THE ARTS PAPER – ARTICLES

Painter Gerald Saladyga connects the dots

Hank Hoffman

Gerald Saladyga. Photo by Hank Hoffman.

These days, painter Gerald Saladyga is interested in “what’s below the surface.” In one sense, this has been true of Saladyga’s paintings for at least a decade: he has been layering different colors of flat latex house paint and sanding areas back to striking effect. What is different now is that Saladyga’s concern with “what’s below the surface” is conceptual. His paintings, while beautiful, are meant to evoke a sense of unease – unease about the environment, about violence, about surveillance.

In an interview in his New Haven studio, Saladyga told me he was profoundly influenced by a trip to Poland within this past year. Where the Warsaw Ghetto once stood is a Stalinist city and gleaming contemporary capitalist development. He visited Auschwitz, which he described as “sanitized.” References to “the Germans” have been changed to references to “the Nazis,” Saladyga said, in deference to the geographical neighbor that is bankrolling much Polish development. A film about the crimes committed at the death camp is no longer shown to visitors, Saladyga said.

“You have this landscape and then you have another psychological or political thing going on below the surface,” Saladyga said.

This situation isn’t unique to Poland.

“Most of the land we walk on is sacred because of what’s been done on it,” he told me, offering as an example the genocide against the Native Americans in our own lands.

Of his career as an artist, Saladyga said, “I willed it.”

In his early 30s in the 1970s, Saladyga was married with children and teaching grammar school. He told me he “thought there was more to life than just hanging in there.”

Having always loved drawing and art, one day he just decided to take up painting. He got a work placed in a small gallery show and went to the Art Students League in New York on weekends.

“I went there and learned to draw and draw and draw; then I started to paint the way I wanted to paint,” Saladyga recalled. Having rented a studio in downtown Bridgeport, Saladyga painted when he got out of work in the afternoon, on weekends, and at night after his children had gone to bed.

“At some point, it became an obsession, something I defined myself as,” he said.

He didn’t follow the academic art school/MFA trajectory. In fact, Saladyga said it’s something of a “personal peeve” when he meets a new artist and “the first thing they say is, ‘I got my M.F.A. at ... ’”

“If you’re an artist, get some training if you have to – learn to draw – but the rest is up to you,” said Saladyga.

He described his initial work as “minimalist,” based on a “tripartite universe” of medieval philosophy: heaven, earth and hell. It is a framing concept that still influences his compositions.

When I asked what attracted him to this notion, he laughed and said “a Catholic upbringing.” But, more seriously, he noted that this tripartite division has a scientific analogue in the sky, the earth and the mantle. Saladyga said he has a “fascination with the horizon line, especially when I’m out on the beach or the water. It’s a very straight line that just divides everything so beautifully.”

From minimalist paintings, Saladyga moved on to more figurative work. Paintings with what he called “cartoony” imagery were followed by what Saladyga described as “very expressionistic figurative bloody Catholic type of art” in the mid 1980s. While he had a successful show of the latter work at the John Slade Ely House, he abandoned it rather abruptly. Saladyga told me he “figured that I was just adding gruesome figures to a world that didn’t want to see that anymore.”

After working for a while on landscapes painted completely in shades of black, Saladyga reacquainted himself with bright color. I asked him whether he has a philosophy of color.

“Whatever you think doesn’t go together, does,” he replied. “I keep experimenting with color, layering color and sanding it down … and very rarely do you get something that doesn’t work.”

When I first met Saladyga 10 years ago, his colorful paintings seemed like pure, if controlled, abstraction. Working on either paper or canvas and using primarily flat latex house paint, he was filling up the surface with solid colors overrun by fields of color dots. Beneath the dots, Saladyga had layered three or four different colors. Using sandpaper, he abraded the surface to selectively reveal some of the underlying colors. What appeared to be abstract, however, was actually a landscape of the imaginative cosmos. The dots were like the stars of the night sky, the sanded areas reminiscent of nebulae and galaxies in images of outer space. The imagery was “spiritual,” Saladyga said. “It was a part of my life where I was into a deep mystical thing.

