The Florence Project: An Experiment in Artistic Community

John Skillen

With six reproductions.

DURING the summer of 1993, I was invited to live and work for one month at the side of seven professional artists engaged in a collaborative printmaking project in Florence, Italy. The specific artistic purpose of the workshop was to produce a portfolio of about twenty intaglio prints, all of which were to take biblical narratives of sacrifice as their point of departure. The project received the endorsement of an international organization of Christian artists, Christians in the Visual Arts, and was funded by a grant from a private foundation.

The idea for the Florence Portfolio Project grew out of conversations three years earlier between two of the participating artists, Bruce Herman and Edward Knippers. Their more private and personal motivation was in imagining the pleasure and mutual encouragement that a group of Christian artists—usually working in isolation—might experience during a retreat—like period of shared fellowship and common work. They understood, however, that their desire for such camaraderie was prompted by the difficulties often faced by Christian artists pursuing their vocation in the contemporary cultural landscape. Such artists—however talented they may be—often find themselves marginalized both by the powers that be in the secular art world establishment (including gallery owners, museum curators, and art journalists), and by the Christian subculture, whose patronage and appreciation they might have reason to expect.

The first purpose of the printmaking project was to create a portfolio of powerful images expressing the validity and authority of the scriptural narrative in elucidating the experience of contemporary people. The second purpose was to explore whether such artistic creation can emerge from a community of artists who define their identity first of all as sisters and brothers in the body of Christ.

While any number of sites could have provided the occasion for voluntary exile and estrangement from habits and invisible assumptions, a city like Florence could provide a powerful example of a cultural time and place where conditions conducive for biblically-responsive art flourished. Moreover, although the Renaissance was the period in which the idea of the individual artist as genius was born, the production of art was then experienced as a collaborative enterprise.

I kept a diary of our experiment in art and community.

Thursday 1 July

During the previous night, Ed Knippers, Bruce Herman, Duncan Simcoe, Tanja Butler, Wayne Forte, Christine (Chris) Anderson, Ted Prescott (who would sculpt the portfolio cabinet) and I flew to Rome from points of origin in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and California. On Thursday, we started for Florence in a rented van, stopping for the night in Orvieto.

In my own mind, our supper together in Orvieto marked the beginning of our enterprise. Over fine Umbrian cuisine, we engaged in those critical first moments of revealing ourselves, of taking in the timbre of one another's voices and nuances of gesture, of coming to those initial and usually unreliable assessments of one another, of beginning to define the purpose that had called us together.

Friday 2 July

Around noon we made the beautiful drive to Assisi through the hills of Umbria. After settling in our hotel, and with a thunderstorm threatening, we meandered at mixed paces down through town. Set dramatically on the cliff at the north end of Assisi is the huge Franciscan abbey built during the century after Saint Francis's death on the site of the original monastery he established there. The walls around the nave of the upper basilica were frescoed during the years around 1300 by Giotto (and/or his school) with scenes from the life of Saint Francis. These depict the big events of Francis's life: the time, for instance, when he was praying in the dilapidated church of Saint Damian and the crucifix told him to "repair my church," the occasion when Francis stripped naked before the bishop and returned all his possessions to his father, Francis's visit to Rome in order to seek papal legitimacy for his new order (when Pope Innocent III dreamed of such a one as Francis holding up a literally collapsing church), and so forth.

One of the overall effects of such a stunning sequence of frescoes—at least for me—is to bring a sort of narrative clarity to Francis's life. Most of us long for such clarity: to be able to know, while they are happening, which episodes will prove to be important and which not, which events are significant—standing as signs of God's presence and action in our lives—and which not. Was it the case, I found myself wondering, that Francis himself as clearly apprehended the significance of these events as Giotto could after the saint's death? Does the depiction of life as a series of connected episodes impose a plot on Francis's life, thus distorting a truthful depiction, or rather does the depiction simply bring more clearly into view the narrative of God's work that indeed was present in his life? (It is this presence of narrative patterns that is precisely what has become questionable for postmodern folk whose experience seems marked by the narrative flatness of mere chronology, and whose theorists present all appearances of plot in life as the groundless impositions of imagination and wishful thinking.) The issue is important to my capacity to identify with Francis, since discerning the significance of episodes generally seems highly problematic in my own life. Portrayals of Saint Francis typically depict him as one able to make the dramatic act (like the stripping naked scene), able boldly and confidently to act on his visions and hunches and inspirations. My own experience has seemed rather the opposite: my efforts at "dramatic enactment"—designed to bring narrative clarity to my life—have almost inevitably proven to sidetrack me from what I could begin (however dimly) to apprehend as the real and really significant plot-lines of my life.

I found myself heartened by a feature of several of these painted episodes which runs counter to the narrative clarity they imply for Francis's life: that is how the presence of enigma and ambiguity and misinterpretation lie at the very heart of the significant episodes. For instance, when Christ tells Francis from the St. Damian crucifix to "repair my church," Francis interprets the call literally and begins to rebuild and repair the dilapidated building. He discovers only over time that God's call concerned the repair, not of the church building, but of the spiritual body of Christ. Similarly, Pope Innocent's dream of a man literally holding up a collapsing church building was an enigmatic sign of the spiritual body's need for a renewal for which Francis and his vision of God's loving presence in the poor and common things of creation could be the agent. Perhaps Francis did not perceive fully the significance of such dramatic episodes when they occurred, but he was willing to step out in a fearless faith that their significance would become manifest.

