ABOUT THE COVER ART: THE PRAYER STICK SERIES
by Barbara Kerstetter
BARBARA KERSTETTER (cover illustration) is an artist living and
working in New York City. Recent exhibitions include Galerie Auberge
La Fontaine, Venasque, France (summer 2000); State Street Gallery in
Sarasota, Florida; and the Vorpal Gallery, New York.
Each morning before I begin to paint, I take a brisk walk through the
park. During this winter, I began collecting sticks for no reason that I
could name. When I returned to my studio I lit a candle and made my own
charcoal with the sticks. As I drew and painted, I recalled having
heard, many years ago, that prayer sticks were part of an ancient
Buddhist ceremony involving a pilgrimage to the mountains.
I love the scent of burning wood, so I continued making gestural
lines until the charcoal tip was worn, then I burned a bit more and
developed the image. I wanted to make something that would last so I
mixed egg yolk with the charcoal. Then I sanded chunks of charcoal into
a blue and white Chinese bowl and mixed water, yolk and powdered
charcoal until I had the desired consistency for each area. I applied
this primitive egg tempera with brushes, palette knives, and my fingers.
What had become a morning ritual yielded many drawings. Sometimes I
listened to chants, sometimes to litanies by Arvo Part. At several
points, I wondered why I didn't feel inclined to introduce color. Could
it be that the dead teach the living? Eventually, after perhaps fifty
drawings, it seemed necessary to add pigment. The colors came from the
earth. I'd brought little containers of ochre pigment from France, which
I mixed into other paintings. The colors came from the earth, pigment
from France which I mixed into other paintings, but red ochre
predominated.
I know a curator of Japanese art. After months of ceremonial drawing,
I met her by chance and availed myself of the opportunity to learn what
I could about prayer sticks. She told me that the sticks were inscribed
with Buddhist prayers meant to appease the gods. They were then burned
so that messages would rise in smoke. Sometimes the sticks were floated
in streams and the water-soluble ink would be communicated to spirits
and gods in this way. None of this was known to me when I began what had
become a morning ritual. I don't make art about religious concepts. I
make art about life, about needs and desires. These drawings are about
what all art is about: the loss and recovery of grace. Nothing is as
painful as loss and nothing is as beautiful as starting again, of being
given another chance, of feeling love again. One knows a feeling and one
longs to recover it.
