John Page / painter, printmaker and professor

site link

Just today, I have designed and posted a new website about the life and work of Iowa-based printmaker, painter and teacher John H. Page (1923-2018). I hope it will be of interest to those who know and admire his work—as well as to those who have never heard of him.

the absurd continuing access to weapons of war

Without hesitation, I can say that one of my favorite artists is the German printmaker and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945). I became acquainted with her work in 1964, when I was 18 and a freshman art student in undergraduate school. In the university’s art collection was one of Kollwitz’s finest lithographs, titled Death and the Woman (1934), reproduced below. 

Many of her most powerful works are self-portraits. One reason that they are so powerful is that her own appearance was so dignified, yet strikingly sad and remorseful, a quality that is equally true of photographs of her. Reproduced above is the commemorative relief profile that was issued as a German coin in 1967. And at the bottom of this blog post is surely one of her most unforgettable self-portraits, an etching titled Self-Portrait with Hand on Forehead (1910). In 1914, her sadness was intensified when her youngest son Peter was killed in World War I, only two days after arriving at the battlefield. 

The awful grief of losing her son remained with her until her own death, a sorrow that she tried to assuage by designing a gravesite memorial to him (and other soldiers), now at the Vladslo German war cemetery in Belgium. At that gravesite, she installed two mourning figures, she and her husband, side by side, known as The Grieving Parents. 

I was reminded of this lately when my friend, the distinguished German psychologist and neuroscientist Lothar Spillman, brought up her name, and recalled what she said at the time of her loss: “Where do those women find the courage to send their dear ones to the front to face the guns when they watched over them all their lives with loving care?” Today, not only do those mothers face the “weapons of war” on the battlefields of Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere—but, in our own country, on the formerly innocuous neighborhood streets.

In 1996, PBS broadcast an eight-part video series on The Great War. In the final episode is a brief but memorable section about Käthe Kollwitz, the death of Peter, and the gravesite memorial. It can be accessed free online on YouTube. The portion that pertains to Käthe Kollwitz begins around 21 minutes into the film. I strongly recommend it. Do take a look, at a time when we too face—increasingly and every day—the needless killing of people with war-grade weapons.

 

hide that typewriter and you go into the closet

Totoya Hokkei / Japanese Print

Henry Miller, in Robert Snyder, This is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974—

[When he was married but, as a writer, without an income] now and then my wife wasn't working maybe and, of course, I wasn’t selling anything—we’d have to separate, and I’d go home to live with my parents and she with her parents. That was frightful. When I’d go home to live with my parents my mother would say, “If anybody comes, a neighbor or one of our friends, y’know, hide that typewriter and you go in the closet, don’t let them know you’re here.” I used to stay in that closet sometimes over an hour, the camphor ball smell choking me to death, hidden among the clothes, hidden y’know, so that she wouldn’t have to tell her neighbors or relatives that her son is a writer. All her life she hated this, that I’m a writer. She wanted me to be a tailor and take over the tailor shop, y’know. It was a frightful thing—this is like a crime I'm committing. I’m a criminal, y’know. This standing in the closet… I'll never forget the smell of camphor, do y‘know. We used it plentifully.

Good, Bad—and Philip Evergood (in Iowa)

Philip Evergood in Iowa

Above Back in the late 1950s, the American painter Philip Evergood was a visiting artist for two summers at the Department of Art at the Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa). Some people still remember it. We wrote an essay about it in 1998, which we've now revised and posted on our website. more>>>

Tony Drehfal Engraving | Braiding Sweetgrass

Braided Sweetgrass © Tony Drehfal

Above In recent years, an old friend and fellow artist, Tony Drehfal from Nashotah WI, has become a devotée and skilled practitioner of one of our favorite art forms, wood engraving. He recently produced an image of strands of sweetgrass that had been braided by his wife, artist Jeanne Debbink. By the fortuitous meeting of minds, it has now been used as the cover of the Japanese edition of a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, titled BRAIDING SWEETGRASS: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (as shown below). You can learn more about Tony and his extraordinary prints at various online sites, including this one, and this one, and this one as well. And of course on Instagram.

Cover of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer