My Rainbow Fractals are not fractals. They are simply miniaturizations and repetitions of segments of Rainbow Belt. But the principle of scale is still at work across the different versions. With each further miniaturization, the image changes significantly. I think of these as potential desktop wallpaper for those who take a little vertigo with their e-mail.
My Minoan Designs are a mixture of original images in what I hope is a Minoan style and stolen images. The Minoans from whom I stole the stolen images, however, I think are past caring. Minoan frescoes and pottery are treasure troves of design. We have so many evocative, expressive images from their culture and nothing else to go on. It is like watching an exciting silent movie with a complicated plot, big chunks missing, and no subtitles.
Another very minimal work, a study in triangles, my Thunderbird Wings compositions use standard Paint shapes, but, as with my lozenge compositions, I just eyeball them, I don’t measure them or regularize them. The result: imperfections. Japanese chawan, or teacup, craftspeople, I understand, make sure every cup they make has a flaw. So do I. Sometimes not on purpose. I just called them Thunderbird Wings because the triangular effect reminded me of them. Thunderbirds strike some subconscious chord in me. I hope to make some more, maybe some closer to the American Indian-style image.
The Cool Pools are my most deliberate attempt at depicting some aspect of chaos theory. In this case fractals. They aren’t really fractal of course, any more than the works I call “Fractals” are, or Rabbit Dreams. But there are three or four different scales of mirror images of the central image within and surrounding the central image. Thus implying, if not truly achieving, a certain recursiveness. After three or four miniaturizations, the image pixilates beyond recognition.
Consider it a non-fractal work inspired by fractals. I call them Cool Pools because they remind me of nuclear control rods in spent fuel pools. Fukushima (as in my Rabbit Dreams) again doffing its exploding hat. Not that I know what control rods and spent fuel pools look like.
I started out simply trying to make rug patterns with my Radio Rug prints. I was trying to be as minimal as possible, limiting myself to nested rectangles, triangles, circles, ovals, color palette. After I looked at the finished product for a while, though, it reminded me of some art deco or futurist symbol for radio. Not that art deco or futurism really looks like this. But it is reminiscent. Also, it surprised me to discover the optical illusion that the four black diagonal lines create. They seem to enclose different planes that aren’t really there.
Yes, I admit it. The inspiration for my lozenge compositions was The Jetsons. The elemental shapes. The bold, children’s playroom colors. And it is also true that I used a number of standard Paint shapes. But I disposed them across the work randomly; and I made sure they were not measured and foursquare but warped and lopsided, reminiscent of the irregular freehand elementality of a Jetsons cel.
I got the idea for Rainbow Belt from a photo in a great book about handicrafts in colonial New England, The Age of Homespun, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The photo depicted a strap of Native American design, woven in 18th-century New Hampshire of linen and dyed porcupine quills by Rachel Meloon, a European-American woman who had grown up among the Abenaki, for her neighbor, Peter Kimball, who carried it, I understand, throughout the Revolutionary War. For Rainbow Belt, I re-produced designs from Rachel Meloon’s strap, but I skipped some, made some up, and colored them differently.
I have always liked pure, traditional designs, carved latticework screens of provenance Islamic
Islamic Screen
and Indian,
Indian Jali Screen
Minoan pottery and fresco,
Neolithic cave painting,
Neolithic Cave Painting
Anasazi pottery,
Anasazi Pot
American Indian design of whatever provenance.
19th-Century Sioux Buffalo Hide Painting
Most such art is non-representational, or, as with a Mimbres hummingbird
Mimbres Hummingbird
or a Levantine rock-art spear-man,
Levantine Rock Art
abstracted.
I do not remember the original inspiration for separating the bands of images from Rachel Meloon’s strap with bands of color-spectrum-sequenced Rubin’s vases.
Rubin Vase
I suppose it had something to do with the cross-cultural nature of the artefact symbolizing the unity of mankind. Or maybe I made that up after the fact. No tracing was involved. I drew the strap designs by hand, one by one, on an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper, using mechanical pencil, ruler, protractor, square, compass, and Michaelangelo-style pounce stencils. The ranks of Rubin’s vase-faces were all drawn free-hand, which is why none of the faces really match, what I like to think of as a my low-rent variation on Shi Huang Ti’s Terracotta Army.
The opening salvo in my triumphant return to graphic art (after Miss McElree’s second-grade class at Albert Schweitzer Elementary School, Levittown, PA [see 1. Introduction – “Art and I” – Ted Silar]) is Rabbit Dreams.
