In Which We Prefer To Use Them In A Painting

Bodily Threat

by SARAH WAMBOLD

When Frank Frazetta turned down a contract to play professional baseball, artists were making more money than major league players. He lived to regret his decision, often waxing nostalgic about the dough he could have made and the physical satisfaction that playing ball gave him. “It almost beats sex — almost,” he said in an interview about the sport. Sales and sex are at first blush the most noticeable angle of Frazetta’s artwork, but these are his passions. When pushed, he admitted to getting more exhausted from painting, an exercise that used more of his imagination.

A purely commercial artist, Frazetta began doing line drawings of comics. He transitioned into painting after a successful rendering of Ringo Starr for the cover of Mad magazine. From there it was all book covers and movie posters, with his painting’s narrative often eclipsing the story itself. Frazetta was accused more than once of swiping images, but only by the uninformed. He continued to paint with a security of vision hardly capable of copying. Director Robert Rodriguez exhibited his collection of Frazetta's work last week at SXSW, and assembled in one place, the paintings displayed a inimitable security of vision.

This isn’t work that has earned him acceptance into fine art circles, despite raising the form of illustration to new levels of skill and detail. He is still considered one of the best illustrators of his era, an important influence on science fiction fans and a true genius of fantasy representation. All of this is the art world's nice way of putting him in his place among working class artists whose popularity feels relatable.

Critics squint their eyes at the overt titillation in Frazetta’s depiction of women. They unironically call them ‘girls’. All of his females appears with as much physical might as any other figure in his paintings, but they’re also fully formed characters who have their own agenda. In "Swamp Demon", its unclear whether the woman is meant to charm or infuriate the creature before her or which one is the real demon.

Compared to his watercolors, which he preferred to work with, his oil paintings have a certain weight that goes beyond just the paint itself. The backgrounds are deeper, the characters thicker and themes darker. "Death Dealer I" depicts the character on his horse, an enormous animal as menacing as the scythe poised in front, still dripping a rainbow of blood. The world of the Death Dealer deserves its punishment; a similar vibe radiates off the frescos in the Sistine Chapel. It is hardly a jump to go from Frazetta’s drama to Michelangelo’s, they were both painting strictly from their imagination, presenting it as photographic evidence and getting paid.

The exaggerated darkness in Frazetta’s work is born out of the fantasy stories he was commissioned paint, but its the light in his work that is more the mirror of ourselves. An immature hope that appears all around, it pours into a painting like "Fire and Ice" gracefully, shining on mottled demons crawling towards human heroes who think they can fight back.

Americans have always fancied themselves control freaks, a reason the subtlety of an Edward Hopper painting fits more perfectly into their vision of themselves. Unrequited, depressed, leering. Frazetta’s work is too teenage, the threats are too bodily, the detail too ornate. Yet Frazetta grew up in Hopper’s landscapes; he used the same colors and afflicted figures, but preferred to use them in a painting you cheered for, not just observed. 

It would be correct to say that Frazetta achieved the same amount of fame as an artist as he would if he’d have gone pro. Baseball would have given him access to stadium applause, the scoreboard showing proof of his success. With art, he got to work in Hollywood painting monsters. If painting today was as influential, artists would take more chances. More importantly, people would pay attention.

Sarah Wambold is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. You can find her twitter here and her tumblr here. She last wrote in these pages about the decay. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Wicked Games" - Emilie Simon (mp3)

"The Eye of the Moon" - Emilie Simon (mp3)

In Which It Leaves Her By The Light Of The Moon

by joan salo

25 & Up

by SARAH WAMBOLD

I am going to be 29 next month. I’m don’t have any big feelings about this birthday. I think more about the days leading up to it, these next 20 or so days. The days between August 22 and September 13 are like a drop off the edge of a cliff; a distorted period of panicked, can’t-turn-back-now feelings. It's completely different at the bottom.

This time gap marks the 25th anniversary of my diagnosis. I was four when it arrived. I came back from a summer vacation on Lake Michigan with an uncontrollable nosebleed and no energy. A second opinion determined it was Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia and I started taking Rosy Periwinkle the next day. I turned five four weeks later. When I turned seven, I finished treatment.

I’m reluctant to call myself a cancer survivor. I don’t remember much about my life before I had cancer; I felt like I came alive right when I got sick and during treatment came to understand that this is what life was all about. You live life in between periods of feeling sick and going to see the doctor. Once that sick period was over for me, I started to become aware that people expected me to wear this experience on my sleeve, contribute my picture or my story to causes, or because I didn’t do any of those things, they assume I don’t remember any of what happened.

The thing I’ve come to realize is that I’m actually pretty shy and when you get cancer as a kid you don’t get the chance to be shy. You walk around bald, fat and if you were me, with a large ribbon tied around your head.  As a kid with cancer you get all the attention and fun every kid deserves. The pediatric oncology ward is full of cool art and toys. I watched E.T. everyday. There was so much light in there I had to wear my 101 Dalmatian sunglasses during chemo.  Many of the other kids I met became nightly news stories and went to Disney World. My mom told me I wasn’t sick enough for all that, but I don’t know what she was talking about. I could hardly eat the cake at my 6th birthday party without throwing up.

