GEN - 1963/sumi ink on paper/ 24 x 36"
bones Left Behind: curator's statement
Doctors and plumbers don't leave so much behind...artists? They leave their bones in so many ways, physically, metaphysically... paintings, sculptures, prints...eras of ideas...and the SLIDES! SO much information, visually, physically and over the years as they've become organized into categorical files that make sense...physically sent to India to be scanned for so much less cost than here...I have to confess, I out-sourced a serious task of digitally transcribing all those images so I can gather them into a way by which we can SHARE with all of you, the magnitude of the blood of the bones these two left behind!
I ask your awareness that most of these images were recorded through the years as Bob and Gennie made the work. Neither of them were photographers, it didn't cross their mind to hire professionals on their budget. They took photos with whatever camera was around...an old Brownie as we were growing up, but in later years my Dad was proud of his Canon Sure Shot that he could snap the pieces as they shuffled through his alchemical transmutation of ideas in the studio downtown until they moved out of town, and in the basement studio he occupied for 40 years in Cottonwood Canyon. I had long email dialogs with the technicians in India, as I paid an extra 6 cents per slide for them to take time to correct for parallax. They did a great job! By the time we were finished with over 2000 images they understood that this was important archival work, that the quality of the slides didn't necessarily reflect that of the work! The digital images came back to me color corrected, cropped and squared up, many with a black border. My dad would have been thrilled to see his work in such clean presentation...like Fraces Senska commented, a little disoriented, when she saw his work so beautifully framed at the show at the Holter in 2006, “A Look Ahead”, “They're all so CLEAN!”. These images from the slides were very clean, relative to the funky skewed images I'd sent away. Now imported into my Aperture Library, this task has made me ecstatic at times...that I can see these bones in context of the lives that they carried.