Word: orpheus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...creative popular musicians of the last decade." Dylan did not make a speech. He did not have to. His personal summing up was about to come out on a two-LP album (Columbia) appropriately entitled Self Portrait. For a man who charged his way through the 1960s like an Orpheus in Hades, the Dylan of Self Portrait is in an astonishingly contemplative mood. As with John Wesley Harding (1968) and Nashville Skyline (1969), the old fire of protest burns low. Obviously, there is time now to look around, time to accept tributes and time to bestow them in return...
While Miss Schuman tries for an illusion of depth, Jamie Smith actually builds out the canvas with pounds of acrylic paint. Smith's "Orpheus" is a light-flooded canvas reminiscent of Impressionism. Roughly textured yellow-greens make up a landscape with field and trees. David Brown uses elaborate surface treatment to an entirely different end. His "Life: Elaine" is a mannered portrait of a lady with classically abstracted features and gilt collar and background. It could be a painting of the sixteenth century. But there is a stylistically twentieth century figure off to one side, and a plastic coating makes...
Aura of Tragedy. As artists go, Boghosian is something of a poet, whose expressive power stems from his skillful embroidery of associations, intimations and unspoken allusions. While the content of his work is literary, its expression is far from literal. Legend recounts, for instance, that Orpheus was torn limb from limb by Thracian women infuriated at his single-minded love for Eurydice; his severed head, still singing, floated down the river Hebrus. To recall this macabre event, Boghosian mounted a wooden doll's head that had been wrenched from its body onto a weathered plank from an old snip...
...Britain, Conn. After a stint in the Navy, he attended college under the G.I. Bill, finishing up with a year under the "hard but kind" tutelage of Bauhaus Master Josef Albers at Yale. Now 43, he teaches sculpture himself at Dartmouth. He first became interested in Orpheus during college days, and printed a small portfolio of woodcuts, accompanied by his own poetry. Years later, while he was picking up driftwood on a Provincetown beach, the story of Orpheus came back. He took to scavenging with a vengeance...
Today the most recurring objects in his sculptures are croquet and billiard balls ("the world, and also the idea of Orpheus as an entertainer and juggler"), dolls ("man in his universe"), and ironing boards ("connotations of heat suggest hell"). Weather, rather than paint, creates his mellowed patinas, as well as the myriad uses to which each object has been put. But more than any natural beauty, it is his arrangement into harmonious compositions that give Boghosian's rescued miscellany a sad, precious sense of fatality...