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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created August 5, 2002
Latest Update: August 10, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

The Story of Transformed Identities Painting

Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individaul Authors, August 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Transformative Identities, Altered Context
by jeanne
Click on painting for a larger image.

The painting: I was thinking of priests and identity and small villages and death and life. Oh, and the penguins that Anatole France's little padre baptized and the turmoil that caused in Heaven.

Now, almost two weeks later, let's see if I can go back there and tell you about what I was trying to express.

I didn't want to start. There was so much I wanted to say, so much theory I wanted to pull together, so many images struggling to get out. As usual, I just chose a blank image sheet from the little program that came on my computer, Corel Photo House. The program that came with this new computer has of course been modified and enlarged, so none of the brushes or paints works like the old one. Progress, damned progress. There had been no time to find the manual and check it out before we went to China. And there had certainly not been a free moment since we returned.

So, in spite of all my fussing at Richard in my office that he should not learn programs by the seat of his pants, I grabbed a brush tip and a paint color that seemed to work, and started to draw. Felt like the old days when I did photography with a pinhole in an oatmeal box. Fun and free.

Besides the barrier of all that new technology, which works most of the time, I hadn't any idea of what I would paint or draw or whatever you call it when you do it with Corel Photo House without a photo. I started with the priest in the middle. I had read a lot on religion while I was in China, and I was trying to sort out questions of identity and ethics and aesthetics, and priests were on my mind. He's got a country priest's hat, and I suspect that I was focused on religion and the oppressed. Beneath the priest, and over to the right, I found myself drawing a church, that toyed with becoming a temple or a mosque.

Right below the church sprawled a body, a male, I think. I was thinking of one of the Blaue Reiter woodcuts. Kirchener, was it? Why murder? Why here? Why now? The killing fields at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The Land Mine Museum, also in Siam Reap in Cambodia. The harm we do to those over whom we have power.

Meanwhile, I had drawn tall buildings, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong. And in the lower left corner was a newstand. I was turning this into an urban area, remembering all the city scenes of the last few weeks.Then came the creature above the newstand to the left. I think he started out as a dog. You can still find the long floppy ear. But we quickly turned into a penguin, except that I had no idea what a penguin looked like. But that's OK. Most of us have no clear ideas about much of anything. My postmodern bent was coming through. And the penguin, of course, was one from Anatole France's Ile des Pingouins. What a delightful debate they had in Heaven as to whether the penguins the old priest had baptised should be admitted, even though animals were generally not admitted. (The solitary little old priest had lost his glasses at sea, and couldn't see the penguins very clearly; he thought they were merely strange humans speaking a foreign language he'd not heard before.) Yes, that makes sense in the crazy, mixed up, colonized, postmodern world of today.

Will add people going into church, crosses, androgenous figure, and little people walking over the murdered big person.

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