An Accidental Darkness
This is the last in a series of three interviews offered in a three-month period that explore the challenges of a trio of Cincinnati artists in various transitions in their careers.
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John Dalzell. Wet Streetscape, 2009. Dry Pastel on paper, 17x22.5in. ÆQAI staff photo.
John Dalzell. Wet Streetscape, 2009. Dry Pastel on paper, 17x22.5in. ÆQAI staff photo.
John Dalzell's 20-year career as an artist didn't start at the drawing board. It began in front of a typewriter—a typewriter that had gone silent.
Dalzell, an artist who shows in a gallery at the Pendleton Art Center, Over-the-Rhine, and draws out of a studio located in his elegant Fourth Street apartment, downtown, specializes in fog-shrouded pastel landscapes.
The native Cincinnati artist, whose family has been in Cincinnati since 1860, also draws probing portraits of the elderly. These pictures are the only ones among his works to reflect concerns about social-political issues.
There also are abstracts that bring uneasy interpretations. Yet, Dalzell, who has a sunny disposition, disclaims any conscious motivation to be disturbing.
For years, Dalzell made his living as a writer. After college, he worked for Procter & Gamble for 12 years, became the founding editor of Cincinnati Magazine in 1968 and later had extensive clients as a free-lance writer.
When his wife, Susan Lehman, an Episcopal priest, was called in 1986 to be chaplain at Sweet Briar College, located just north of Lynchburg, VA., Dalzell saw a chance to break with business. He wanted to write fiction.
Unexpectedly, Dalzell said, "I had a terrible writer's block. I had written novels and didn't sell a word.
"I determined one day I was going to write at least one page of copy impossible to turn down. I started at four o'clock in the morning and worked until about 8 o'clock that night retyping the same page over and over and over again.
"I got up from the typewriter and never went back."
Perplexed, Dalzell turned to a psychiatrist for help.
"I drew a mandala to try to explain who I was to him," Dalzell said. "A mandala is a psychological picture. It's non-representational and tends to be round with all kinds of things going on inside it."
The mandala has roots in Hinduism and Buddhism. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung had his patients construct them as an entree into exploring the unconscious self.
As a result of preparing his mandala, Dalzell said, "I began to draw. The whole thing broke open."
With a new artistic course identified, Dalzell began to work with artist Joe Monk at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He initially began painting in oil but he labeled the results as "sloppy."
John Dalzell in his studio, December 2009. ÆQAI staff photo.
"I went to Joe and he said, 'Well, it's going to take you a life time to learn to paint.'
"I was in my '60s, for God's sake, Dalzell laughed. "So, I went back to drawing and began to have shows in Virginia."
Dalzell keeps the prices of his art in the reasonable range of $300-$600. He is not on a mission to come up with some sort of aesthetic breakthrough to quadruple sales.
"I don't need the money to do it," he said. "I have a level of sales that goes along pretty much the same year in and year out. I just finished a commission of five pieces for the undercroft in St. Xavier church, downtown.
"I do about 30 (drawings and pastels) a year," said Dalzell, whose yearly output splits about evenly between sales and gifts of his art.
When his wife retired, the couple returned to Cincinnati in 2006.
Dalzell continues to work in pastels (he unpretentiously prefers the term 'chalk'). His cityscapes, such as Wet Streetscape (2009), depict urban environments shrouded in mist.
As the eye moves into the background of Wet Streetscape, his highly simplified skyscrapers give way now to constructions suggesting those cables on suspension bridges that rise up to the pinnacles of the support towers.
Dalzell does manipulate his pastels. There is some finger smoothing, for instance in the sky area of Wet Streetscape that covers about two-thirds of the picture but this manipulation is measured. He avoids wholesale smudging as is characteristic of so much pastel work among less competent artists.
The cityscapes are devoid of pedestrians and traffic. They look like the empty, post-nuclear New York City canyons that confronted Harry Belafonte in the 1959 film The World, the Flesh and the Devil.
