Essays

Six Ways of Worldmaking: The Mythopians Artist Group

The H.F. Johnson Art Gallery featured the exhibit "Six Ways of Worldmaking" Sept. 8-Oct. 23, 2004. The exhibit featured work by the Mythopians Artist Group, which includes six artists: Nancy Jean Carrigan, Robert Kameczura, Diane Levesque, James McNeill Mesple, Christine O'Connor, and Steve Sherrell. The following essay was written by Garrett Holg for the exhibit catalog. Holg is a former Chicago Sun-Times art critic and a contributor to ARTnews magazine. See the catalog.

"Six Ways of Worldmaking": An essay

By Garrett Holg

“Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking. ... (It) begins with one version and ends with another.”
— Nelson Goodman (1906-1998), American Philosopher

Cobbled together from bits and pieces borrowed from the worlds of others, the worlds we remake as our own come from those old and new, distant and near, imperfect and ideal. We embellish our versions freely and edit them judiciously. In doing so, each one becomes a rich, densely woven fabric of symbols with multiple intertwined meanings from which we fashion stories that may impart a moral, recount a history, or simply entertain.

Storytelling is integral to worldmaking. It is the center from which we build. It is also essential to the unique work created by The Mythopians Artist Group, a coalition of six stylistically distinct artists — Nancy Jean Carrigan, Robert Kameczura, Diane Levesque, James McNeill Mesple, Christine O'Connor and Steve Sherrell — who exhibit their work collectively "out of a mutual love of figurative and narrative art and a fondness for the Romantic tradition."

The Mythopians are accomplished artists and storytellers who move easily between ancient mythologies, daily newspaper headlines and fanciful invention. The worlds they create are beautiful, complex and diverse. In them, we are as likely to encounter Eros dreaming of a love triangle, Penelope weaving her tapestry, or satyrs playing their pipes, as we are likely to meet Jack Kerouac sipping a drink, Sigmund Freud sitting in a swamp, or Victorian ladies in distress. Theirs are extraordinary worlds where the logic of time, place, subject and action does not hold — worlds that have been remade wondrous and sublime. "Six Ways of Worldmaking," the Mythopians current exhibition at the H.F. Johnson Art Gallery, Carthage College, Kenosha, takes its title from Nelson Goodman's influential book, "Ways of Worldmaking"(1978). It is an engaging mix of varied and sometimes contradictory styles. Despite the affinities that have brought these six artists together, they remain caretakers of their own dissimilar, yet intermingled worlds.

Nancy Jean Carrigan

A playful and inventive line, fantastical shapes and deep vivid colors obtained by painting on sheets of layered acrylic film are the hallmarks of Nancy Jean Carrigan's art. Her images, with their graceful sweeping curves, intricate spatial fills and other complex and delicate patterns, possess a bold graphic look.

Carrigan's painting, "Il Cigno e La Sirena" (2003), depicts an intimate embrace between a mermaid and a swan. In it, the same sensual curve used to delineate the contour of the mermaid’s golden hair is repeated in the mermaid's curled tail and arm, as well as in the neck of the swan, (which joins the mermaid's arm to complete a heart-like shape). Spiral forms comprising the mermaid's breast, her scales and the picture's roiling nebulous background reinforce the picture's curve motif.

While Carrigan does not offer any clues to assist in the interpretation of the image, the story of Zeus taking the form of a swan as Leda's lover comes to mind. Since Leda was not a mermaid, however, this explanation provides only vague associations. Carrigan, who enjoys the ambiguity of the image, invites the viewer to fill in the blanks with any number of fascinating scenarios.

Not so in "The Burden of the Phoenix (9/11)" (2002), for which the artist has chosen the legend of the fabulous giant bird who is reborn from its own ashes, as her response to the destruction of the World Trade Center. Carrigan has given the Phoenix a stylish female face with almond-shaped eyes that cry blood-red tears, whose shape and color are restated in flames issuing from the Twin Towers tucked beneath the Phoenix' brilliant red wings, wings which also enfold a child within its womb. Here there is no ambiguity as Carrigan deftly retools the age-old myth of rebirth — of life from death — into a message of hope for today.

