 Siamese Twins, Los Angeles, by Joel-Peter Witkin (USA) 1988 The Valley of the Shadow of Death: Jerome Witkin and Joel-Peter Witkin When Joel-Peter Witkin read about Yvonne and Yvette, the craniopagus conjoined twins, in the Los Angeles Times, he immediately set out to photograph them. The McCarther sisters were fused at the top of their heads. Their mother had turned down the chance to surgically separate them after birth because of the risk of one or both dying. The sisters were thus literally inseparable. They did everything together. To earn money for their medical expenses, the McCarther children worked in sideshow acts for the circus, getting paid to let crowds of curious onlookers gawk at them. Later, they became gospel singers, recording and touring as Yvonne and Yvette: the Siamese Twins. When they passed away in their early forties, they were enrolled together in a nursing program in college. Photographer Joel-Peter Witkin was always looking for models whose bodies subverted societal norms. The controversial artist pursued people from the margins, the mutilated, medical anomalies, the amputated; people with deformities, people who were damaged, or different; little people; transexual people, people with transgressive sexual identities; as well as the already deceased. Even with a bountiful repertoire of subversive models and severed body parts, the McCarther twins would be a rare camera capture: Witkin had never photographed conjoined twins, and craniopagus conjoinment was the rarest kind of all. The artist has faced, of course, constant backlash and opposition for his work, which some view as gruesome, sadistic, pornographic, and perverted, and others view as degrading and objectifying to those who are disabled or marginalized. Witkin has a much different perspective, viewing his practice as both religious, and driven by beauty. He often describes his work as a kind of prayer. The McCarther sisters consented to pose for him, and the resulting artwork is ethereal and eerie. Hands entwined, the women wear white lace negligees and white Venetian masks, contrasting against their Black skin. One holds a bird and the other a bouquet of flowers. The artist recalls the sitting on his Instagram page. “During the shoot the twins very distinct personalities became apparent,” he says. “Yvette on the left was frightened of the bird so she got to hold the flowers while Yvonne was thrilled to hold the bird. Being in the twins’ presence was like being given a gift. They were so sweet and kind and were embracing life making up for lost time. The air was electric.” Unlike Witkin’s other photographs, there are no severed limbs or bizarre sexual fetishes depicted, no blood or oozing fluids. Even so, the image is still haunting. The photo captures the profound connection between the women. There’s more to the story in this artwork, moving from what we see to what we don’t see. Joel-Peter Witkin is also a twin, but by 1988 when this work was created, he had been estranged from his identical brother Jerome Witkin, also an artist, for more than two decades. ** In 2014, the Jack Rutberg Gallery in Los Angeles exhibited Twin Visions: Jerome Witkin and Joel-Peter Witkin, showing the work of both brothers together for the first time and ending a 50 year separation between them. The exhibition then travelled to Mexico City. An audience hungry to make sense of such a dramatic severance would have been disappointed. There were no such explanations offered before, during or after the historical event. All we know is that they amicably drifted apart and went their separate ways. There was no seminal event or argument referenced that triggered their schism. Perhaps the mystery of it all gives an even more compelling context to the Witkin name. By the time of their reunion, Joel-Peter was a widely collected artist with works exhibited in top tier museums like the Art Institute of Chicago and the Louvre, world famous for his art of darkness. Unbelievably, so was Jerome. Joel-Peter used a studio to stage scenes and models and a camera to immortalize the strange and the dead, drawing from and recreating the traditions of the old masters. Jerome’s work ran parallel in paintings. Jerome Witkin, described by the New York Times as a “virtuoso figurative painter” creates narrative art rendered in a style that combines classical realism with gestural abstraction. A recipient of the prestigious Pulitzer travelling fellowship and the Guggenheim fellowship, the artist’s subject matter is social and political, focusing on atrocities like sexual violence, terrorism, death, AIDS, destitution, and destruction. For 23 years, Jerome immersed himself in the darkest recesses of human history, obsessively researching and painting the Holocaust. ** Given the gravitas and morbid imagination inherent in the work of both Witkins, it is perhaps surprising that both brothers are known for their charming, gentle, warm and witty demeanours. Joel-Peter is seen as wildly intelligent, and a more solitary figure, deeply engrossed in his work (“It’s all I have. It’s all I need.”) Yet in contact with others, he is theatrical, gregarious, demonstrative, hilarious. He wears polka-dotted eyeglasses. Jerome is quiet and mild in mannerism, possessing also an extraordinary intelligence, while agreeable and funny. A Facebook page created by his fans and students proclaims, “Anyone who has had the pleasure of taking a class with Professor Jerome Witkin can tell you he is quite easily the most random, amusing, and quotable man to walk the earth.” ** It can safely be said that Jerome Witkin has no contemporary peer. Few figurative painters maintain such a consistent laser focus on human suffering. The influence of Goya is obvious. Jerome is unrelenting in depicting the pain and chaos of the human body and psyche. Fewer still have the skill and vision to carry out what he does, immense, visceral works with supreme technical prowess. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Kenneth Baker wrote, “Witkin’s only peer is Lucian Freud…. Witkin is one of the finest realist painters working today…he stages pictorial dramas that grapple with contemporary historical crises and moral pressures, while offering a lavish physical display of his medium…. ” His unusual style that blends the academic with abstract expressionism is uniquely suited to his work, making for an urban, dystopian sensibility, the impression of souls and their surroundings in demolition and ruin. They are important, unflinching, honest works, created by a master artist. I’m a more reluctant admirer of Joel-Peter’s work, and yet I find it endlessly compelling. I’m easily drawn to the macabre and see truth and beauty in darkness. But I’m also squeamish about biological and medical realities. Perhaps I am also prudish about penises out of context, especially disembodied ones, and about the more extreme outer limits of human desire and violence in sexuality. I don’t care to see explicit private acts like spread-eagled sodomy by foot, thank you very much. I am fascinated and mesmerized by the artist’s imagination and aesthetic. But I am also shocked and disturbed. Joel-Peter is also without peer, contemporary or historically. No one has ever plumbed the depths of darkness so fearlessly and elegantly; no one has ever so brazenly embraced death and sex and the extremes of the physical in such a spiritual way. And no one has done this with photography and real live (or real dead) models. Arts writer Marina Isola describes his work in one of his monographs as “Part Hieronymus Bosch, part ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” And if other photographers like Diane Arbus have bravely photographed the forgotten and dismissed, Joel-Peter’s art is not just capturing and curating what he sees. He is an installation artist first, staging theatrical scenes. Then he is a photographer. The essence of his work takes place after both of these stages, when he prints and paints and scratches and engraves into the images to make them look antiqued and otherworldly. Joel-Peter seeks his subjects firsthand, approaching real people whom, like the McCarther twins, he learns about through research and newspapers. Driven by the desire to make visible the invisible, he has even placed calls through classified ads: “Pinheads, dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, pre-op transsexuals, bearded women, people with tails, horns, wings, reversed hands or feet, anyone born without arms, legs, eyes, breast, genitals, ears, nose, lips. All people with unusually large genitals. All manner of extreme visual perversion. Hermaphrodites and teratoids (alive and dead). Anyone bearing the wounds of Christ.” He has, of course, been routinely criticized for his fetishistic quest for the most mutilated and marginal of human bodies, for constantly pushing the boundaries: morbid obesity, intersex people, people with no arms, dwarves, the sick, the elderly. His grisly obsessions are not limited to the living. Joel-Peter does not flinch at death, procuring human corpses and body parts from medical institutions and Mexican morgues, using cadavers and severed limbs in still life arrangements. Vanitas, indeed. If the artist’s search for taboo and bizarre bodies seems precariously close to the freak shows and human zoos of yesteryear, that is not far off the mark at all. It is the literal beginning of Joel-Peter’s art. When they were young men, Jerome took Joel-Peter to the “freak shows” on Coney Island. Jerome himself was working on a painting that incorporated sideshow people and asked Joel-Peter to bring his camera to take pictures. They encountered severely handicapped people, and a man with three legs, and a hermaphrodite. Joel-Peter claims he had his first sexual encounter with the hermaphrodite, that is, someone with both male and female genitalia. “I wanted to travel with them, but they didn’t need a photographer,” he said. Joel-Peter was deeply moved by the people he encountered in the Coney Island sideshows. Later, he told the Los Angeles Times, “I’ve always been attracted to things that are looked on as ugly or taboo. I don’t want to live feeling that I can’t communicate with someone, because there’s a form of beauty in everything. I’ve been thinking about St. Francis, who had this terrible fear of lepers. One morning he was walking down the road and saw the most grotesque leper and he knew that to get beyond the demise of his own flesh, he had to kiss that leper. And at the instant St. Francis kissed him, the leper turned into Christ.” If we see his subject matter as salacious, Joel-Peter sees something else entirely. “My work is all about human dignity, caring and compassion... Those who understand what I do appreciate the determination, love, and courage it takes to find wonder and beauty in people who are considered by society to be damaged, unclean, dysfunctional, or wretched.” As for death, Joel-Peter insists unequivocably in his work and philosophy that death is a part of life, even if most of us prefer to ignore it. Death is actually a mainstay of art history tradition, including the practice of working from the real thing. Chaim Soutine would take dead animals from the butcher shop and hang them on a meat hook in his apartment, painting from the raw material. Theodor Gericault borrowed body parts and corpses from the morgue so that his massive historical narrative painting, The Raft of the Medusa, would be as realistic as possible. The raft was a makeshift lifeboat assembled after the sinking of a naval boat in the early 1800s. Dehydrated and starved, the few survivors on the raft resorted to cannibalism while awaiting rescue. Gericault interviewed two of the survivors as part of his research as well. (Joel-Peter Witkin recreated the Medusa masterpiece in his 2006 political work, The Raft of George W. Bush.) Death was much more personal, however, than pragmatic for the artist. He has spoken often of a pivotal moment of imprinting when he was a child. “We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother's hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it – but before I could touch it someone carried me away.” Later, Joel-Peter enlisted to work as a combat photographer during the war in Vietnam. His training was intense: across American and in Europe, he had to take pictures of all kinds of death. He never went to Vietnam: he was discharged from the army after a suicide attempt. Much later, in 2024, Joel-Peter made a remarkable claim in a documentary about himself and his twin, Jerome. He said that he had memories from his mother’s womb. (Interestingly, Salvador Dali also claimed intrauterine memory. Most experts consider such claims to be false memories or fraudulent. But others believe that very rarely, some individuals recall their experiences much earlier than the rest of us. It is considered an aspect of hyperthymesia, or unusually detailed memory processes, and only 100 or so people in the world are considered to have this form of memory.) While I could find very little reference to this online, Joel-Peter said that he and Jerome were actually triplets. Some online sources state that the sister was stillborn. Joel-Peter described in the documentary his recollection of knowing his sister in the womb, and connecting with her at the time of her death. “In that sense, I knew death before I knew life.” ** Jerome, too, has always depicted violence and death. While Joel-Peter views his own work on these themes as joyful, inclusive, and beautiful, Jerome makes no such claims. He believes himself instead a witness to the depravity and pain around him. “I’m a witness. With the paintings and the drawings, maybe they make other people say, ‘There shouldn’t be this. There shouldn’t be this again.’” On his website, he states, “Since the times we now live in are not pretty and do not have a possible future remedy for those societal troubles, neither are the images I present.” ** How did Jerome’s path so closely mirror Joel-Peter’s? Both men became artists, which is perhaps not surprising. Siblings of any kind who pursue similar careers are common. But it is exceedingly rare for artists to become successful, internationally acclaimed, awarded, and exhibited in premium galleries and museums. Both brothers’ work is deeply rooted in art history, and also in spirituality, albeit with dramatically different expressions of these shared origins and motivations. The audience’s natural curiosity wants to get to the why of the spirit of their work. All people have a morbid curiosity about human depravity and a desire to make sense of or understand it. But few devote themselves so completely to the task. The dark mysteries of the human heart and the frontiers of the unknown are evergreen fodder in art history and literature: from the Psalms to Picasso’s Guernica, we grapple with evil. Yet few artists fuel their work entirely from this question. Countless studies of monozygotic twins like Jerome and Joel-Peter confirm fascinating but still little-understood matters of genetic inheritance. Our comprehension of biology is really still in its infancy, and epigenetic explorations are even more mysterious. Nothing about genes is simple: biology is destiny, and yet genes do not guarantee an outcome. We phrase things in terms of “predisposition” or probabilities, or potentialities. The body and all that is inside of it is far more essential to our natures than most of us are willing to acknowledge. While few of us still subscribe to old “blank slate” theories, we usually favour nurture over nature. Even if something is in our nature, we are not slaves to our biology, we believe. Even the most die-hard materialist holds murderers to account for their choices, though the instinct to kill is clear to anyone paying attention. We might be a fat family, and yet we are sure that a person can modify their predisposition to corpulence. Addiction may be innate to some, yet many outwit their inheritance through practice and grace. Even if higher testosterone and lower intelligence quotients are shared traits among most violent men, most men manage to contain themselves and function in a civilized fashion. A high sex drive is normal for the vast majority of younger people, and yet only a small percentage commit rape or are otherwise unable to contain themselves. Most people, even when experiencing the most intense sexual desires, wait until they are behind closed doors and don’t start humping like dogs beside a public fountain. We have at least some control of our biology, then. Most of us give much more credence to nurture than nature. We perceive that fat follows poor self-control or emotional factors. We see that many antisocial criminals were badly abused in childhood and understand that early imprinting and trauma contributes in a major way to how we behave. We believe that hate is taught and that most of what we are is learned in some way. After all, even if we possess particular abilities, whether athletic or mathematical or artistic, we must still attend school or apprentice somehow to grow our gifts. Perhaps our best understanding is that our raw material is given by biology, and then it is impacted by our experiences and pursuits. Everything that happens to us and that we witness and learn interacts with how we are made to become the people that we are. This fascinating interplay of our environments, biology, families, and chance give us infinite variations of humanity, and we never tire of unpuzzling it. We comb through these mazes constantly- humans are naturally nosy, never tiring of discussing the neighbours and our families and scandalous celebrities. It could even be said that much of the basis of literature, art, religion, and Netflix follow this white rabbit, and that we never do get to the bottom of it all. ** The parallels for Joel-Peter and Jerome make some sense, then, simply because they are twins. They also shared an upbringing: they were not twins separated at birth, but rather in young adulthood when they were already partly formed. It is likely they were born creative, driven, highly intelligent, and curious, and so their paths as artists was long set into motion. It is just as likely their shared experiences in their formative years contributed to their direction. If Joel-Peter’s seemingly impossible intrauterine memory of their sister’s brief spark is real in any sense, then it is also real for Jerome, even if he doesn’t remember it. Did those mystical moments of connection and untethering impact the way they saw the world? ** If Joel-Peter’s artwork seems at first incomprehensible, even grotesque, it is still inexplicably beautiful and summons profoundly conflicting emotions in the viewer. We are enchanted and disgusted. We can’t look away, and then we cannot unsee it. One of Joel-Peter’s most famous photographs shows two parts of a man’s head positioned as if in a kiss. He recounts the genesis of this disturbing arrangement as accidental. Working in a medical research lab, he was unaware that a head had been bisected, and when he picked it up, it slipped, ultimately suggesting a man kissing himself. Joel-Peter emphasizes that while he worked extensively with deceased bodies and parts in his photography, he did not kill or dissect their bodies himself. His material came as is from research labs or morgues. Objects trouve, indeed. It all goes so far past our collective sense of taboo in so many ways. But when we hear Joel-Peter’s account of the pivotal childhood moment of trauma, where he witnessed the gruesome death of another innocent child, a young girl tragically beheaded in an automobile accident, it starts to make sense to us. When we learn that he witnessed the dead constantly in preparation for a grisly but necessary job as a war photographer, we feel his wounding. We unravel some of the unfathomable mystery of it, the mystery of death itself, something liminal and luminous, the innocence of being and of the body and psyche at once. Our empathy for the girl and for the artist who witnessed the event when he was just a child give us more context for what he sees and feels and why he seemingly does not hold the same boundaries that we do. And we are able to go where he goes and be inside that space. We can almost shed our own limits in a way that lets us see past our own shock and natural fear and disgust. Perhaps we can even see the way he sees, and lose our repulsion altogether, that death, sex, pain, deformities, and otherwise marginalized bodies are mirrors, after all, not something outside of us. They are us. In light of this story, the artist’s insistence that such depicting such bodies is an act of love, rather than gratuitous or revolting, resonates. We are able to see and feel the truth of what we usually deny. ** Our penchant for nurture and fear of the body as truth, and especially of death and putrefaction and anything that might hint at it, has made death the ultimate taboo. Perhaps our rejection of the body in general stems from this fear: our bodies show us the grisly reality of our finite selves, a decade or nine before the inevitable comes to pass. It may also be that our aversion to the corporal is innate on a biological level: the dying and death itself are both symbolically and literally contagious. We burn or bury our dead and don’t live with them. Some cultures have elaborate ceremonies for the diseased and deceased, most brief and geared toward assuring the longevity of the soul, limiting the contact and communion with the actual body to prescribed rituals. The rest of us dispose quickly of our dead after a few days and entertain any further communion in spirit alone. Too much interest in the corporeal in life is viewed as superfice or vanity, and in death, as depravity and perversion. We find it traumatic to see death literally, even though most of us will not be able to avoid it. And yet, and yet…we all have an insatiable curiosity about this threshold, if we are honest. And if we are not honest, our obsession is still obvious. The most holy theme in religion is death, and in Christianity, the literal corpse of God is the most sacred of all imagery, connecting the eternal with the most raw fundamentals of the human body. We all tune in to the daily news, where war, murder, and pestilence are universally decreed the most important stories. Millions tune in to murder on television, relentlessly filling ourselves on series like Criminal Minds or serial killer specials. We really can’t look away. ** The crux of my fascination with Joel-Peter’s photographs might be this: I am no different. I also turn tragedy and mortal flesh into sculpture and cinema, only I call it poetry. I dissect people like frogs, expose them in composite revelations in my stories, summon their spirits with the abracadabra of rhyme and simile. I want to know everything. I want to understand what cannot be understood. I have my own reasons. I pursue beauty relentlessly, too, but I know that we are also knit from darkness. Given the chance, I have volunteered to watch a bullfight, lurk in the shadows of BDSM fetish festivals, attend murder trials for strangers in court. In my wayward youth, I ingested massive doses of various psychedelics to see what I would find at the outer limits of consciousness. I’m comfortable confessing to a lifelong fascination with death. Like Joel-Peter, I was imprinted with the macabre realities as a young child. There were several incidents that impacted my psyche in this direction: the suicide of a young playmate, poetically ending a young life of torment and sexual abuse by hanging herself from a tree; the suicide of my mom’s brother, broken in front of a train; and the gang rape and murder of a teenage friend, strangled and then burned in an abandoned house by hooligans after marching a protest against capital punishment. Oh, the irony. Later, a teen neighbour boy hanged himself if the basement of the same house I used to babysit in. I did not witness any of this death in person, but these events had an immeasurable effect on my psyche. Indeed, I have been so closely taunted by the grim reaper, felling acquaintances nearby and intimate beloved with a ferocious frequency and all manner of gruesome, tragic methods that in my less stable days I believed I carried a curse and was some kind of mystical danger to others. I attribute these experiences for my morbid curiosities, as I have always been drawn to death in literature, art, and television. When I travel, I visit cemeteries and catacombs. I dive headfirst to find out more about any sordid cultural customs and relish anthropology on cannibalism and human sacrifice. I read constantly about murder. I write about death. I feel something of Joel-Peter’s conviction that this subject, in all of its manifestations, is a necessary theme for art, simply because it exists. On one occasion, I was invited to the morgue by a friend in medical school, a chance I jumped at. It was a terrible and incredible thing to experience: a hands-on session with thirteen cadavers, faces peeled back, stomachs slit open, for students to see inside ourselves. In the name of science, there was a Tupperware-type container filled with human organs preserved in formaldehyde: I held a human brain in my hands. I was filled with emotion and overrun with tears, this rare opportunity to connect physically with the most interior part of a person, the place where a million moments were both programmed and recorded. ** Jerome’s work is much easier to approach, even though it dwells equally on darkness. Unlike his brother, Jerome does not see his art from the standpoint of beauty and love. But he does believe that his art also comes from a place of spirituality and compassion. He enters into the darklands for the purpose of truth and witness. We approach these paintings with a clear understanding that the artist’s motivation is to bring us into communion with victims. Even as the images are unrelenting in their horror, we recognize clearly the messages of social justice and human rights awareness. Jerome is quoted in Image: Art, Faith, Mystery. “I wish to be remembered as a religious artist who attempted to portray the most intimate range of human feelings and the meetings of the human with life's demons and deities.... Art and the holy are twins. Rembrandt, Kollwitz pray with muddy and bloody hands.” (Kathe Kollwitz was a German artist who painted grief, after losing a son and grandson in the world wars.) Most of Jerome’s work grapples with intense and harrowing of human experiences, grief, war, oppression, AIDS, 9/11, urban violence. One of his works is called Unseen and Unheard (In Memory of All Victims of Torture (1986), the title pointing again to the idea of the artist as witness. Addiction is a subject he paints often, for example, in his stark portrayal The Crack House (1990). Another recurring theme in his work is homelessness: he spent several months visiting My Father’s Kitchen, a homeless resource centre in Syracuse, New York, sketching marginalized people and talking to them. “I like drawing people,” he said. “They need to be seen.” And of course, the Holocaust. Jerome spent twenty years researching, processing, and painting themes of the Holocaust, daring to enter into the depths of the depravity and horror to bear witness. His works draw as much from art history as his brother’s, referencing specific artists, such as his portraits of Van Gogh and Kollwitz, for example, as well as working from the narrative framework of the Old Masters, who used mythology and Biblical stories to contemplate the complicated morality of human history. He also uses styles and aesthetics from the great painters, ancient and modern, blending them to form a recognizable continuum in contemporary form. His vast works are magnified further in size and impact as he frequently uses diptychs, triptychs, and polyptychs of five or more panels in a single work, a common convention in historical religious paintings. While Jerome’s work fits more easily into our psychological paradigm of right and wrong, assuring the viewer that both they and the artist are on the right side of history, so to speak, we can’t help but question how he got here. He was not the one who witnessed the terrible car crash and decapitation of a young girl, and nor did he photograph the dead as employment. So how did he end up in the same haunted corridors of the mind as his brother? ** Perhaps our why mind can be satisfied by the quote of another artist, Francis Bacon, to whom Jerome has been compared. In his last interview with his friend Francis Giacobetti in 1991, Bacon stated, “Since the beginning of time, we have had countless examples of human violence even in our very civilized century. We have even created bombs capable of blowing up the planet a thousand times over. An artist instinctively takes all this into account. He can’t do otherwise. I am a painter of the 20th century: during my childhood I lived through the revolutionary Irish movement, Sinn Fein, and the wars, Hiroshima, Hitler, the death camps, and daily violence that I’ve experienced all my life. And after all that they want me to paint bunches of pink flowers…” ** Is it enough? Yes, and also, it’s not enough. We return to our unquenchable curiosity. We are always looking for pieces of the puzzle, for clues to give us more context. The audience is not much different from the artist in this regard: we both want to dig around behind the scenes, to excavate shards and artifacts that can shed light on the human condition. A neon light in the dark blinks out from our minds, glowing: make it make sense! But can we? Yes and no. ** We can follow the breadcrumbs with this question as our headlight: why does this man, this artist, feel the weight of the world? Rifling through the detritus of any man’s life, you will find ruins and dried blood. As both brothers remind us constantly through their art, life is full of death. Jerome and his work’s ongoing struggle with grief and dying owes at least something to the tragedy of losing his 16 year old son, Andrew. Andrew suffered from a rare blood disorder and ultimately died after the hope of healing from a bone marrow transplant. The artist felt the agony of unfair loss firsthand, and perhaps no pain in life is as acute as bearing witness to the suffering of their child. “…This is going to sound very strange—but when you have one child walking between life and death, you start going on your knees a lot and praying. You simply realize that life is everything and holding onto life is everything,” Jerome told Larry Groff in Painting Perceptions. “I love that child more than anything on the planet. He is just so amazing.” Yet this painful ordeal happened in 2010, when Jerome was already in the twilight years of a long trajectory as an artist. He speaks more often of the impact his father had on his psyche. The Witkins, like most of us, had a complicated family. Their father was Jewish and their mother was Catholic, and these religious differences proved impossible to reconcile, ultimately contributing to their divorce when the twins were around four. Max was a glazier by trade, but had tremendous difficulty making ends meet and keeping a job. He suffered from depression. Mother was volatile, often throwing tantrums and dishes. Max became itinerant, living on the streets, and attempting suicide. Ultimately, he died tragically, beaten to death by hooligans from a Puerto Rican gang. It happened at Coney Island, where both brothers had drawn inspiration for their burgeoning artistic oeuvre. Max had given Joel-Peter his first camera, a gift that at the very least set the dominoes of fate into motion. Yet the photographer claims that he had little intimacy with his father. Much later, he told the Los Angeles Times, “His death didn’t affect me at all.” It’s a strange declaration of detachment from a man who constantly stresses that his raison d’etre as a visionary is his love, like Christ, for “the least of these.” Jerome, on the other hand, admits how much his father’s life and death weighed on his mind. He was drawn to the experience of homelessness through his heart for his father’s battle with depression and instability. “My father was a homeless man,” Jerome told Larry Groff. “He failed in his business. He failed in two marriages. He tried to commit suicide. He was mugged to death in a park in Brooklyn. You couldn’t find him, and all that stuff. My father was a very sad case of not succeeding in anything. But at the same time, as a homeless man, where homeless people look alike, it’s usually very sad. And they are open to being hurt by other people.” He was also drawn to learn more about and understand his father’s, and his own, Jewish ancestry through this loss. The painter spent more than two decades studying and painting the depravity of this time of unimaginable horror. On Syracuse.com, Katherine Rushworth describes Jerome’s monumental five-part painting Entering Darkness (1998-2002). “In this painting, Witkin provides a brutally frank depiction of the Holocaust as detailed by Dachau nurse Dorothy Wahlstrom in a series of letters — the flames from the ovens, medical experiments on prisoners, starvation and torture are all there.” Are their shared and divergent experiences enough to explain the Witkin twins’ twin obsessions with the dark side of the moon? Or were they knit this way, their shared DNA encoded with both brilliance and a need to plunder the darkness and examine it, reveal it, through their creative gifts? Both? Cintra Wilson, writing for Salon Magazine in 2000, said, “True perverts are born, not made…I believe that Joel-Peter Witkin is a true, born pervert.” She means his soul, or aesthetic- she can’t speak to his private sexual predilections, of course. Perhaps, like the Witkins, I am prone to asking unanswerable questions. It seems reasonable to surmise that everything we are and become is both nature and nurture, a dynamic interplay of predisposition and possibility, and the chance roll of the die along the way. And while inquiring minds want to know, to figure out, to understand why someone does what they do, the origin of the Witkins’ muse must remain, to some extent, in the murky mists of mythology. How we each play out our fates and what we are drawn to remains a conundrum, even as we look for explanations. After all, so many people suffer unspeakable agonies and turn to cutesy crochet animals or ascetic meditation practices. They don’t make horror movies. They don’t even watch them. And others emerge radiant from unbroken homes to run church charities but collect serial killer paraphernalia. When Musee Magazine’s Andrea Blanch asked Joel-Peter why he dwells on the morbid, he explained that he doesn’t see his work as morbid at all. “I photograph social outcasts because I want to celebrate their singularity and the strength it takes for them to engage life.” He talked about a man he met and photographed who was profoundly disabled because his mother used a drug called thalidomide for morning sickness during pregnancy. The drug caused extreme deformities and was banned. “He’s born without skin, and without arms or legs. He’s in pain from the moment he was born… I had a friend in L.A. who saw him begging on the sidewalk…I got on a plane to L.A., to convince this man to be photographed. I was very struck and emotionally engaged in photographing him.” Variations of this statement abound in Joel-Peter’s interviews. Reading it brought to mind Jerome’s statement about the homeless people he sketched. “They need to be seen.” Curiously, Jerome has a painting called Looking: Bob Bersani in the Studio, of a different bald figure without arms, using electronic prosthetics. My own belief is that we are each made up of our genetic inheritance and our experiential imprints. And also, something more, something intangible and elusive, beyond our understanding. Fate, faith, destiny. I believe some have assignments or callings. They have specific challenges or blessings or burdens or tasks or purposes. Others are exempt those callings; they have their own. I believe some people simply are, and rhyme or reason for what they have to do is not always apparent. I feel like the Witkins had no choice but to bear unflinching witness and create honest, transgressive art from the mysteries of darkness and show it to the rest of us. ** Time marches on. Today the Witkin twins are 86 years old. Joel-Peter has said, “I will die in the darkroom, printing.” ** An interesting twist of fate: Joel-Peter Witkin’s son, Kersen, is a neoexpressionist painter. And Jerome Witkin’s son, Christian, is highly successful fashion photographer. ** Jerome Witkin created an artwork about twins, too. The Rounds Twins, Before the Camera, depicts two stunning redheaded women in a dressing room, with clothes, wigs, and high heeled shoes scattered around. Like all of his work, it is an arresting image, fraught with tension and disarray. Twins appear again in another of his works, perhaps overlooked in the big picture. Division Street: Mad House, Family of Fallen Man is a heartbreaking painting, depicting a chaotic interior scene with a red faced mother pulling viciously at a young girl’s ponytail, arm raised about to strike. A clown’s head and the statue of a saint look down at them from the wall. Witnessing the mayhem, two boys stand in the shadows, helpless, their backs to the viewer and faces hidden, hands of one boy behind his back. We know the boys in the striped shirts are Jerome and Joel-Peter, because there is a sketch of this scene made after the fact, in 2015, the year after the Witkin’s reunion. Jerome titled it, Joey and Jerry. ** Another photographer I admire very much is John Paul Caponigro. He says his work is about “the nature of perception and the perception of nature.” He has photographed spectacular images of deserts and of Antarctica, and his work has been collected by top tier institutions like The Smithsonian. Caponigro pays homage to photographer Witkin as an influence on his own work and thinking. “Witkin’s work challenges me to look at things I turn away from, and my own denial.” ** Perhaps Caponigro’s insight holds the key to approaching the most difficult, disturbing artwork and the truth they might contain. What if, rather than seeking a way out, we would instead look for a way in? Lorette C. Luzajic   Division Street: Mad House, Family of Fallen Man, by Jerome Witkin (USA) 2015
