Defining the Project

My friend’s mother would sneak into his father‘s art studio to “correct” his paintings. She wasn’t an artist. On one hand I thought that was funny but on the other I was horrified that anyone would do something so invasive; the creative process being personal and sacrosanct.   So it was with a lot of trepidation that I’ve undertaken this project that involves altering of my father‘s work. I gave myself the  strong caveat that I would not “fix” his art, creating details where there were none or altering a drawing. I’ve made one exception through the whole process in adding a toenail to a blob-like toe that stuck out when the art was reinterpreted from a black-and-white drawing to more of a rendering, and did feel guilty about it. What I have done is manipulate the images in Photoshop, making them into half tones, changing watercolor into monochrome  bit-map images; shifting the overall color of the image. I’ve made digital collages of various elements from his images, as well as true collages from multiple works. All in an effort to find ways to make them compatible with mine to serve a given composition.

For the longest time, I viewed Max‘s black-and-white drawings and felt they looked so dated. I was right. How could they not have been? A signature technique of his time was to lay down a shape of color and create an ink drawing on it. That cemented the ink to the blank page. It was a popular device then and if it is done today, it is done differently. It is easy to look at the images of any age and know when they were created. We think of Art as transcending time, but it is very much a product of and a witness for its time, just as it is recognized that music defines an era.

His career aspirations were of a commercial artist. I can’t ask him what distinctions he made between his illustrations and his watercolor works, what rules he set for himself, but the two are very different. He seems to have moved fluidly back and forth between the approaches as he documented the sights of India. He died before the explosion of abstract expressionism that came out of his generation. Whether or not he would have embraced it is yet another open question.

My challenge for this project in large part, has been to maintain the integrity of both his work and my own; to bridge the artistic intent and styles. But, the difficulty in unifying work outside the context of time has also become more and more apparent. Ultimately, I’ve let myself off the hook recognizing it is impossible for me to make work outside of my time either.