“I experiment a lot, play around a lot. I have the time to do that. If one thing doesn’t work, I kind of learn from it. Or, if it doesn’t work, I do something to it until it does. I don’t give up on a painting. I can always sand off something and start again,” he said. The dots started as such an experiment. Working on a huge canvas, Saladyga used a large eyedropper to make the dots.

“They kind of lumped up. There were little Matterhorns because of the way they dried in the studio. I was really disappointed,” Saladyga recalled. Rather than getting rid of the canvas, he decided to sand it down to the primer and start over. But in sanding the dots, “they became exactly the way I intended – just by accident – smooth and round.” Saladyga continued to work with the dots until the constant squeezing of the eyedropper caused him to develop carpal tunnel syndrome. His recent paintings use dots more sparingly as part of his increasingly complex compositions.

Over the past several years, Saladyga has become inspired again by landscape-oriented work. A fascination with space and land-imaging photography and with maps has permeated his work, which is inflected with political concerns about war, environmental degradation and increasing intrusions on privacy.

“As I began to peruse photographs and ads in newspapers, I realized I could find a way to look back at the planet from space,” he said. Paintings have been inspired by plane flights over the Andes, mountaineering maps, and a map printed in The New York Times of locations in Lebanon struck by Israeli cluster bombs during the 2006 war.

Saladyga brings the whole of his technique to these works: the sanded layers of color, the dots, even reprising some of the cartoonish icons of bombs, ants and planes from his early work. To add texture to imagery of mountains and planets, Saladyga applies a fluid wash of black paint to the paper or canvas surface and then manipulates it with crumpled paper. The results resemble Renaissance engravings.

Despite the dark undercurrents of his present work, his paintings have a bold beauty. Saladyga sees no contradiction.

“Devastation,” he told me during a visit to his studio during City-Wide Open Studios in 2007, “can be beautiful.”

This wasn’t nihilism. As an example, he gestured out his studio window to the remnants of the old Macy’s building, then in the process of being demolished. They were striking, he said, when viewed at sunset.

The combination of beauty and disquiet is an intellectual choice but it also has an aesthetic payback. These are works that keep a viewer engaged. And they are keeping Saladyga engaged, too.

“They are becoming more and more complex and more and more fun to paint,” he said. “There’s always something you have to add to balance, do something to it. And whatever you add has to be relevant so you have to do some thinking … It’s a process of making a painting, a building process.”

The yield of contemplation
Arts program helps inmates express, explore and invest emotionally

David Brensilver

	Jennifer Brown, The Ashes of Empty Dreams

Jeff Greene’s definition of an artist is “someone who cannot help but make art.” He believes inmates in the state’s correctional facilities “have every reason to make art” and “should be doing exceptional things.” Their work is the yield of contemplation. After all, Greene, says, they are provoked to think in ways we never will be.

Greene manages and coordinates Community Partners in Action’s Prison Arts Program, whose annual show will take place this year at the John Slade Ely House from May 3-31, with a reception on Saturday, May 9.

Greene is quick to point out that he’s not an activist. He’s an artist. He doesn’t believe the inmates he works with are victims.

“Some people are victims of their own homicidal tendencies,” he says.

Greene also points out that 99 percent of the inmates in the state’s correctional facilities are getting out. Citing a recently published Pew Center on the States study (One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections), he says one of every 33 citizens in Connecticut is under correctional control, that is, incarcerated, on probation or parole.

Greene teaches in five correctional facilities. In his workshops, he demands “emotional investment.” He doesn’t ask participants – who must be discipline free – to copy existing images. He asks them, for example, to paint scenes they can only imagine. He’s got no interest in seeing a portrait of an inmate’s daughter. Instead, Greene wants to see that inmate draw a suite of pictures depicting interactions that could never happen.