How Rabbit Dreams CAME TO BE
I drew Rabbit Dreams by starting to doodle in one corner of a large sheet of drawing paper and, years later, ending in the other. It started out as a meaningless free-form salmagundi. But as I went along, it started to take on meaning. There: Fukushima. There: more nuclear power plants. There: regiments of technocratic onlookers. There: the rabbit, symbol of overpopulation. There: his nightmare, aftermath of rabbits doing what comes naturally.
I bought a set of art pencils when I started out. But half-way through, I realized that mechanical pencils worked best for the ornate fiddling I was doing. I did copy some of the images from books and the internet. But I drew all of it freehand—no tracing—and each image was altered to suit my purposes.
When I was finally finished, I took the drawing to a printmaker in Bryn Mawr and had a scan and copies of various sizes made. Then I bought some colored ink pens and started to ink in 8 1/2 x 11 prints like pages in a coloring book. In my first version, Rabbit Dreams I, I used the whole rainbow. In later versions, I found that a limited palette gave each version more of its own character. Unfortunately, the digital versions of these small inked prints are all that is left of them. The ink has faded to a pale pastel on the originals. A lesson. Never use colored ink on coldpress water-color paper. It just sinks in and disappears.
Even though I draw it, I believe that one could consider my art conceptual–because I start with a concept!
MY CONCEPT: CHAOS!
Chaos in this case was my concept. A long time ago, I read a chapter in James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science on the subject of “scale,” the idea that objects, if they are of sufficient complexity, look different when seen from different viewpoints.
One example stayed in my memory. The Paris Opera House, Gleick argues, is more interesting to look at than a New York skyscraper, because the Paris Opera House employs “scale.” In other words, view it from nearby or view it from afar, the New York skyscraper always looks the same. The Paris Opera House, on the other hand, is complex enough that your perception of it changes as you approach and as you retreat.
“Simple shapes are inhuman,” asserts Gleick. “They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.” The initial concept behind Rabbit Dreams was to draw something with enough complexity that it would have scale, that it would look different when viewed from near, far, or yonder.
When I was 7, I wanted to be a cartoonist. Somehow I lost my way, straggling off from art into writing and music. Maybe when I got glasses. Maybe when my second-grade teacher, Miss McElree, put a poem I wrote (along with a fired clay monster I had sculpted) in a hallway display case for public consumption. (“Hmm,” I guess my always-plotting 7-year-old mind thought, “maybe I can make a million dollars as a grammar-school Shelley.”)
GEORGE SEURAT, C’EST MOI
I have never, though years passed like a rush-hour stream of rattletrap pick-ups, stopped thinking up art projects, however. Finally, about 10 or 15 years ago, I said to hell with this. My original dream was to stand on a ladder next to a huge canvas, like Georges Seurat, only doodling away instead of dabbing away.
I also imagined my huge canvas up on blocks and me rolling around underneath it on an old-fashioned, wooden mechanic’s creeper, doodling away, like Michaelangelo on his back splashing on the Sistine ceiling.
The art of the dOODLE
I soon discovered that a regular old sheet of 18 x 24 coldpress and a sagging barcalounger was plenty enough and then some. Oddly, I found the work singularly relaxing, a welcome diversion, almost therapeutic. Even when I erased and re-drew a doodle a hundred times to get it right. Writing was, is, a challenge, difficult, frustrating, requiring intense, narrowly-zeroed-in attention. Musical practice, like drawing, can be relaxing, but composing, like writing, requires intellect, application. With art, however, I can just doodle away while my mind floats unmoored through all the tangled, ancient driftwood clattering around my brain-pool.
At present, for instance, I am working on transforming a scan of the hand-drawn Rabbit Dreams into a digital drawing. The work is laborious and very slow. Intently, slowly tracing a line with a mouse, my mind will faithfully dredge up a muddled gallimaufry of the strangest, most unexpected memories from out of the long-lost lagoon of my past.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE (AN OUTSIDER)
I think of my art as outsider art: I certainly don’t know nothin’ ’bout no art. But can you really be an outsider artist without being illiterate and raised by a horny toad in some backwoods West Virginia holler? This, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is a question for the ages.
A book I found in a thrift shop, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome, by Michael Parenti, inspired Ashes. Parenti’s thesis is that historians tend to favor the optimates of ancient Rome, the rich, the powerful, the ones we know from the history books, and denigrate the anonymous, “panem et circenses” rabble, the lowly mob. In like manner, they also denigrate those who would better the lives of this lowly mob, the Gracchi, Saturninus, and especially Julius Caesar.
These men are all “demagogues,” consensus historical opinion would have it, according to Parenti. And Julius Caesar fares worse: he is a “dictator,” horror of horrors. Parenti’s book is a necessary corrective to this consensus opinion. In short, it denigrates the optimates, favors the rabble, and lauds Julius Caesar’s efforts to better their lot. When I read criticism of Parenti’s work, it reminds me of criticism of Oliver Stone’s JFK. There are hundreds, even thousands of allegations made and implied in these two works. Critics pull rank (“Parenti is not a professional classicist and I am”), draw two or three allegations into question, dust off their hands, and declare all refuted.
