Patrick Hughes at Art on Paper

Patrick Hughes, all 4"h x 6" w; watercolor on paper.

I first encountered the work of Patrick Hughes at the New York Art on Paper fair. I was struck by his engaging compositions, subtle and controlled palette, and intimate size, in the context of big, flashy, need to grab your attention works all around. The paintings are very reminiscent of Juan Gris with a touch of Joan Miro. And this is where they become problematic, because they look too much like they could have been painted in early 20th Century, Paris. This is problematic, because Patrick Hughes is from Iowa and is making art in 2018. Does art need to reflect the time and place of its origin? Perhaps. It needs to at least build on its influence if it is to attract any interest. In these paintings, Hughes has done an admirable job of capturing the feel of analytical cubism and early surrealism, but he hasn’t moved the idea further or even put his own mark on it. He is treading ground already broken in by Gris. I would want to see more than this reworking. Hughes has it in him.

Arthur Bruso © 2018

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When a Square is Just a Square

Arthur Bruso; My Death Series - No. 13 - Spirit of the House; 8"x10"; photograph.

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

 Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

For an artist, inspiration can be a convoluted process. Many influences can converge to determine the final work of art. There is often no direct path that leads to the final result in an artist’s practice. If an artist discovers something another artist has done which catches their imagination, be it a medium, a technique, a process or subject matter, which makes them consider other possibilities, and how those possibilities can be incorporated into their own work, it is not a form of plagiarism. It is a new opportunity asking to be explored by their creative process. The unsolicited inspiration will be filtered through their mind, their process, and their hand. It may arise and show itself in a way that is so foreign to the original idea, that it becomes completely their own.

The initial motivation for my Portal series of drawings came from viewing an exhibition of Richard Serra's drawings from his series Out of Round from 1999. I had not encountered any of Richard Serra’s drawings before. I was aware of him as a sculptor. He had a reputation as an arrogant artist whose work demanded to occupy space and consume one’s field of vision. The infamous incident of one of his balanced lead sculptures falling and killing a viewer always preceded a discussion of his work. I was not prepared for the visual experience I had when I saw the drawings that made up the series Out of Round. I was impressed not with the monumental presence I had come to expect with his sculptures, but with Serra’s expressive use of the medium of oil pastel. It was the impasto texture of the viscus black that attracted me. It communicated so much of the energy, strength, and substance of the works. The compositions were the simple geometric shape of a circle, but the visual interest came from the extreme textural quality inherent in the handling of the oil pastel.

Richard Serra; Out of Round XVI; 1999; 66 3/4"w x 74 1/4" h; paintstick on Hiromi paper.

Oil pastel was not a medium I had incorporated in my studio practice. I had dabbled a bit with dry pastel in my student years, but it had never attracted me into full time use. Oil pastel was too crude and unwieldly for my realist tastes. But, under Serra’s robust hand, it took on other possibilities. Possibilities that I wanted to explore in my own work. It became such a strong impetus that I began trying to make drawings that integrated this textural idea.

I had no visual language that would easily absorb this sort of textural commitment. And indeed, my first forays into trying oil stick and its expressive potential had me falling back on my realist hegemony. I was having difficulty transferring what I saw in my mind on to the page. I knew I wanted to do something abstract, not the simple geometry of Serra, but an abstraction that could hold up to the heavy texture I envisioned. I also had decided that there should be a variety of textures: the impasto of oil stick certainly; but also the dryness of charcoal; the sheen of pencil; the artificial, plastic quality of acrylic paint. This amorphous concept had to have a form and a structure. Since my past photorealist interests had provided me with ready source material, I turned to my vast photographic resources to find compositional inspiration. I began selecting images from my large photographic output that had geometric content. I found what I needed in my architectural compositions.

Even though I chose images with strong geometric foundations, I kept resorting to rendering the image realistically. Instead of exploring abstraction, I would fall back into my art training in objective representation. I wasn’t exploiting the textural qualities of the media as I had envisioned. The language of geometric abstraction was foreign to me. It took several attempts before I was able to learn this language and start to build what I saw in my mind onto the page.

It took 18 drawings, each based on a portion of various different photographs, before this new language coalesced into something of what I was envisioning. The photograph I was using as source material that occasioned my comprehension of this new media language contained no special qualities from the previous photographs. It was simply the next image in the sequence. The photograph, My Death Series – No. 13 – The Spirit of the House, just happened to be the one that became my charmed 18th attempt. The socio-economic and personal message of the My Death series had no immediate importance to this series of drawings. I was looking for shapes and parts of the photographic image that held the potential for visually interesting compositions. My initial excitement of Serra’s use of oil pastel was now only a vestige of what I had seen in his work. I had early on, after three or so drawings realized I should concentrate on parts of a photograph, to hold my tendency to render at bay. The entirety of the image was distracting me from realizing my idea of abstractness.