 The Mermaid's Tale, by Joel-Peter Witkin (USA) 2018  The Crack House, by Jerome Witkin (USA) 1990
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 Forest, British Columbia, by Emily Carr (Canada) 1931 or 1932 Deep Forest: the Soul of Emily Carr The forest is alive, a living, breathing entity, for Emily Carr. In this painting, Forest, British Columbia, circa 1931, viewed at the Albright Knox Gallery’s exhibition, Northern Lights, in Buffalo, the artist enters the inner sanctum and shows the interior with exquisite reverence. It is often said that the west coast forests of Canada are Carr’s cathedrals. Here, the spirit of the woods is an almost figurative goddess, a presence both tangible and fluid, a hooded, shrouded being of mystery. The curvatures of trunks and boughs wind together, and combined with our profoundly intimate point of entry, creating an almost sexual suggestion, similar to the effect of Georgia O’Keeffe’s extreme close ups of flowers. Canadian artist Emily Carr, who lived from 1871 to 1945, trained in a range of ways, starting at the California School of Design in San Francisco as a teenager after the death of both parents, followed by a couple of years in London, England, time in Paris, and a stint in an English fishing village artist’s colony. But wherever she went to work and study, she longed for the ancient forests of home. The spectacular woodlands of west coast Canada include the coastal forests, old growth forests, dense interior forests, inland temperate rainforests, and the boreal or Taiga forest way up north by the Yukon and Alaska borders, considered today to be the world’s largest intact forest on earth. These multilayered canopies danced with conifers like western hemlock and redcedar, and some of the largest spruce trees in the world, along with balsam poplars, trembling aspens, and ponderosa and lodgepole pines. From coastal muskeg peatlands to alpine tundra, these forests are home to grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, moose, caribou, coyotes, wolves, and eagles. This was Emily’s real classroom, the soul of her work and everything that mattered to her. The natural world and its mysteries and power was as important to Emily as it was to the Indigenous people she revered. She travelled to islands and northern and interior forestlands solo on horseback and boat, and into remote Indian villages, to learn all she could about nature and the first nations people, all of which were, to her, the real world. "The liveness in me just loves to feel the liveness in growing things, in grass and rain and leaves and flowers and sun and feathers and furs and earth and sand and moss," she wrote in her diaries. Emily rejected the traditional, mechanical, representational perspective of art that still dominated instruction in her day, a view that was dissolving as more and more painters were looking to participate in creativity as a divine act driven by expression and witness over technique. She used bold, rhythmic brushstrokes to convey the dynamism and magic of her subject matter. “There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.” Emily’s rejection of tradition in art and in femininity was looked upon with wariness and misgiving, and it cost her clients and pupils. Her respect for Indigenous peoples and their ways was met with suspicion, too, by the society surrounding her. It was exceedingly rare for women to be independent, unmarried, and defiantly travel alone into dangerous realms and into men’s terrain like the frontier. Emily didn’t care: she did what she wanted. And she painted the way she wanted, for her own reasons. She found profound meaning and importance in both her own artistic growth, on her own terms, and in the history of the land and its original peoples. “Whenever I could afford it, I went up north, among the Indians and the woods, and forgot all about everything in the joy of those lonely, wonderful places. I decided to try and make as good a representative collection of those old villages and wonderful totem poles as I could, for the love of the people and the love of the places and the love of the art; whether anybody liked them or not…. I painted them to please myself in my own way, but I also stuck rigidly to the facts because I knew I was painting history.” Emily’s spirit of independence and refusal to pander to the norms of Victorian society led to a diagnosis of hysteria, and she was placed in an English tuberculosis sanitorium for eighteen months. This strictly regimented institutionalization quashed her painting but only temporarily. She returned to Victoria, B.C. Canada, and to her beloved forests, spending time on the Ucluelet Peninsula with the Nuu-chah-nulth people (often called Nootka), by whom she was given the Indigenous name Klee Wyck. On a trip far up north to Alaska, she made it her life mission to paint the “vanishing totems.” Totem poles are a form of tree tower wood carvings by Pacific Northwest communities such as the Haida, Tligit, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Coast Salish, honouring ancestors, clan lineage, animals, and spiritual beliefs of these peoples. "I glory in our wonderful west and I hope to leave behind me some of the relics of its first primitive greatness. These things should be to us Canadians what the ancient Briton's relics are to the English. Only a few more years and they will be gone forever into silent nothingness and I would gather my collection together before they are forever past." For Emily, the living past and the secrets of the forests and the original peoples who were its guardians were the essence of her art and soul. She viewed the woods as a deeply spiritual place filled with the truth and the manifestation of God. “Real art is religion, a search for the beauty of God deep in all things.” Lorette C. Luzajic  Beauty Revealed, by Sarah Goodridge (USA) 1828 Beauty Revealed It was a century or so before the suffragettes achieved voting rights for women in Massachusetts, with the landmark ratification of the 19th amendment. And it was half a century before the most famous of Boston painters, John Singer Sargent, (who was not actually from Boston), scandalized the Paris art world with that infamous slip of a strap on Madame Gautreau’s evening gown, immortalizing her as Madame X. The New England region was, of course, steeped in Puritan history, the derogatory term given to the early American colonists seeking freedom from Protestant persecution in Europe. The Puritans had a reputation for being dour, stodgy, and prudish. This was the social context in 1828 which 40-year-old artist and “spinster” Sarah Goodridge painted her naked breasts. The miniature portraitist wore the severe, heavy clothing of women of her time and region, but privately stripped naked and created one of history’s most remarkable paintings, a self-portrait. The tiny work of art, measuring around 3 by 2.5 inches, is a delicate rendering in watercolour on ivory, of Sarah’s own breasts, idealized stark white teacups with rosebud nipples, swaddled by swathes of white fabric. They look remarkably close to the classical Greek and Roman sculptures of Venus and Aphrodite, unblemished but for the personal touch of a pale mole just under her right collarbone. Goodridge specialized in portrait miniatures and had painted various public figures and well to do personalities, operating her own studio in Boston. This particular miniature was one that she presented herself as a gift to Daniel Webster, a politician who had sat for her, after he was widowed. Miniature jewelry portraits on brooches and pendants of a lover’s eye had been recently popular in Europe. And erotic miniature paintings surface from their secret drawers throughout art history, from all cultures, European, Persian, Indian, Mexican, Peruvian, and beyond, some of them extremely explicit. Human desire and beauty is of course an evergreen theme in our story, and miniatures are more suited to discretion and economy than large-scale works. But a woman artist’s own depiction of her assets, deliberated gifted to a man she admired, was something extraordinary. The determination behind such an action, and the confident expression of desire, was unique. It is quite likely that Sarah had remained single on purpose to protect her vocation as an artist. Perhaps at forty, past the years when pregnancy would distract her from her true purpose, she set her sights on a man that she believed saw her as an equal, in hopes of marriage. Perhaps the token was purely unabashed eroticism: a sext, if you will, a secret, an invitation. In any event, Webster remarried someone else, a woman of more means, some said. Whether he otherwise responded to her call is uncertain. He wrote over forty letters to Sarah and posed for her again, and Sarah visited him in Washington, DC. Whether she simply accepted his choices and gladly resumed their friendship, or if they were also lovers, is a matter of speculation. We all have this story, don’t we, an occasion where we chanced revelation, bared our breasts or our teeth or our soul. The risk of such a situation is always uncertain, sometimes leading to what we wanted and sometimes leading to something unexpected, or to nothing at all. Risk happens, and the various outcomes shape us, as do our personal choices. Most of us don’t have writers and museum folk prying in to our private text messages or rendezvous. We do not know exactly what transpired in the hearts or loins of Sarah or Daniel after the gift of this Beauty Revealed. But we do know this: now part of the permanent collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Webster kept the gift until the day he died, the ivory gently worn from his touch. Lorette C. Luzajic  Mingling among my books are an assortment of artifacts, curiosities, and novelties; I have always prized trinkets of art and history and nostalgia. Perched in my art book library: a cheap made-in-China Jeff Koons balloon dog knock off, a three-footed polka dot pottery bowl made by a dear friend, and my Vincent Price action figurine. Vincent nests atop a row of eclectic critical art writings: Robert Hughes, Robert Motherwell, Frank O’Hara. He is the guardian or perhaps the gargoyle of this treasure chest of the wonders of human creativity. Vincent Price is best known as a charismatic, handsome actor in dozens of horror films spanning the ‘30s through early ‘90s. His urbane, campy sophistication and the mellifluous, velvet, baritone qualities of his vocal delivery elevated the lowliest movies of the genre into artful dramas. Classic performances include House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and House of Wax. My own introduction to Price was his iconic narration of Rod Temperton’s rap in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” a genius performance that helped catapult Jackson’s album to become the world’s bestselling record of all time.
Like everyone else, I enjoyed Price’s witty, dramatic flare in fun films over the years. But in 2022, I was commissioned to create a small collage tribute to the Crown Prince of Terror. And that’s when I fell head over heels. Vincent’s voice, face, and genius for menace could make anyone swoon, but discovering his passion for art history and work to democratize access and exposure to that knowledge is what really sent shivers down my spine. When working on themed artworks, I like to immerse myself in my subject matter and learn as much as I can about the topic at hand. So I danced to “Thriller” in my library and spent a few cozy nights curled up with Vince and various bloodcurdling film flashbacks. But diving into some behind-the-scenes research, I found what was, for me, pure gold: not just a pretty face, Vincent’s first passion was art, and before he started acting, he studied for a degree in art history, from Yale, no less.  Vincent Price, commissioned mixed media artwork, Lorette C. Luzajic 2022 Vincent Price was born in St Louis, Missouri, with English and Welsh ancestry. His family was wealthy with a candy empire and a booming tooth powder company, and so he was fortunately able to afford prestigious higher education. But as it turned out, his access to that knowledge benefited the rest of us. Price developed an interest in theatre after graduation, even as he started working on his masters in art history at the Courtauld Institute, quickly securing acting roles at the Gate Theatre in London. With his stately intelligence and quick wit, his stage presence was formidable, and he landed a variety of roles, moving into character acting for films. His first horror movie was Boris Karloff’s Tower of London. The IMDb puts him in 190 films, from minor cameos to starring roles, and 69 television shows. Vincent’s acting work spanned sixty years from 1930 to 1990. With his good looks, cultured demeanor, and incisive wit, he was effortlessly popular with directors and a heart throb for the ladies…and for men. Vincent was married three times for ten plus years each, but it was an open secret that he was also gay, something his daughter confirmed posthumously. Throughout his entire career as an actor, Vincent had two other passions. One was cooking. Vincent was a formidable gourmet and he loved to dine on his world travels and share his discoveries and experiences with others, inviting the masses to the pleasures of world cuisine. With his second wife, Mary, he wrote a 500 page cookbook, A Treasury of Great Recipes, aimed at showing people how they could create their own “dastardly delights” and "travel around the world using your cooker." He even had a TV cooking series for budget gourmet, Cooking Price-Wise. His other passion was the one that preceded his involvement in theatre and film. Art was Vincent’s first love, his foundational interest, and perhaps even his raison d’etre. Price was an avid art collector, growing his collection with his film earnings. He was interested in an eclectic range of visual culture, from Rembrandt to Pollock. Vincent’s first acquisition was a Rembrandt drawing that he purchased on a payment plan with his own allowance when he was a young boy. He was especially interested in pre-Columbian art and artifacts and amassed hundreds of examples over the years. Price saw his position of privilege as an opportunity to democratize art and become a kind of art activist or advocate. He believed that art was not just for wealthy or elite people, but was something that everyone should experience and own. This conviction is what drove the extensive work he did to bring art education out of the scholarly and museum realms and encourage a wider populace to look, learn, and collect. “The indoctrination of art at Yale and the Courtauld really set my life’s pattern,” he said in a 1992 interview, “And I’ve probably kept up more study in the history of art than most people who are in it professionally. Because I’m not a professional at it. I’m an amateur — in the French sense of the word, a lover.”  Early in his acting career, Price saw the potential of well-paid, idolized Hollywood actors to contribute to a thriving marketplace for artists. In 1943, he opened a small gallery in Beverly Hills- The Little Gallery- showing his own collection as well as emphasizing little-known local talents to his movie friends. “Our openings consisted of anywhere from 50 to 400 people cammed into our little room, drinking the strongest, cheapest vodka martinis we could make. Everyone came…” Vincent wrote in his memoirs. “…Tallulah Bankhead, Fanny Brice, Katharine Hepburn, and other assorted actors, writers, directors, and just people.” Around 1950, Vincent and Mary visited a small college art gallery in Los Angeles. He saw the need to expose young people to art and donated ninety works from his personal repertory of paintings, drawings, and artifacts, establishing the first teaching collection at a community college. The East Los Angeles Junior College renamed themselves the Vincent Price Art Museum, eventually holding over 2000 works donated from the actor’s private collection. The museum is still active today, continuing Vincent’s legacy and his desire to expand access to art, broaden community participation and representation, and remedy historical erasures and omissions in the story art. In 1959, Vincent wrote his memoirs, I Like What I Know: a Visual Autobiography. The book tells the story of Vincent Price through his love of art, his childhood introduction to museums, and his world travels to view art everywhere. This rollicking adventure from one artwork to another is at once erudite and down-to-earth, extolling the magic to be found in diverse works like the Arnolfini Portrait, Modigliani, Oaxacan pottery, Titian, Veronese, Yoruba sculpture, and much more.  Double Day and Company, 1959 In 1962, Price established a monumental partnership with Sears to bring original art into everyday homes. He was given carte blanche to curate an ongoing collection of affordable works for the general public. Price travelled the globe, choosing works from historical and modern artists from a wide array of cultures to be sold through Sears. It was a major project that spanned nine years and brought original works into contemporary households. All in all, fifty thousand originals were sold through the initiative, empowering people from all walks to collect art. Prices ranged from $10 to $3000, with payment plans starting at $5 per month. Artworks were advertised widely and shown in Sears catalogues, with travelling exhibitions and displays in Sears retail stores. Price commissioned artists like Salvador Dali and Andrew Wyeth to create works specifically for the collection, and the partnership offered works by Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Peter Paul Rubens, James McNeill Whistler, Georgia O’Keeffe, and many more. Perhaps due to the typically corny aesthetic of ‘60s advertisements, the project was later criticized as a corporate cash grab. But Price’s visionary work with Sears afforded thousands of people the opportunity to experience art and empowered them to collect originals through reasonable pricing and payment plans, as well as giving thousands of artists paying work and exposure.
 In 1972, encouraging interest in American art history, Price wrote the book, The Vincent Price Treasury of American Art,published by the Country Beautiful Corporation. Here, Price brought his expertise and insights to the expansion of general knowledge for Americans on their own legacy of visual art, with brief essays and colour plates on Jasper Johns, Franz Kline, Charles Sheeler, Elihu Vedder, Mary Cassatt, Horace Pippin, Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, and beyond. He referred to his book in his foreword as a “biography of America” and suggested that readers visit the public galleries where the works resided to experience the pieces firsthand, saying, “the real thing will always come as a surprise.” In each short essay, Price highlighted interesting biographical snippets of the artist and background on the specific painting shown, with his trademark clever and conversational style.