THE ELITE CONSENSUS
Most fiction set in ancient Rome takes a similar tack to that of the consensus historians. It tends to be about historical personages of the upper classes and their hangers-on. Unsurprisingly, in view of the fact that ancient Roman historians, Suetonius, Tacitus, et al, only wrote about the upper classes. For information about the lower classes, we have no recourse but hints excavated from ancient Roman literature, from satirists like Juvenal and Martial especially, and from archeology. A much harder row to hoe.
There are exceptions. Ruth Downie’s Medicus Series took five books to introduce the emperor into its primarily lower-class milieu of physicians, soldiers, provincials, and barbarians. The Coin of Carthage, a novel written, surprisingly, by a very aristocratic Lost Generation Englishwoman, Winifred Bryher, tells of the Second Punic War from the viewpoint of commoners: farmers, merchant seamen, soldiers.
Ancient Rome Insula
Taking a cue from Parenti, I resolved to go further. To write a book about slaves and proletarii in ancient Rome. A book about people who are so busy living their lives that they don’t even know what the upper classes are doing. Julius Caesar does make an appearance in one of the books. But our characters do not know who he is, they have more important things to do, anyway, and the reader will have to stay alert to catch a hint of him. This scene of insouciance was in fact the very first scene I imagined, and could be said to be the scene around which Ashes is built.
RECREATING ANCIENT ROME WITH LATINISMS
I use a lot of Latinate words. A certain Latinity of language is traditional in historical fiction about ancient Rome. Not surprisingly, given that the language of Rome was Latin. Thus, the diction of novels like Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Wilder’s The Ides of March, Williams’s Augustus, and Graves’s I, Claudius is quite formal, Latinate, literary. A relatively recent one, Burton’s Caesar’s Daughter is, I think, to my surprise even more formal and Latinate than these older books. Or consider Ben Hur—the book unquestionably (Jesus’s words are direct quotations from the King James Bible), but the 1959 movie, too, goes in for this traditional elevation of language.
You would expect the language of a relatively modern TV series like Rome to be colloquial as all get out. But, no, depending on the episode, the dialogue can be as formal as Ben Hur and then some. Illiterate soldiers can sound like perorating Ciceros. Since the screenwriters themselves are not, as a rule, all that, uh, scholarly, let us say, the results can be quite, uh, grammatically delightful, as when Caesar asserts, “It is only I that offers mercy,” or when Atia refers to a single “congery” (hard g) of party-goers (like some movie reviewer rating movies according to the formula one kudo, two kudos, etc.)
TO LATINIZE OR NOT TO LATINIZE
The problem with all this Latinate English, of course, is that, in English, the Latinate words tend to be the formal words, thanks to two historical convulsions: the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman Conquest. In Latin, on the other hand, all the words are already in Latin! (Not precisely true: there is a stratum of formal and literary Greek in Latin almost comparable to the stratum of Latin in English, though not as extensive.) It is an insoluble conundrum. Write in modern colloquial English and risk making your ancient Romans sound like street-corner hipsters. Write in a Latinate, literary style and risk making soldiers sound like Cicero.
THE PATH OF EXCESS
I have opted for the Latinate path. Not the moderate, modulated path of the aforementioned books, however. I have chosen the path of excess. I have tried to infuse Latin into everything. Not only do I use Latinate English. I also eschew contractions. Which in itself creates a literary tone. Moreover, rather than throw in the odd “per di” here and there for local color, as is the practice in most ancient Roman fictions, I use untranslated Latin words and translated Latin idioms by the plaustrum-load.
I trust that their meaning will be clear enough in context. If not, there is an extensive glossary. And if this barrage of strange words adds to the strangeness of the reading experience, this is exactly what I intend. I want to emphasize difference. I want to take the reader into strange, overwhelming, intensely alien territory—which is the way in the final analysis I see ancient Rome, despite its many affinities with the now.
EVOLUTION OF STYLE:
FROM LITERARY TO COLLOQUIAL
I use a particularly literary English for the dialogue in the first section of Book I, set in the mountains of Umbria, because I mean it to have the effect of an idyll, a dream-world of perfect freedom and self-sufficiency. I have been up that winding road beyond Fons Clitumni, seen that sun-drenched, south-facing mountainside field, eaten the mountain fare, quaffed the country wine, heard those night-roosting birds, and can attest it is just the place for an idyll.
