10/25/2021
Henry Oelkers, everyone's favorite costume model, costumer par excellence, musician and wit. died this weekend after a three-month-long fight against an aggressive cancer. Stunned artists are flooding instagram with drawings and paintings of Henry.
Below I reprint an essay inspired by his poses; below that is a photo from the NY Times showing Henry as Santa Clause during our Make Music Winter performance in Petrosino Square in 2017; and, lastly, Henry as Uncle San during one of our annual Fourth of July costume-drawing and concert events.
To Respond:
Minerva Durham
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Henry Oelkers, Rodin, Goya, Hokusai and Me in the Cold in the Park
Tell me how -- on a cold, sunless morning in a godforsaken, somewhat neglected, downtown park corridor frequented by godforsaken, addicted, homeless, dispossessed creatures -- I can have drawn drawings that are better than any drawings I have drawn in my whole life.
I've drawn Henry Oelkers many times. He has almost always projected an essence that could be grasped in a second, processed as quickly, and then miraculously fit onto a page with exuberance and without too conscious a struggle. But I had never felt like this before, as though I were gliding along an obstacle course, both difficult and easy at the same time, while the cold robbed my hands of all the facility I had got from practicing for sixty years. I kept on going, resigned to the struggle, but willfully and quietly maintaining a steady rebellion against the elements.
"Very Cold (Henry from the back)" Minerva Durham, Charcoal pencil with smudges 9" x 12"
"Henry Posing With Plastic Recorder" Minerva Durham, Charcoal pencil with
smudges 12" x 9" Collection: William Skillman
Since we started drawing clothed models outside in the park, I have been thinking a lot about Auguste Rodin's drawings , the ones he did late in life when he was famous from his sculptures. He could afford to hire a few models at a time, mostly dancers, asking them to move around, then to stop on command. He allowed himself a spontaneous freedom more extreme than the sort of freedom found in his early drawings. He unskilled himself. He drew without plan, allowing the sense of touch to guide his pencil, Years of working with clay to construct human forms had left him embedded with haptic memories ready to be transformed. He didn't look at his page when he drew.He scribbled. He chose to draw on smallish pieces of paper, later using watercolors to wash over the lines, sometimes unifying, sometimes confusing the image. Did he shock himself when he first thought to cut out one of the figures and to reorient it on a clean sheet of paper, and then to cut out more figures and interlock them?
For me, Rodin, Goya and Hokusai form a sacred Triinity of aged artists whose drawings reached their highest level in the last years of their lives. Francisco Goya, God the Father, all powerful in his craft, drew a set of fifty or more scenes, small and unassuming masterpieces in ink, of persons that he observed on the street and of satires of human weakness, intense imagined images: "They argue even as they fall" could be a comment on the current state of the American Empire.
Francisco Goya, "They argue even as they fall"
I see Auguste Rodin as God the Son, an artist bound to the earth who liberated us, giving permission to all artists to draw without constraints.
I complete the Trinity with Katsushika Hokusai, God the Holy Spirit, announcing that lines and dots will jump to life, not miraculously, but as the result of our being "mad about drawing."
"From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing." -- Hokusai
THE MORAL:
The best drawing you will ever do is the one you are going to draw tomorrow.
Goodbye, Henry. We will remember you.
Henry in the basement studio at 64 Spring Street, years ago
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