Throughout these years, Price also served fourteen years on the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, for the advancement of Native American artists. He collected Native American art and included essays on indigenous artists in his American art book. He was invested in the promotion and visibility of contemporary Indigenous artists. He used his celebrity to bring attention to Native American artists like Oscar Howe and Fritz Scholder. He also established the first creative writing awards for Indigenous students at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, and he read their poetry on the Johnny Carson Show. He helped Indigenous artists discover economic opportunities and ways to sell their work. Another important art advisory role for Vincent was serving the White House Commission of Fine Arts by invitation from Jackie Kennedy! With the objective of making the White House a centre for American art, Vincent’s expertise and flare were invaluable. He gifted President Kennedy an Albert Bierstadt painting. Price never stopped evangelism for his cause. Somehow between a prolific schedule of filming, writing, and haunting, he found the time to deliver over 400 lectures to different colleges and universities on art history, igniting passion for visual art in countless inquiring minds. He also recorded a series of narrated tours of museum collections, called the Colorslide Tours, for the Columbia Records Club, taking people on tours of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Prado, and the Louvre. And he wrote a syndicated art column for the Chicago Tribune-New York News, published in the Washington Post, Allentown Morning Call, and numerous other papers throughout the States. Once again, Price’s objective was to empower people to look, explore, and learn more about visual art, rejecting scholarly elitism in favour of making his favourite subject accessible to everyone. In a 1985 interview for the Clockwatch Review, Price summed up his passion for James Plath: “Art lifts the spirit. It edifies. For me, it’s the great escape!” In a 1987 article for the Washington Post, Price wrote, “To my mind, museums do as much good as hospitals.” If Vincent is most remembered for his exquisitely sinister and sardonic performances in dramatic horror cinema, it is his forgotten advocacy work that has changed the world. “Art belongs to everyone,” he said often, and his efforts to democratize art and empower people to engage deeply with visual art profoundly impacted his audiences of millions to become passionate, knowledgeable participants in the art of looking, in museum-going, and in collecting. The extraordinary popularity of art among people of all walks of life in North American life today is due in part to Price’s tireless cheerleading and promotion. He inspired countless fans to explore, understand, and discover visual art from the past and present. He championed both historic and modern artwork, as well as showing a wide audience what it means to appreciate creativity from many cultures. “One thing is certain,” Vincent wrote in his autobiography. “The arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge…If at times I’ve been demanding…that you like this or that because I do…it’s because I believe this is a way to start seeing something you perhaps have missed…I hope that my life’s devotion to seeing may open a few eyes that have been shut by fear of seeing something new…Art is only another person’s way of seeing…it is, or can be, a way of seeing through another’s eyes the wonderful world of reality or imagination…of truth or fiction…of actuality or abstraction. The human mind and the human spirit are not, and never have been, one sided.” Vincent’s evangelical zeal for art is a mirror of my own. You have often heard me say that “art is everything” and my work to promote ekphrastic literature is partly driven by my conviction that writing is thinking, and that writing about art is an incredibly intimate way to look closer and engage deeply with images. For me, the power of images to connect us with other individuals and other cultures, and with our very soul, is unparalleled. Nestled among my library of enchanted pictures, the Vincent doll is a droll reminder of the everyday magic available to all of us through human creativity. “Life is short and art is long,” Vincent wrote. “A man’s art, a civilization’s art, are its immortality.” Lorette C. Luzajic   Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez (Spain) 1656 Old Woman Poaching Eggs Las Meninas is one of those paintings that everyone who has ever opened their eyes has seen. If not in the flesh at the Prado, its home since the grand museum’s opening in 1819, then in textbooks and on postcards and mousepads and memes. Diego Velazquez’s 1656 masterpiece is widely considered one of the most important paintings in art history. Baroque era artist Luca Giorgano said it represents the “theology of painting.” Picasso painted 58 versions of his fellow Spaniard’s magnum opus. The massive canvas lets you walk right into the artist’s studio, and there he is, painting the picture before you, a shadowy, angled affair that draws the eye right to its centrepiece, King Philip the IV’s infanta daughter and her entourage, including her beloved bodyguard, a mastiff, and an attendant with dwarfism. By the time he created his masterpiece, Diego Velazquez was a few years shy of the finish line, after a long and illustrious career as court painter to the King of Spain. Las Meninas was his opus work. Before the Prado, it hung in the palace, where Diego lived and worked on site.  Old Woman Poaching Eggs, by Diego Velazquez (Spain) 1618 Nice work if you can get it. Few painters in history lived in palaces with guaranteed paycheques. And this was the Spanish Golden Age, no less. It was a rare life of privilege, a position deserved for Velazquez talent and determination. But perhaps I’m not the only one who laments a gift that seems squandered on dreary portraits of the court, of this count and that, for the Royal Collection? Velazquez works are pure mastery of technique. But what else? If Las Meninas is full of provocation, curiosity, complexity and innovation, many others are stalwart, standard, even dull portraiture. If I should feel awe or admiration looking at Pope Innocent X or another portrait of a court lady, I don’t. I feel nothing. Velazquez used tenebrism, a word from the Italian, tenebroso, which means “dark, murky, gloomy.” Artists like Velazquez and Caravaggio worked with tenebroso and chiaroscuro, painting inside this drama of dark and light for enigmatic effects and strong contrasts. Velazquez prepared his canvases with a deep ruddy brown and worked directly from there, seldom using separate drawings and sketches. But what do we feel of that moody approach? Where is the immediacy and the intimacy? Perhaps what could have been is best glimpsed in his early painting, Old Woman Poaching Eggs (housed today at the National Galleries of Scotland.) Diego was around eighteen or nineteen when he created this exceptional artwork, a bodegon painting featuring a haunted old woman making eggs for a young man. Before Velazquez moved to the royal palace of Madrid, he was a young man of modest background in Seville. He began a six-year apprenticeship with Francisco Pacheco at the tender age of ten, training rigorously in the techniques of art like proportion and perspective. Pacheco literally wrote the textbook of the era with The Art of Painting, a posthumous treatise on technical and thematic prowess for Christian painters that remains a classic in Spanish. As with Italy especially and European art history in general, art was a rich tradition of Catholicism, offering an array of dramatic themes, an integral part of the spiritual and community life of the Spanish. Diego of course painted religious works as had his teacher and all of his predecessors and peers. But paintings of everyday objects and scenes rather than religious or mythological stories were becoming widespread around this time, and Diego’s practice included pictures of citizens at the table, bread, leeks, bottles, and eggs. Paintings of peasants and merchants and foodstuffs came to be known as bodegon paintings (sometimes called tavern paintings) in the Spanish tradition, which were still life paintings of culinary objects and food, often featuring people and scenarios as well. Still life and genre paintings were historically on the lowest rungs of the hierarchy of art. Painting peasants in everyday life, or objects without people, did not match the lofty ideals of myth and meaning in religious, royal, and historical narrative painting. But even so, they were exceptionally popular and beloved. Art was an integral part of spiritual and community life, a staple of the Catholic churches. But after that, many more people visited taverns than royal corridors or the hallowed halls of academia. Bodegones showed off the prowess of the artists, enticing those with some means to commission a painting- look at the details here, the transparency of the glass carafe of dark wine, the metallic glint of the brass mortar and pestle, the glaze inside the cazuela. And they spoke to the people with representation of familiar objects and events, reflecting their world. Diego’s egg painting is extraordinary. Eggs in art history held layers of symbolism from ancient times, including essential nourishment, life itself, and regeneration and renewal. The artist contrasts the new potential of life in the eggs and the youth and the wine with the elderly woman near the closing of her chapter. Velazquez honours her with a dignified posture, elevating her life as a subject worthy of attention. Cooking and sharing food is exalted. The depicted characters could be our own family. The dignity afforded here to peasants turns up again later during Diego’s time in court, when he gives humanity and depth to the faces of people with differences and disabilities, such as his portrayal of a court jester, Portrait of Sebastián de Morra. The Spanish court had the regrettable practice of employing people with dwarfism or deformities in a similar spirit to their later employment in circuses and zoos. Under Diego’s brush, however, they were fully human. The tenebrism that defines much of Diego’s work is already present in Old Woman Poaching Eggs, but here, the shadows are alive, flickering with intrigue and possibility and bustle. The painting balances mastery and mystery, while offering common, everyday people a place at the table. Lorette C. Luzajic  Las Meninas, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1957  The Exhibition at Galería de Arte Mexicano, 1940 “Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world," said Andre Breton once. Anyone who has set foot in this strange and wonderful land of cacti and volcanoes, of luchador and matadors, of masks and micheladas, fierce stone gods, dancing calavera skeletons, cemeteries strewn with bones, nuns, and churches teeming with colourful and gory polychrome, has experienced this firsthand. “Mexico, half-awake of its mythological past keeps evolving under the protection of Xochipilli, God of the flowers and lyric poetry, and Coatlicue, Goddess of the Earth and of the violent death… This power of conciliation of life and death is without a doubt the principal attractive that Mexico offers. This keeps an open record of endless sensations, from the most benign to the most insidious,” Breton famously wrote. The French artist and writer was the founder of the surrealist movement, but on a visit to Mexico in 1938, he saw that surrealism was much older and deeper than he had ever imagined, thriving naturally outside of the confines of his own definitions. He was not the only European surrealist to have this jarring experience. Salvador Dali, the great genius of surrealist painting, visited only once. "Under no circumstances will I return to Mexico, as I cannot stand being in a country that is more surreal than my paintings." During his visit, Breton struck up a friendship with the most important artist in Mexico, Diego Rivera, and therefore, also, with Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo. Diego was of course the master muralist painter, but he dabbled constantly with new influences, pumping out a few cubist works after his time in Paris and a visit to Picasso’s studio, and now painting some winding mandrake roots and adding a spider web and skull to a portrait, expecting centre stage for Breton’s planned exhibition of surrealist art in his city at the Galería de Arte Mexicano.  Symbolic Landscape, by Diego Rivera (Mexico) 1940 Far more important to Breton’s Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo in Mexico City in 1940, organized along with Wolfgang Paalen and César Moro, was the contribution of Frida Kahlo. Breton was very interested in Frida’s work, describing it as “a ribbon around a bomb.” He also arranged her Paris debut the year before the big Mexican show. Kahlo rejected the label of surrealist artist. “I never knew I was a Surrealist until André Breton came to Mexico and told me I was,” she said. In a letter to Mexican-Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray, who was one of her lovers, she said, “They thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” Nonetheless, she busied herself with the creation of two important paintings for the exhibition, which would feature work by major artists like Dali (The Persistence of Memory, no less), Rene Magritte (the seminal Treachery of Images painting), Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Pablo Picasso, and May Ray, and cement Mexico as a recognized hub of surreal art. Frida seldom painted large-scale works, possibly because her intermittent health and mobility issues meant she often worked from her bed or a wheelchair. But both of the paintings in the show were uncharacteristically massive. Clearly she was savvy about positioning herself confidently and memorably in a way that would make an impact next to the mostly-male and European bigwigs of the exhibition, despite her disdain for the surrealist label, and for the surrealists, too. (In that letter to Nickolas, Frida continued, “They sit for hours in the cafés warming their precious behinds… thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic nonsense, and poisoning the air with theories and theories that never come true… You don’t have even the slightest idea of what kind of old cockroach Breton is, along with almost all those in the Surrealists group.”)  The Two Fridas, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1939 The first of Fridas paintings created for the exhibition would become her most famous piece. I was lucky enough to see The Two Fridas at its home in the Museo de Arte Moderne in Mexico City. The painting was a larger-than-life double self-portrait of twin Fridas sitting with her upright trademark form, holding hands, against a roiling dark and cloudy sky. Frida took inspiration from a work she saw at the Louvre in Paris that same year, The Two Sisters, 1843, by Théodore Chassériau. Both Fridas have their anatomical hearts exposed for all to see. One Frida is dressed in white, holding surgical forceps to try to stop her own bleeding. The other is dressed in a traditional Mexican blouse and skirt, and holding a tiny photograph of Diego. The timing of the exhibition overlapped for Frida and Diego with a time of great personal turmoil. Their marriage was on the rocks in 1938, following his affair with her sister and Frida’s affair with Leon Trotsky. They divorced in 1939, but it didn’t stick, and they married again December of 1940, later in the same year as Breton’s show. The Two Fridas boldly addressed the artist’s inner turmoil and how love and pain, and Diego himself, were so integral to her identity.  But it is the second painting, The Wounded Table, or La Mesa Herida, a painting few today have heard of and none or few living people have seen, that is arguably the most important work of Frida’s career. The painting showed at a handful of world exhibitions, and was last seen en route to Russia as a gift to the government of the Soviet Union. It was politely rejected and ostensibly shipped to a museum in Poland for a show. The trail stops there. Dealers and scholars have been looking for the painting ever since, and imposters have been trying to sell fake copies on the black market, but the whereabouts of the artwork remain to this day unknown. Frida probably created The Wounded Table, a sprawling, eight foot wide oil painting, with the intention that it would be the wow centrepiece of the exhibition among giants like Dali and Picasso and her ex-husband and again fiancé, Diego. The impressive work was not simply grand in size, but in complexity, theme, and skill. In The Wounded Table, we see Frida’s trademark weaving together of subjects of self-portraiture and Mexican folklore and mythology. Frida unabashed declaration against surrealism was, “I painted my own reality.” In this remarkable depiction of that reality, then, she seats herself audaciously and quite literally at the head of the table of martyrdom, where Christ sat at the last supper, with her wounds on display for all to see.  Replica of The Wounded Table, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1940 To the profoundly Catholic society of Mexico, this painting would have been deeply sacrilegious. Yet Frida often incorporated Catholic-tinged images, along with older and indigenous Mexican motifs and beliefs, into her artwork. Frida and Diego were both well-known as Marxist atheists who rejected the colonial institution of the Catholic church, but they were both sympathetic to the vast array of folkloric and religious imagery that meant a great deal to the Mexican masses. They considered Catholicism problematic, but also understood the power of its imagery as a visual language that meant a great deal to Mexicans. They collected and promoted pre-Columbian art and artifacts, much of it used as part of Breton’s exhibition on surrealism, and they also collected exvoto paintings, popular works of devotion by the people that were left in churches and at shrines in gratitude to saints. These folk paintings were an essential influence of Kahlo’s work and style. Frida could paint as intricately and realistically as Diego, but the vast majority of her works have a flat, almost-cartoonish affect to them, an aesthetic that is often called “primitive” that was a direct style choice in homage to this folk art tradition. Very early on in her trajectory as an artist, Frida had come across an exvoto that depicted a scene similar to her experience in a trolley accident. She was still a teenager, recently enrolled in medical school, when she was impaled by a steel rod during a streetcar crash, a kind of crucifixion that changed her destiny completely. The accident that injured her back and speared her uterus was the source of her lifelong debilitating pain and struggle with her legs and spine, and it robbed her of her hopes of having children. Frida altered the folk painting to make it personal, including adding her infamous bushy unibrow. In that year that she was bedridden in a body cast, she entertained herself by painting, ultimately taking her work to show to Diego Rivera. And the rest is history.  