Arthur Bruso; Portals - No. 18 - Shard; 18"w x 24" h; oil pastel, acrylic paint, ink, dry pastel, pencil.

Out of this photograph, I created four separate drawings. The first was Portals – No.18 – Shard. This drawing was almost where I wanted it to be. It had a simpler composition. It approached abstraction. The black upper half employed the textural possibilities of the oil pastel. The white bottom half was less textually successful, but a good try. It was the transitional strip between the two halves that sabotaged the work. I did not successfully find a way to render the passage that held the two halves of the composition together. Even so, a synergy was happening.

What didn’t quite integrate in Portals – No.18 – Shard, would finally combine into a sensible language in the next drawing, Portals – No.19 – Transom. Everything I had been working toward for 18 drawings coalesced in Transom. Texture, shape, composition, and tonality finally balanced and became an abstract whole. Harmonizing these elements of the drawing had me understanding in a different way, what Serra had already known and wanted to teach me. As slow and unperceptive a student as I believed I was, the 19th drawing of Portals was my “water” moment. Transom opened up a new world as remarkable and profound as the feeling of water has been to Helen Keller. I could see and speak in this new way, using the texture that had set me on this path so many drawings before. Achieving the texture was not as simple as rubbing the oil pastel on the paper, the mark had to be considered. The medium had to be applied in a determinate way – not haphazard and random, but in a way that exploited its qualities. I should have known this from my prior studies, but often a new medium confuses your sensibilities, and its special qualities need to be learned.

Arthur Bruso; Portals - No. 19 - Transom; 20" w x 4" h; pastel, acrylic paint, oil pastel, conte crayon, ink on paper.

Transom is a drawing of three rectangles of different tonalities and different textures. The darkest rectangle incorporates a triangle that imbues a visual interest in the unrelenting quadrilateral geometry. In between the central rectangle are two narrow white shapes that offer a break in direction from the dominate linearity of the composition. Within this composition of three shapes, I also wanted some subtle surprise to tease the eye as well.

Excited by the success of Transom, I next completed Portals – No.20 – Entrance. This drawing continued the trifold composition of Transom, but now there were three elongated arch shapes that I lifted from the windows of the door in the photograph. Each arch shape was a different tonality, texture, and a slightly different size. The size difference was to give a visual rhythm to the composition. The medium gray shape also included a black triangle in the bottom, right corner as a visual tease to keep the viewer’s attention.

Arthur Bruso; Portals - No. 20 - Entrance; 18" w x 24" h; ink, acrylic paint, pastel, charcoal, conte crayon, oil pastel on paper.

The final drawing from this particular photograph was Portals – No. 21 – Sidelight. Deciding on this subject presented a new visual problem. I wanted to use the sidelight windows from the photograph in a drawing, but I did not want to include the door. The windows of the door had already been explored in the drawing Entrance. It seemed to me to be a radical concept to try and successfully compose a drawing that had a major void as its central element. I would need to solve what to do with the space that the door occupied. Instead of eliminating the space, I wanted to somehow activate it so that it would relate to the separated stacks of rectangles on either side. The width of the white space was important: too wide and the rows of rectangles would not relate. Too narrow, and there would be the question of why it was there at all.

Arthur Bruso; Portals - No. 21 - Sidelight; 18"w x 24"h; dry pastel, oil pastel, acrylic paint, ink, pencil on paper.

The white space is not blank. It has a texture of white oil pastel over white acrylic paint. This relates texturally with the darker rectangles on either side. On the left, the rectangles are in a gradient from light at the bottom, to darker at the top. The right-side rectangles are in a gradient light at the top the darker at the bottom. This provides visual direction for the eyes – up the left stack, jump over the white space, then down the right side. The two anomalous shapes on the left and right further guide the eye in the correct directions. At this point in the Portals series, Sidelight is the most visually manipulative of my Portals drawings, but these visual cues are necessary for the viewer to retain interest in its simple composition.

The architectural source of these drawings may or may not be discernable at first view. I give voice to each source in the title of the work: Transom, Entrance, Sidelight, each a paean to the original structure that contributed to the final drawing. Shard is the lone drawing of this group that is not named after its major architectural element. I refrained from titling the drawing the descriptive, but mundane “window.” Instead, I focused on the triangular shape of the pane remnant in the window to identify it. This element had more narrative possibilities than the depictive word “window.”