The other dimension of these frescoes is how they not only link up horizontally with one another as a narrative sequence depicting Francis's life as the site of God's actions, but also invite the viewer to link them vertically with the episodes of biblical narrative arranged above them, which seem to offer some sort of commentary on the action of Francis's life. The typological habit or expectation of finding parallels between narratives (between an Old Testament event and its fulfillment in Christ, or tropologically between events in the reader's life and scriptural episode) has the two-fold effect of rendering the first of the pair real and valid (authenticated by its fulfillment in a bigger story) and also of marking the hiddenness of its significance at the time of its occurrence. Our lives are full of significance exactly as they participate in a larger narrative design of divine action. And yet this participation for the most part operates behind the scenes or between the lines or under the surface, and is apprehended only after the fact, and even then but through a glass darkly.

Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 July

In the morning we drove to Florence. We arrived in the afternoon and located the convent where we had arranged to stay: the "Oblate dell'Assunzione," the ministry of whose half-dozen nuns is to offer a hostelry for longer-term sojourners in Florence. The dark, cool, quietness of the convent was a blessed relief after the hot and noisy din of the streets.

We arranged to have our first formal meeting as a group in one of the sitting areas after supper. We began our discussion of what we would expect of ourselves by way of living in community, discovering quickly enough a variety of views and preferences. We reached no particular resolution or consensus about such matters as worshipping and praying together (and even going to church together on Sundays), or about the value and purpose of having regular meetings to discuss such matters as the larger context of the workshop or provide opportunities for airing feelings and concerns that would inevitably occur through living and working so closely together.

The next morning we attended the Anglican Church of Saint Mark together.

Monday 5 July

This afternoon we made our first visit to the studio. Everyone seemed wound up pretty tight. Expectations were that we would cut up a copper plate into six small pieces and the six artists would begin experimenting. At lunch, Tanja admitted to feeling nervous about being watched and working with the group. Wayne said he was excited and ready to work.

Our rented studio space is in the Santa Reparata Centre for the Graphic Arts, operated by an American printmaker and art professor at the University of Texas, Dennis Olsen. Olsen greeted us and gathered everyone around the large worktable for his orientation talk. He explained how to use the press and get the right pressure, how to use the rollers for spreading ink, how to use the draw knife for cutting plates, and so on.

The artists began to poke around and ask questions, most of them lost on me. I'm ignorant of the entire vocabulary, the entire process.

Tuesday 6 July

First day working in the studio.

I walked over to the studio at 7:30 a.m., stopping for coffee and pastry on the way and meeting up with Tanja and Chris. Bruce was the only one already there when we arrived. He was preparing a copper plate for his morning's experimentation.

Preparing a copper plate: (1) clean and polish the plate with copper polish; (2) cover the back of the plate with contact paper to protect the rear side from acid; (3) clamp the plate to the work table top (optional) and bevel the edges at a 45-degree angle with a metal file; (4) smooth the edge with 600-grit emery cloth. By 8:10, Tanja, Chris, and Ed were arranged around the large worktable in the center of the main work room, filing away on their first plates.

8:15 Tanja invited us all—with self-confessed trepidation—to see the drawings she had brought of some picture ideas. The others were affirming in their praise. All the images were typologically—constructed diptych forms linking Old Testament scenes with New Testament episodes. For example, one shows Moses before the burning bush on the left, with the Annunciation on the right. I commented on how one of the traditional types of the perpetual virginity of Mary was the burning bush: on fire but never consumed. Tanja and I took up this issue of typology at lunch-time. We talked together about the difficulties she faces in having to take into account viewers—even if Christians—who are typologically illiterate. These viewers may very well have difficulty deciphering the images singly, let alone entering in to the picture's exploration of how the images comment on each other. I noted the irony of how an illiterate leather worker in fourteenth— or fifteenth—century Florence would be far more typologically sophisticated than a literate twentieth-century Christian.

8:30 Chris tells Tanja how comfortable she is with her. "I prayed that the other woman here wouldn't be a dragon lady." The exchange seems to me a tender one between two women openly and charitably negotiating their relationship. I was grateful that my own presence didn't seem to interfere. (I'm aware that my own chief anxiety is whether I'll be an interfering presence, and how I'll be able to elicit information and commentary from the artists without bugging them while they work.)

9:15 Bruce invites me over to the glass shelf beside the sink where he is troweling a small pile of thick ink onto his first plate for a first proof run on the press. After squeezing the ink into every line and nook and cranny on the plate, the excess ink has to be wiped off the plate, leaving only the ink in the acid-engraved lines and spaces, which of course makes the print-impression on the paper when it is run through the press.

My first posing. Tanja asks Chris and me to pose together "for only two minutes" as Ruth (Chris) holding up the aged Naomi (me). Chris cracks a few jokes about bad breath and hugging the guys.

By mid-morning all the artists were at work.

Wednesday 7 July

This morning has dawned with a dazzling clarity and coolness. Last night we sang and prayed together with a spirit of thankfulness for half an hour after supper. We have the studio space from after lunch until 7 p.m. The others have accepted my role in recommending, at least through the first week, an itinerary of places to visit together during each day's free time.

We spent this morning at Monastery San Marco, where Fra Angelico frescoed individual scenes from the life of Christ, chiefly concerning the Passion, for each cell. The cell frescoes would of course have been intended to invite long and steady meditation and identification with the particular moment of the Passion represented. I could feel keenly how the monastic life, by definition, requires (or invites) the sacrifice of one's own narrative hopes for life, the dissolution of one's own intentions, the leveling of one's own trajectories, and the gradual ordering of one's own life according to the events of Christ's Passion (itself the narrative of his own self-surrender). Indeed, the monastic community is created by sublimating all private narratives to the imposed rule of the narrative of Christ.