There was only one other known Last Supper painting by a female artist before the time of The Wounded Table, an extraordinary 25-foot wide work by a self-taught painter and Italian nun, Sister Plautilla Nelli, completed in 1568. But it was also lost, rotting away in a forgotten storage, until its recovery and restoration in the 1990s, so Frida, along with the rest of the world, was unaware of its existence. From this perspective, this makes Frida the first known female painter to use this religious motif to fuel her art, and the first to give women a place at the table. There would be numerous female and feminist renditions later on. Irish painter Nora Kelly recreated the classic scene by adding women as present at the supper. Mary Beth Edelson famously collaged the work from a multitude of underrated women artists. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Table installation was much different but referenced the historic theme in its conception. There are just a few photos of Frida’s painting in existence, and from these black and white pictures, reproductions have been made, with and without colour. She holds her head defiantly, sitting straight-backed as always, wearing a traditional Tehuana dress. Under the dress, her dripping blood seeps into the floorboards. The table itself has human legs and feet. At either side of the table are two children to her right, and a baby deer to her left. Frida loved her pet animals, including a deer named Gambizo. She also painted herself later as The Wounded Deer, summoning St. Sebastian with a body pierced by arrows and her own face on the deer. The children shown in The Wounded Table are her niece and nephew, the offspring of her sister Cristina, whom she loved, but by whom she was betrayed in the recent affair with Diego. Perhaps these children represent an even deeper wound than that betrayal: the pain of her own inability to have children. Frida desperately wanted to have Diego’s children, and by this time had already had three miscarriages or medical terminations because of the internal damage from the trolley crash. The strange figures that flank her blend Mexican folklore with her own mythology. The large paper mache figure of Judas towers over her the way Diego does, in every way, physically and symbolically. The Judas motif figures into Mexican folk practices, with annual burning rituals of Judas effigies. Frida is enmeshed with this figure of betrayal, enveloped and unable to escape him. There is an odd Nayarit figurine beside her too, a pre-Columbian sculpture collected by the artist couple. The skeleton we see is a popular Mexican motif. In this case, there is a hole in its pelvis exactly where Frida was impaled. Its foot is also amputated, precisely where Frida herself had several toes removed. The face of the skeleton is not the same as the cartoonish calavera emblems seen everywhere. Rather, she resembles Mictlancíhuatl, the Aztec Goddess of the Dead who died herself in childbirth. These characters, Judas, the skeleton, the Nayarit statue, and Frida, all appear in her work from the previous year, Four Inhabitants of Mexico, showing that their representation, herself included, mean Mexicanidad to her. The Kunstmuseum Gehrke-Remund, Baden-Baden, of Germany, which displays a replica of The Wounded Table, interprets this work parallel to all of her works: the profoundly personal is blended with Mexicanidad. Frida and Diego were both committed to this idea, that the Mexican identity of the people was the essence of their liberation and salvation, the truth that would set them free. The loss of aspects of Mexicanidad was the symbol of their dissolution and oppression. It's a powerful, magnificent painting. Frida wrote to Nickolas in late 1939 to say she was “working like hell” to have it ready for the big exhibition. The work was shown a few times and then in 1943, Frida decided she would donate it to the Soviet Union. This was a gesture of goodwill: Frida and Diego were staunch Marxists, but they had been supporters of anti-Stalinist deserter Leon Trotsky, harbouring him and his wife in the Casa Azul. While the couple stayed with them, Frida had a passionate affair with Trotsky, possibly as revenge for Diego sleeping with her sister Cristina. (Trotsky was assassinated several months after the surrealist exhibition.) Frida and Diego wanted to assert their commitment to communism in the aftermath of these complications. While Russia accepted the painting, they didn’t exhibit it. “It is necessary to bear in mind that we are interested in the works of the realist movement,” a Soviet official wrote in 1948. Kahlo’s work was “alien to the principles of Soviet Realist art…the possibility of displaying such artworks in the Soviet Union is excluded.” The painting was sent to be stored at the Pushkin Museum. Rivera convinced the Soviets to show the painting in an exhibition in Warsaw, Poland, the year after Frida’s death in 1947. This was the last time that the work was seen. Experts say it is unlikely it was returned to Russia, which didn’t really want it. But where it ended up is mystery. In 2020, a Spanish art dealer claimed he was in communication with an anonymous source in possession of the lost masterpiece. They were asking $45 million for the work, stating that the buyer could choose to work with historians to validate its origins after purchase. But art experts expressed concern about the painting’s substrate, suggesting that the original had been painted on wood panels, not canvas. The dealer maintains his conviction of its authenticity, saying that Frida used wood panels only for small paintings, and for her larger works, canvas. Canvas can be removed from its stretchers and more easily shipped to international destinations for display. It is true that the vast majority of her works were on canvas, and relatively few on wood. The Two Fridas, which was also painted for the surrealist exhibition, was on canvas. The Soviets dismissed Frida’s painting as, "Bourgeois, formalist and decadent." This leaves me scratching my head, wondering if I quite understand the meaning of these words correctly or need to revisit my definitions. Unconcerned with, or oblivious to, Frida’s feelings towards him, Breton himself stated that her work was “pure surreality, despite the fact that it had been conceived without any prior knowledge whatsoever of Surrealism.” The Wounded Table went on to exhibition at the Palace des Bellas Artes, a prestigious and, yes, bourgeois museum in Mexico City. Then it was sent to Russia, and on to Poland, and from there the trail goes cold. It might be said that Frida’s reality personified surrealism: the dominant voice inside us that is the unconscious, the one that ultimately speaks louder than the mundane and real. The Wounded Table is a self-portrait, after all. And Mexicanidad is, arguably, itself, surreal: ancient, mythic, contradictory, colourful, and theatrical, rippling with ancient spirits and the everlasting battle between the worlds of beauty and terror, between life and death. Lorette C. Luzaic   The Last Supper, by Plautilla Nelli (Italy) 1560s  Nile in New York City, wearing his hand-painted hibiscus coat. Photos courtesy of Nile unless noted. The Nile Experience His work is what visitors notice when they enter my home. My own frantic, urban, abstract, wildly colourful paintings cover every wall surface from floor to ceiling, but it is this one quieter, realistic work by another artist that draws their attention first. Inside a Toronto subway, a dozen weary passengers commute to destination unknown, juggling parcels and attending to their phones. On the left, the figure of a young man stands serenely with hands in the pocket of a long beige car coat. His curly hair is pulled back into a ponytail, revealing an elegant profile and eyes downcast, waiting. The viewer is pulled right into the train by the painting’s perspective because it positions them standing inside of it, looking down the barrel of the subway car. It is framed like a smartphone photograph, straphanger and car floor lines naturally taking the eye from here to there, as if we are scanning for the possibility of a seat. We are people-watching in daily traffic. Of all the people on our train, the figure on the left is the one that stands out. There’s something about his patient, solemn assurance. He is compelling, and beautiful. When my guests get lost in the picture, I point at the figure of the youth and tell them he is the one who created the painting. They can already tell there is something special about him and that is why they are looking. I tell them more: how in some ways, this young man has restored my belief in humanity,
It is a statement that might make Nile uneasy. There is no trace in him of many artists’ stereotypical proneness to self-importance or pretention. Nothing contrived. His confidence exudes from pure curiosity about the world and a hunger to learn everything he can about it. He is, here, only eighteen, innocent, green as gold. He is charming, articulate, passionate. His affect is not at all self-conscious or reserved, but there is a kind of awkwardness about him. He is certain but also bewildered. He has no idea how he got here, really, but here he is. And he has work to do. In one’s journey to middle age, despair is a natural response to a litany of disappointments. At some point, the relief of jaded realism sets in as one accepts the facts of life, the complicated frailties of ourselves and our fellow travellers. Along the way, the banalities of existence and the petty cruelties of life lose some of their sting. If we are disenchanted by our own unrealistic expectations of others, we eventually come to terms with some of the pervasive superficiality, conformity, and disinterest around us. We accept some of the upsetting incongruities with the understanding that everyone is on their own journey, with dips and peaks. We learn to discern the jewels in the mire, the small sparks that keep our soul alive. We see deeper connections and people who follow their own offbeat path for what those moments really are: extraordinary. And sometimes we are fortunate to encounter the remarkable. Let me tell you the story of Nile.  His name is Nile, like the river in Egypt. His full name is out there but it doesn’t matter. He is Nile, the artist. He is a self-taught painter who has been creating and selling paintings of what he sees en plein air on the city streets for eight years, since his arrival in Canada from Sudan when he was twelve. He carries his work and art supplies with him on his bicycle, rain, snow, or shine, and sets up on busy street corners, in subway cars, in parks. He has developed his skills practically, working in traditional techniques of perspective, draughtsmanship, colour mixing, and brushwork. He has used trial and error, practice, Youtube tutorials, and most of all, the study of artwork by diverse painters through history to inform his understanding and application of art. He has also diverged into the exploration of other media: silversmithing and jewelry design; metal sculpture; and textile art, adding vivid tropical flowers and ancient Egyptian patterns onto his car coats. Nile set up at his first fair last year, the long-running Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, and there he was granted the first Charles Pachter Entrepreneurial Emerging Artist Award. His subway series was exhibited at The Koffler Centre, where he also performed live painting. This is his third year at OCADU, the Ontario College of Art and Design University, in my hometown of Toronto, where he started his studies at age 17. It is highly unusual for a young person to be an accomplished, award-winning professional painter before starting and finishing formal training and education. Even so, that is not what’s most interesting about Nile or his work. It is also rare to have his direction and determination as a child. But it is his free, unorthodox spirit and unique vision that truly set him apart. Nile refuses to be imprisoned in convention or in can’t. He can, and he’ll find a way. While Nile describes his home and family life as “normal,” he has been working on the streets for years because he loves being part of the living, breathing city and its diverse communities. Money is no object, either. He is not interested in the limitations of his student budget or his location. Nile rides his bike everywhere, taking his studio with him. And I do mean everywhere: Nile put his bike on a train, twice, to New York City, to paint there en plein air. And he rode his bike from Toronto to Montreal to Quebec City, and back, to visit art galleries all along the way. Then he rode his bicycle to Detroit, to Washington D.C., and to Baltimore, documenting his journey on Instagram and camping roadside and in parks. He traversed thousands of miles on his bicycle. He’s thinking next of Mexico City, or Ecuador. The icing on the cake is his latest project. He recently bought an old school bus, tore out all the seats himself, and has started renovating the thing to turn it into a roving studio. Nile will turn twenty on Christmas Day.  Nile after bicycling to Washington D.C. from Toronto. I first met Nile on the Go Train from St. Catharines after Thanksgiving weekend at my sister’s a year ago. He was wheeling his rickety bike laden with milk cartons and canvases into the train. I couldn’t believe that he was on his way home to Toronto from New York City. And I couldn’t believe that I had never run into him before. I’ve lived in Toronto for 35 years and never saw him painting in Kensington or beside the old St. Lawrence Market. I was struck right away by his awkward charm. He enunciated his words and held his head with careful dignity. He was radiantly beautiful with caramel skin and a profile like Nefertiti. His carriage was confident yet there was a shyness there, too, and his coat and slacks were baggy over his slender frame. I loved him immediately. We exchanged Instagrams. On the way home, I scrolled through his paintings and adventures. I saw him in his pork pie hat and an oversize suit in urban doorframes, or sitting straight-backed on a milk carton at his outdoor easel. I saw him in his pale suit with Matisse and Modigliani at the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo. And I saw his own paintings, accomplished, complex works full of the streets he roamed, crowds of people and heavy traffic, intricate depictions of storefront facades and urban architecture. He posted frequently to his social media and had an enthusiastic audience. He had his own website as well with his paintings and prints for sale. After that, I saw Nile everywhere. Coming out of the Art Gallery of Ontario, I saw him whipping past on his bicycle. My partner texted from an escalator at the Eaton Centre with a selfie. “Look who I ran into!” and there was Nile, balancing his inventory and his bicycle on the way up. I headed to St. Lawrence Market and there was a small crowd gathered around Nile watching him paint. I was on my way to buy olives and picked up a chicken sandwich for him, too. I ogled the silver and lapis ring swimming on his index finger. And I bought the canvas print of him on the subway commute and took it home and hung it in my foyer. It gave me immense joy each day to know that such a person was out there in the world. A person hungry and curious for the art that came before him, a person serious about doing the work and improving his craft and exploring the possibilities, not afraid to try and fail, and not afraid, either, of excellence. A person open to adventure and courageous enough to follow his own path. A person determined to live his own way and to refuse any obstacles. A person with fans galore, a person who loved connecting with people and a variety of communities, who was nevertheless, flying solo. Out of necessity: because there simply isn’t anyone else like him.  Selfie with Nile at St. Lawrence Market. Nile arrived in Canada from East Africa when he was twelve years old. When I visit him at OCADU on a Sunday afternoon, he tells me how he started selling water bottles on the streets of Toronto. Taking his earnings to Dollarama to get more supplies, he got lost in the aisles of crayons and markers. He was excited by the way the colours came alive for him and wanted to create from those materials. He bought his first paints in that aisle. His earliest painting was “a basic sunset” and he sold it at Dundas Square. There are early pictures of him precociously standing beside a bundle buggy with his paintings clipped along the front and sides of his cart, hawking his work to passersby. He loved the direct connection with the people of the city. He started painting street scenes live and loved talking with the crowds that gathered around him, feeding off of the excitement he generated. People enjoyed watching the process of a painting come to life as they went about their day, and he sold his work directly from his easel. The price was $25 for a small canvas, or $5 for a painted rock. An overturned bucket on Yonge and Dundas was a favourite perch, and another was the bustling St. Lawrence Market, where he still works regularly. By age 14, he had 30 thousand Instagram followers. He has since rebranded, and is building his social media again. The print that hangs in my hallway was originally painted on site, in a series of commute pictures that Nile created directly from the car of a subway. He set up his studio inside the train, capturing the people around him as he worked. In a video on Youtube from the series, he said, “I want to give people an experience, and see the process and be a part of it, because quite frankly, this painting represents them. They’re a part of it. I like to paint it, and paint it in the real spot.” He rode the subway loop from Finch Station to Union Station and up to Vaughan and back around eight times to create the work in the series. BlogTO picked up the story and it went viral. Nile switched to oil painting several years ago, discovering that the quality of blending and flexibility with longer drying times was superior for the kind of work he was doing. His paintings are complex and intricate and realistic: he paints what he sees, following the lines of horizons and architecture carefully, blending colours that match the city and the people that he captures. His intention was to continue his studies independently. But he often rode his bike around OCADU because of its proximity to the Art Gallery of Ontario, which he visited frequently in order to study the work of different artists. He was drawn to the university’s street front window of mannequins, and he watched students working on looms and machines inside. He wanted to explore textiles and create art that you could wear. He registered for school and started painting his trademark car coats with fabric paints. He dyed his worn beige one dark green, and on a visit to Allen Gardens, a greenhouse at Sherbourne and Gerrard, he studied and sketched tropical plants, including a purple hibiscus flower, which he screen-printed onto his coat and embellished by hand. He started growing monstera plants, envisioning an eventual studio space with living greens, and hand-painted the leaves onto another coat. Inspired by an ancient Egyptian statue, he worked on another coat for two months, using red dyes and creating intricate fan patterns and the monstera leaf motifs. These distinctive, one of a kind coats have become his trademark, suggesting a future as a fashion icon and utterly original artist.  