As the story moves on, from idyllic mountainside to mean streets, I start to add colloquial Romanisms. For instance, the Latin cognate for “to scold” would be ‘”objurgate” in English. Investigations into Vulgar Latin, however, have revealed to me that ancient Romans used the idiom “to howl” in the same way modern English speakers use “to bitch.”
Surprised at examples like this of how similar ancient Roman and modern concepts can be, no sooner do I turn the page than my source confronts me with the abject terror with which Roman writers, usually so unexpurgated, approach the concept of the landica, and then I read Catullus 63, and I know I am still in a very strange land.
And, as the story evolves, so does the language. By Book III, the Latinate dialogue has devolved almost to incoherent monosyllables.
PLOTTING
I also eschewed fancy plotting. A story of down-to-earth, everyday people, it seemed to me, called for a down-to-earth, everyday plot. The long arc of the life of a family, through the years, lived day by day, in chronological order. Irony and surprise must needs arise naturally out of the train of events or not at all.
“EMBOLIUM” OR INTERLUDE
That is, the plot stays simple up until the second part of Book III, where beginneth my own version of an “embolium,” a short, comic play or performance inserted between acts of a longer play in ancient Roman theater. There is little concrete known about embolii. No descriptions of or scenarios for embolii survive.
Apparently, a single performer danced and sang and acted out a lewd, comic story. Embolii were famously lewd. Unlike other drama, no masks were worn, and the performers were often women. My embolium follows almost none of these conventions except that it is comic and lewd. It erupted directly out of too much reading of Plautus and Terence. Though it owes little to Plautus and Terence, either, except for the comedy and the lewdness.
APPROXIMATING THE POETRY OF ANCIENT ROME
But in keeping with the idea of embolii as a kind of musical comedy, my embolium does incorporate two poems, poems written in meters that English-speaking poets have decided approximates the feel of the Roman originals (although of course, ancient Roman poetry doesn’t rhyme much, and mine rhymes up a storm). I seem to have a demon in me that compels me to insert mad, excessive, absurd poems into the flow of my narrative. Ah, well. Ita vita.
I plan to write three more books in the series. I will eventually do it on my own. But encouragement from my readers will greatly speed the plow.
SYNOPSES
Ashes Book I: A Novel of the Poor of Ancient Rome
It is ancient, late-Republican Rome, and, denied the freedom he was promised, successful merchant-slave, Ariston, sets fire to his master’s Palatine villa, rescues a slave-girl, Felicia, from crucifixion, and both escape to the distant mountains of Umbria, where they marry and raise a family, setting in play an odyssey that spans generations, an odyssey that leads from the cruel streets of the slums of Rome to chariot races in the Circus Maximus, from bloody, no-holds-barred street boxing to the pursuit of fugitive slaves across the length and breadth of Italia, from the great landed estates of the Roman countryside to the law courts of the Roman Forum.
Ashes Book II: A Novel of the Poor of Ancient Rome
P. Silvius Priscus Niger, the gentlest of slave-owners, hires slave-catchers Aries and Syriaticus to return to him his beloved escaped Carthaginian slaves, Endymion (Carthaginian name, Melqart), Adonis (Carthaginian name, Aqbar), and Narcissus (Carthaginian name, Adonibaal). The chase leads from the Carthaginian quarter of Surrentum to the luxuries of Pompeii, south, down the Roman road, the Via Popilia, to the Valley of Diana, to mountainous Bruttium, to the wheat fields and olive groves of Sicilia, to volcanic Mt. Aetna, in the course of which, the slave-catchers ignite a war between Roman legionary settlers and native Lucanian farmers, are outwitted by back-country outlaws, attacked by mobs of angry slaves, and nearly clubbed to death by an angry gladiator.
But Aries and Syriaticus are relentless. They anticipate a rich reward.
Ashes Book III: A Novel of the Poor of Ancient Rome
Ancient Roman slave-catcher, Aries, returns from a long pursuit to find that his anticipated reward has disappeared, his father, Titus Pomponius Basso, successful chariot-horse trainer in the Circus Maximus, has been falsely convicted of witchcraft and sold into slavery on a landed Etrurian estate, and his grandmother, Felicia, has gone into hiding in an attic deep in the slums of Rome, vowing to devote her life to the cause of the liberation of all who languish in chains. Rescue and vengeance, however, Aries finds, carry a price—learning the truth about his family’s origins.
In a comic interlude, an obsessed physician causes himself immense trouble trying to raise the money to buy and ravish a slave-girl. The slave-girl’s beloved, a female gladiator, struggles mightily to thwart him.
My Minoan Designs are a mixture of original images in what I hope is a Minoan style and stolen images. The Minoans from whom I stole the stolen images, however, I think are past caring. 
