From Journal to Print

One of my excuses for slackness in blogging lately is that I've been working really hard to finish the large woodblock print shown here.  (I've also used this print as the basis for an edition of artists' books that my friend Laura and I have done as a collaboration.)  Here's the story:  about a year ago Laura, whom I had just gotten to know, and I discovered that we had lived in the exact same small neighborhood in New Orleans.  I grew up in the neighborhood and then lived there again in the mid-70s;  Laura moved there in the 70s to study to be a jockey at the horse race track (which was a mysterious and forbidden place in the neighborhood when I was in elementary school and spending many hours a week trying to sneak into it).  As we talked about our adventures in this wonderous place, we were amazed at how similarly we remembered tiny details-- the broken spot of pavement on Leda Street in front of the old Jockey Club;  the sweet olive trees that perfumed the entire two-block area in autumn and spring;  the corner grocery store, still operating today, the odd religio/cultural underpinnings of the place.

So last year Laura and I each made a journal for our neighborhood project, and we began research and image gathering.  We've met nearly every two weeks for the past year to eat dinner at one of our houses and then retreat to  the studio and work for several hours on whatever phase of the project we were on.  Our journals have been repositories of the images and ideas we've incorporated into our prints and now our edition of books.

Below are two of my journal pages that gave rise to images on the print.  One shows my sketches of bats that lived in the palmetto palms in our yard, a fun feature of our lives, as we hunted for the dead baby bats that frequently fell from the tree and conducted elaborate funerals for them. Bats were a feature of the neighborhood as they swooped around every evening scooping up bugs while we played Kick the Can in the street until the street lights came on.
 
 The page shown below is where Laura and I worked on the idea of the religious syncretism that was very present in the amalgamation of French Catholicism and African Voudou in the neighborhood.  This close connection of two different cultural and religious strains made for an interesting set of rituals and processions and ceremonies.  On the page below, I used a general map of the neighborhood to construct an approximation of a voudou veve, which ended up a rubber stamp cut incorporated into the larger woodcut (lower right area, in brown).  On the same page, Laura reflected on my sketch of a Catholic Virgin Mary statue that was treated ritually much in the same way the Voudou Erzulie Frieda was.  We several times wrote in each other's journals as we developed our thinking.

We have titled our series (the large prints and the edition of books) Faubourg nan Main Bon Dieu, which means Neighborhood in the Hands of the Good God.  In another posting I will show the finished books and Laura's big print.