I visit Nile in an empty room at OCADU, where he is working on a narrative painting from his experience camping on the industrial outskirts of Philadelphia. He rode his bike from Delaware, taking shelter in a small tent. He tells me about the urban loneliness he felt “biking past the Sunoco gas station, rows of dilapidated houses, a big, abandoned penitentiary.” He took in the surroundings, telling me how the late light reminded him of animated film stills from Tom and Jerry cartoons. “These scenes of alleyways and pipe stacks were like liminal spaces,” he explained. "They are spaces in transition. They are spaces that people are just passing through to get somewhere else." He shows me some of the animated stills on his phone, empty, deep purple worlds with dark angles and pipe stacks. I am reminded of the era of Precisionist art, real but surreal, inhabited only by industry, and show him some paintings by Charles Sheeler. He says, “I want to paint the places that look like they have been forgotten.” His work in progress is about how, in the dead of night, he was awakened by a freight train roaring past. He had assumed the train tracks were as abandoned as the rest of the area. The event was so unnerving that he packed up his camp and rode his bicycle to the airport to take shelter with people coming and going, drinking coffee under bright all-night lights. Nile wants to start painting more from these personal experiences and adventures, and I agree that this direction is an important one. Art sometimes depends on our stories, and Nile’s audience is tuned in because we care about those stories. We live vicariously through others, always interested in how other people experience the world and the things they feel. Few of us will travel with this level of immediacy and risk, and we want to know more about what it’s like. It's a Sunday, but when he’s not riding his bike to explore new places and visit museums, Nile works seven days a week. “I’m here from around noon and often until midnight every day,” he explains. If he’s not here, he’s in class, learning to weld or weave, or painting in Kensington Market, getting to know the people of the city while he works. I ask him if he gets lonely when he’s not on the streets. “Never,” he says. “I need space to just think. I listen to music, I work on sketches of what I see in my head, and I paint.” He takes me on a tour of the school. There are few other students at work today, but most of the shops are open just in case. We visit the spaces for metal work, photography, printing, and painting. We peel and eat oranges in a lounge where a few people are reading. Then Nile takes me to a corridor where his monstera plants are thriving in a sunny window. When his bus is ready, he will move them onto it. He likes to have living things around him. Nile wants to visit Vietnam, to see the wild jungles and ruins there, and the textiles. “I want to go to Mexico,” he says, where everything is ignited with colours and spices and millions and millions of people. I tell him I have been to Mexico City several times and that it is my favourite place on earth, so far. “Many artist do, but I don’t especially want to go to Paris,” he says. “The Louvre is full of artifacts from all over the world. I would rather go to the places they were taken from, and see them in their real settings.” He might take his bike one day all the way to Mexico City. He can’t wait until his bus is road-ready and filled with his paintings, and he can go anywhere. To Mexico, or out west, to see more of Canada. “I am free,” Nile says. “Art is liberation. People should be able to do anything they want to do, and live any way they want to live. There are no rules. Unless you are hurting someone else, there shouldn’t be any reason you can't do whatever it is you want to do.” He knows that most people live with restrictions, family or work obligations. But he also understands that most restrictions are just conventions, and the idea of what we can and can’t do is in our minds. Nile is unlimited. He'll have more money later, but he’s not waiting for that in order to live. He has travelled to a dozen cities just by peddling a bicycle from one mile to the next. He doesn’t even have to worry about museum entry fees. “I bought a membership to the Detroit gallery, which has a reciprocal entry plan, the most of any museum reciprocation cards. With that membership, I can visit hundreds of museums from Alaska to Panama.” He lives on fumes and trust, knowing that he’ll be able to sell some of the work he creates on his way to fuel the next meal. He doesn’t stay in motels because he has a tent, although he will book something with Airbnb if an area feels too dicey. He is also free because he loves his work. His work is his life and his life is his work. They are not separate. His journeys, his homework assignments, his hobbies, and his workday, all the labour he does for art exhibitions or fairs, all of his studies, all blend into one thing. Since the age of twelve, he has been creating his own life, working tirelessly to mold it the way he wants it, full of passion and intrigue and growth, shirking unnecessary constraints. He doesn’t see the why nots that limit most of us. Obstacles are imaginary. He learned that he is free just by actually doing the things he dreams of doing. He is his own green light. Nile really doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary about his innate sense of agency or the fact that he’s been working for himself and working on himself as a DIY project from the age of twelve. His outlook is exceedingly unique for 19, or ninety for that matter. Age is just a number, along with a lot of other imaginary boundaries. I ask him outright if he understands that he is special. And it seems that my assertion has made him uncomfortable, something I did not intend. I wear my big, messy, heart on my sleeve, and am prone to calling it like I see it. And Nile is a jewel among rhinestones. I don’t think he sees himself this way, as set apart, as much as being part of everyone and everything. He is as playful as a child and as articulate and sage as his professors. He is part of all the people he comes across, equally comfortable around sporty suburbanites, street people, artists, or professionals. From the beginning, he talks to me as if we are old friends. I do think Nile is special, though, and I reiterate my conviction. “You are an incredible talent,” I tell him. “You are gifted as an artist, an entrepreneur, a hardworking individual, and as a rare personality.” I tell him to give himself all the time he needs, and to keep doing what he is doing, as his ideas unfold. “You are going to be massive,” I declare. He thanks me, then deftly deflects the conversation away from my praise onto more neutral ground. Before our meeting, Nile looked over my artwork online and learned a bit about my background as a collage artist, arts educator, and editor of The Ekphrastic Review. Our work is not remotely similar; we are ages apart and have very different cultural backgrounds and lives. But perhaps we share an outlook; we are hungry to know everything about the world, to experience it from the inside out. We share a passion for all kinds of art, for wanting to know and understand what is behind the work an artist does and why they do it. We spend several hours chatting and wandering through the various workshops of the school, in preparation for this article. But the time comes to leave him to get on with his work of the day. Nile presents me with an envelope. There is a surprise inside, a loose sketch in pen and marker, of me. One of his recent experiments has been creating spontaneous, quick drawings of people on the spot, something he did recently through the festivities of the annual cultural event, Nuit Blanche. It is something I will frame and treasure. I feel an overwhelming affection and the desire to nurture and mentor this unusual and wonderful young man. But it’s been obvious to me from the start that it is the other way around: I have much to learn from Nile about becoming a great artist. Lorette C. Luzajic View and purchase Nile’s paintings or learn more about his work at his web site: https://artistnile.com Please support Nile’s roving studio project to transform a bus into a moveable workspace. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-convert-my-bus-into-a-moving-art-studio?attribution_id=sl:fa8f607a-34fb-49bf-b5db-839e0a3ffc09&utm_campaign=natman_sharesheet_dash&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link Follow Nile’s adventures on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artistnile/    Painting by Nile of Distillery District building.  Another painting by Nile from the subway series.  
   For the Sake of Her Children, by Lana Matskiv (Canada, b. Ukraine) 2022 Defiant Stories Anyone who has met Lana Matskiv in person is already aware of the storyteller spell. Lana the artist is first and foremost a storyteller. She is an archetype, an astute observer and a magnetic force that draws everyone in and holds them close. When talking with her at a soiree, Lana’s audience leans in instinctively to catch every word. She talks about the stories inside the paintings of others, sharing her passion for the visual world. She recounts fables and fairy tales and operas. She tells of her own harrowing scrapes. Most of all, she glows when sharing a fellow traveller’s triumphs and tragedies. She is right there with them every step of the way. This is what you must listen for when looking at Lana’s paintings. Despite immediate impressions of exquisite colourship, of impossible precision, flawless perspective, and mastery of composition- the artist as storyteller is how you must approach her art. There are a multitude of labyrinthine rivers coursing under the surface of these stunning paintings, deep and wide with promise and meaning, with hurtful and hopeful histories, blood and water as real as that running through your own veins. Because it is yours: in the layers of fairy tale and fancy, of history and hell, Lana paints for the truth that lies at the bottom of the well but always spills out, defiantly, and ready for battle and beauty. No matter what Lana’s paintings show on their surface, they are her story, told through the story of others. Whether a portrait, or an homage to a cultural treasure, or a scene from folklore or ballet, Lana paints about wandering, about movement, about migration. This road is best taken by choice, when we follow our hearts and curiosities to learn more about others and the world, or by chance, when wanderlust changes our course and becomes part of our fate. Of course, the road is too often the desperate path of refugees or immigrants sacrificing home for hope of a life of freedom from oppression. The dance is one of danger and bitter obstacles for too many. But even so, there is beauty in each story. Over thirty years ago, Ukrainian-Canadian artist Lana Matskiv fled the Soviet Union with nothing but six dollars, her teenage daughter, and a rolled-up painting in her possession. Anything else she had was left behind, or taken from her en route. She was a journalist by profession, interested in people’s stories, in their cultures and histories. This curiosity and compassion, along with her own experiences, informed her lifelong interest in themes of migration and immigration, wanderers, travellers, refugees, and settlers. She has been driven to understand what is behind people and what is in front of them when it comes to the dangers and promises of the road. Is home something you leave behind, or something you carry in your soul? Lana’s interest in the arts is lifelong. “In a country where religion was forbidden, the god in my family was art,” she says. Born in Poltava in Central Ukraine, art and literature surrounded her. Her family prized writers and philosophers connected to local history, Gogol, Kotlianarevsky, Kotsybuynsky, Lesia Ukrainka. Childhood in Ukraine meant total envelopment and saturation in folk arts such as embroidery, kilim weaving, and pysanka- elaborate decoration of Easter eggs with pre-Christian astrological patterns. Everywhere, there was Petrykivka painting, a decorative folk art tradition from Central Ukraine. Paintings of floral and avian motifs on freshly whitewashed abode walls, ceiling beams, boxes, hearths and more brought colourful cheer to the atmosphere and celebrated humanity’s place inside the natural environment. Each bird and flower held unique symbolism of eternity, masculine and feminine beauty, harmony, eternity, and the cyclical rebirth of nature. Lana attended art school in Kharkiv, and had private instruction in Odessa, where she also frequented regular literary gatherings or exhibitions of artists in secret studios. Many artists were jailed, exiled, or forbidden to paint or show their work. It didn’t make sense for a middle-class girl to become an artist in this political climate. Becoming a teacher was seen as a stable or respectable option. Lana also had a passion for literature and a gift for writing, but she was most drawn to what she calls “faction” rather than fiction- she was interested in the real stories. She had an aptitude for history and politics and an instinct for people, so she went into journalism. This very appreciation for stories past and present, for cultural diversity and expression, was the same reason for her continued interest in visual literacy. Art is the fingerprint of a culture, the way a culture reveals itself. It is also about her deep connection to people as individuals, because art is the way we express our unique perspectives and communicate with each other across time and across borders. Lana still yearned to create art herself, but as a newcomer in Canada, she found meaningful legal work. She was busy with pragmatic and urgent work helping other refugees. While she used her professional life to help newcomers land and build their lives, she was forging connections and friendships and imprinting the stories of their lives on her soul. She also became something that is perhaps even more important than the creation of art- a collector of art. Lana built an impressive collection of art through her years in Canada, starting with her artist friend’s rolled up portrait that she brought with her. The Matskiv Collection is something rare, a rich and eclectic range of works of Canadian and European painters, focused heavily on Ukraine. Some jewels include Viktor Gontarov and Mykola Mogylat. Collecting art is arguably the best education available. It involves commitment, conviction, and sacrifice. The Matskiv Collection has been exhibited at the Palette School of Art in Vaughan, and her door has always been open for private tours. Seven years ago, the many roads and branches of Lana’s life intersected by chance or destiny. Lana was returning home from some errands and saw that a woman was set up outside of her home, painting a watercolour streetscape. Of course Lana struck up a conversation with the artist, Manije Sabet, who happened to be a recent immigrant from Iran. Lana signed her daughter up for art classes at Manije’s studio, and before long acquired a piece for the Matskiv collection as well. At the second scheduled instructional, Lana’s daughter was late and the artist invited her to come in and draw rather than waiting idly. A sleeping giant came to life in that moment. “Since that time, I never stopped,” Lana says. There are many paths available to an artist today, and many modes of expression. But while Lana sees immense beauty in all kinds of forms, she is an intense, thorough person and for herself, there was only one possibility, the hardest one. “I wanted to draw and paint,” she says. “And I had to learn how to draw and paint realistically.” “The world did not need another amateurish landscape or still life. The pursuit was only worth my while if I learned to do it on an acceptable professional level.” Lana was working full time and was a mother, too, and she was not sure how to resolve this issue. But she felt she had something important to say, and on another level, she understood that all her pursuits and experiences were now converging. There was no choice but to go forward with this calling. She had stories to tell. Lana began her work with Oleh Nedoshytko, a private instructor from Odessa that she invited to Canada. They worked together from a method known as “constructivism,” which is essentially dissecting subjects into their essential geometric forms. A second method was the French Atelier way, which involved exercises to develop motor skills, following the mantra to “draw what you see.” Lana’s nature, of course, was to decide she needed to learn both methods to get where she was going. She began working at the Toronto Academy of Realist Art, founded by internationally renowned teacher Fernando Freitas. She also undertook studies at the George Brown in Fine Art Foundations for a helpful overview of anatomy, art history, composition, design fundamentals, and illustration. In this short time, Lana has already given birth to a vast and difficult body of work, painting and drawing around the clock. Her art has already been exhibited, collected, awarded, and auctioned. Her work was part of a Waddington’s fundraiser for Ukraine, and it was displayed at the Ukrainian embassy. It is in the permanent collection of the Ukrainian Canadian Art Foundation. A careful observer will see Lana’s vulnerability leaking from the edges of her confident brushstrokes. She has rigorous expectations for herself, but isn’t interested in adulation for her gifts of draughtsmanship, or in the way she can focus and construct a likeness in time and space. She credits her teachers for these talents, and wants her work to be recognized for something else. “Even the chairs at Fernando’s Academy can learn to draw reasonably well in a short period of time,” she claims, as if a brilliant instructor can transform a lump of coal to gold with nothing in talent or labour from the artist herself. When I marvel with the helpless jealousy of another artist next to a master’s talents, Svetlana dismisses my praise. “It’s something that anyone can learn, with practice,” she tells me, as if the magic of light on ballet’s silk or ancient coral beads is a passing trifle. But these paintings could not be created on emotion alone - they required a gruelling commitment of time and patience, a remarkable talent, and a dedication to work and study that few painters possess. But we can understand where Lana is coming from if we understand what fuels her passion to create art. This is not merely the desire for self-expression or for a creative outlet. This is about all the experiences she has amassed along the way, absorbed from her culture in the occupied Ukraine, accumulated from the voices she has worked to free. These paintings are not about the meticulous tonal variegation or the painstaking accuracy of their objects. They are about struggle, survival, soul, and beauty. “What does it for me it to capture form, shape, and colour in the world around me, as they are divine. But they only live on a support surface if they have a spirit and get my message across,” Lana explains. The stories are dense and richly layered, in literary allusions and references to fairy tales and folklore. They are there in homages to other artists, to writers, to mythologies. They are woven in the brushstrokes that bring symbols and motifs across vast geographies, across time. They are written into the traditions Lana acknowledges in patterns. They are lurking in the faces of her models. They are written in the flowers and birds. “For this show, I prepared a story about wanderers…They defy the gravity of the comfort zone and embark on the road not only by choice, or by trade, but too often by circumstances larger than themselves. But there is much beauty along the way. The beauty they encounter, and the beauty of spirit they develop. I hope I captured some of it in these paintings. Much more to come.” Lorette C. Luzajic This essay was previously published in Lana Matskiv: Paintings and Graphic Works, 2022, the catalogue that accompanied the artist's exhibition at the Shevchenko Museum, Toronto. It formed the basis of the keynote speech Lorette gave at the opening of the exhibition.   