Origin of an idea

2012_3_23 Origins of an Idea: Rewrite from 6/16/1991

The Hieroglyphic Theater began to germinate in my imagination 22 years ago this month. I remember it like it was yesterday. Suzie and I arrived in Eugene the first week of June, 1969, and once we got settled, first in a small apartment for six weeks, and then in the house on 34th Street, which just happened to have a room that was more than adequate as a studio. While Sue went to summer school I got busy on my drawing board. Through that summer I did a batch of pen-and-ink drawings using the image of the black ball/pearl, which went back to the vision I had had in July 1968, in Las Vegas. I am referring to the experience I call THE INFERNO, the main transformative experience of my life. Most of that early series of drawings were exploratory in nature; indeed, when we went back to Las Vegas the following August I left a pile of drawings I regard as rejects, learning experience at best but not worth keeping. (In 1976 I received quite a shock when we went back to Eugene to visit friends and I discovered that Mike Keenan had salvaged 15 drawings and they were all on his walls at home, and they looked better than I thought they should.)

I remember how excited I was to be exploring a new and personal symbol. When we left Las Vegas I had hoped the move would accelerate my desire to find a fresh approach to my drawing, to get beyond the social narrative and satirical bent I had leaned on for the past five years. I was in search of a more metaphoric approach to imagery, with a different narrative, something that took account of the spiritualization I had experienced through THE INFERNO and Kundalini. I was after something original and I thought the best ticket to achieve that was using the black sphere of vision.

Altogether I probably did some 40 or 50 drawings before that show I had at Oregon State in late November. Probably the most successful drawing of that period was “The Alchemist,” which is owned by Stan Nishimura, an ex-student of mine. Although an enigmatic image, it had a clarity of form and expressive strengthen I found encouraging, which was lacking in many other drawings that I saw as hybrid images of uncertain identity. In fact, the years 1969 to 1973 were a time of working through many ideas that were interesting but lacked focus and cohesion. But by 1974 I had hit my stride and felt I was the master of a personal style and an original narrative. That time frame can be looked upon as my ‘axial period’ as artist and a man.

I drew my first true triple-decker hieroglyph in February 1970. It resulted from a moment of pure inspiration. The idea came to me while I was reading Oration on the Dignity of Man by Renaissance writer-scholar Pico della Mirandola, one of the foremost humanists of his day. I knew about Pico from a Renaissance class I had taught my first year at UNLV, 1965-1966. It was his commentary about the nature on man and his place in the universe according to the ancient wisdom and Pico deeply admired it. Man was seen as “the daemonic intermediate creature” that God placed between the angels above and the beasts below, hence a three level arrangement. Man’s estate was to be “the interpreter of nature” and “to elevate himself above the dung-heap of the inferior world.” Those few words provided me with a moment of illumination: I saw immense possibilities in the triple-decker ontology. An angel in that first hieroglyph represented the ABOVE, and in many future ones a Mandala would represent the highest spirituality, as I understood it. The beasts BELOW were Man’s animal nature and I represent it with a large tapir in that first hieroglyph; but also it represented “hyle,” the material world as such. (Hyle was Greek for “matter.”) Man and his mental abilities existed and flourished in the middle zone, which was elevate from the material zone and in the first hieroglyph I represented it with a self-portrait. I later referred to that level as PSYCHE; it represented a step up, so the speak, but was still short of the full cognizance of the third and highest level, SPIRITUS MUNDI, a world I had glimpsed and tasted and held as the highest attainment possible.