The annual show, which is open to anyone incarcerated in the state, features nothing but original work. Thus, you won’t see paintings of lighthouses or clipper ships.

Greene says Vincent Nardone, who is serving a life sentence, painted clipped ships from the early 1970s until he joined the Prison Arts Program some 10 years ago. He started painting clipper ships while incarcerated in Kansas and Maryland because he believed people liked paintings of clipper ships. His first assignment from Greene was to produce a drawing of his most vivid memory. Nardone remembered visiting New York with his father and thinking he’d see King Kong. What he produced, Greene says, was a drawing in which he’s holding a biplane out the car window.

Greene says Nardone, at this point, has “illustrated his entire life … that’s what the Prison Arts Program provoked.”

Greene says Nardone told him, “I feel equal to someone who is free” during program workshops.

“Art provokes empathy,” Greene says. “They (inmates) go out into the world again and they don’t readily see everyone as a victim.”

In 1994, the Arts Council of Greater New Haven exhibited letters written by inmates in the state’s correctional facilities. One read, in part, “My prison sentence will be just one bad experience that I will try to forget,” Greene says.

One inmate whose work will be on display during the Prison Arts Program’s annual show is George Gould, who is serving an 80-year sentence and is a longtime program participant. Gould, along with Ronald Taylor, was convicted in 1995 of murdering of Eugenio DeLeon Vega on Grand Avenue in 1993. Fourteen years after that conviction, New Haven State’s Attorney Michael Dearington has reopened the case based on new DNA evidence.

Gould’s work in the Prison Arts Program show is about his case being reopened. He is one of more than 150 inmates participating. Greene says the exhibit will showcase more than 300 works created in more than 15 Connecticut correctional facilities.

Greene says, “Our press has been, for over a decade now, non-stop positive.”

The annual show certainly does provoke attention, especially when someone as recognizable as Michael Skakel is involved, as he was last year.

Dennis Coleman, who admitted to the 1987 killing of his then-girlfriend’s mother, Joyce Aparo, no longer participates, as any mention of his name includes mention – a reminder to readers – of his crime.

Greene says he and his colleagues will opt not to show work if they think doing so could have a negative effect.

Each piece in the annual show, he says, illustrates the complexity of the system, society and an evolving institution.

“It’s the ideal illustration of complexity,” he says, going on to suggest, “It would be fascinating to have an annual show of artwork by insurance salesmen,” and that any show of works provoked from those who otherwise would not create art would be fascinating.

“When I’m sitting on the bus,” Greene says, “anyone on the bus could be writing the greatest novel of all time.”

Black and white in color
Carl Van Vechten’s images document richness of 20th century African American culture

Hank Hoffman

Carl Van Vechten's portrait of Langston Hughes.

Carl Van Vechten was a Renaissance man, a Modernist and a man ahead of his time. But, as a new exhibit at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale demonstrates, time – in one sense – has finally caught up with Van Vechten, who died in 1964 at the age of 84. Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten’s Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939-1964 showcases 140 full-sized color portraits of African Americans digitally reproduced from Van Vechten’s color slides. The images are part of Carl Van Vechten’s papers, donated to Yale’s James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters (which Van Vechten, with Johnson’s widow, helped found in 1941, three years after Johnson’s death in a car accident).

According to Bruce Kellner, a biographer of Van Vechten (Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades), as well as a friend in his later years and trustee of the Carl Van Vechten Trust, none of the images were made public during Van Vechten’s lifetime. Now, thanks to digital technology, a selection of Van Vechten’s color images has been reproduced for this show and the whole of his color slide portraits of African-American cultural leaders are accessible online. Beginning in the first decade of the 20th century, Van Vechten forged a trailblazing career as a writer and cultural critic. He was an early champion of such modern dance masters as Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan and Vaslav Nijinsky.

In an introduction to the catalog for a 2003 show at Yale of Van Vechten’s portraits of women, Kellner wrote, “As a music critic, he had been first in America to endorse Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie and as early as January 1917 he had pronounced ragtime and jazz ‘the only music produced in America to-day … on which the musicians of this land can build … in the future.’”

