I drew "Stars and Clouds" during this same period, about 1979, when I was very much interested in M.C. Escher and also anything in a black silhouette. This was originally drawn in black ink and later printed as a card in brown ink.
I loved trying to trick the eye with this sleight of hand, an enormous billowing world of both stars and clouds above this tiny little house, with its two tall cemetery pine trees and its swirls of art nouveau smoke, its little fence and mailbox on some lonesome landscape, where a falling star has landed like a space ship.
A friend of mine used this image for her wedding card (in blue ink) and I was so touched and so surprised, too, for I had not once thought of this as a wedding, but she made me look at those stars and clouds and that little house in a different way.
Here is one image that I was studying so intently in 1979: "Sky and Water" by Escher. Oh, how I loved how the silhouettes of the geese become more and more defined as they rise up to the sky above the fish in the water, the whole of evolution, our lifting off into flight, and the interlocking, inter-dependence of our world, the oneness of it all, and more, all captured in this one woodcut.
As the white fish ascend, they become the white sky, and as the black geese descend, they become the black water. This one incredible drawing made my mind go round and round, for it seemed to me to be a visual poem without end, one thing becoming the element in which the other lived, and vice versa.
And again it had that jigsaw puzzle element that was beginning to take hold in my mind: my growing desire to lift the pieces of a drawing off the page with my fingertips and move the pieces around at will. This was when I first began to cut things out of Canson black art paper.
The black paper led me to all the colored art papers, some with textures. Soon, I began cutting into gift-wrapping paper, but it would be about 15 more years before I would suddenly reach for a piece of fabric and think to myself, "Wait! I could cut a miniature dress out of fabric and hang it on a clothesline ~ like this!"
In writing this post, I went looking through WikiCommons, searching for a painting of a lone house sitting beneath a big sky. And I found this painting and got stopped in my tracks. It was painted before 1917 by Serhiy Vasylkivskiy, a Ukrainian artist. I haven't been able to find out anything more about the painter or the painting, so I'm not quite sure what it is.
I see a windmill in some vast hinterland, with the hint of other windmills far away, disappearing at the horizon line the way ships disappear as they float over the curve of the earth, passing out of our sight. I think I like my oceanic interpretation of this painting and how these windmill ships remind me of the ships that dared to cross the ocean in search of the East but finding the Americas instead. How brave those men were!
How brave are those who go to war in search of peace and those who don't go to war in search of peace. And so, from stars and clouds, to sky and water, to windmills and ships, I find myself brought round and round and round from a greeting card I made in 1979 to Veteran's Day in 2009.
All of a sudden, I am sitting here with bowed head before all the men and women who have given up their lives to make the world safe, and I hope for the day when such sacrifices will never be asked of anyone again, when humankind will have found a peaceful way to solves all its differences, for we are as interlocked inside this universe as an Escher drawing, and surely, surely, we can find a way to see inside each other's hearts, being so entwined as we are.
I might rename my old drawing: "the falling of the stars in the clouds of war and peace."
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