Lana Matskiv at the show.  Lana and Lorette   The Queen's Gambit, by Lana Matskiv (Canada, b. Ukraine) 2025  Easter Journey, by Lana Matskiv (Canada, b. Ukraine) 2019-2022  The Magic of Mercurio: an Artist at an Exhibition for Giuseppe Mercurio “I don’t know what I’m doing,” the artist reveals candidly from the podium. It is Giuseppe Mercurio’s first retrospective exhibition, curated by Francesca Valente at the Joseph D. Carrier Art Gallery in Toronto. We are surrounded by giant, colourful canvases, playful, instinctive, semi-abstract, gestural works; immense palimpsests of splash and scrape and shape and sgraffito, of asemic writing and graffiti and colour fields. The paintings are raw and intuitive. They are both ancient and ultra-contemporary, each one a kind of archeological dig that excavates old cities and cultures, treasures of cuneiform and intaglio, from a surface of the modern city and all of its flash and griffonage and neon signs. But the pulse is personal, too; we are wandering through the artist’s emotional landscape and imagination, a person of passion and frenzy, mischievous, driven, and outrageously creative. Mercurio’s parallel incarnation is that of chef and restauranteur. Almost thirty years ago, he opened Bar Mercurio on Bloor Street near the Royal Ontario Museum. It’s an intimate, rustic space centered around the classic long bar and a bountiful, glittering apothecary of bottles, serving spectacular pizza on sourdough, succulent duck pappardelle, and the best carpaccio in the world: grass-fed, drizzled with the oil of Sicilian olives and bright lemons. My initiation into Bar Mercurio was by chance, walking past after a lecture on science at the University of Toronto. It was late on a late summer evening and there was a free space on the patio. My date and I agreed that a glass of Mount Etna wine and a pizza seemed like a perfect nightcap. Stepping inside to visit the facilities, it was a series of intriguing paintings that stopped me in my tracks. These were bold and marvelous creations, magical mazes of colourful shapes and word fragments. They summoned Hans Hoffman, Gorky, Kline, Klee, De Kooning, Tapies, Twombly, and Basquiat, while wholly original to their maker. And yet, I recognized them as if looking into a mirror. Someone I did not know saw what I saw, was driven by similar aesthetics, a frantic, raw creativity amok with adventurous colour, messy beauty, fragmented dreams, scrawled words, numbers, and cryptic sigils. Our art was very different: this artist was much better and more advanced on his path; he worked on larger substrates; we both used acrylic media but mine used collage liberally and employed fewer drawings. But creatively, I knew that we were kindred spirits. I inquired as to the provenance of the paintings and was told it was the owner’s work. This was the only invitation I needed to centre Bar Mercurio as the restaurant to which I would return for every special occasion as the next eight years unfolded, feasting on calamari and spaghetti and salads with mixed greens and candied walnut morsels, and sampling my way through a gorgeously curated wine list. For many years before it stopped publishing, I wrote regularly on wine and art pairings and on food lore for Good Food Revolution, with wine, food, art and literature a holy tetrad of my personal and professional passions. Here at Bar Mercurio were all the things I loved most. To this day, we visit for enchanted dining at every anniversary or with guests from out of town. Back on that first night, my date returned to the patio after paying the cheque inside, and said, “Did you see the paintings? The art reminds me of you.” Perhaps it is gauche to put too much of the spotlight in a story of another artist’s work on one’s self. But the parallels in source, style, aesthetic and inspiration would be a glaring omission if not acknowledged. It was absolutely transformative to encounter the work of an artist who clearly experienced the world and the creative process with a mutual intensity, an artist who speaks in a similar language. I dreamed of seeing dozens of Joe’s paintings, and entering the Joseph D. Carrier gallery for his first retrospective, that dream came true. This exhibition is exquisitely curated by Francesca Valente. The spacious, palatial architecture and two-story showcase allows guests a journey with the paintings, with ample room to encounter each work. Grand, yet intimate. Up close and personal, each painting reveals a masterful medley of rich textures and movement, a buoyant dance of mark-making. You are submerged into joy and revelry, but there is a sardonic undertow, too, an alchemy where tension and anger are released into light. There is, too, poetry, and a spirit of play. It is often said that the key to unlock the ninety million dollar secrets of Mark Rothko’s works is to enter them physically and encounter them as a form of meditation. Rothko, the abstract expressionist, famously painted large-scale colour fields, simple rectangle blocks of contrasting colours. These consistently sell for tens of millions of dollars and are status symbols for collectors and museums. The secret is to stand in front of them and dissolve into the experience of the colour, to become one with them, if you will. Contemplating them in this way will deliver an emotional confrontation. Rothko himself stated, “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” I enjoy the occasional Rothko immersion, but have never quite fallen under their spell. The high stakes commerce obliterates the spirit and simplicity of the contemplative experience that might make sense in its absence. Still, I am a champion of this technique: entering into art and surrendering to it, meditating on it, and allowing a profound connection, is the best way to experience art. It is a technique that proves a revelation with Mercurio’s canvases. It’s as if stepping outside of yourself is the ideal way to step inside of yourself. Communion here takes you into another realm, into the mystery of creativity. There is something essential that happens, that is, something of the essence, a spell where all that is enigmatic, where mystery itself, takes material form and becomes image. “By transcending any reference to contingent elements, Mercurio embraces a new realm in which the tangible and intangible become one, the outer and inner worlds appear as an unicum in a mental dimension which incorporates the past and the present simultaneously,” writes Valente in her curatorial statement. This magic cannot come from instruction. You might say that it can only be liberated. It is pure imagination and freedom. The artist must have a conviction of beauty, yet be in profound embrace with a wide and broad definition of such an elusive ideal. They must see beauty everywhere, so that they can show us, while being paradoxically unflinching in the face of terror and darkness, because here, too, is beauty, and some of the truth of the world. “Why do I paint and what do I paint?” For Mercurio, it is rhetorical question. “These inquiries have haunted me for a very long time and they have been a very tough code to crack. A copious mass of coats have been peeled away to glimpse at this existential matrix.” The Catalan painter Antoni Tapies has been profoundly influential in my own practice. Tapies saw creation as a ritual act, as a way of participating in and connecting with the consciousness of the universe and time. He loved to include humble materials, emulating the ordinary and overlooked aspects of the world, such as textures in sidewalk pavements or a discarded stick. Mark-making and graffiti to him were symbols and incantations. Repetition and all that is raw and elemental were aspects of, building blocks, of meditation and ways to plug in to the past and future. Attention and intention were spiritual or mystical matters, and being present for experience was the essential work of the artist, the spectator, indeed, anyone. He was interested most in a deep engagement with the materials he used. I have long used recurring symbols in my artwork, and perhaps the simplest of them is the X or the +, recurring motifs for Tapies as well. I see them elsewhere, of course, including in Mercurio’s paintings. The straightforward intersection of two lines has always resonated as deeply meaningful to me, suggestive of signature or being present (“X marks the spot”), of seeing inside something (“X-ray vision”), of lovers coming together (“xoxo”), of standing in for something else (“x+y”), of life (the ancient ankh of Egypt), of intersections and decisions (the crossroads), of declarative and decorative mark-making (graffiti), and of God and man uniting or Christ’s power over death (the Christian cross.) This is admittedly a lot to wrench from one humble mark, but there is just as much meaning in a circle, a stripe, a dot of orange, a spiral, a star. Every mark made by an artist participates in a complex, universal, multilayered symbolic code. It is not always a jigsaw puzzle to be meticulously pieced together, or to be deciphered, but rather, experienced on all levels, consciously or unconsciously. As Mercurio stated in his speech at the opening, “Only you, the viewer can complete the story on these canvases.” Images transcend the maker’s intention. They communicate from both the concrete and the liminal. Standing in the presence of Mercurio’s art is to be fully here, and fully “there” at once. It is the same sacred experience of entering into a cave of handprints and horse outlines in ochre and animal fat marked there by people who lived thousands of years in the past. An image is one way that we participate in eternity. By nature, I am sign-seeking and introspective, always linking the individual to the archetypal. I approach art with whole-hearted openness, expecting to be changed and transported. My appreciation is wildly diverse: I adore the meticulous draftsmanship prowess and rich symbolic language of still-life painting; I am swept away by the beauty and mythology blushing under the pre-Raphaelite’s brush; I love the opulent maximalism of the rococo and the high drama of Latin American colonial religious art. Perhaps I am most critical of the art that bears some resemblance to the aesthetics of my own work: I love street art, and yet feel most of it uninspired or driven by a hackneyed desire to shock. I feel that Picasso’s grandiose confidence gave way to spectacular innovation that paved the road for me and my collages, yet his inflated ego deterred him in some ways from growth. He never did master composition and most of his works evoke no emotions at all. (Acknowledging that I’m on thin ice here! Joe expressed to me, “Picasso said that it took him old age to finally pain like a child. I vibrate profoundly with this thought!”) Franz Kline’s sweeping gestures zing with the energy and movement of dance, but Jackson Pollock’s are muddy and too easy to replicate. Jean Michel Basquiat was a genius and the rhythms of his graffiti and pictorial improvisations reflect the fragmented ways that our minds manifest information, identity, and memory. But Julian Schnabel’s efforts at the same are discordant and empty. Mercurio’s art shares something with the best of these, all the while resisting labels. “I do not have any favourite artists,” he told me. “I am drawn obviously to the great American abstract artists, but I struggle with anyone in their entirety. I love individual paintings for the momentary idea shared.” In his artist statement, Mercurio says, “I detest the limits of being defined.” His art is pure instinct and conjure. Joe is a self-taught painter. In his speech, he states, “I am not a classically trained painter, I have had no formal training…However, I am committed to tirelessly paint.” His mentor was Uno Hoffman, a Swiss-born artist who lived here in Toronto. (I was shamefully not familiar with Hoffman’s artwork until I started cyberstalking Joe’s.) There is a compelling immediacy in self-taught work that I find irresistible: at its best, it embodies that which cannot be taught- freedom, instinct, imagination, ambiguity, rhythm, innovation, experimentation, exploration, expressiveness, nuance, paradox. Indeed, as Joe said to me, “My artistic process must be immediate.” He begins “with a canvas pinned to the wall.” Using acrylic paints and oil sticks, Mercurio starts with an undercoat and builds with brush and paint stick. “Painting is the medium I use to release something that resides inside of me which must be expressed. A cathartic release… painting depicts the inner nuances, emotions, feelings, etc. As such, they complete their journey and do not remain stuck within!” The self-taught artist must draw not from the particular school of thought inherent in his training, but from his own devices and the constellation of personal influences and interests. This is the richest environment for art to flourish. Mercurio’s work is vivid and emotional, thrumming and alive. He is a confident colourist, unafraid of unpredictable juxtapositions. His work pulses with flavours, with conversations, with cultures and cities and a roller-coaster spectrum of emotions. He draws from his Calabrese heritage and Toronto home, from the studio, from his family and the kitchen and his love of bicycling. His educational background in statistics and Italian language make an appearance, too, with layers of ambiguous script and mathematical calculations forming part of the texture of his art. Perhaps those who dine at the divine Bar Mercurio have front row centre insight into Joe’s art. At the helm of this restaurant, Joe is both exacting and freewheeling. Quality is first: only the best ingredients will do. He is an expert curator, bringing together flavours and ambiance that are experiential for his guests. There is a sense of tradition and the hospitality of the old world and family, with Mom on deck for quality control, and the warm and gorgeous Jackie to attend to our every creature comfort. Everything is expansive and generous, and every staff member is unique, contributing in their own way to the culture of the place. It is busy and noisy, yet the atmosphere is relaxed. The food is upscale and immaculate, yet you can come as you are and be comfortable. Perhaps Joe’s name holds some clues, too; the fleet-footed Mercury was the messenger of the gods, the Roman god of business, travelers, communication, and mischief. The word “mercurial” draws from this archetypal history and denotes passion, quick-thinking, intelligence, impulsivity, eloquence, and ingenuity. Joe strikes me as creative, clever, witty, intense, hard-working, ambitious, and over the top. He has a rich background of academic, artistic, and entrepreneurial endeavours, but even so, you can tell he is a live wire, operating almost entirely on instinct. On top of all that, there is a certain je ne sais quoi here: from my first visit to Bar Mercurio, I felt it was an oasis, an enchanted, inspired place. Everything here can equally apply to the experience of his art. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he says. Only, clearly, he does. One foot in the old world, the other in the new and the now, and the rest in a different place entirely. Pure magic. Lorette C. Luzajic Visit Mercurio’s exhibition On New Ground until September 29, 2025 Joseph D. Carrier Gallery 901 Lawrence Avenue West, Toronto Artist website: https://www.studio1mercurio.com/about Visit Bar Mercurio: 270 Bloor Street West, Toronto https://www.barmercurio.com  A Pantomime with a Bugle (Giuseppe Mercurio, 2020)  Joe and Lorette.  The Algorithm in Delirium (Giuseppe Mercurio, 2019)   Pizza of the gods.  Toller Cranston and his dogs in Cabbagetown. Toronto Star Archives. Beyond the Beyond: Toller Cranston In my wildest days, I lived in a basement apartment on George Street in Toronto, just across from Allan Gardens, a botanical greenhouse and sketchy park where dog walkers, street walkers, and an assortment of addicts would convene to partake in the various mysteries of intoxication. The nearby pub, Pimblett’s, where I held the after-party for my wedding, and Walk on the Wild Side, a longstanding establishment for wigs and large sized ladies’ shoes, were classic haunts for transgender women and crossdressers. It was a neighbourhood frequented by a rare breed, old queens, the fey and the fabulous, if you will, those wonderfully flamboyant characters with a penchant for antiques and excess, for opera and old movie stars. One such personality was my neighbour Paul, known for his lawn chair perch surrounded by scraggly rhododendrons, decked to the hilt in festive fuchsia feather boas atop an old “wife beater” style tank shirt. Anyone and everyone was welcome to join him for a tumbler of Maria Christina, even before noon, or a sampling from assorted pills and powders served on a vintage Tiffany platter. You would be regaled with racy stories and scathing witticisms about passersby if you stayed. It was the same district where the enigmatic Toller Cranston was often seen in his big floppy hats and his fur capes, walking his spotted English setters. On one occasion when his beloved dog Minkus got lost and the locals helped find and return him home, Toller had thrown a party for them. “To show my appreciation…I had a cocktail party for all the people who had helped me: the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the pimps, and the mental patients from the streets…They were imperial. They were perfection. They were so helpful.”  