Raymond Saunders ~ Jack Johnson, Then and Now

Raymond Saunders painted this image of Jack Johnson in 1971. That was a year after James Earl Jones portrayed Johnson (thinly disguised) in The Great White Hope. Johnson was a famous black American heavyweight boxer. He was the first black American boxer to win the heavyweight title.

Saunders has reprised this image in works he is creating at Magnolia Studios in the Bay Area. As described in Magnolia's newsletter...

In new unique works on canvas, wood and panel, acclaimed Oakland-based painter Raymond Saunders incorporates digitally printed elements into mixed media images which are densely layered with lyrical pencil drawings, spray painted vases, gauzywatercolor pomegranates, coffee grounds, torrents of dripping oil paint, collaged paper ephemera, and various other ingredients. Prints on recycled plywood from Urban Ore form the foundation for several of the works, lending a readymade texture with which ink and other media can interact. Saunders can be seen nearly every day bringing work back and forth from his studio, where elements are applied by hand, to Magnolia, where new elements are incorporated using a large scale flatbed printer. In some cases these elements have been scanned from older works and it is difficult if not impossible to tell which parts are hand-painted and which are printed. Also in the works are a series of mixed-media Saunders etchings which combine traditional copper plate etching with collaged elements.

Here's a quick video showing the printer adding color to the image.

Raymond Saunders ~ Dr. Faustus

"Dr. Faustus", you ask? How can Raymond Saunders be associated with Dr. Faustus? Read the chalk like writing on the image above and you'll see that David Mamet wrote a play about Dr. Faustus. Mamet asked his long-time friend Raymond Saunders to do the broadsides for the play that was originally performed at the Magic Theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005. Saunders created a painting in which he depicted this visual musing on heaven and hell. Trillium Press then created twelve pigmented prints each of which had added handwork and collage. The augmentation was typical of Saunders' art practice. Each print is unique, much like individual performances of a play. Below you can see nine of those twelve images. For you Mamet buffs out there, Raymond Saunders also created the broadside for the original production of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway back in 1984.

Raymond Saunders ~ Red Star, Jasper Johns and Robert Colescott

Just so you know, Fifty Two Pieces operates 7 days a week, 365 days for one year only, vacations included. Both Amy and I are away from home this weekend. She put her posts together early; I chose to wait. Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? Fortunately tomorrow for me which is now today is three hours earlier than Portland Daylight Savings Time.

So, here is Raymond Saunders after a full day in Brooklyn and a trip over to Governors Island which required transit through Manhattan. Yikes, Raymond Saunders was born in 1934 so he's been around for some time. Painting, creating art, doing his thing so to speak. Doing his thing is the important part here. In the 1960's at the height of the Black Power movement, abstraction was the focus of the art world. Artists like Raymond Saunders who made color field paintings or assemblages were not treated well by the movement. Saunders was criticized for works such as his 1970's Red Star, shown in our post for the day. Saunders defended his penchant for Abstraction that looks to Jasper Johns' symbols and numerals with this statement ... "racial hang-ups are extraneous to art."

Here's an excerpt from Raymond Saunders' Black Is a Color published in 1967.

Some angry artists are using their art as political tools, instead of vehicles of free expression...An artist who is always harping upon resistance, discrimination, opposition, besides being a drag, eventually plays right into the hands of the politicians he claims to despies--and is held there, unwittingly (and witlessly) reviving slavery in another form. For the artist, this is aesthetic atrophy.

Certainly the American black artist is in a unique position to express certain aspects of the current American scene, both negative and positive, but if he restricts himself to these alone, he may risk becoming a mere cypher, a walking protest, a politically prescribed stereotype, negating his own mystery and allowing himself to be shuffled off into an arid overall mystique.

Racial hangups are extraneous to art, no artist can afford to let them obscure what runs through all art--the living root and the ever-growing aesthetic record of human spiritual and intellectual experince. Can't we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end?

This wasn't exactly the position of Robert Colescott from Week 20 here at Fifty Two Pieces.

Kitchen Table Series

As long as we are going to consider Saunders' Assemblage to reference a kitchen table, lets not forget Carrie Mae Weems and her kitchen table series. These shots were taken in 1990, just a year before Assemblage was made. We talked about Weems' work here in week nine of 52 pieces. In this photograph I see an incredibly beautiful and powerful woman who owns her space. In Saunders' piece I see a similar woman coming through. I'm guessing a mother who encouraged playfulness, by the brightly colored chair. Who kept milk and cereal on the table, and games in the house. Games that puzzled the brain and worked the mind, like Chinese Checkers. I see fruit and flowers and a big black heart. The kitchen table belongs to mom, look at Carrie Mae Weems.

Raymond Saunders, Assemblage - Links with Kiki Smith and Louise Nevelson

Take a look at this image of Assemblage. That red rectangle on the left is a piece of oilcloth. There's a Chinese checkers board. There's a chair. There's an article about the Tuskegee airmen. There are two oil paintings. There's a little of this and a little of that. Raymond Saunders collected much of this from the streets on his walks. Two other artists here at Fifty Two Pieces have also collected detritus from the streets. Most recently Kiki Smith in Week 25. And in week 24, we saw the queen of detritus, Louise Nevelson. There are any number of people who pick up "stuff" from the streets -- not all of them make works of art from those little bits and pieces though.

Here's a quote from Raymond Saunders about this method of making art. Each of the objects “finds you; you find it. You become visually receptive, attuned. You take something off the street, not knowing if you’ll use it, or how. I’ll see a sign on a phone pole, walk three blocks thinking about it, go back and get it, take it home and later discard it. Then I ask myself, Why did I ever bother carrying this across town?” So don't think yourself foolish if you pick up "stuff" off the street. You, too, could make art from all of those pieces you bring home. It seems that it's the intention of your act when you're creating that makes it art.

Assemblage by Raymond Saunders

Raymond Saunders was born in 1934, He did this piece in 1991. It is individual daily pieces of life laid out on a big flat surface next to a chair. Does that make it a table? he made this piece the same year he did a show at the Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco called Flowers From a Black Garden. A title that could fit his autobiography.