24 Dec 2017Ling Sigstedt The Art of Theodore Czebotar
A bio, by Val Sigstedt
December 24, 2017
Theodore Czebotar, Painter
An artist dies at age 81, in 1996, leaving virtually his entire body of work intact. In his studio was half a centuries' accumulation of art products: a very large ouvre of paintings and drawings and dozens of notebooks where he had written and drawn his ideas, observations, and countless studies of larger paintings. This will be an effort to introduce the work of Theodore Czebotar, a man who was only about art.
He was a Polish-American who grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. He hoboed around in boxcars in the 'thirties, wrote poems and drew everywhere he went. At age 22 was given a one-man art show in the Walker Gallery, on 57th Street, New York City, which earned him favorable reviews in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other national publications. He was a man 'on his way.'
In 1941 he married a brilliant cosmopolitan dancer and poet, Els Snapper; they left New York, bought a cottage in Fishkill, New York, near Beacon, in the Hudson River Valley. Thereafter Czebotar never again asked the art community for anything, preferring to encounter the milieu of America with only art as his tool for comprehension.
Every summer they camped on the Northwest coast, where Theodore bathed in the landscapes that brought his imagination to its highest powers.
Countless sketches of the beaches, mountainsides forests and canyons were reworked upon their return to Fishkill. His astonishing garden bore huge vegetables, sunflowers, artichokes, flowers and willow trees shaped by his hand, all subjects for his mind to elaborate upon in his art.
In their later years they were unable to travel. Els Czebotar died in1995 and Theodore died a year later; their ashes were scattered under a tree in their garden. Ted's sister Gertrude, the executrix
of his estate, encouraged a small committee of his friends to approach the art community with examples of his work, to study his products and write about the art values he lived and painted.
What follows are some thoughts that the work has provoked. I experienced Czebotar as an artist first through deeply inciteful conversations with his lifetime friend Arthur Hagadus, then through the friendship of the Czebotars and my wife and children; we visited their home many times. Theodore usually worked at night, but he rarely painted with anyone present. He talked me into exhaustion many times, as the dawn came, and the first birds started singing, my mind overfilled with his astonishing thought. What I hope to accomplish here is to introduce the mind of an astonishing original American artist.
Theodore Czebotar painted the passionate interface between natural landscapes and human emotions. His art speaks in the language of myth.
Using classical techniques he created thoughtscapes that reach into the subconscious mind, slipping past our civilized censors on the vehicle of natural forms where art images succeed in submitting to our sensibilities an uncensored view of the human condition.
Art always exists in the vibrant plane between two worlds. Picasso said, no line, no color, no composition. Rodin said that every human emotion can be expressed by the body alone. In "The Psychology of Fire" the author shows that while flame can be scientifically analyzed, fire is a phenomenon at the interface where the physical world ends and human psychology begins; fire invokes uniquely human responses in our imaginations. Even light, that revealer of the world, is a force that has been called "too primitive to describe." We respond deeply to light's apparitions, deriving our realities out of its hypnotic grip. That task falls powerfully on the painter.
Czebotar, from his youth searched for a subject that was on the scale of his thought, where he could use the lens of his understanding and exercise his belief in art. At first he found the Old West in Arizona and Mexico, with its histories, pure distances and deserts, yet with civilization's painful heavy handprints still on a pristine nature that existed only a few generations back. On that battlefield the Myth of Nature still trembled the leaves of the present from out of the past.
Finally Czebotar found his life-long subject, the Pacific Northwest.
He encountered the temperate rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula, the tattered coast deeply scalloped by the Pacific Ocean, leaving headlands and islands fighting to survive in the dissolving, eternal sea. It is the home of giants: the giant orca, the giant octopus, a place where fogs and rain dim the outlines of things at a distance, where the great fallen trees that cover the region sometimes are carried out to sea, to return and collect in windrows of huge weathered driftwood, in house-high heaps, or as lone, beached tragedians with arms gesturing back to the sea. There, in the words of Walt Whitman, Czebotar's imagination was "free to consider the things thou lovest best: night, death, and the stars."
We who love Czebotar's work call this his world, the stage where conceptual relationships emerge from the fog, messages Czebotar knew to be his special avenue for comprehending the interleaved, complex world we all were born into. He painted Nature's and our continuity with the rest of existence. He saw the world of forms, history and beauty which can be intuited from nature parading past us in the cycles of seasons and change. In the notes that accompany many of his small artworks he studied his feelings as he observed, and delineated both the eternal natural forms and the passions of his art. He said he painted what was there, that he didn't need to add anything.