After we returned to the studio, Ed Knippers invited me to watch him "ink up," wipe, and run off the first proof of an image of John the Baptist and Jesus. He seems to enjoy talking and explaining things to me while he is working. Wayne has put his small Flight into Egypt plate to soak in acid, as does Tanja her Ruth and Naomi image. Duncan is still drawing. Tanja has begun sketching for a second small plate of Samson and Delilah.

The studio is bright, full of light from a clear sky, with breezes wafting through the open windows. The views out the windows are jumbled messes of rooftops, rear-facing walls, utility pipes, courtyard greenery, hanging laundry, window flower boxes.

I'm not confident yet of my "reading of the vibes," but the group seems comfortable in the company of one another. It does strike me that people (including me) are still searching out their spots, establishing the traffic patterns, laying down the scent trails of personal space. I hope I can develop sensitive-enough antennae for the sort of hidden negotiation over place and presence, for the vibrations set up by the magnetic fields of personality, that are inevitable in such an enterprise.

Thursday 8 July

I started out for the studio by myself at 8, but along the way I saw Chris at a coffee bar and joined her for a second coffee. We chatted a bit about the negotiation occurring for space and presence, the vibes and magnetic fields being set into play in the studio, marked thus far—as far as I can tell—mainly by charity and unresentful deference.

10:00 Everyone is working intensely. Earlier Bruce asked me to retrieve his Sacrifice of Isaac plate from the acid bath. I'm not sure I want to get involved in much "helping" work. My fingers burn from the acid even now, and I was wearing one of my silk shirts which I worried about splashing with acid. The issue is that of establishing my own peculiar role at the studio as diarist, not gopher.

Friday 9 July

One of the actions—mainly covert—that is occurring today is everyone's awareness that the first of our four work weeks in the studio is drawing to a close. It surfaced overtly at breakfast this morning, which Bruce, Ted, Ed, and I took together at one of the nearby coffee bars. With his leaderly concern on behalf of everyone, Ed revealed some anxiety that we weren't producing work fast enough to complete a portfolio during our stay. So he proposed that, on days when we have the afternoon shift in the studio, we might not take supper at the convent, but just eat lightly at a sandwich place near the studio in order to allow an uninterrupted session from 2 until as late as 11.

When Ed and Bruce broached this idea at lunch Chris said she wasn't sure she agreed. She thought that our meal-times ("breaking bread together") were important for establishing and deepening our life and identity as a community, as were our times of praying and singing together in the little chapel after supper. "If people want to go back to the studio in the evening, they still can." The issue remains unresolved.

It's new for these people to be working with others around. I can't quite draw a bead on whether there is a lot of looking at each other's work going on, whether individuals are restraining themselves, what exactly the range of curiosity is, and whether the curiosity is prompted by the competitive urge or openness to mutual influence. There seems to be a general freedom about walking over and looking at proofs freshly drawn from the press. Comments are always supportive and complimentary.

5:30 Back in the studio, Chris breaks into song: "I've seen lonely days that I thought would never end, but I always thought that I'd see you, baby, one more time again." Tanja has asked Chris to help her mix up some more white ground. In Tanja's modest deference to others, I fear that she may sometimes get pushed out of her rightful place in line at the acid bath.

Another topic at last evening's supper: loneliness. Duncan's wife Kathy (who has been doing some sightseeing by train) joined us and we who are married were jestingly voicing our envy of Duncan, and our loneliness without our spouses. Ted described the loneliness he felt when he traveled alone in Europe for a month and a half several years ago: the peculiar loneliness of being in a foreign land among plenty of people but with whom one can have only the most superficial of conversations: Un caffe, per piacere. Grazie. Quanto costa un francobollo? ("How much does a stamp cost?")

I mentioned to Tanja the acute loneliness that Abraham must have felt on the long trek up to the mountain with his only-begotten son, and of Mary during the time of uncertainty between the Annunciation and the Visitation, waiting in silent faith for the unpredictable outcome of an as-yet unnameable action. I suppose every sacrifice involves loneliness—the loneliness of being in what Saint Augustine called a regio dissimilitudinis or region of unlikeness, where every act, even the simplest, can seem fraught with danger, where ignorance of conventions makes every action a risk. But in such a regio dissimilitudinis, cut off from our self-sufficiency and sense of control over our environment, we are more open to entrusting ourselves to God.

Last night after supper, instead of singing and praying together, we decided at Wayne's urging to stroll together down to Piazza Santa Croce and have gelati. We paused in the piazza to watch the evening sky slowly deepen into a clear and powerful aquamarine before strolling on down to the Arno—painfully romantic for those of us who had left behind loved ones.

Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 July

I asked the group if any would like to accompany me to Padova and Venice to see my friends Antonella and Vittore Pagan on this, our first weekend. The others were enthusiastic about coming along.

We reserved two compartments in a morning train for Padova. Tanja, Bruce, Ted Prescott, and I settled down in one. While we watched the changing landscape of northern Italy, much of our conversation mapped out the terrain of an issue at the very heart of the portfolio project: namely, whether or not, or how much, the artist herself must have spiritual experience of the narrative subject in order to portray and explore it adequately in paint. Would it be enough for the artist to be a careful observer of spiritual experience, without having lived it deeply, or at all, himself?

