Twenty Years of Image 2 comments

1989: Cover Art by Steve Hawley

Steve Hawley. Black Glass Still Life with Fish, Pear, and Skeleton, 1986-88. Oil and alkyd on paper. 43 x 60 inches. This painting appeared on the cover of the first issue of Image in spring of 1989. © 1990 Steve Hawley. www.stevehawley.com

Gregory Wolfe on Issue 1's cover

The choice of Steve Hawley’s Black Glass Still Life with Fish, Pear, and Skeleton for the front cover of the pilot issue of Image appears in my memory to have been a fairly straightforward decision. And yet I realize that it contained within it a host of assumptions about the journal and its identity.

Steve was a close friend of Image’s co-founder, Harold Fickett; at the time they lived near each other north of Boston. Harold’s lengthy profile of Hawley set the stage for our commitment to coverage of the visual arts from day one. Because we felt that putting text on the front cover was essential—advertising highlights of the issue and using language artfully to indicate the liveliness of our content—we thought we should choose a horizontal image. (Our one experiment with a vertical image on the front cover of issue #2 felt awkward and we never attempted it again.)

Black Glass Still Life emerged as the obvious candidate for Image because it was simultaneously traditional and an edgy, modern work. In a sense it is a combination of still life, trompe l’oeil, and the ancient liturgical art forms of altarpiece and triptych. The trompe l’oeil effects include the masking tape that sticks the three images to the black glass. These “photographs” include a deposition on the left, a hint of a crucifixion in the center, and a nude, heavily pregnant woman who suggests the Virgin Mary. Each of these elements seemed to involve an imaginative re-visioning of Christian iconography. The ancient visual tropes and symbols—including the reflection of the artist himself in the black glass—reflected the challenge any artist faces to “make it new.”

Above all, the choice to include a complete work, without cropping or resorting to a detail, represented the editors’ desire to do justice to the artist’s vision for the piece. That the painting was edgy, multi-layered, and innovative was perfect, for we wanted Image itself to be all those things.

The following is excerpted from Harold Fickett’s profile of Steve Hawley in Image issue #1, now out of print (and very rare):

The visual complexity of Black Glass Still Life with Pear, Fish, and Skeleton allows the eye to play over its surface, delighting in its many splendid moments. Those moments are troubling as well as eye-catching. The viewer would almost rather refrain from taking in the painting as a whole, for each image is in its own way disturbing; and we feel ourselves, much before we are able to express why, responding to the painting with the kind of fear that is said to be the beginning of wisdom. The coordination of the iconography here presents a devastating interpretation of sacrifice that re-explains to us what an altar means. The painting may make us feel as if we have stolen behind the Rood screen and found much more than we had hoped.

The three central images, painted Polaroids affixed with painted tape, picture three separate stages in life. We see a pregnant woman in the Polaroid on the right nearing the end of her term, the baby almost the more present for being concealed in her flesh. On the left we see a young boy—Steve’s second son, Vincent—standing in one corner of the studio, with a full-sized cross set up behind him. Beside the cross there is a ladder. In the middle of the two images we have a Polaroid of a man screaming out in agony.

The triptych form directs our reading of these images. Because of their reference to the crucifixion we are going to be looking at life as it leads to death. Then, too, there are interior elements that tie the three together. The little boy continues the theme of growth and development enunciated in the pregnancy. The ladder leads us to connect the boy with the man in agony, for it suggests that the boy’s ascent in life as he grows will simultaneously lead to the universal crucifixion of mortality. The very isolation of the boy evokes a tremendous pathos as we realize that in some sense the central image of Christ in agony is an image of every man. The child seems to be as overwhelmed by the mysterious world about him as we are by the fear of death and its pain, against which we can only protest with cries that are one with the first wail of the infant at his birth.

At the horizontal base of the black glass this time we have a fish that nearly spans the width of the black glass itself. Its head rests on a purple cloth, the purple of advent, with its penitential significance. The body of the fish lies on red and white tiles. The fish, since the beginning of the Church, has symbolized the Christian faith, particularly in its sacramental aspects. Christ, as the fisher of men, calls us to the altar, where he breaks the loaves and fishes, supplying a meal that satisfies our eternal hunger.

In this painting [as in earlier black glass paintings] we have a pear. It has its significance within the larger frame of this painting. The artist has widened the scope of his canvas to show us more of what surrounds the black glass. We are in the artist’s studio again; we can see the same windows to the left, a plant at the top center, and another hanging drawing, a crucifixion, at top right. Our attention will be immediately drawn, though, by the skeleton that dominates the right hand side of the painting. It looks like the kind of skeleton—rigged out as it is with wires and clamps—from which medical students might study anatomy. The artist has chosen to extend the skeleton’s right hand, lay it on the table that supports the black glass, and place the pear in what would have been the man’s palm. Written on the pear, in Latin—and painted so that the writing is seen as it would appear if actually printed on the pear’s skin—is the “Agnus Dei.” Lamb of God which takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. The life that Christ extends to us, the painter seems to be saying, He gives to creatures who in their mere flesh are nothing but bones that cannot live. The words that come to us are printed out in nature, but in such a way that they obviously come from a source beyond nature.

Hawley has chosen his traditional symbols here with a greater degree of sophistication than ever before. At the same time, the painting suggests that this is a more personal statement than he has made previously. We see not a reflection of the artist’s world this time in the black glass but his own image. In this self-portrait he seems to be contemplating the sorrow of what he has chosen to show us, and his look reveals how moved he is by the condition of mortality he shares with the viewer. Although the Lamb of God offers us life, he does so—and we can only find life—in the context of bitter agony. Christ’s offer was made through his submission to humankind’s greatest enemy, death itself. And in turn, if we are to find life, we must do so by seeing ourselves as so many bones that cannot live otherwise. Not as we wish. Not for eternity.

The painting itself, though, suggests that our hopes are not unfounded. There is the miraculous pear. Equally, when we look into the black glass we see that the color of the light from the windows has been transformed. The series of golden panes to the left of the self-portrait suggest that within the black glass, within the darkness of our faith, we have a sacred interior. Not everything is clear, but what we do see is illumined with an unearthly light.

The painting has one abstract element that ought to be mentioned, a gush of red brushstrokes against the windows on the left. The Death Angel must finally pass over this scene because it has been hallowed by blood. We might return to the image of the pregnant woman and wonder whether the sacrifice of our lives on the altar of our days does not presage a new life.