Stratoz and I discovered Retro TV which we can magically receive due to a cheap digital converter box and rabbit ears from Radio Shack(yes, we are very high tech!)  Dragnet was unknown to me as a child, but is a regular on Retro TV and  I was watching the odd intro where Joe Friday advertises some attraction of Los Angeles in his deadpan voice, and the attraction turned out to be Watts Towers.  Mosaics on Dragnet!  With Friday’s emphasis that the Towers survived the Watts Riots of 1965.

I’d heard of the Watts Towers but did not realize how tall they are, with some approaching 99 feet, and that Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant, created them by himself with only a few hand tools, over a period of 30 years, starting in the 1920’s.  He collected broken bottles and china and anything else he could find to mosaic the structures composed of metal pipe.

I can’t imagine what it was like to live in Watts with this tower slowly growing toward the sky and then literally towering over the neighborhood.  It’s like living in the shadow of a mountain, part of the landscape but wondrously bizarre.

I found a video of a 1957 documentary called The Towers, by William Hale,  which is a fascinating look at Rodia at work.  The narrator cites Rodia’s “urgent need for expression,” which captures the intense drive he had to build something big.  It reminds of Philadelphia’s Isaiah Zagar and his Magic Gardens, how someone collects castoffs, scraps, all that is unwanted, and turns it into expression, into art, or in some cases, orders for demolition, followed by rescue and a flow of people wanting to come and see.

Related Posts:
In a Dream

The
Magic Garden of Philadelphia:  Mosaic Immersion with Isaiah Zagar

I was fascinated to discover this mosaic on Martin Luther King Day, of which I had never heard:

St. Francis of the Guns
Beniamino Bufano, 1898-1970
1969, bronze, gunmetal, mosaic tile

Commissioned by the mayor of San Francisco after the assasinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., made of voluntarily donated handgun metal from 2000 handguns, inlaid with mosaics of King, Kennedy, and Lincoln.

A Pilgrimage to Walls Speak:  The Narrative Art of Hildreth Meiere

Stratoz and I greeted the New Year by going to see the Arshile Gorky Exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Museum.  I was moved by the persistence of Gorky’s life, beginning with his childhood in Armenia and witnessing the massacres by Turkish forces, his mother dying in his arms out of starvation, fleeing to the United States and painting, painting, painting.  His two portraits of himself with his mother were intensely somberly sorrowful.  Art critic Ed Voves in an intriguing article points to the influence of the Eastern Orthodox Icon image of “The Mother of God who Shows the Way,” Theotokos Hodegetria.  Gorky’s icon of mother and son is heartbreaking as Arshile stands leaning toward his mother, as close as he can get without actually touching her.

Gorky had a circle of friends including Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in New York at the beginning of the Abstract Expressionisim.  One artist mentioned on a title card was the mosaicist Jeanne Reynal, which of course caught my attention.  I will have to find more about her.

Walking through the gallery, in a giant circuit, we followed Gorky from his first studies of Cezanne, his trying on different styles like garments, and finally emerging as himself, full of emotional power, and yet plagued by depression.  Stratoz and I were both sobered by the end of the exhibition, with Gorky’s struggle with cancer, his studio burning, and the painting that emerged, Charred Beloved, breaking his neck in a car accident, and finally committing suicide.  At the same time I felt gratitude that he did find something he loved doing in this life, that somehow he created in the midst of destruction. He died very near my age, a relatively young man who had lived several lifetimes of suffering.

The exhibit is at the Philadelphia Art Museum until January 10th, 2010.  Go see it if you can.  And while you there, be sure to check out the Wrought and Crafted: Jewelry and Metalwork 1900-present.

I was fortunate to find photos by Roberta Fallon from the Gorky exhibit, and to learn about her groundbreaking artblog.  So many cool arts happenings in Philadelphia!

Related post:

Stratoz on the Gorky evening.

I read that Emile Norman, mosaic artist, died on September 24, 2009 at age 91.  I was not familiar with his work, but was intrigued to read about his “endomosaics.”  Endo means “inside” and that’s exactly what his mosaics were about, a technique he developed making store displays in New York City.    He took fragments of stained glass, shells, plant matter, stones, and for this window from the Nob Hill Masonic Temple, soil from all the counties in California(sent to him by Masons!) and Islands of Hawaii, and sandwiched them between two layers of methyl methacrylate(plastic to non-chemists).

Norman was commissioned by the Masons to make this mosaic in 1958, and he worked on it for almost 2 years, with his life partner Brooks Clement.  I admire his creative energy, his improvisational spirit, as if he were a geological force, creating sedimentary rock.  Conservators at the Architectural Resources Group started restoring Norman’s mural.  Plastic was exciting technology in 1958, and all the preservation implications not understood, but the Masons had the savvy to ask him to write down all his construction materials and methods and they kept the notes in the Temple’s safe.

Emile Norman lived in Big Sur, and his neighbors Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry produced a PBS documentary on his life, Emile Norman:  By His Own Design.  This is a courageous way to live, by your own vision and design.

I will be getting the poems out and giving a reading.
Here’s an excerpt of a poem I wrote about glass, which I mentioned in my post about Christopher Ries.

As you can see, glass has been on my mind for awhile!

Sea of Glass

an excerpt on Dale Chihuly’s Seaforms:

“They are like chiffon woven with ribbon,
they still look warm, as if the blower’s breath
gave the heat rather than the fire.
Some have lip wraps, an edge of color
named a lip.  These forms are open,
lips are the boundary;
a mouth that can say anything.”

Come out and hear the rest!

Mad Poets Society presents a series of the previous Poet Laureates of Montgomery County, 2nd Saturdays at 7:00, at Churchill’s in Pottstown. I was Poet Laureate in 2000, and I’ll be reading with Sorina Higgins.