Tanja was inclined to the view that "the understanding of the narrative has to come from the inside out." Fresh from our mutual experience of Fra Angelico's frescoes, she took up the "beato Angelico" as an example of one whose paintings "spring from, and require for their portrayal, an authentic piety," and that they "must grow out of personal devotion." As a counter example, Tanja developed her sense that the paintings of Caravaggio "may, but may not, have been created out of a devotional center."

It's a good question. Can one conclude anything about the artist from the artwork? Or, to come at the same question from the opposite angle, is the intentionality of the artist relevant to, or reliably embodied within, the work of art? Bruce surprised me by taking a more skeptical view. I say surprised, because I have often heard him speak about the closeness of connection between his spiritual life and his painting, and of the gratitude and satisfaction he feels (the fulfillment of intention?) when his paintings take an edifying place in the corporate worship or private devotion of the body of Christ. But I realize that this matter of the artwork's effect on the devotion and spirituality of its viewer is different than that of its relation to the artist.

On the train, I asked the others whether, and how, they experienced any connection between their own spirituality and their artwork. They were curious themselves as to how, and how often, their artwork seemed to enrich their devotional life rather than the other way around. And that their images seemed to emerge with more spiritual depth and authority when they were concentrating "artistically" on the image rather than trying to be conscious of any religiously edifying intention. As Bruce remarked, "When I deliberately try to create a 'religious' image, it goes dead." Bruce told of the occasion recently when his friend Thomas Howard, obviously moved profoundly by Bruce's "Crown of Thorns" image, asked him "what were you feeling when you painted this?" Bruce responded, "Well, what I was 'feeling' was how I needed a little more dark here and a little more green there." But Bruce spoke later in the conversation of "the trepidation I feel in painting the face of Christ."

We all spent a wonderful afternoon and evening at the Pagan's large country villa, and in the morning, Bruce and I watched out our window a fast and delicate progress of rain dissolving into a layer of luminous violet mist rising over the fields, then a rolling cloud bank giving way to a bright and breezy dawn. After breakfast, the Pagans took us back to Padova to catch our train into Venice.

While resting in a church piazza in Venice, I asked Tanja how she had met her newly-wed husband, Tony Butler. Tony turns out to have been Tanja's high school English teacher in the small New York town of Averill Park outside Albany. She experienced him even then, twenty years ago, as a gifted teacher who expected much, and respected high schoolers enough to ask probing questions of moral and spiritual import, a quietly charismatic figure in many students' lives, whose devout Roman Catholic faith revealed itself in his teaching. Only last fall, Tanja learned that his wife—the mother of their nine children—had died. Tanja sent Mr. Butler a note of condolence, and during Advent sent him one of her beautiful hand-made woodblock Christmas cards. Tony invited her out to dinner, and in a conversation about the "battle for the mind," Tanja realized that Tony was speaking of the spiritual warfare described by Saint Paul, and that they shared a deep and mutual faith in Christ. During Epiphany Tony proposed marriage. Tanja accepted, and they were married on February 15th. At 58, Tony is twenty years her senior. Tanja is now stepmother to nine children, from ages 17 to 32. And suddenly, as Tanja has said to several of us, she who was on the verge of joining a monastic order out of desire to share in a Christian community, has been given all at once a community of her own.

Tanja's story struck me as another example of an action, inaugurated long ago, its current invisibly guided by God beneath the surface of decades of conscious activity, until the moment ("Ripeness is all!") prepared for its disclosure—a moment known only to God, except that when it makes its appearance, we apprehend it as a story we have known all along.

Monday 12 July

At 8:15 the artists were already at work. A quiet conversational atmosphere: everyone greets one another warmly. There is a sense of being here as a group, not as a set of self-enclosed individuals forced to share studio space.

Bruce is mulling over the image of the scourged and mocked and blindfolded Christ, an image now influenced in his imagination by Fra Angelico's San Marco frescoes and his study yesterday in Venice of Titian's Dead Christ. Later, he tacks up his image: a blindfolded Christ entitled Sacred Head: The Crowning . It looks very powerful to me. He says he's still processing Fra Angelico (specifically, the cell fresco with the blindfolded Christ surrounded by detached images of the elements and agents of his persecution), which will take a long time, a couple of weeks, or years, he laughs. Bruce, and the others, show a depth and immediacy of both emotional and aesthetic response to things they see which is still largely foreign to me, and tantalizing.

Tuesday 13 July

Yesterday—as Chris discovered—was Tanja's 38th birthday. Today at lunch-time, Chris was late in appearing. Halfway through a delicious first course of shells with a creamy vegetable sauce, Chris bursts through the kitchen door together with Sister Stella bearing a gorgeous layered torte (fenced round with miniature vienna fingers, a single candle in the middle) and singing a hastily-learned Italian version of "Happy Birthday." Our gift: a box of "Giotto" colored pencils, the cheap Crayola—equivalent found at the nearby Standa supermarket. Beneath her demural about making a fuss over her birthday, Tanja seemed delighted by our little party.

This morning six of us (all except Ed and Duncan) made an excursion to the Franciscan church of Santa Croce. Giotto's famous but fragmented frescoes in the private chapels of the Bardi and Peruzzi families stand to the right of Gaddi's fresco of the legend of the Holy Cross, which fills both sides of the arch behind the main altar. According to this legend, the wood of the forbidden tree in Eden provided in time the wood of the Cross—the wood of the first Adam's death serving as the means of our redemption through the death of the second and greater Adam. The story includes many episodes, including Solomon's burial of the wood after the Queen of Sheba's troubling prophecy and the Emperor Constantine's recovery of the cross following his mother Helena's vision of its whereabouts. It remains, for me at least, an archetypal story of the thing buried and hidden through long stretches of time, but stretches of time which find their true significance only at the punctuating moments when the thing that matters surfaces. The real elements of the narrative—of the unfolding and purposeful trajectory of action—whether in God's cosmic story of salvation or in the enigmatic narratives of our own lives, often lie below the surface, waiting patiently until the time is ripe, until we are ready to bear their revelation.