My mom is the real survivor. So is my dad. Do you know what they do to parents in the pediatric oncology ward? They make them crouch down in front of their kid so we can pull fistfuls of their hair and scream until we can’t breathe while a doctor taps our spine with a needle for bone marrow. I once kicked my mom in the face after all my veins collapsed and they had to resort to putting an IV in my foot. My parents send me gifts every year during this time gap, letting me know how happy they are. If you really want the emotional, triumphant survivor story, ask them.

Their story is tough and completely heartfelt and I can hardly write about it without breaking down.

by joan salo

I used to stay up all night when I was a kid, lying on my floor thinking about how some people die from cancer (my uncle, my neighbor, my friend’s mom) and some people don’t (my grandpa, me). My heart would beat almost out of my chest until I closed my eyes and imagined I was vibrating out into the universe like a dying star whose fast fading light we still see on earth. Those feelings don’t go away.

My friend came to visit me last weekend and we were reminiscing about the clubs in our old neighborhood that had signs that said Must Be 25 & Up. We were too young at the time to go inside. Why 25? What did you know at 25 and not at 24?

Sentimentally, my time is up. I would like to thank the doctors and nurses who kept me in the game. I wish I knew the people who took part in the trial drugs that allowed for my life to go on. It must be that if you make it to 25 & up you sometimes want to keep going, even though you don’t know why. The cliffs get higher. The bottom gets closer, faster. You find yourself down there again, living it up.

Sarah Wambold is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. You can find her twitter here. She last wrote in these pages about the decay. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Paintings by Joan Salo.

photo by brewcitysafari

"An Acute Sensitivity Is Not Simply A Madness" - Keiji Haino & Jim O'Rourke & Oren Ambarchi (mp3)

"Invited In Practically Drawn In By Something" - Keiji Haino & Jim O'Rourke & Oren Ambarchi (mp3)

by joan salo

In Which We Can Only Imagine The Decay

by Sarah K. Flora

Body Acceptance

by SARAH WAMBOLD

Embalming is no secret. Information about the process is available through a simple google search. There are plenty of tumblrs and blogs by morticians that answer questions about the process. It’s interesting only because people just don’t want to know and most embalmers don’t want to tell. So embalming becomes like a secret or maybe more like gossip being repeated incorrectly in suspect tones.

I had to tell a woman about embalming once. I had to get on my high horse because if I didn’t she would have thought she knew more than me. She didn’t. She didn’t even have a license! Why did she think she knew more? Because she saw someone who was embalmed once. That was all she was bringing to this rodeo! I couldn’t believe it.

She started off by saying that the body, which happened to be that of her mother’s, had to be embalmed or else she couldn’t see it.

“Impossible,” I said. “Why wouldn’t you have been able to see it?”

“Because,” she said, “it was too dead. The mortician had to make it look alive first. We can’t see things that are too dead.”

I thought about that for a moment. I thought about where she would have gotten that thought. She would have gotten that thought from the mortician who thought they were protecting her from seeing something she did not want to see. Her mother, dead. So they showed her mother full of chemicals and with make-up on. Nostalgic, I thought about when I used to prepare bodies with formaldehyde. I loved the praise, through tears and disbelief that I would inevitably get from the family.

“She looked nice,” the woman said.

“They usually do,” I replied.

“Do you know how to embalm?” the woman asked me.

Of course I do. I was always really good at science in school and my embalming professor kept my final term paper to use as an example for the following class. It was about embalming a radioactive body. It was so flawless he thought I had copied it from someone else. But then I reminded him of all those times in lab when I would dig through the fascia on the neck of a donated dead person and pull up the carotid artery and a vein faster than anyone else. He had to close his eyes and search deep in his brain to find that image of me, standing over the body, pulling apart tissue with two small silver hooks. When I was done, he would say “Looks good!” and smile. He opened his eyes when he remembered this.

by Sarah K. Flora

“I was the best embalmer in my class and also during my apprenticeship,” I told the woman, “I’ve embalmed over 1000 bodies. I used to love it. But I don’t love it anymore.”

“Why? Did you have to embalm someone you knew?” The woman asked.

“No,” I replied, though that happens. But that’s not why I don’t love it.

I don’t love it because something happens in the embalming room that I can’t see. The chemicals don’t just get into the dead body; they get into my body, too. And they get in the ground if the body gets buried. No one sees it, but it happens.

I used to think that no matter what, the trauma or disease or old age that killed the body should be reformed into a perfect-looking death. How could you possibly show a mother her sons face with a bullet hole in it? You clean up the face and wound and use clothing and pillows to position his head correctly. When she sees him, you hold her hand through the whole thing. You don’t say he will look perfect again.

I want to help dead bodies be acceptable again. I want to start a campaign on behalf of the dead body who wants to show its true colors. Even if it is purple and greenish or red and pink. I want the dead to have the visibility they once did in our culture, when they were invited in people’s lives and the living stood around touching the dead so it didn’t feel so rejected because it was not perfect. I wish we weren’t so judgmental about looks in our society, so much so that we will put an embalmed dead body behind glass as an example of a perfect death, while the other, less perfect deaths slink away, afraid they are scaring everyone.

I told the woman there are no rules about dead bodies, we just imagine there are. As you can see, when we get worked up about imagination, we force it into fact. Instead, we should just try to look at what is in front of us.

Sarah Wambold is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. You can find her twitter here. She last wrote in these pages about CK One. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Paintings by Sarah K. Flora.

"Sandy" - Nancy Wilson (mp3)

"Wise Up" - Aimee Mann (mp3)