It is important to notice just here that Czebotar, a gifted poet, did not collect or publish his vivid words, but chose to communicate in the mute language of painting, using the silence of nature.
In one of his notebooks, Czebotar writes: "In Greece philosophizing
was a mode of action. -Kierkegard." That is exactly what he did.
Sometimes he called his work 'my homely little drawings,' by which he only meant that he hadn't dressed his ideas up in the fashions of the times.
Czebotar searched for the world's humanistic center. He spoke about Picasso's "Guernica" - where we experience the violence and pathos of war; Goya's "Fortunes of War" - savage and unadorned, reported like a fierce camera; Moore's "London Underground Shelter" drawings, his vision of Londoners huddling below their burning city in World War Two; the Holocaust Museum, with its assemblage of cryogenic bestiality frozen on the walls - all attempts by the living to memorialize life at its very moment of dying.
Art's duty is to make the commonplace world heroic. With the bravery of the child-patient we all encounter a seething energy field from which we will not escape alive, where if we are resolute we find ways to be healthy and inspired. We like to comfort ourselves by erecting visions of permanent order, ideas like Natural Law, and World Peace, but there are enormous verities that are only approached by means of painfully-acquired disciplines. There are whole sciences that study time, the ineffable, history, the ever-changing planet, war and greed, beauty, our societies, love, disease. We give human responses to real things and events, based on our private perceptions of them, which are all-too-human.
Everyone experiences the life the painter paints; we are all conscious of our passage through time, the existential dilemma of being human, and knowing it. Following Cezanne, who equalized the surface of certain paintings and brought painting to the front of the canvas, painting was both a delineator and an interpreter of nature.
Art's subject and ours is always ourselves. Czebotar made whatever reached his canvas a hero on a stage, singing in a great open-air opera about the astonishing forces that brought it to this point in time. In his work can be seen his enormous repertoire of feelings and passions, the comprehensions that rushed out through his brushes.
In my personal opinion he was neither a moralist nor a detached observer; He saw art as a discipline which if was 'art for art's sake' was immediately afterwards done for humanity's sake. Czebotar gave out the impression of having great controlled power, like a Zen master, which in one way I believe he was, like a lone exponent of an ancient rite. He was sometimes sardonic and always humorous, both elegant and peasant-like, seductive, erudite, incisive, secretive, judgmental, and above all, intelligent. Never, until the moment when death finally felled him, did he allow himself to be violated. He was outraged when helpless people were humiliated. He was driven to express what he knew and chose to paint it, and he painted in absolute freedom, like an angel on a mission.
In a notebook, below one of his great beached tree trunks the words "speaking wood," and, "chthonic darkness." He is saying that these trees, and all of nature, are messages sent from the underground forces, the chthonic kingdom which was worshipped and mythologized by the ancient Greeks, where dark gods dwelt.
These giant tree are the skeleton remains of a complete life, a once-living, uniquely-shaped creature, its streaming life fixed in its last moment like the deathbed photograph of its entire history. It had dealt with all of its realities and vicissitudes by accreting shapes that had successfully gripped the land, sought water and nutrition, responded to wind and climate, the very model of an independent citizen of Earth. While its trunk looked like all others of its species, its roots were unique structures, built of layer upon layer of new growth over old, forming a mysterious powerful artifact, until its life was anything but a clone of its neighbors.
For Czebotar, the vegetable world was never that different from our own. Our species which has adapted to stress by evolving the potentialities of electricity in our highly-developed nervous system, is not easily convinced that plants, which deal with one location by means of rapid chemical reactions, are our equals in consciousness, or an analog of wisdom, But Czebotar read science constantly, and knew that plants and humans are genetically quite close, out on the same evolutionary limb, and that plants' chlorophyl molecule differs from animals' hemoglobin molecule by only a dot of iron or a dot of manganese in their centers.
Artists and scientists risk doing dangerous things to develop the truth as they see it. A scientist studies his "hunch" for decades and sometimes breaks out a great new understanding of it, but may find after decades of work that he has gone into a blind alley, where his journey ends. History is ruthless, and for some people the inchoate in nature is like a chaotic monster which it is their duty to defeat.
Czebotar felt it was his duty to survive even his own death, by leaving traces of his encounters with life.
oOo
by Val Sigstedt,