In the Pazzi Chapel, empty of other tourists, Chris, Bruce, and I sang the simple chorale of Dona Nobis Pacem. The acoustics transformed our simple voices into a choir.

Gradually the artists seem to be hitting their stride. Bruce returned to the studio last night to work and ran off a proof of the Blindfolded Christ he began yesterday. I think it may be very strong and very beautiful in its pain.

Wednesday 14 July

Last night at supper we decided to have an evening soirée in the convent's garden. Bruce discovered that the nuns had a guitar for the borrowing, so Duncan Simcoe and Bruce Herman played songs, I brought out the two bottles of wine I had bought in Orvieto, we lit up a citronella candle to fend off the mosquitoes, and had a sweet and relaxing time of singing and chatting and telling stories.

But this morning we discovered that Bruce Herman had woken up sick with a fever, body ache, and intestinal distress. He made it over to the studio but soon decided he'd be better off in bed. At Duncan's suggestion, we gathered around Bruce and prayed for him. We're not sure yet what he caught and how, but it prompted some anxiety among several members of the group who felt the threat that sickness poses for creative work done under the severe time pressure of the workshop.

Bruce was able to join us at the supper table, but only (according to the Italian idiom which Sister Stella used) "mangiare bianco," to "eat white" bland foods. Duncan again voiced concern that we not allow the fear of sickness and health problems to subvert the faith and hope we wish to bring to this project, so Duncan, Ted, Chris, Bruce, and myself gathered in the convent's little chapel to pray together after supper. Indeed, Tanja—who spoke knowingly of her own empathetic inclination to take on or take in the ills of others—looked very pale and tired at supper. She ate little and went straight to bed.

Thursday 15 July

Bruce is slowly regaining strength, and is back at work. Tanja isn't quite sure of her diagnosis, but she slept from 9 last night straight through until noon today.

In the afternoon, Duncan, Chris, and I went for a coffee break. Chris mentioned studying Michelangelo's sonnets with their interwoven spiritual and sexual passion. Duncan remembered a neat discussion he had read in a book called Sayonara, Michelangelo in which the author juxtaposed different translations of the sonnets to show how different cultural periods translate—or rather interpret—differently, according to their own values and assumptions. That prompted a discussion about whether it is ever possible to reconstruct a past moment of a cultural tradition. The issue is obviously relevant to the portfolio enterprise, in which the artists are deliberately and consciously engaged in looking at, and responding to, past works of art in the Christian tradition which embody particular understandings of biblical narratives.

Friday 16 July

I'm fascinated by how several of the artists are toying seriously with forming layers of images on the same plate. Sometimes this occurs in the context of a new image superseding one that the artist didn't think was working well—yet somehow the rejected image is redeemed by its enriching presence in the new image. Sometimes images are set down and deliberately layered over, as when Wayne layers over etched words which then seem to whisper behind the image in the foreground. Hidden layers whispering their presence, unheard words still heard. He's now working on his Good Samaritan image, through which appears the outline of its original image:

SAC
RIF
ICE

I'm reminded of a fascinating conversation between Bruce and Wayne on the train back from Venice last week. Both spoke of a mysterious desire to give up control over their paintings, even to "sacrifice the image itself." Wayne imagined letting the plate sit in acid "until the image floats away."

Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 July

WhenI arrived at the studio about 8:30, Bruce, Ed, and Duncan were the only ones who had arrived. I videotaped Duncan cranking the hand press to run off the first proof of a new image. He gave the image the slightly facetious working title of "Columbus"—because of the sail image with cross that fills the top half of the plate. He envisions the sail at the top as a "going home" image and a figure at the bottom expressive of a "mix of the celebratory and of the physical facts of torture." This male figure, arms lifted, "is the most overt Christ figure I've ever worked with." Duncan identified two influences which he thought were probably at work in his imagination: (1) The verse from Hebrews 12:2, "For the joy set before him, he endured the cross," and (2) a reaction to some of the churches we have been seeing which prompted him "to want to avoid the fascination with blood and suffering as an end in itself and to focus more on Christ's suffering as a necessary fact of the entire route to the real goal: the joy set before him."

Tuesday 20 July

At 10:30, Duncan invited me over to his work space to talk about the process of his work on the "Columbus" plate. He says that the full figure with arms upraised was "too obvious, and I don't want to be obvious." He makes some very interesting comments about how he is consciously allowing and anticipating different works in the portfolio to enter into conversation with one another, allowing him to do things, or encouraging him in directions, that he might not take if the works were independent entities. He comments, for instance, that Bruce Herman's focus, in his Heads of Christ series, on the torment of the moment has in part been what has prompted Duncan to "move on to the joy beyond those torments."

Wednesday 21 July

Everyone has arrived at the studio after our noon meal of pasta Genovese, chicken with mushrooms, salad and fruit. I just began to videotape Ed Knippers beginning an initial drawing. For some reason he was irritated, and asked me to stop.