Van Vechten also was first to tout George Gershwin’s music, was an advocate for Gertrude Stein (he was Stein’s literary executor and got her papers placed at Yale), and was one of the first critics to rediscover Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which had fallen into disfavor not long after it was published.

Van Vechten wrote several novels of his own during the 1920s, including Nigger Heaven. (The title referred to the movie theater balconies to which blacks were relegated under segregation.) While widely read as a window into the era’s black culture in general and the Harlem Renaissance in particular, Nigger Heaven was controversial both for its title and for being a representation of black culture by a white writer. But Van Vechten’s interest in African American culture was not “slumming.” He championed black culture in all its diversity.

“He simply fell in love with black culture when he was about 21,” Kellner told me in an e-mail. “Many of his longest and warmest friendships were with African Americans. During the (so-called) Harlem Renaissance of the twenties, he began to meet members of Harlem’s intellectual life, and he published a number of articles about the culture in influential white periodicals.”

Van Vechten, who already had behind him a decades-long career as an established writer and critic, began photographing in earnest in 1932. In part, according to Kellner, Van Vechten was motivated by a desire “to make a public record of African Americans because at the time nobody was.”

But, as someone who was deeply rooted in the broad currents of the culture of his time, Van Vechten photographed writers, actors, musicians, composers and visual artists regardless of race.

“When Kodachrome color film became commercially available in 1939, he began photographing his subjects in both black and white and color,” Kellner told me, “always with an eye toward their significance in the future when – he was convinced – serious attention was going to be paid to African American achievements.”

“One of the compelling things about Van Vechten and his project of photographing the African American community is that he wanted to photograph the greats … but he also photographed lots of people most of us now would never have heard of,” said Nancy Kuhl, curator of poetry in the Yale Collection of American Literature. (The Living Portraits exhibition was originally curated by Patricia Willis, who has since retired, for a planned 2008 showing. That exhibit was postponed until this year because of repairs being made at the library.) “They were part of the cultural fabric of the time but didn’t necessarily rise to the level of fame and importance of people like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald or Paul Robeson.”

Kuhl noted that in the historical shorthand of the Harlem Renaissance, the whole cultural moment often gets reduced to that of a few well-known names. But, Kuhl said, part of the “genius of Van Vechten’s project was to recognize” that documenting the whole community was “as important as focusing on any one of the leading lights” and offered a “much fuller sense of what the conversation was … at this moment that was so important in American culture.”

The sweep of Van Vechten’s pictorial project is reflected in the selection of images for Living Portraits. Spanning a quarter-century, the show includes portraits of cultural and political giants such as Robeson, contralto Marian Anderson, civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois, poet Langston Hughes, artist Jacob Lawrence, diplomat Ralph Bunche and gospel music legend Mahalia Jackson. Some of Van Vechten’s subjects remain active to this day, including Harry Belafonte and Billy Dee Williams. But there are also portraits of individuals I had never heard of before who were deeply accomplished figures in their time, including educator Alain Locke, journalist and musician Dan Burley, anthropologist, dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus and many more.

Van Vechten had a darkroom in his New York City apartment and printed his own black and white images, many of which have become iconic. A Van Vechten photo of blues singer Bessie Smith was used on a U.S. postage stamp. The color slide film, on the other hand, was sent out for processing and until recently few of those images were printed.

“His style is very distinctive. You know you’re looking at a Van Vechten photograph when you see one,” said Kuhl. His images are notable for an often dramatic use of black and white, light and shadow. Another signature of the Van Vechten style was the use of boldly patterned fabric backdrops that he acquired for 10 cents a yard at discount stores. For that reason, these color portraits are revelatory. Shot at the same time as well-known and widely shown black and white images, they emphasize the boldness and brassiness of Van Vechten’s vision.

“You can see in a different way what Van Vechten was getting at with these photographs with their vibrant color,” said Kuhl, noting that the print backdrops make for interesting contrasts with his subjects. “They are bright and kind of wacky.”

