Six Ways of Worldmaking

The Mythopians Artist Group

September 8 – October 23, 2004

“Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worldsalready 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.

Six Ways of Worldmaking

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Garrett Holg, a former Chicago Sun-Times art critic, contributes to ARTnews magazine

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www.carthage.edu