Last evening, sculptor Ted Prescott initiated an after—supper meeting for the principal purpose of discussing some of the logistics that we will face during the final week of the project: when, exactly, the artists should begin printing their two best prints; how we will select from all the images completed by each artist those which will comprise the portfolio; and how we should arrange our daily schedule beginning on Friday when we no longer will be sharing the studio. This last issue precipitated a discussion in which there was no clear consensus. Bruce proposed that we cancel taking our mid-day meal at the convent, thus encouraging everyone to put in a longer, uninterrupted day at the studio. That seemed to sit okay, but he also called for less talking and more concentrated and silent work in the studio. Bruce alluded to there being someone who found distracting the convivial conversation that sometimes occurs. The issue is complex since eight people have different work habits. Chris gave voice to the view that such "rules" were unnecessarily constraining and controlling, and that we ought to be able to trust one another to speak directly and kindly about any interferences that arise. Work—and pressure—has understandably begun to heat up now with only a week and a half left. The concerns of living together charitably as a community will doubtless be put more to the test. But that's one of the explicit and defining features of this whole enterprise, or experiment: to see how Christian artists might be able, or unable, to work congenially and collaboratively together when artistic production in the modern secularized world assumes, and declares, radically different conventions of private, individualistic, and competitive work. We'll see at the end how we assess our success and failure.

Thursday 22 July

I've just gone around taking some photographs of people at work. "The studio is a sacred place," Chris whispers with a twinkle in her eye, "like a church; private, a place of confession. It must be respected, or else people won't be free to confess. The secrecy of the confessional must be honored." I will ask later whether she was speaking generally or specifically to me about what would be appropriate for me to record. Ed hung up a first proof of his whipped back of Christ image entitled With His Stripes . "Are you satisfied with that line, Ed? Nice and crisp," asks Wayne. At this stage, the back is pretty much without shading; just the bare white back scarred with deeply etched lines everywhere.

Duncan walked into the large workroom and, after looking at his "Columbus" (or "Sail") etching, raised the issue of how literal the sail ought to be: how about putting in a mast and some rigging? or more "ebullience" in the sail? A bit later, Duncan invited Ted's response to several options, and, with his usual directness of suggestion, Ted recommended making the sail smaller and darkening the space around it. Duncan seemed to concur.

Monday 26 and Tuesday 27 July

The group is moving into the "final stretch" mode required during their last week of work.

On Monday, Duncan ran off a proof of his enigmatic Vacant-eyed Face on the electric press. Bruce asked Duncan, "Is this the man born blind?" Duncan explains: It is the sacrifice of grief—that is, the giving up of grief itself—which the Lord asked of Ezekiel when he said, "I am going to take away the delight of your eyes; but don't weep" (Ezekiel 24: 15-17). I was interested that Bruce, and everyone else, had waited so long before asking Duncan about the subject of this weird and enigmatic image. Why the reticence about direct inquiry?

I've been doing a lot of videotaping of processes this morning: following Ed through the procedure of inking a plate, rolling on soft ground, and running a piece of fabric through the press on top of a soft-ground covered plate.

On Tuesday, Chris's early afternooon work was to engrave accent lines into the thorns of her Crocifissone #1 . The handprints appear in the print rather like photographic negative images, with the x-ray appearance of the Shroud of Turin.

Duncan continues work on a new Abraham and Isaac plate. He has eliminated the pile of wood in Isaac's lap (was that too obvious a clue for Duncan's taste?) and added two grocery carts. He's put a ram's head in one. (Is this a typical process of Duncan's? He begins with the gestures of contemporary figures, adds trappings as clues to the biblical narrative he is playing with, and then gradually removes those trappings until he arrives at some intuited balance point at which the image glances subtly in two directions at once.) The grocery cart is a nice contemporary "icon" of transience and displacement. The leap of verbal/pictorial wit: imagining Abraham and Isaac heading up into the mountains pushing their grocery carts with the materials for the sacrifice.

The group has decided to hold a meeting at 5 Wednesday afternoon in order to review the images of each artist and begin selecting those which will comprise the portfolio. The meeting—and the selection—needs to occur early enough to allow time for finishing touches, printing of two careful images for each selected print, drying, and packing for shipment.

Wednesday 28 July

Bruce has run off a proof of a Deposition from the Cross. In the proof, the one-and-a-half inch border is simply imprinted with the linen fabric pressed through soft-ground. But he showed me the second stage—now in the acid—in which he has "open bited" into this border the repeated letters INRI (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews). Duncan came over to have a look, too, and openly asked Bruce about this big difference in approach. Bruce's work—with its typical raw emotional and expressionist gutsiness—has seemed always to eschew anything that might smack of the "decorative," or even of accepting the confines of a limited and clearly-defined pictorial space. And here he is not only turning to a starkly traditional and severely limiting framing convention but also adding a decorative border. "Well," he said, "I've been inspired by all the great art I've been seeing. The great masters didn't seem limited by the requirements of decoration. They were not just 'expressing themselves.' They were making things of beauty. They didn't scorn the pretty. When I was a boy I loved to make pretty things. Then I got to art school."

Duncan and Bruce then fell into conversation about the violence of the modernist rejection of the beautiful, and the "machismo" cult of brave ugliness. Both were interested in the final failure of that project in painters such as Philip Guston, who, for all his efforts to reject the beautiful, could never evade his love for the beauty of color. Under his hand, even the ugly became beautiful.