It was not my intention that the architectural components that informed each drawing would have a strong informational connection with each finished drawing. It was my hope that each drawing would stand apart from its source. Conversely, I did not want to hide the source of the compositions either. One influenced the other, but they are not codependent. These are not faithful renderings of their particular building features, they are in the end, geometric shapes that allude to the source.

There may be some residual influence of the social and economic subtext of the original photographic series. The My Death series was conceived as the answer to a project lesson from my third-year college photography course in which the class was instructed to interpret through photography a major life transition. This series of photographs was my response to those instructions. But does the heavy social implications of gentrification and population displacement through urban renewal make an impact on these four Portals drawings? Perhaps. Perhaps the font of origin is too strong to quell, or is this a decision the viewer must make providing he has all of the pieces of the origin story?  

Arthur Bruso © 2024

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How Summer Begins

A showy variety of hawthorn (Crataegus sp.) found thriving along a Bronx Zoo service road.

Midsummer eve had come, bringing deep verdure to the forest, and roses in her lap, of a more vivid hue than the tender buds of Spring. But May, or her mirthful spirit, dwelt all the year round at Merry Mount, sporting with the Summer months, and revelling with Autumn, and basking in the glow of Winter's fireside. Through a world of toil and care she flitted with a dreamlike smile, and came hither to find a home among the lightsome hearts of Merry Mount.

Nathanial Hawthorne, The May-Pole of Merry Mount

There is a world that lies between the furrowed tameness of the agricultural field and the foreboding darkness of the forest wilderness. This is what scientists have termed the ecotone. It is the boundary between the forest and the field. A liminal place of change from the familiar and tame, to the wild and foreign. It straddles our imagination as that bizarre place that contains the suffering of brambles and the fecundity of fruit and vegetation, which therefore must be especially blessed with the gifts of Pomona and Flora.

To traverse this precinct of change is to experience the transition from one world to the next. To travel through the light of the meadow to the dimness of the forest we must pass through this threshold. The forest contains the terrors of the unknown, while the meadow embraces the safety of home. In between home and the unknown lies this magical space that is neither forest or field but holds the sanctuary of one and the trials of the other. It is a place of opposites. A place where superstitions arise, and the otherworld may be glimpsed.

Most of the life that calls this liminal area home has been deemed by humans to possess some form of special energy that can benefit mankind if the trick to harness it is known. Their ability to traverse or thrive in the world of the known and the unknown must take a special ability. Some may call it magic. Some may call it blessing from the gods. Whatever the quality may be, there is something both benevolent and profane about the living things that call this place, that is neither here nor there, home.

The three growth zones of the temperate forest showing the ecotone.

One small tree of the ecotone which has taken on a multitude of folklore and beliefs is the hawthorn (Crataegus sp.). The scientific name Crataegus is derived from the Greek kratos, referring to the strength of the wood, and akis which translates to sharp, alluding to the thorns that grow on many species. It is the thorns of this tree that have captured the human imagination for their wickedness and their utility. The thorns of some varieties can be quite vicious in size and sharpness, a feature that has caused the hawthorn to be cultivated as a property boundary for livestock and humans, to keep the one in and the other out. The thorns have also given the hawthorn the reputation for being a protective agent. Not only does the tree have the practical agricultural use of keeping livestock contained, but in their thorny branches birds find protection for their nests from predators. The thorns are an evolutionary advantage for the tree because browsing mammals find them a painful experience to their noses and lips and avoid eating the leaves or fruit of the tree, leaving the fruit free for the birds to consume or the nimble fingers of humans to pick.

This idea of protection spills over into sympathetic magic, where to grow a hawthorn near your door, or keep a branch over the transom would protect the house from evil. It is said the demons of adversity would be kept from entering such a protected house by being distracted by the wickedness of the thorns and compelled to stop and count their number. This counting would send the demons into spasmodic delight as they revel in all of the ways that these thorns could cause suffering to mankind, and therefore forget to enter the house proper.

The fruit of the hawthorn is a small pome like an apple, although it has a berry-like appearance. These bright red or orange fruits ripen in clusters that follow the pattern of the umbels of the flowers. They persist well into winter. Birds will eat them, but squirrels tend to leave them until all of the more favored food has been depleted. Humans find them a bit small to consume out of hand but they can be processed into jam or sauce.

The fruit of the hawthorn.

Hedge Witch; There are numerous symbols on her skirt and she has her hair tied back in a bun; 1700-1720; woodcut; sheet 4"h x 3 3/8"w.