Living Portraits will be on display from April 30 to June 30. All of Carl Van Vechten’s color portraits of African Americans are viewable online at www.beinecke.library. yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/SearchExecXC.asp?srchtype=VCG.

In the Write...
Spoken word makes itself heard in Greater New Haven

The literary arts represent an oral as well as written tradition, from Homer’s Iliad, which generation chanted to generation until its commitment to papyrus, to the poetry slams and street rapping competitions of today. To hear the spoken word, there is no dearth of opportunities for the aurally inclined to meet and greet authors, hear poets read or listen to writers describe the creative process.

But where does one start? The curious reader can always begin at the local library, where authors are more than eager to discuss their latest works, literary agents are happy to guide would-be writers, and publishers welcome the chance to describe how to break into the book trade. Visitors to New Haven Free Public Library, host to Writers Live! events, will see a spate of activity over the next month, from an April 29 screening of SLAM! and “Favorite Poem Community Read” on April 30, to its panel “Breaking In: How to Get an Agent and Publisher” on May 13.

Community bookstores have also taken on an active role promoting writers and their work. At Labyrinth Books, located at 290 York St., the month of April featured authors such as Yale historian John Merriman, biographer Adina Hoffman, Yale sociologist Philip Gorski, and Yale Law School professor Heather Gerken. RJ Julia Booksellers, at 768 Boston Post Road in Madison, adds to the steady stream of writers passing through its doors – including Ilana Stanger-Ross and Dr. Sherwin Nuland – such April events as its open mike night for poets and writers (April 24) and its poetry contest awards ceremony for kids (April 26).

Colleges and universities are also always a source for listening to writers at work. The Visiting Writers’ Series at Southern Connecticut State University typically consists of three readings each semester by a poet and fiction writer with at least one book under his belt. Meanwhile, at Yale, one of the more intriguing organizations is the Working Group for Contemporary Poetry, which discusses problems and issues of contemporary poetry within international alternative and avant-garde traditions of lyric poetry. Regular invitations to visiting scholars and poets – such as Susan Howe, Jacques Jouet, John Yau, and Charles Bernstein – enliven the group discussion on American and European modernist masters, as well as more recent poets and poetic theories from around the world.

Outside of these institutional settings is a universe of author talks and readings at small organizations and informal gatherings. One of the most popular is the monthly reading that occurs under the auspices of the organizers of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series, started over three years ago. Listeners can look forward to poets Major Jackson and Lynne Sharon Schwarz reading on May 19 in the basement of the Anchor Bar, located at 272 College St. Slightly more sporadic but no less engaging are the activities of the Word of Mouth series, which, in April, featured poet Susan Kinsolving at the Institute Library (847 Chapel St.). Equally sporadic are the author and reading events sponsored by New Haven Review, such as the 1st Annual Poetry Crawl on April 29 in the Westville Village area of New Haven.

For full lists of events, visit the following sites:
New Haven Free Public Library: www.nhbulletin.blogspot.com/
Labyrinth Books: www.labyrinthbooks.com/events_calendar.aspx
RJ Julia Booksellers: www.labyrinthbooks.com/events_calendar.aspx
Working Group in Contemporary Poetry (at Yale): www.beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/working-group-in-contemporary-poetry/wgcp-schedule-and-readings/
Southern Connecticut State University Visiting Writers’ Series: www.southernct.edu/events/calendar/ (select “readings” for event type)
Ordinary Evening Reading Series: www.ordinaryevening.blogspot.com/
Word of Mouth Series: www.allgallery.org/html/readings/wordofmouth.html
New Haven Review: www.newhavenreview.com

Bennett Lovett-Graff is publisher of the New Haven Review, a literary journal and Web site that hosts parties, sponsors speakers, and supports and celebrates the literary activities of the Elm City. For more information, visit www.newhavenreview.com or send e-mail to publisher@newhavenreview.com.

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