1:45 "Wayne, come in here and tell me I have to be patient," says Tanja from the acid room where her Moses Passion diptych has been soaking for several hours. I walk over myself and give her a little pep talk. Wayne comes in, looks the plate over, inspects the line depth, and says that it looks good and deep to him, that in his opinion it was done. "That's what you wanted to hear, isn't it?" he asks, laughing gently. "Yes!" says Tanja. I comment that we're getting to know one another. "They read you like a book, Tanja. Take what you say and reverse it." Duncan, appearing in the doorway, quips, "The flipside of community."

2:00 Tanja asks out loud to no one in particular, "Why does the title 'Rushing Toward Judgment' keep running through my head?" "Maybe," I whisper, "because the 5 o'clock deadline is fast approaching." She nods.

Tanja had given voice to the anxiety that everyone doubtless felt as we gathered in the small workroom for the 5 o'clock meeting whose chief purpose was to select the images to be included in the portfolio. I suppose I had assumed that it would be no big deal for a bunch of established professional artists to sit down with friends and hang their works up on the wall, works whose process of making everyone had been privy to. But I learned from several in the group that they had very seldom been in such a setting where their work was up for assessment by a larger group of peers. Several had been on the professorial end of the experience as art teachers holding "critiques" of student work, but seldom as the one being "critiqued." This in fact was the word that Chris Anderson used to describe the selection meeting. In his opening comments as the one asked to run the meeting, Ted Prescott suggested that to call it a critique struck the wrong set of connotations. We were not here to evaluate one another's prints as failed or successful works of art, but as friends and colleagues to discuss together in affirmative terms which prints from each artist would work well together both as individual groups of three or four images and as a cohesive collection of eighteen or twenty.

We decided to gather in the small workroom because it had an entire wall of corkboard on which we could tack all of the images together. We lined up chairs against the opposite wall. The first issue of discussion was who would go first. For a solution to that problem, Ted numbered slips of paper 1 through 6, put them in Tanja's straw hat, and everyone picked a number. Ted officially began the meeting with a prayer. Tanja was first up. Generally what happened was that people would pipe up with comments, mainly positive ones about the images they really liked and why, and casual conversation would ensue over 15 or 20 minutes until a consensus emerged as to the three or four likeliest candidates for inclusion in the portfolio. Several people remarked that the session turned out to be more painless than they had anticipated.

Thursday 29 and Friday 30 July

Finishing touches. Wayne is trying to finish up on Thursday, since he is the first of us to depart (in two days). By 10 a.m. he is at work running off the final proofs of his Rest on the Flight into Egypt, which we have unanimously selected as an appropriate gift for the Sisters at the convent who provided such warm and generous hospitality during our sojourn. He will entitle the print "Sojourners," and we will all sign it. Wayne also runs off final proofs of his Deposition .

Chris is working on her Crown of Thorns with Crucifixion, getting ready to add a house to the bottom area. She has cut out three identical but different-sized gray ranch-style house silhouettes and is asking Duncan for advice about which size works best and in which placement.

Each artist must run off—as finely and carefully as their skill and the studio's equipment will allow—two prints of each of their three images.

Friday evening: The artists are wrapping up their work at various speeds and in varying conditions of energy and emotion, and tomorrow will be a heavy workday for several. But in part because Wayne's departure makes this our last day all together, we decided to celebrate our month's work and life together with a group dinner at a restaurant.

Bruce suggested we try a place recommended to him by Trinita and Steven Grieco (the brother of Bruce's brother-in-law) as offering the "best regional cooking in Florence." Trinita must have called the proprietor to mention our coming, because when Bruce mentioned the Griecos' recommendation to the proprietor, his face brightened and he smiled knowingly.

Our meal was fabulous, and all sorts of reasons conspired to lengthen it. Everyone slowly relaxed. Each course deserved slow savoring. The celebratory mode took hold; the portfolio was accomplished, and was worthy. At one point, Bruce jumped up suddenly and ran out the front door and returned momentarily with single red roses for Tanja and Chris. The food, the proprietors' congenial presence, the wine, the odd line-up of old American rock 'n' roll and gospel music which we gradually realized was being played in our honor, all added to the conviviality. The honest pleasure that the owners took in our own appreciative presence culminated at dessert time when, without our ordering it, they brought out special liqueurs, including their private reserve of Vin Santo or "holy wine."

Three and a half hours after our arrival we departed, sharing warm regards with our hostess and her son, our last supper together having been transformed into a Babette's Feast or a Wedding at Cana.

Saturday 31 July and Sunday 1 August

I imagine that all of us would say that last night's dinner signaled the fitting conclusion to our month together. The finale was not quite as clean cut as the endings in fiction and the movies.

The seven of us remaining in the group had planned to arrive at the studio by 11 Sunday morning to clean up the place, and to have the big final meeting over the prints themselves: making definitive selections and deciding on the sequence of the images in the portfolio collection. We finished cleaning up around 2, and decided to take a lunch-break at the Chinese restaurant around the corner before the portfolio meeting.

During lunch, someone—I think it was Tanja—made the genial invitation for each of us to say something about whether or not our expectations for the workshop had been met. Responses were varied. Indeed, the conversation placed a vivid caution-flag before any inclination I might have to romanticize our month together.

Back at the studio, we spread out the eighteen selected images and deliberated about the best order for the prints within the portfolio. We reached a consensus, and packed them up for the next day's trip home.

Epilogue

At a distance of several months after the Florence project, do I have a more settled impression of its success? My own mood of assessment seems to be one of kindly ambivalence. How ought its success or failure be measured, I wonder. Of the first of its central purposes—to create in one month a portfolio of intaglio etchings gathered around a single theme—job accomplished.