It is the fruit, often called a haw, which gives the hawthorn half of its name. Haw is derived from the Dutch haag, and the Old English term haga, both of which carry the meaning of “hedge.” But it cannot be denied that it also bears a strong similarity to the pronunciation of “hag.” A hag being defined as an older woman without living relatives who has outlived her usefulness as a productive addition to the community. As such, she would have been banished to live on the edges or borders of the town. She would often be considered by the populace a witch with negative associations to reinforce her being ostracized from society. As a person who became part of the mysterious and superstitious netherworld of the in-between places, these old woman would also, in the imaginations of the population, take on the supposed magic and mystery of these places, which added to their diabolical reputations. Her ability to survive would be contingent on her foraging and self-sufficiency. Her ability to thrive without the support of the larger population would also be considered a marvel adding to her other worldly qualities. As a forager of the hawthorn, it would be difficult to determine if the tree derived its name from the hag or the hag was named for the tree, either way she would be considered a denizen of the hedge, a place for an individual that belongs to no place.

An additional power attributed to the hawthorn tree is its association with its assumed masculinity and its erotic nature. The flowers of the Hawthorn tree bloom at the beginning of May, usually during the time of Celtic Beltane. Beltane is an agricultural celebration that happens at the midpoint between the spring and summer solstices. These days are called cross quarter days since they divide the four quarter seasons of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter into a further four notable days of celebration.

Beltane is considered the ancient beginning of summer. These are three days set aside after the work of the plowing and planting are over to encourage and bless the sprouted seed and protect it during its growth to ensure a bountiful harvest. It is the time of the year that marks the end of the unsettled weather of spring and welcomes the calm, long, and steadily warm days of summer. It is essentially a fertility celebration that employs sex magic to keep the earth fecund.

The hawthorn tree happens to bloom just about the time of Beltane. It may in fact signal the start of the celebration although the information for that is uncertain. What is certain is that the hawthorn became essential to the summer celebration. In the Gregorian calendar, May 1 was set aside as the first day of summer. This may or may not coincide with the blooming of the hawthorn in modern times, which may be some evidence that pagans may have waited for the certainty of the blooms before determining their celebrations.

Hawthorn flowers have a distinctive odor that resembles human semen. This fragrance and its association with masculine sex has set this small tree apart in the imaginations of agricultural celebrants. Many traditions have developed around the supposed masculinity of the tree and the need for the fertility of the earth and the insurance of a bountiful harvest. This has led to much phallic symbolism and to male dominated sex magic, for to plow and to sow are masculine acts, while sprouting seed and growth are feminine actions as the result of plowing and sowing.

The most enduring of these pagan traditions has been the maypole. Initially the maypole was born out of dancing around the flowering hawthorn tree proper, which would end in an orgiastic celebration of sex that would consecrate the earth and render the fields fertile enough to produce an ample harvest that would stave off starvation. There would be bonfires to cleanse and renew, since fire has since the beginning of human history been associated with purification because it consumes and transforms what it touches. There is also the association of fire with human sexual intercourse because fire is obtained not only by friction, but also the use of a hand drill to produce the ember to start a fire mimics the active and passive principle of sex. The participants of the maypole dance would have to jump over or through the bonfire to purify themselves to be eligible to take part. In this celebration, the hawthorn tree as the vertical member represents the phallus and all of the life that springs from that source. And only the men who have the courage to brave the purifying flame will have shown their prowess to participate in the sex magic under the tree.

Another tradition was to choose a May Queen. This was usually a young woman of marrying age who was still untouched by a man. The men would compete for the favors of the May Queen by going into the forest on the night before the summer festival to search for the mayflower or the bloom of the hawthorn. The first male to find and return to the village with a flowering branch of hawthorn won the right to take the maiden’s hand, either for the duration of the festival or for life as each individual community would decide.

An alternative ritual was for young unmarried men and women to disappear into the forest on the night before the summer holiday. In this tradition, the youth were expected to find each other in the darkness and consummate their union. Any children that may result of these liaisons were considered good omens for a generous fall yield from the fields. In the morning, they were also expected to be carrying mayflower branches to show that they had been successful in their nocturnal adventures.