Robert Kameczura

There is an atmosphere of enchantment that permeates Robert Kameczura's acrylic paintings, as if he opens windows into timeless worlds where the mundane assumes the aura of magic and theater. Like characters in a costume play, the men in his paintings have full beards and wear robes or tunics. The women are dressed in diaphanous gowns. His lighting, which exudes an otherworldly glow, is dramatic and stage-like, accentuated by a kind of broken color that is alternately warm and cool.

Some of the worlds Kameczura creates are complete inventions. Others, such as "Pluto and Persephone in the Underworld" (2004), with its phosphorescent glimpse into the domain of the dead, are drawn from classical literature and myth. The painting "What We Are, What We Think We Are, What Other People Think We Are" (2004) comes by its title through a simplification of a phrase by Voltaire. It is an ambitious discourse on how people see themselves and others and how they are seen and perceived by others in turn.

As in much of his work, Kameczura packs this imaginative diptych, edge to edge — foreground to background, with images and events, leaving no empty space, or any place in the painting where something is not happening. Featured among the many vignettes he stages is a woman holding a mask up to her face, as if confronting her "false" and "true" selves. Another woman primps in a mirror even though her face is partially veiled. There is a couple wearing sunglasses embracing before a fire, a woman carrying a torch and a painter working on a picture.

Every figure in Kameczura's painting has a role to play. There are artists, actors, dancers and lovers, each representing a variation/degree of seeing, or being seen. Every object — every action has a meaning that enhances the believability of his strange and beautiful worlds.

Diane Levesque

A great deal of psychological complexity is packed into the shallow, rather claustrophobic spaces of Diane Levesque's provocative acrylic portrait paintings. Her subjects, whether of friends or strangers, are characterized as much by her faithful likenesses, as they are by the surreal-like accumulations of objects she brings into their orbit — objects which retain the residue of memory and which hold the clues to her subject's identity and place in time.

Levesque's art is heady and evocative. It allows the artist to transform Beat poet Jack Kerouac into Oedipus of Thebes and herself into Oedipus'/Kerouac's mother/wife in "All Things Being Equal: Oedipus and Jocasta" (2003), a cautionary tale of incest. Her art is often inspired by a line of poetry or a phrase in a book, as is the painting "In the Country of the Marvelous" (2003), whose title was gleaned from a book by Pierre Mabille. The canvas, which was begun the day after war with Iraq began, is a poignant indictment of religious extremism and the grasping for political prizes.

In "James Joyce: He Domesticated His Metaphysics" (2004), one in a series of portraits focusing on writers and painters whom she considers influential to her own work, Levesque ingeniously recasts Joyce's retelling of Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey" into a board game with playing spaces that wind around the picture’s surface like Joyce's stream-of-consciousness prose winds around the page of a book.

In Levesque's version the viewer encounters a profusion of images, including a doll in a jar, a rooster pitcher filled with roses, a figure falling from a stone tower, Greek sirens and a large button. Each encapsulates an emotion or experience Joyce's main character undergoes as he wanders through the city of Dublin. An extremely articulate painter, Levesque imbues the seeming chaos and irrationality of Joyce's art with her own arresting form and artistry.

James McNeill Mesple

It is not hard to imagine the paintings of James McNeill Mesple adorning the walls of a first century Roman villa, even with their humorous quirks and allusions to contemporary culture. The figures he paints are almost exclusively those of Greek or Roman mythology and their names, if not their stories, are, for the most part, familiar to most everyone.

But Mesple's paintings, executed in egg tempera and oil glazes made from pigments he prepares himself according to formulas rooted in the Middle Ages, are always a surprise. Marvelously inventive and seamless in their melding of ancient and modern imagery, the genuineness of the worlds he creates is never in doubt.

The disparate images in "Dune Music" (2004), for instance, should not make sense, but in Mesple's world they do. In it a pair of reed flutes is played by the slender green fingers of an unseen musician, two classical heads litter the ground and a couple of exotically dressed figures play alongside a pond. In the background are the Indiana Dunes, Chicago's skyline and a wooden ship sailing on Lake Michigan. It is a curious and improbable idyll from Mesple's unconventional imagination that permits myth and magic to enter into the everyday.

