, created from: In The Ever After by Allan Chinen, (pp 129-137)

A childless couple loved their dog and one day the barking at a particular spot of ground got the old man to dig – and he uncovered a sack of gold coins. The greedy neighbor borrowed the dog so it could find gold for him. The dog was unsuccessful and the neighbor killed it. The dog’s owner carved a mortar and pestle from the tree that stood over the dog’s grave. The mortar produced delicious food for the elder couple and the neighbor borrowed it to produce food for him but it only produced foul wastes so he burned it. The owner arrived to claim his mortar/pestle but could only return home with it’s ashes. But he learned that when those ashes touched barren branches the branches bloomed – even in winter. He demonstrated grand results for the Sultan and the next day the evil neighbor tried to show what he could do with his ashes. Nothing happened except to cover the Sultan and his court with ashes. The neighbor spent the remainder of his life in prison.

Dr. Chinen writes of the symbolism in the theme of reclaiming the magic and wonder of childhood. At the end of life one returns to the beginning with experiences being transfigured and illuminated. (p. 132) The dog, gold coins, greedy neighbor, mortar, ashes and blossoms are all symbols for the human cycle of oral, anal, phallic and genital stages that reverse in old age.

Retired Art Professor

The second question people ask about my work is how it’s made and that is more complicated to tell because I’m older and have thought a lot about my choices in life.

I’m a retired art professor who taught two and three-dimensional design, drawing, ceramics, sculpture and several art history courses, particularly medieval ones. My background is in ceramics and sculpture. When I was young I was always much more interested in three-dimensional building than drawing or reading about art. Maturity brought more emphasis on design and symbolic aspects of the parts being built.

When I first started teaching at the college level, right out of graduate school, I was lucky to be teaching with another young graduate and the two of us would critique each other’s work. I learned a tremendous amount of design in listening to John Fletcher critique my own work, and I would critique his, and then we would talk about design possibilities for hours. The other great way to learn design is to have to teach it. But then teaching is a great way to learn anything; because if you don’t know it you sure can’t teach it, especially to bright students.

Even though my training was mostly in sculpture media I began to really enjoy teaching design. Throughout my teaching career design was my favorite subject to teach because it was so full of ideas that could be manipulated depending on what the creator was trying to do. I always felt I earned my salary most fully when giving a design critique. To move down through a series of twenty or so compositions on the wall and explain what was happening in each and involve students in discussions of what choices were available was a real performance in which I tried to give my best. I do miss that but I don’t miss all the newer chores of teaching, like documenting each student piece to show what the project was, how it was evaluated and why it got a particular grade. Much more time was spent working on outcomes assessment than time in class.

Design

Design is visual language. We’re born with certain levels of design abilities, some more than others. I did quite well with no design instruction until my freshman year in art school. I didn’t even know what one did in a design class! But I learned there was communication going on there and the artist better be controlling it if success was wanted.

There is a sense of formal design in my Reliquary series pieces since the glass sits on a wooden cube holding a light source. The glass towers have equal width sides and rise to, at first, flat tops, and later to gabled roof shapes. But I like to contrast the tightly controlled outside shapes with the compositions in each glass panel; perhaps a slight tension between panel to panel as one moves around the entire piece, but more importantly, a clear sense of visual involvement in looking through the outside layer of glass into another layer – with something happening there also.

All of the components of design are available and selections must be made to make the piece communicate. Elements and principles of design are mark, line, shape, color, texture, balance, contrast, unity, movement, time, variety, pattern, size, format, value, scale, and the idea is to be open to any possibility of relationship between these ideas and make choices based on the goals of the piece. There are a lot of possibilities and the problem is to eliminate everything that gets in the way of the visual statement.

Collage

Collage seems a logical way of working with materials for someone interested in actually handling media and that’s why I started working with it in the middle 1990’s. The collage pieces on my website become quite complicated constructions. First, I used only painted, or drawn, or photographed images that I had created. That was important to me. I made the images. Second, collage manipulates space in two ways; one is to separate each segment and call attention to itself as a unit (like changing media from watercolor to oil and still be a part of a single face) and the other is to continue the illusion of moving around in three-dimensional space. These two facets of collage are contradictory and if not mixed with control will tear the composition apart. But if done well the whole composition becomes exciting as the viewer studies each unit to see new ideas going on.

I actually handled each piece of collage as a three-dimensional shape by painting the edge of the piece so it would be clearly defined. Collage permitted very complicated ideas to become easily related to others, rather like the whole being larger than the sum of its parts. These pieces become complicated quickly, but that’s my view of the world.

Collage to Glass

The transition to stained glass from collage is obvious when considering a flat piece of collage could easily become a piece of glass. And even better, now one can actually see through the piece to reveal space on the other side. And that space could be contained, as in a box, so now I could have a controlled three-dimensional space that could even house my clay figures. With the light boxes I now have a complete stage to present a complicated story – all in one unit.

Hot Glass

A lot of ceramic people move into glasswork because of the close relationship of material and process; hot kilns, chemicals and minerals, physical labor of creation and rigid craft process that must be mastered for success. I believe most of these people move into hot glass work of forming molten containers but I was more interested in color, intense color, and stained glass colors just blow me away, particularly when I can use them to illustrate ideas. I probably would have been happy as a medieval glass craftsman working on a cathedral – until I think about how hard the labor would have been, even to just cut a piece of glass!

Elder Tales

The thing that excites me about elder tales is that here is a compilation of stories from all over the world that go back to the most ancient of time that presents information on how to live a better life, how to improve oneself. And this guidance in moral behavior is not coming from a religion that has restrictions on how and who can be successful. Some people seem to forget that moral guidance is readily available outside religion. Elder tales seem an entertaining way to get involved with ideas that relate to improving human behavior and since my career was in education, clearly, I’ve always been involved in teaching, or passing along information.

Dr. Allan Chinen

But I need help in understanding these elder tales. I enjoy reading them, and think I get all the points of the story until I read a critique of the tale by someone who really knows what is being discussed; like Dr. Allan Chinen. Then I find out how much I missed. With all of these ideas I select the forms that will become the shapes in my pieces. Viewers will not understand all the symbolism in the work but they can enjoy what they do see and relate to just as we don’t understand all the symbolism involved in a lot of Christian or Buddhist religious work but we can still enjoy the aesthetic experience.

Reliquary series

I call this series of work my Reliquary series with reference to the medieval containers of religious relics that serve to hold an object but the entire container becomes an expression of thoughts.

I think it’s an appropriate name for what I’m doing.