Yet, Wet Streetscape is not science fiction. The city is still and unpopulated as Edward Hopper's empty streets and silent gas station.
Dalzell quickly pulls a large-formatted book of Hopper's paintings from a bookshelf near his drawing board. He says Hopper has been influential but does not rule him.
Dalzell's work is less complex than Hopper's. He points to a rectangular building at the lower left of Wet Streetscape.
"This little piece is the outside of Procter & Gamble (at Sycamore and Sixth streets). But the picture left there really quickly," Dalzell explains.
He said beyond the detail of the P&G building, the pastel expanded into flights of imagination.
Dalzell is charmed with the idea that I see suspension bridges in Wet Streetscape. He wants interpretation of his art to be as free as the mists that veil his buildings. He tells me the bridges "are there if you want them to be."
John Dalzell. Red Wave, 2005. Dry Pastel on paper, 17x22.5in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Mysterious landscapes represent only one direction in Dalzell's his art.
His abstract drawing Red Wave (2005) presents a deeper palette than the gentle colors found in Dalzell's landscapes. The foam at the frothy crest of the wave is done in white but where the crest of the wave rises up and then curves forward to form a kind of a letter 'C' an oval is created. The oval is impenetrable black. The remainder of the picture—nearly half of it just below the ominous oval—is given over to a sangria red, maroon blended with more black.
"I wanted motion and for some reason or the other, it came out as a wave" Dalzell explains. "I'm not sure whether the motion or the wave is there but the texture, anyway, for me, took over."
The black hollow of the wave is so dense I cannot resist the comparison with Edvard Munch's The Scream (1910) that reflects the general anxiety the Norwegian artist was feeling during a walk in Oslo at sunset.
Munch's uni-sex figure walking on an Oslo bridge holds his hands to either side of the head. The mouth is painted in a black oval veering slightly to the left just as the oval the wave forms in Dalzell's pastel.
The oval Dalzell forms suggests not a wave but a vision of death personified.
Squint a little.
See how the crest of the wave suddenly becomes the shroud that surrounds the Grim Reaper's featureless face. The black and red passages below meld into a swirling robe.
Despite the artist's stated intent to capture the energy of water," Dalzell's picture has taken on a life of its own. The wave has turned into what might be described as an accidental darkness.
"I get excited. I feel my skin tingle, You are going in a direction I didn't dream of," Dalzell said with unbridled elation. "I have accomplished what I need to do—simply be a creator."
John Dalzell. Dried Arrangement, 1999. Charcoal on paper, 17.5x23.75in. ÆQAI staff photo.
There is far less ambiguity in Dalzell's drawings of the aged as represented in Dried Arrangement (1999). An elderly woman, perhaps in her 90s, looks hollowly at a bouquet of dried flowers she holds in her left hand in slight elevation.
The mood is dramatic. Under Dalzell's incisive moves with the charcoal stick, the woman's wrinkles deeply impinge on the face. The black strokes clash boldly with white passages where the charcoal is minimal or not used at all.
"I think she lacks life in her face," Dalzell says in a more assured commentary on this drawing. "She lacks an expression that is warm and engaging. Her mouth tends to pull down as if she has had a stroke."
The inspiration for Dried Arrangement started with a photograph Dalzell happened upon in the New York Times.
"I was 68 years old and looking at the next decade and thinking 'what in the world is this going to be like?'
"So, I used that photograph as a beginning... just looking at her eyes."
"Part of this is a political statement," Dalzell continues. "We treat our old people like dried arrangements. She is the dried arrangement. We don't treat them as if there is vitality left in them."
Dalzell said he knows from personal experience how older people are regarded as stereotypes.
He has said he has been told, " 'Don't get up and pick up the box. Sit down and rest. I'll pick up the box for you.' That happens all the time.
"I say to myself, 'I'll do what I can as long as I can; maybe this is the time I can't do it, but dammit I'm going to find out myself.' "
Dalzell pauses. The cheerfulness retreats.
"And there's this age business," he reflects. "I feel strongly that I have this chance to be myself."