Most of Mesple's works are faithful, if somewhat tweaked versions of legend and myth, like that of Arachne who bests Athena in a weaving contest and is changed into a spider. Yet some of his work is purely lyrical, as is the hauntingly beautiful "Rain Goddess" (2004). Here the ethereal face of a woman appears in gray storm clouds, the strands of her hair mingling with streaks of rain falling on an iris flower that has blossomed in a rainbow of colors. Mesple's painting has the delicacy of a Renaissance botanical rendering infused with poetry. His art is nothing short of magical.

Christine O'Connor

Christine O’Connor paints portraits of famous people from history and literature, like the astronomer Galileo Galilei and the missionaries Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa. She presents her portraits within the context of stories that illuminate the relationships between her subjects.

Friendship and professional rivalry, for instance, are the topics in O'Connor’s portrayal of psychoanalysts Freud, Jung and Adler, whom she situates in a fecund swamp. Here Jung stands apart from the group, while Freud sits next to Adler, a rifle resting across his lap aimed at his companion’s book on aggression. Through setting and gesture, the pointed painting speaks volumes about the trio’s tangled relationship and eventual estrangement.

Each of O'Connor's works is intricately detailed and richly colored. Her painstaking technique imparts an exceptional transparency and luminosity that resemble the tempera paint and oil glaze finishes of certain Old Master paintings. "Venetian Diptych, duality: woman/man" (2001) is a particularly exquisite work. In it O'Connor tells the story of the great adventurer and lover, Casanova and Henriette, the young French runaway with whom he had a brief love affair.

Here Henriette and Casanova face one another in profile from opposite ends of the canvas. She is dressed for a party. Pictured above her is a pair of costume masks; one, of which, has painted tears on its cheek. He is seen against a stone wall with a barred window through which a Venice canal shimmers. It is a quite, penetrating picture whose bittersweet air is heavy with memory and loss.

The past often blurs with reverie in O'Connor’s work and the images in her paintings sometimes turn out quite differently from those that initially sparked her imagination. More important to O'Connor is that some type of experience and understanding has taken place during the making of the painting and the telling of the story. It invariably does.

Steve Sherrell

Working with the same assuredness in a variety of different media, from computer art to painting to collage, Steve Sherrell moves with equal ease between a diverse range of styles, from the abstract and figurative to the visionary, as in "A Gift from Time" (2003), (graphite, acrylic collage on three canvases). A large (9' x 7') work representing a celestial meeting between Beauty, (a woman clad in snake-skin), and Pegasus, the winged horse, it is elegant in both its cool blue-green color scheme and concise decorative design.

At the core of Sherrell's work, however, there is always a sense of the fantastic steeped in melancholy. It is present in his wistful, at times playfully perverse collages of Victorian women, and in fears of the Cold War that he revisits in "Rumors from the Rocket State" (nd), a work occasioned by a Thomas Pynchon novel.

Such feelings are most prevalent, however, in "Rimbaud" (2004), a discerning homage to a quintessential Romantic artist. In this mixed-media work (graphite, acrylic and collage on canvas), Sherrell envisions the French Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) as slightly rumpled and unkempt, as if he were a vagrant posing for a police line up, rather than a prodigy who revolutionized poetry before the age of 17. His scratchy penciled likeness conveys a nervousness and spent sensitivity.

Running along the edges of the work are squares in which Sherrell cubbyholes important dates, quotes and events in the poet's life. A bullet in each of the work's four corners represents shooting attempts on his life. Most curious is the extra pupil Sherrell has tucked inside each of Rimbaud's "drunken" undulating eyelids, perhaps symbolic of the gift, or curse of prescience. Sherrell's work is an incisive portrait of a man who lived his life in the extreme and who sacrificed himself readily to myth.

Final Word

In "Ways of Worldmaking," Nelson Goodman wrote "We start, on any occasion, with some old version or world that we have on hand and that we are stuck with until we have the determination and skill to remake it into a new one." The six artists who comprise the Mythopians Artist Group have the determination and skill. Through their gifts of storytelling and art they create intriguing worlds from which each of us might borrow something for our own worldmaking.