I feel the air of another planet

Provenance and Sources

The original drawing for this piece, created about 1977, is lost.  A rubylith stencil was hand cut with the intent to make silk screen prints, and this stencil survives (shown below left), no screen prints having been made.

In 2017 the stencil was scanned, and the digital image put into Adobe Illustrator. The design was modified in Illustrator and, via phototransfer, several silk screen prints were done (below right) with the title “Jericho”.  The design was modified again in 2023 from which the current giclee prints were made and the current title applied.

The title is from the first line of a poem by the German symbolist poet Stefan George, Entrückung (Transcendance). This poem was set to music by Arnold Schoenberg in String Quartet No.2, composed in 1908. This work is generally recognized as Shoenberg’s first venture into music without a tonal center or key.

In the mid-1970s the artist was listening to 20th century composers such as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich. In the local library he found the set (on vinyl recordings) of Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard that Leonard Bernstein had given a few years before. The lecture that stood out for him was on Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No.2.  The artist saw it as parallel to the branching into new expressive territory taking place in the visual arts with works such as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre (1906)

In this piece the artist has sought to capture the spirit of both Schoenberg’s music and the emotional certitude that drove its creation.

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