Artist James Rosenquist by Richard Schulman
Fictional Truths
John Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” (“when the melancholy fit shall fall”) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Alone”
(“I have not seen as others saw”) hint at delirious insights into my life photographing creative narrators and the lives they made while creating art and ideas.
I say, “Follow me.” There are two of me as one. Like a single domino bone with pips, I am filled with both melancholy and exuberance. I am alone in the woods, yet surrounded by cacophony in the urban streets. I am never lonely, yet always alone. My memories and time enter each day like a traveler in the Grimm Brothers or Baron Munchausen stories. I step into a vanishing world with every capture my camera is capable of seeing. It is here and gone until just another day.
Upon entering the studio of the artist James Rosenquist, I was greeted with an unexpected and surprisingly generous welcome. Rosenquist is one of a mixed breed of artists: Pop, Surreal, and other labels. His DNA is like the ancient fossil trees of Cairo, New York: It exists in traces of science and must hold volumes of inventive stories to be told. The artist’s roots step south into depths of the past and sprout north into our future’s birth, death, and divine roots in history’s time: Rosenquist is a fine example of an artist who had one branch of his mind in the past, and another like a periscope scanning the future, connecting his art to generations both behind and ahead. Like a protruding limb with grafted babies attached, there is no end to the evolving dialog of an artist’s life.
Jack Daniel’s: I haven’t had a relationship with that style of whiskey: But when I placed the fifth of “Jack“ in front of James and watched him peer into the abyss of a willing bottle, I wondered what does it feel like to stare into abstention? A number of artists in my archives drank from that same elixir, but this was a first, the man who swore to divorce the whiskey from his everyday life.
A eulogy to a man and a time:
I was in a famous artist’s studio. Just me and art history in the room.
When all was fated and completed I bowed in my mind with great, great gratitude. I had made the pictures and enjoyed the conversation with someone who, by the end of my day, became a friend. And yet, I remind myself of a link to photography’s past: Rosenquist’s fifth of Jack Daniel’s whiskey is my tethered bridge to England’s historical, remnant of a captured life. Roger Fenton’s famous photograph, The Queen’s Target made while engaged in a day with Queen Victoria and entourage was not my day with Pop artist James Rosenquist.
An 1860 photograph from a bow and arrow exercise of play and theater remains an enduring reminder, a fragment of a moment when a photographer illustrated a mere speck of life in time. My artist, sat behind his bottle for just a favor to me. The resulting image remains as my contemporary Queen’s Target: a reminder of a day linking my decades to my dreams, my camera’s life!
Rosenquist the man whose countenance dresses in equal parts melancholy and exuberance allowed me to be me, positioning himself for whatever I wanted. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was a dream subject. We like kids, glided and meandered while croqueting through the studio as he peppered me with stories. There were no doldrums for me; I was alive with a lilt in mind, eyes and step.
The day came to an end. The man waved to me goodbye with mapped eyes, eyes decked in stories and adventurous bouts. I listen for the sound of light and can hear an afterglow.
