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Lee Tracy's studio and Red Tree Project were the inspirations for two series of paintings called, Enormous Room / Shrouds.
For years, I wanted a work space that could be both my Room of One's Own as per Virginia Woolf, and at the same time, satisfy my need for a commune of artists and the interested, where art and ideas stimulate each other.
Both needs were satisfied when I began sharing Lee's Chicago studio on Blackhawk Street in September of 2002. I came into the space through a doorway and when I turned back to look at the way I had entered I saw two large openings in a brick wall, one was the tall doorway and the other a gigantic opening like an entrance to a sea cave several feet above the floor level.
I began to paint abstracted landscapes or portraits of the room itself because I wanted to understand the structure and try to capture the beauty and mysterious quality of the unequal openings.
During those high bright fall days when the real world became surreal, the doorways began to look like the twin towers whose collapse was superimposed on my vision at all times.
I had been reading e.e.cumming's Enormous Room. He was accused of being an accessory to free speech. The accusations against him were both ridiculous and true. His crime was that he would not repudiate his friend who was telling the truth. For that crime he was held as a prisoner of war in an enormous room where freedom was denied. I think it was his metaphor for hell.
Unlike Cumming's room, our enormous room gave me freedom to work and the two doorways always held the promise of exit. Even though I knew what lay beyond in the physical space, the paintings are more like life than architecture and do not reveal the future.
As I painted these pictures the world surrounding our enormous room become a place in which citizens could be spied upon under The Patriots Act and names were invented for fighters which made it possible to ignore the Geneva Convention abroad. At home, freedoms guaranteed by the 14th amendment began to disappear and those who argued against a call to war were branded unpatriotic.
The studio space I needed became the room of one's own to work out the nervous energy caused by loss and fear, and the need to create. The Enormous Room paintings are always about more then one thing at a time. Doorways lead in and out. Standing ajar, they give a glimpse of what is beyond without demanding commitment. The floor is seldom solid. The paintings represent finding a personal space, loosing perspective, and seeing metaphor everywhere. The space gave me the right to paint representationally and abstractly at the same time.
The second series of paintings loosely document an episode in the Red Tree project that transformed the studio space. I am pleased that two paintings that document an episode in the Red Tree project are part of a permanent installation at US Equities art collection in Chicago.
In private collection
24" x 18", 2002. ©BCH
In private collection
In private collection.
In private collection.
36" x 49", 2002 ©BCH
Prayer
Tragedy dries the throat
And leaves a shaft of grief
A column of ashes
Deeper in our collective soul
Then the buildings stood tall.
When tenants did not leap
Into the blue, indifferent sky
Nor run for their lives
Nor cover their mouths,
Nor cry, scream
Nor turn to silent dust of stone.
And others did not
Spend their days sifting rubble
For a fragment of hope
A whisper of life to find only
Human fragments of despair.
We plead God’s mercy
Who is scooping up the souls of suicide pilots
To sit at His right hand.
The true God
Always on both sides of war,
His cloak the cover for a billion wrongs.
Death to thousands in a single hour
Is progress for the primitives
Christian, Muslim, Jew
Who destroy the living for the
Promise from a few
Who say they know God’s will.
Holy Father, in whatever tongue,
Leave us alone to wander through our short day
And love each other
And not you,
Prince of Peace, Messiah, Savior, Allah,
Vishnu, Buddha, Yahweh, Zeus, Ra, Jesus,
Nor self-appointed interpreters
All who stop our throats with ashes
On a sunny Tuesday
Under the vast and innocent
Perfect and empty
Clear blue sky.