Toller Cranston skates in front of Toronto's city hall in February, 1973. Fred Ross / Canadian Press Photo Toller Cranston was the charismatic Canadian icon best known for revolutionizing the world of figure skating. He was a virtuoso, internationally renowned athlete who took national champion of Canada six years running from 1971 to 1976. Though he “only” took the bronze medal in the Olympics and never made gold, his epic flights of fancy on ice changed history forever, turning the sport into art. If it smarted to evade the gold medal that many believe was rightfully his, Toller said it was a useful reminder that he always had something more to strive for. “I really wasn’t a competitor…The only person I was competitive with was myself.” And if the names of gold medalists often fade into forgetting, no one could forget Toller’s radical contributions. Certainly, he was keenly aware of what he had wrought. In his books, he refers to himself repeatedly as the Patineur du Siècle, the skater of the century, and he is right. Toller brought interpretive, full-bodied expression, dance, creativity, and musicality into the game. With his seemingly impossible choreography, exquisite high kicks, and spinning fluidity, he was known as Nijinksy on Ice. Indeed, the man who made theatre on the rink had started with ballet at the age of six. The hockey skates he was given as a child were meant to make a man of the boy who wanted to be a ballerina, but the young Cranston began inventing dances with them. His spectacular leaps and bounds were all the more astonishing when we consider that at age thirteen, he was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter, a condition of inflammation of the ligaments. He was told he would never skate again. But one thing the world came to know about Toller Cranston was that he never took no for an answer. In his autobiography, When Hell Freezes Over, Toller wrote: "The great moments in figure skating occur when a performer is true to his own nature, and puts his heart and soul on the line with no holds barred." This is what he gave to the ice, and to all of us, the entirety of his body and soul. In doing so, he changed the sport forever into art. With those impossible, arabesque arcs and arches, in skin-tight sequinned orange and aqua deep plunge V neck disco jumpsuits, he was dazzling and over-the-top. No one had ever seen anything like it. And we couldn’t keep our eyes off of him.  Toller Cranston's House in San Miguel, Mexico. Andrew Osta, CC BY-SA 4.0 Toller Cranston was a maximalist in every way, on and off the rink. Everything was dialled up to eleven. He was theatrical, smart, exaggerated, and snazzy. He glittered. He was the same eccentric character whether at work and at play. He was electric. By my day, he had retired from skating and sold the house he lived in two streets over, and all the treasures of his infamous clutter, enchanted old gewgaws and curiosities. Toller described his home as “rococo gone loco” and as part museum, part “bordello.” “I had a green Murano glass fountain that lit up, played music, spewed perfumed water, and changed colour,” he wrote in his memoirs, Zero Tollerance. “I had nine-foot-long Mexican Christ figures from the 18th century flying in the air. I had jewelled boxes; anything that would illuminate itself, marble columns that lit up; secret, strange things; magical things; wonderful things; terrible things; practically hideous things; exquisite things.” Waddingtons, where he loved shopping til dropping, recalled that he would scoop up every carved wooden cherub they had. “Toller was always on the hunt for the wild, the colourful, the outrageous, the beautiful and anything over the top,” wrote Duncan McLean in his eulogy at the auction house. “His favourite expression when he saw something he had to have was: ‘It’s beyond the beyond!’” Later, Waddingtons sold all those things for him. Toller took the money and ran, off to San Miguel in Mexico. There, he spent the next twentysomething years collecting a new assortment of baubles and handicrafts, and also, doing something else: painting. In fact, Toller Cranston considered himself an artist first. Skating was but one kind of art, collecting, another. All of it stemmed from his imagination as an artist, and painting was his primary expression. Toller described himself as a “painter who skates.” The San Miguel de Allende blog quotes him as saying, "We're all born with an inclination in the genes. Who we are, what we're supposed to do, it's in the DNA. I had full knowledge as to what my destiny was—my inclination—from a very early age. I was a painter." By the age of sixteen, Toller was a self-supporting artist. He did attend post-secondary studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Montreal, but he didn’t graduate. When his teachers told him there was nothing more he could learn there, he left. He was already using his professional painting to fund his costly ice-skating adventures. Still a teenager, he held exhibitions in his skating coach’s house. Barely 21, he had a major exhibition in Toronto. He considered himself a self-taught artist, and on his world skating tours, he visited the great museums everywhere. “That was my education,” he said. He learned how to paint from his skating artistry, too. “Something that I learned as a skater, and brought it into my painting, was the idea of rhythm and the never-ending line.” Our northern Nijinsky had more than enough accomplishments and contributions in figure skating, but they were a sideshow next to his life as a painter. He had been studying and creating visual art from the beginning, and until the day he died, in 2015, of a heart attack at the age of 65, he painted obsessively in his self-imposed exile to Mexico. Twelve hours a day, he said, seven days a week. He had several hundred solo exhibitions around the globe. The sheer volume of his output attests to such a schedule: in 2025, he told the Globe and Mail he had created over 30 thousand paintings, not including drawings and prints. The estimated number occasionally changed, being cited as 70 thousand in another interview. Most experts put the number at a minimum of over 20 thousand. And he sold them all. As a point of comparison, Pablo Picasso’s prolific output is estimated at 13 500, not counting prints and sketches, and Paul Klee meticulously logged his oeuvre to show close to 10 thousand works. Marc Chagall probably has around the same as Klee. Quantity meant something to Toller, who bedazzled every square inch of his homes, performances, and canvases with eclectic oddments and razzmatazz and curiosities. But quality mattered, too. He was driven by beauty and magic. And his paintings are spellbinding and masterful. For a man born into the drab gray industrial landscape of Hamilton, Ontario, Cranston’s art is inexplicably enchanted, with fantastical scenes and creatures, evoking Russian Orthodox ostentation, Croatian naïve art traditions, an aesthetic of opera, ballet, and fairy tales, Canadian woodland native art, colonial Spanish opulence, and Mexican shrines and folk art. His life and work personified the aesthetic of horror vacui, or “fear of an empty space.”  Photo of Toller Cranston with his art, taken a few days before his death in 2015. Andrew Osta, CC BY-SA 4.0 Sarah Hampson’s Globe article made much of Cranston’s colourful persona, patronizingly dismissing his theatricality as performative vanity. This fashionable reaction to Cranston is almost part of his legend. “Cranston is not so much an artist as a performance artist,” Hampson harrumphed. She emphasized the man’s audacity to compare himself to Van Gogh. "’My work is windows into another world that no one else sees,’ he proclaims… He sighs. His voice has a drawl to it, a suggestion of ennui, as if he has long come to terms with his sense of superiority and the explanations it requires…Artistic arrogance is the costume Cranston dons to strut through the world... He once wore a peacock outfit in a skating performance and still, at least in spirit if not in dress, he likes to fan out his plumage.” It makes for good reading, to be sure. But the implication that Cranston, the “peacock with the paintbrush” didn’t merit his streak of eccentricity doesn’t fly. His passionate drive as an artist was borne out by his lifelong, obsessive work ethic as an artist, whether on skates or with brush in hand. Perhaps the writer did not understand the concept of camp. A classic archetype of gay personae, camp is an artful and dramatic way of life. Camp is difficult to define: it is performative, yet second nature to those who possess it. It is about art and artifice, yet impossible to fake. It’s a show, but more than that, a way of being. It is both ostentatious and subdued. Intelligence, wit, and irony are hallmarks of camp, yet it inverts and disrupts dominant ideals of beauty and taste. Camp is a form of masquerade, yet it must come naturally in order for one to possess it. In camp, everything is exaggerated, and yet it is sharp and incisive and confident. Camp is about excess emotionalism, and yet it is detached. To be camp, one must possess a cocky superiority complex, but it is also self-deprecating. The word might come from the French, se camper, meaning to pose in an exaggerated way. Camp is Oscar Wilde, Freddie Mercury, Jean Cocteau. Toller Cranston’s grand gestures and maximalist sensibilities on ice and in art, are absolute camp.  The Bride Who Flew Away, by Toller Cranston (Canada) 2007 As an artist, he was also a magician. His paintings are other worldly fairy tales from his fertile imagination, a veritable circus of fantastical costumed queens and creatures, summoned from mythology, dance, folklore, and literature. He was profoundly influenced by both folkloric and Imperial Russia, and the history of Russian ballet, and visited often from his youth. Pravda, the Russian paper, described him as “more Russian than the Russians.” His work was also heavily informed by theatre and dance. His paintings are narratives and performances for operas and ballets that have not yet been written. They are resplendent, too, with ornament and motifs and patterns inspired by palaces, by tiles and embroidery and painting in Uzbekistan, Persia, China, India, Mexico and beyond. They are ostentatious, and decorative, evoking sumptuous fabrics. They are floral, ornamental, all silk and velvet. They are whimsical, mythic, phantasmagorial. Toller sometimes felt like a fish out of water, misunderstood, as he put it, by a country that was too young to “get” his old soul. "Our country is too new,” he told Hampson in 2003. “The DNA is too new. The brains are too new." He was probably right. If his slight seemed snide, it was a response to a real phenomenon. Canadians by and large ignored his art completely, and some dismissed it outright. Harold Town, an abstract painter of fading renown, called Toller a “Sunday painter,” a snub that couldn’t have been more tone-deaf given Toller’s relentless productivity and self-support of an expensive athletic career. Barbara Sears for McLean’s Magazine quotes AGO curator Maria-Mari Sutnik, explaining why the museum does not own any of his paintings. “His work doesn’t fit into any of our collections. His work is decorative art. And then he left the country. He wasn’t part of the community.” This embarrassing exclusion borders on outright bigotry, attesting to the sorry state of academic and popular arts-historical, history, and cultural education in this country. Cranston lived and painted in the modern and postmodern era, and modernism pervaded art, with a critical and popular preference for massive canvases marked by abstract splashes and austere geometrics, and for conceptual work that draws on ugly politics over sumptuous beauty traditions. There is, by design and rebellion, nothing of the old worlds in the new. Beauty and old culture were stripped away from art defiantly as artists sought to separate themselves from everything ancient. Thematically, conceptually, new art has been about austerity, resistance, and oppression, rejecting history, tradition, and any hint of opulence or theatre. Toller said, “My work has always been atypical…of what one might think of Canadian art…” He was a fountain tapped into those ancient worlds, the rivers of old cultures and their ideas of beauty, their patterns, pageantry and puppetry, their lavish courts and harems and storybooks. On his passions and performance in daily life, writing, ice, and paint, Toller stated astutely, “It all derives from the same creative reservoir.” He was also deeply rooted in the 20th century world of theatre and dance, where countless gay artists and actors and costumiers and couturiers thrived. This world of new and ancient spectacle was where he belonged. Everything was camp and flourish and beauty. No wonder he fled to Mexico. Mexico’s pomp and passion and fearless colour were synonymous with his soul. Fashion journalist Jeanne Beker described him thus: "He was style personified in his dramatic hats and capes, with a wardrobe of the finest cashmere sweaters, in exotic shades of persimmon and banana.” Olympic silver medalist Debbi Wilkes trained with Toller in his early years and travelled the globe with him. After his passing in 2015, she spoke to the Canadian Press of his unforgettable personality. “He was crazy, he was absolutely the weirdest and most wonderful person ever. Incredibly generous, but never spoke about that, and loved the drama, loved the spotlight, wanted to be the centre of attention.” “Cranston’s over-the-top self-aggrandizement, combined with the incessant name-dropping, threaten to turn the book into either annoying drivel or hilarious parody. But it never does, and the book remains an oddly compelling read.” The literary review, The Quill and Quire, weighed in on one of his autobiographies, Zero Tollerance. “Although he admits to suffering from a cocaine addiction in the early 1990s, for example, he glosses over the gory details. And, with the exception of one brief, but apparently passionate, affair with a married man in Paris, Cranston refuses to open the kimono on his sex life.” Perhaps. Leaving aside the question of how much of one’s personal life is the rightful business of the public, it was no secret that Toller was gay or that he struggled with cocaine addiction. Like many focused athletes, Toller strived for monastic celibacy when training, unwilling to let desire distract. As for his dalliances, this was also a time when social and cultural homophobia allowed what was obvious so long as it was undeclared. In terms of his addiction, Toller’s chapters on the subject are quite candid. He wrote honestly and insightfully about the personal and social stresses that lead to substance abuse, about crashing under the pressure of his own drive. “Alcohol, drugs, or religion can freeze the pain for a moment. Under their influence, particularly cocaine’s, you reach a point where you don’t give a good goddamn about anything. Then you do it to punish yourself.” He advises the reader not to place the blame for his choices on anyone else, including another skater and colleague of Toller’s who had tragically died of a cocaine overdose at the age of 40. “I crumbled. I went past my limit, and I had neither close friends nor family. I had no one to turn to…Perhaps, at the time, I had created a persona that was too far out, and I had to crash. I had to get real. I had to start playing the game of life like other people in the world, not just live in a fantasy.” He also spoke about falling for the deadly fantasy of turbulence. "The myth was that to be a great artist, you had to lead a tortured life.” Perhaps the takeaway for those of us who have gone down this terrible road and lived to tell the tale is the realization that it is not the road of artists alone. Artists are necessarily sensitive creatures who experience life and feel deeply. But pain and confusion and the search for coping mechanisms with which to handle it gracefully are universally human. It is not only the colourful personality that falls into the undertow of addiction, but rather that their position is one of unique public scrutiny and pressure. He was also engagingly forthright about his infamous inability to manage his money, and the messy impulsivity that drove his spending habits. He lived lavishly but was more often than not totally broke. In true form, he died without a will, leaving his next-of-kin with a shambles of paperwork to sort through his assets. One could get catty instead about Toller’s trademark self-aggrandizement, but perhaps it is better to ignore that eternally boyish bravado and turn that attention to the fact of his work. Toller put everything into his work, with a rigorous, obsessive discipline that was only matched by his voracious creative vision. The athletic endurance and training it reflected, the tireless efforts, the sacrifices he made. His friend and agent Christopher Talbot said on video for the Canadian Press, “His greatest joy was in the studio. But he certainly suffered. Nothing was ever good enough. He was a perfectionist to the point of absolute dysfunction.” At the end of the day, if he compared himself often to Van Gogh and to Da Vinci, what of it? I would go so far as to say that such comparisons are his rightful place, if work, passion, skill, talent, innovation, production, experiment, and study have anything to do with it. Toller’s paintings bring us into a magical kingdom infused with lively storybook spirits and the enchanted realms of ancient cultures. Decorative? Oh, yes. The whole history of multicultural ornamental aesthetics is brought to life on his canvases, teeming with flowers, jewels, and patterns from palaces and folk culture alike, from old Europe to the near and far east, to the pre-Columbian Americas. And watching him skate is an otherworldly experience, too. The videos are all scratchy and dated, but even so, the artist is enigmatic, transporting you into another space. He soars on those slivered silvery blades, spinning until we are dizzy, with exquisite grace and panache. Watching him, we sail away, beyond the beyond. Lorette C. Luzajic  |
Lorette C. LuzajicLooking at art and learning about it has been my lifelong passion, and it fuels everything I do: art creation, publishing, writing, and teaching. Visit this blog for occasional essays and musings on visual art. Categories
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