Manic Kaddish for my Father, 38″x48″, oil on canvs, ©ITIN ’98
I found a sketchbook of my dad’s drawings from the early to mid seventies. It was when he was mostly designing work to be built by Italian craftsmen out in Queens. This guy Joe Deluca, who lost an eye to a flying nail in his shop, made mostly industrial trade show displays and sets and things of that nature. It was probably a real thrill for him to make “fine art”… seems all Italians are raised with a respect for art (even the mobsters I’ve met were always very impressed when you told them you were an artist). We’d go and have dinner with him and his wife and his nine daughters, or whatever it was. My parents would be offered the wine that he made hiself in the basement… and they hated it, but always tried to get a glass down just to be polite. Anyway, they made these things up in wood and the new tinted plastic laminates. It was all very high tech, high modern, and hard edge… So I was sort of pleased to find a set of studies for what would have been a large public sculpture (I don’t think he got the commission) being reverse engineered into a study of trees.
Actually, its a study of our front woods in winter at sunrise. The model of the sculpture was done in shades of orange and yellow. I found some other drawings I like that seem to relate to landscape and mapping.
These landscape drawings took me back to a walk, or forced march that my old man took me on during my first clinical depression… the old man got me out of my bed and made me walk into the deep woods behind our house and up into the area that IBM hadn’t developed yet. It had once been a large farm and we came across over grown Alleys of trees, with their gothic arch branches and we followed the running stone walls that mark New England’s Glacial fields. I remember we stopped in the burned out ruins of the farm house… surroundedd by bonzai like juniper trees… with only the walls and the chiminey standing and we both cried and he told me about all the pain øf his youth and how he’d hoped that by making some graphic design money and sending me and my brothers to good schools, that we would avoid the pain he’d known growing up and how terrifically disappointed he was that sadness is something that comes with blood and life and you can’t escape it, if you are sensitive. It was really very sweet and somehow I think that is the day I started reading Buckminster Fuller’s Critical Path… it was like we’d found the path in the woods… the path out of darkness and home. It’s a nice memory.
So I’ve started drawing some trees in the empty pages… you can see rather dramatically where he quit painting in this book… which is sad….because the drawings are this awkward funny attempt to go forward and I think they would have been cool. I’ll show you later…. Right now I’m standing under my father’s trees.