Whether the portfolio—both as a whole and as individual images—demonstrates sufficient artistic merit, power, and integrity to be deemed worthy both of the artists' signatures and of public exhibition—the jury is still out. The reports back from the portfolio's first exhibition last August at the Greenbelt Festival in England were all positive. The artists' own remarks to each other during that final selection and ordering session were that the images did work pleasingly and coherently as an integrated and sequenced group. I don't trust my own sensibilities in that regard, but at the moment I'm struck forcefully by their difference of tone. Chris's Crocifissone #1, for instance, is in a different tonal universe than Tanja's Samson and Delilah or Wayne's Deposition. Will the striking juxtaposition of such images be provocatively fruitful or disconcerting? How much ought we even to have expected by way of overall harmony and coherence in the collection? After all, the artists were expected to bring with them and set into play, not to repress or sublimate, the characterizing features of their oeuvres so far.

It seems to me that Bruce Herman's and Ed Knippers's prints work in a traditional mode of depicting and exploring a specific moment in a readily-identifiable narrative (the blindfolded Christ after his arrest or a stone sailing through the air at Stephen's head). But they also achieve "expressionist" effects which give their images an emotional immediacy that depends on distinctly contemporary sensibilities. The way in which Chris Anderson's and Duncan Simcoe's work "expresses the validity of the scriptural narrative in elucidating the experience of contemporary people" (to cite the first purpose of the project) is different. Both head more in the direction of the "symbolic" than the "narrative," and the serious play of their compositions involve the surprising juxtaposition of elements and motifs from past and present that forcibly, even intellectually, invite connection-making across historical time and space. Tanja Butler and Wayne Forte work with traditional artistic conventions of organizing the space in each image, but their work (in contrast with Ed's and Bruce's) seems to assume that less violence will be needed to activate the appropriate emotion in the viewer. Rather, their work draws out the sort of emotions—of pathos, tenderness, and affection—that contemporary culture pretends to be embarrassed by but for which it is starving.

The success of the portfolio, therefore, may be owing not just to the excellence of individual prints but to the way in which the whole collection can train the viewer in a broad range of responses to scriptural narratives. A common denominator throughout the portfolio is the artist's dialogue with their Renaissance predecessors. It was clear to me, however, that the artists had gotten well beyond the imitative. They had gotten behind the works of their Renaissance counterparts to the questions and divine calls that drew those earlier works into being. In doing so, the portfolio artists responded to those calls in the context of our own contemporary setting with its peculiar fears and evasions of God's invitation to find ourselves by sacrificing ourselves.

The issue of the unity-in-diversity of the images comprising the portfolio applies equally to the second defining purpose of the workshop: to live and work together as a "community" of sisters and brothers in Christ rather than as autonomous individuals obliged to share studio space. How did we do? Again, my comments will be slippery, ambivalent. We certainly discovered among ourselves incompatibilities at the level of personality and the chemistry of character. But what group of eight wouldn't? Could we have expected a single month—one of hard labor, not group therapy—to be enough time to disclose personality, to identify the well and ill features of personality, and to nurture one another into greater maturity and wholeness of identity? Surely not. There were few open eruptions of discord. Is that a reliable signal, or suspect? Would some frictions have better been aired than buried and allowed to fester under the surface? When is reticence an act of charity and when an action of passive aggression? For that matter, when is apparent intimacy of self-disclosure just a more subtle form of deflection and control? Or is it that each artist had the proper obligation to manage his or her own inner weather (of emotions, body chemistry, and the like) for the primary responsibility of concentrated attention to the work at hand, to the copper plate under the engraving tool. An issue: when to sacrifice that necessary devotion to work in order to attend to the needs of another? All I can say is that I saw the artists daily facing that problem, not avoiding it.

Perhaps not every action of relating to one another was marked by perfect charity. But surely it is more remarkable how much charity and good will and open appreciation of one another did occur. For me, a reliable sign of such charity was the transparent atmosphere of pleasure that marked our meals together, the wholesome honesty (not always happy, sometimes discouraged or anxious or tired) written on the faces of my companions as I watched them take their seats around the table. So what's my own assessment of how, in one short month, we labored to allow personality and yet to sacrifice private quirks and habits for the sake of a larger commonweal? Not perfect, but as an old friend of mine often found occasion to say, "as good as any and better than most."

How about the forms in which our common spiritual life was expressed? In planning the workshop, Bruce and Ed imposed no rules of prayer or worship on the group, but they did indicate their expectation that our common Christian faith ought to find some corporate manifestation. The fact is that we did not stumble upon any mutually-compatible forms of piety, whether as "orders" of daily devotions or modes of prayer or traditions of hymnody. Had we brought with us greater uniformity of denominational or devotional "style," we might have created the appearance of tighter spiritual unity. But while we never found a repertory of hymns that suited everyone, we did sing lustily enough on occasion to give the nuns the impression that we were a professional singing group! And while joint prayer never quite served as the glue unifying the whole group, plenty of prayer went on in groups of twos and threes and fours, and our meal-time blessings were never perfunctory.

Can one create Christian artistic community in a month? No. But over the long haul, such months can bear fruit. Is there some readily achievable community ethos that can replace the radical individualism that marks the modern production of art? No. But workshops such as ours are probably a fruitful setting for working out such an ethos. What forms of sacrifice must occur among artists and patrons and communities to foster art which can serve as vessels and image-bearers of the face of Jesus? I suspect that my companions have wiser things to say about such a question after the Florence Project than before.

Issue #6 • Summer 1994