“The Eternal Return” is the name I gave to that first official hieroglyph. The black sphere in it became a black sun; it is near the angel who is dropping his seed on an egg. From this point on I called the series THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER that idea coming from Frances Yates book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, a book I ran into by accident in a Eugene bookstore. One of the great interests to the Humanists was emblem poetry, and as a result they eagerly studied Egyptian hieroglyphs, as symbols with religious meaning. Hieroglyphs were seen as a deep way of stating hidden truths related to a sacred universe. I view them the same way.
My kind of cartoon-like images, or “magic realism” as one reviewer put it, has been misunderstood at times as ‘mere’ cartoons, a low art that doesn’t belong in a gallery or museum. In contrast, Robert Hughes has called Robert Crumb “the Breughel of the 20th century.” There are many other examples: Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Lindner, Mel Ramos, Red Grooms, and Wayne Thiebaud. There is also a whole tribe of illustrators for Graphic Novels that are doing great work, although still on the margins of “fine art.” One could also say the William Blake and Max Beckmann also used cartoon-like figures, and both certainly are in plenty of museums. As Jack Burnham has said of Marcel Duchamp: “The aim of every skilled Hermitic artist is not to lie, but to veil his message in themes so obscure or universal that the possibility of a true identity is never apparent to the public.” I am a mythmaker who operates behind a mask. I am a cartoon striving to be a hieroglyph.


One of the drawings I considered for the cover of Bridge in the Fog more or less sums up my current usage of the hieroglyphic idea. The inspiration for the idea came from a picture of a clown that I found in John Towsen’s wonderful study of the clown tradition through history that represented the Grimaldi Tradition of the 18th century. Towsen’s writes, “Grimaldi was to pantomime comedy what Keaton and Chaplin were to silent film comedy, the genius of whose hands ‘low’ comedy became art.” In other words, the Grimaldi clown was more comic trickster than romantic or magical Harlequin. The figure I worked around was a typical clown with white face, puffy sleeves and pantaloons pants, with a mandala of sorts on his chest. In his hands he has a pig in his raised right hand and fish in his lower left hand. In my version the figure is strutting across a runway with a more absurd and fanciful get-up and make-up, and in his right hand rather than a pig he holds a thunder bolt, like Zeus or Thor might, and in his lowered left hand he holds a fish. Rather than a God figure I offer a lowly clown in praise of folly of man’s earthly estate, as a more fitting image of who and what we are. Still, he has resources. The thunderbolt in his raised right hand indicates some heaven-sent powers are at his deposal, if he but uses them. A current of creativity is always available if we but plug into it. Conversely, he holds a fish in the lowered left hand, for the fish lives in the depths and they must be visited every bit as much as a piece of heaven must be grabbed. So despite his inherent absurdity, the clown’s reach is high, low and deep. The comic trickster is no fool. And of course the black sphere sits near the clown, drawing him like a magnet, high, deep, and low.

In my own case the fish spit out a black pearl during my dark night of the soul. There is a gnostic poem that comes to mind with the mention of a pearl. In The Hymn of the Pearl a seeker goes down into Egypt (the unconscious) to bring back the ‘One Pearl’ (the unifying power) that lies in the middle of the sea, which is encircled by a snorting serpent (Kundalini), thus letting the seeker put on “the robe of glory,” which had been lost (rebirth or redemption.) In Hans Jonas’ fine book The Gnostic Religion writes that in the glossary of gnostic symbolism, ‘pearl’ is one of the standing metaphor for the ‘soul.’ To whit, pearls are hidden with the shell of an animal, which no doubt adds to the lore and lure of the pearl.

The final note to this short essay about the evolution of the black sphere and the three-decker universe is what I discovered in an Egyptian art history course I sat in on with Professor Stein the second semester 1972. He showed a slide one day of the Serekh Motif, a cartouche with an emblem that blew me away when I saw it. It was a cartouche that was common on much of the sacred architecture of the early dynasties, a kind of symbolic cornerstone of Egyptian religious identity. There were three levels with a vertical format. The bottom level was a pillared hall that spatially went deep inside, so there was a three-dimensional feel to the image. In the middle level there was a snake, a cobra, and at the top was a large falcon, a representation of the God Horus. I saw the thing as sheer poetry expressing the essential spirituality of the Egyptian metaphysical understanding of the world. The hall of pillars represented the world of space and time; the snake reveals the Egyptian awareness of “Serpent Power” (kundalini) or world of psyche; and the Falcon/Horus, the high God of the Egyptian pantheon. And of course there are other traditional arrangements of three levels or parts, like, for example, body-soul-spirit; hyle-psyche-pnuema; heaven-earth-underworld or hell. The triple division of spaces provided me with a framework to play in and to give value to each register and to the harmony and reciprocity between them.