The correlation with the phallus and masculine sexuality waned when the maypole was eventually substituted for the Maytree as a more convenient and accessible alternative during beginning of summer festivals. This change was implemented when the Gregorian calendar was substituted for the various agrarian methods of telling time. Illiterate farmers often used a lunar system and or a visual system to tell when the time was right for annual activities, timing planting or harvesting by the phases of the moon or by visual cues in the environment. This changed when the Catholic Church enforced the Gregorian Calendar (named for Pope Gregory XIII who deemed it necessary and commissioned it) on the Western world. The Gregorian Calendar is based on solar astronomical movements. The Gregorian Calendar was similar to the Julian Calendar that was in use before it, except that the Julian calendar (put in place by Julius Caesar and used in Europe for 1,600 years) rounded out of the solar year to 365.25 days. This rounding out caused a drift in the days, causing a gain in one day every 129 years. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar was calculated to correct this drift – mainly because the calculated date of the Spring Equinox needed to be set as March 21 (in actuality the Equinox varies yearly by three days between March 19 – 21) as it was calculated that that date contained an equal number of hours of daylight and darkness. At the time of Pope Gregory’s recalibration, the solstice was drifting to about ten days prior. This date was important to the Catholic Church, since it was used to calculate the celebration of Easter, the holiest day of the Catholic year. Once the Church reset the calendar, the blooming of the hawthorn tree could no longer be counted on to occur at the proper time as the summer festivals were now fixed on May 1 as the midpoint between the solstices. This required a more reliable alternative to the hawthorn tree and the maypole was created as a stand-in. The maypole gradually became merely a fixed point for chaste circular dances.

Of course, once the Catholic Church became involved the pagan festivals were tamed. The sex magic was regarded as improper, heathen, and inspired by Satan. As long as the celebrations were kept to a certain decorum, the Catholic Church was wont to look the other way in certain local matters. In England, it was the Puritans that would tolerate none of these pagan and profane festivities. They put all of the merry making debauchery to a halt by 1645 when they took control after the English Civil War.

May Day dancing around the maypole, early 1800s.

The hawthorn tree itself became sanctified and Christianized as the tree which provided the crown of thorns for Christ (no matter that this is a tree of temperate climates that would not thrive in the climate of the Middle East where Christ lived and taught.) As the supposed source of Christ’s crown of thorns, its symbolism was modified to one of piety and Christian suffering. In Catholic countries May became a month-long devotion to the Virgin Mary who as the virgin Mother of the Son of God, replaced and absorbed the aspects of the ancient goddess of spring, Flora who represented purity, beauty, and fertility. The practice to empathize Mary’s role in Christian faith was begun in the 13th century monastic communities. It gradually spread throughout Europe with the empowerment of the Catholic Church and the rise of evangelical initiatives to convert pagan cultures.  

Humans have a great ability to imbue the world around them with special powers. Often there is a correspondence detected in something that incites the human imagination into the belief that because a certain feature in one thing is similar to another human feature, then the conclusion would be that the one is related to the other. So, it was with the hawthorn tree. As the tree protects itself with thorns, so those thorns will protect my property and myself from evil. The thorns, given the discomfort and wounds they inflict follows a certain logic. It is when the odor of the flowers arouse certain abstract thoughts, that the associations become more convoluted. Hawthorn flowers to humans smell like semen, the male contribution to new life. Because of this correspondence, cultures where this tree flourishes have invented phallic and masculine sex fantasies around this unassuming tree. Hawthorn’s association with sex became so entrenched in the psychology of the subconscious in some temperate cultures, that long after the agrarian sex magic became forgotten, it was still taboo to bring hawthorn flowers into the home because to do so was to invite evil in. The evil was the prudishly unspoken inuendo of sexual arousal. The scent of the flowers might invite improper thoughts to those susceptible.

A place that is considered a passage from one place to another whether it be a hearth, a doorway, a crossroads, or the ecotone can be a place of magic. These areas where it is difficult to ascertain where in the physical geography they can be placed fuel the human imagination with possibilities. They are always locations where fate has some intervention. At a crossroads, choosing a direction dictates the course of your entire life. A fireplace is a place of transformation that needs constant vigilance lest the power get out of control. A threshold marks the transition from one space to another, from one world to another, each separate and distinct from the another. What happens in one room may be totally different than what happens in another. Inside is a far different experience than outside.

The ecotone is a special place of transition. It marks a boundary that eases you from tame to wild. The life that lives there has special powers as befits the transitive state. Humans saw this transition as magic. It envisioned the life in the liminal space as a portal to another world. To sleep under a hawthorn tree is to invite the opening passage into the supernatural otherworld. If the power of transition could be tapped into, perhaps the special magic could be used for the benefit of humankind. The hawthorn was singled out because it offered very sensual clues to its magic. The people used it the best way they could devise to keep the community alive and flourishing and keep famine and death at bay.

Hawthorn tree in situ at the Bronx Zoo.

Arthur Bruso © 2024

Header photograph of hawthorn flowers and ending photograph of a hawthorn tree in situ by Arthur Bruso © 2024

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