A Life in Relief
By Tom Wachunas
“…Disjointed scenes of a life lived in
nighttime dreams. Memory holders of what? Wood, ink, paper – stuff of another
age. Like me. Not perfect. Film noir. Cuz I never dreamed in Technicolor.
Poetry, not prose. My biography.” - from
William Bogdan’s Artist Statement
“Art teaches nothing except the significance
of life.” – Henry Miller
EXHIBIT:
Xylographic – Biographic, woodcut prints
by William Bogdan / THROUGH JULY 15, 2017, at The Little Art Gallery / located
in the North Canton Public Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton, Ohio /
330.499.7356 /
www.northcantonlibrary.org
After only a few
seconds and footsteps into The Little Art Gallery’s opening reception for
William Bogdan’s solo exhibit, I was floored. I hadn’t greeted anyone yet,
hadn’t even looked closely at a single piece. But I saw immediately something
wholly fresh and arresting about the space.
The walls are a spectacle of black and white
starkness, at once startling and inviting. The sheer uniformity of Bogdan’s
presentation – each piece matted in white and set in a simple, elegant black
frame – is spot-on. And curator Elizabeth Blakemore has done a superlative job
in sensitively spacing the works with a keen attention to not only their
variable subject matter (including landscape, architectural, and figural
content), but also in setting up a variety of visual rhythms that can keep your
eye engaged and moving throughout the gallery. We would expect nothing less
from a show that featured electrifying works with a strong color dynamic. But
interestingly enough, while there is no such dynamic here to excite our senses,
the room still pulses with a strong heartbeat.
Could you describe
your world without actual color? Could you envision a lifetime of experiences
engraved into your memory as a panorama of only black lines and shapes, all
intertwined against the white sky of existence? To put it another way, can you
see your past simply as symbolic black marks on paper? In his artist statement, Mr. Bogdan likens
this collection of his woodcut prints, made over the last seven years, to
“…photo snapshots kept in an album…keepsakes that preserve a moment in time,
but with a story before and aft that is meaningful to me.” Bogdan’s personal
story is the ‘Biographic’ (or more accurately, autobiographic) component of
this exhibit.
So, “photo
snapshots kept in an album”? While there’s a certain intimacy to the idea of
flipping through a photo album to fondly remember the past, I think this
exhibit is more akin to reading pages, indeed chapters from a book you can’t
put down. A book of remembered people, places, and sensations, of moments
poignant and mysterious, or painful or comforting or… Books. Remember those?
Organizations of white papers inscribed with marks made from ink. You’ll notice
one of those here, “Bill’s Hill,” made
in 2010, visible in one of the gallery’s glass showcases.
Then there’s
Bogdan’s ‘Xylographic’ component. We don’t hear the word xylography too much these days in reference to the printmaking
process of making woodcut images. It’s from the Greek ξύλο (xylo), for wood, and γραφή
(graphé),
for writing. The English term arrived in 1816, translated from the French,
recalling the Japanese and Chinese techniques (from the 8th and 9th
centuries) of carving text or patterns in relief on a wooden block, which was
then inked for applying to paper. Wood-block printing as a fine art form emerged
in Europe during the 14th century, and the process would ultimately
inspire Gutenberg’s method of printing from movable type in 1439. Voila, books.
I offer this nutshell
history if only as a kind of lyrical appreciation of Bogdan’s methodology.
Sourcing a technique originated in the very distant past – making a connection
to time-honored art history - the act of carving away at a piece of wood
(itself a holder of history) to make a picture can in many ways be seen as a
poetic metaphor for cutting through the present to reveal, or uncover something
of the past. To remember is to
actively make the past present. Right
now. At any point in time, what is our
right -now if not an accumulation of assimilated back-whens?
Look at the
haunting way Bogdan takes us to a back-when in his piece called “4”, depicting
the legendary New York Yankee, Lou Gehrig (who wore number 4), showing us his
heartrending gratitude and mortality. In another back-when, “The Picture on the
Gallery Wall,” a few folks appear oblivious to Bogdan’s art on the wall, as if
imprisoned and isolated by their own passivity. And here we are in our right-now,
looking at a picture of them not looking at a picture. Intriguing.
Bogdan’s
representational drawing (or should I say cutting?) style can vary from the
relatively tight and crisp, to the loose and spontaneous, sometimes giving way
to amorphous passages of generalized or abstract markings amid spatial ambiguities
– a tentative yet fascinating conflation of the primitive and the refined. For
example, the bright, crisp clarity of detail that we see in such pieces as
“1604” has the marvelous effect of beckoning from a distance as you enter the
gallery, calling you to perhaps frolic with the children in the front yard
of the house with the 1604 address. On the other hand, the skewed perspective
and dramatic figure-ground contrasts in “Man, Bed, Cat” might make you wonder
who is dreaming here – the sleeping man, the cat, or that ghostly figure off to
the right side, floating in a white void?
In the 20 works
exhibited, there are only two occurrences of color. Miniscule as they are, they
function as exclamatory punctuation marks within their respective narratives.
In “Simon 23, 26” (a reference to the gospel of Luke, 23: 26, wherein Simon of
Cyrene briefly carried the cross for Jesus), one of Simon’s fingertips is
covered in blood. That splotch of red is echoed by a red fingerprint at the
bottom of the image – a deeply loaded signature, to be sure. There’s a
religiosity, too, about “The Orange Chair,” though I’m not convinced that the the two bright orange stickers – one a circle (eternal cycle of life?),
the other a triangle (Holy Trinity?) – are successfully integrated with the
intricate imagery. Like a storyboard for a time-lapse film, seven continuous panels
comprise a sequential view of a house interior showing the woman who lived and
died there, her favorite chair empty and dotted orange, and in the last panel,
a young girl standing in a doorway, the orange triangle hovering above her.
Despite my
reservations about the indelicacy of its orange intrusions, the piece is
nonetheless exemplary of Bogdan’s capacity for conveying an uncanny, fragile
harmony between timidity and fearlessness. His visceral images feel searched
out and sifted through, often as if quickly excavated and recorded before they can
fall back into the dusty piles of more peripheral memories. To varying degrees,
each one suggests an illustrated transition from the scenic to the psychic, the
physical to the spiritual.
Bogdan’s Book. He draws like a writer.
PHOTOS, from top: 4 / The
Picture on the Gallery Wall / 1604 / Simon 23,26 / Man, Bed, Cat / detail
from The Orange Chair / The
doe lay dead in a field of asters
