SPEED STUDIO MARFA

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CAIN & ABEL

9 paintings, each 60 X 40 inches, gouache & analog collage, 2022

Cain & Abel

     Looking back I can now see that these paintings got started because of the ants. I live in far West Texas where the sky and the ants are both large. I walk the same path just about every day, usually pausing at this  mound or that to see what the ants are up to. They work hard and so I’ve gotten to admire them which led to thinking about the fact that if ants were to vanish from the planet then thousands of other species would go extinct along with them.  If, on the other hand, we humans were to vanish, the earth would  be better off without us.

 Around the time I started worrying about ants I came across images of a small group of 15th century paintings and ink drawings, attributed to the “Master of the Black Pen”, known as Siyah Qalam or Siah-Qalam. They include a half dozen or so wrestling demon paintings that just knocked me over. The demon wrestlers reminded me of photos I’d seen years before of American style high school team wrestling so I started sketching with the aim of figuring out as many visually interesting ways as I could to arrange the limbs of two fighting guys into a 60 X 40 vertical rectangle. It’s a fun problem because the fighters have to arrange themselves differently in a narrow vertical rectangle than they would in a fat vertical rectangle, a square or a horizontal rectangle.

     Cain & Abel: Annunciation is the first painting in the series.  Adam and Eve sit under th tree.   Eve has a small baby bump that will later become Cain, their firstborn future brother-killer . The snake whispers “Dominion”  in Adam’s ear.  No one knows what’s coming. The first underdrawings told the story that Adam looked at himself in a mirror, mistook himself for God, and granted himself DOMINION, but the mirror shape made for a weird composition and I also really wanted that curl of pale yellow so I opted instead for the snake.

 Sometimes the collage elements in these gouache and collage paintings are there solely for the composition but when I get really lucky the images on the found paper also add to the possible stories.  The three main found paper sources for the Cain and Abel series were an1870s Gustav Doré illustrated bible from Sweden that I bought as scrap paper after it was wrecked in a Galveston, Texas flood, pages from 19th Century woodblock illustrated issues of The London News that I found on Ebay, and wormholed Japanese woodblock prints from the same era. Adam’s vest is made from a London News image of a bombed-out building. I can’t remember which war. The squirrel caught in the cat’s jaws that makes Eve’s skirt is from the same newspaper. Everything else is painted and more often than not, I alter the found-paper collage with a small brush an paint as I go along.

 Three or four different wars are represented in Deposition. One of them is the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) the first true “World War” sometimes called “World War Zero” but their fancy uniforms look almost the same as those worn during the Spanish-American War, The Franco-Prussian War etc. ….all the wars from that era. The accusing officer on the belly of the top wrestler is pointing his finger at the contorted face of bottom wrestler who is having the breath squeezed out of him. So I was thinking about George Floyd and it also brought up my mother’s death by COPD and of course everyone else who has died slowly drowning during the COVID pandemic.

That pointing finger gave me the word “Deposition” which is a strange word because, besides naming a legal process of interrogation, it’s also used to describe paintings where Jesus is being taken down from the cross…. which makes me think of “cross-examined”. “Deposition” also describes   the dethroning of monarchs and popes AND if you take it in apart it’s “DE-position” which could describe being flipped over by your opponent in wrestling OR “walking back” a political statement or “position” which I think of as “UN-lying”.

 The bridge being burned in Elijah’s Slippers is the Pont du Point du Jour, a viaduct just outside Paris. I like that “Point du Jour” translates to “daybreak”or “dawn”.  So, someone has bombed the bridge of dawn.  There is a certain black humor in that. The figure from the Doré bible on the attacker’s slippers is a famous prophet named Elijah. In the 9th century BCE, a bad drought was causing starvation all over the land. The two main religious factions each claimed that they alone knew how to fix things. To decide who was telling the truth the prophet Elijah challenged the other prophets to a battle-of-the-bands style prayer-off. The plan was that they would each kill some cattle and burn them as a sacrifice in order to make it rain BUT the trick was that neither side was allowed to use a torch to ignite the cattle.  They had to start the fire with their prayers only.  Elijah’s side won the match by setting their cow on fire first, after which he immediately directed his crew to slaughter all 450 of the losing team, which they did.  I would say that with that action he burned a few bridges.

The collage piece on the butt of the upside-down wrestler in And His Angels With Him is another Doré engraving from the same drowned Swedish bible. I originally picked that piece of paper out of the piles and piles of paper that litter my studio because it had a light splash in a dark background and I could see that, if I placed it just right, the white part would make a 4th circle that would tie the composition together. After it was glued down, I took a closer look at the image and realized it was an illustration of Revelations 12:9 where Lucifer and his rebel angels get blasted out of heaven with a big flash of lightening which, in my painting ends up reading like angels are being fart-shot out of the losing wrestler’s butt.

The Last Supper on the legs (one leg is the table, the other is the coffered ceiling) of the bottom wrestler in Cain & Abel: Cain’s Monkey  was cut from one of the leftover proofs pulled from a gravure plate that Flatbed Press made for me from a scan of a print I found at a flea market. About halfway through the painting it became clear that the wrestlers and the background blue-gray were too close in tone and needed some shadow to separate them so I decided to use the monkey’s tail as the shadow by painting it longer and giving it curves. The curves were just to make me happy. It was only after the color/composition problem had been solved did it finally dawn on me that Cain’s monkey having a long tail is also a pretty good metaphor.

   The last painting of the series, Cain & Abel: Dead & Gone started with a recent plague of pocket gophers who are cute little bucktooth rodents that tunnel out the earth just under the surface so you’ll be out walking along and all the sudden you’ve got one foot stuck in a gopher hole and/or you’re flat on your face.

   Thinking about gophers led to thinking about badgers (who have more elegantly shaped tunnels) so I drew several badgers in the burrow along with with the skulls of the murderous brothers but that was overkill so I took the badgers out but left the shapes of their tunnels. The background pattern/sedimentary layers started out with collaged battlefield images at the very bottom covered with multiple layers of dirt and rocks and then grass on top. The idea was good but the composition was bad so I scraped off the collage with a putty knife and sanded it all back down and repainted so now the sedimentary layers also read like bone or skin cross-sections as seen under a microscope which made the grass at the top of the painting read like hairs.

Seeing it that way recalled the phrase “bred in the bone” and made me wonder…. what is intrinsically wrong with the human race that causes us to behave the way we do? Maybe the “Master of the Black Pen” nailed it? If it’s not “demons” who are the cause of our persistent lunacy then what is? A virus?…. or perhaps a parasite like the one that causes its host mouse to seek out the cat who will kill it so as to complete its life cycle? What is the fatal flaw in our species that makes it impossible for us to even pause our fighting even as our planet burns down around our ears?

Our species might be irrational and absurd but I believe that there is order in the universe.  Somewhere in there is a reason to make art.

Julie Speed Marfa, Texas