YOUR FOREIGN CO-RESPONDER
(person who reacts quickly or positively to stimulus)
by Jan Galligan
Santa Olaya, PR
SKETCHBOOK: A BOOK PREVIEW
Mar 17, 2022
It was with surprise that we retrieved from our Post Office box a package the other day sent by our long time Albany artist friend, Allen Grindle, mailed from his studio where he has lived since we first met him, over 40 years ago. That's a long time to live/work in one place. You can imagine our delight when we discovered an eight by eight inch, softbound book entitled SKETCHBOOK, with art by Grindle and words by Joseph Dane. Dane we did not know, but Grindle's art we know well, and as we thumbed through the 130 pages, we saw many works that we had already encounted, either in exhibitions, during visits to his studio, or via the nearly annual holiday mailings received from Grindle and his partner Wendy Williams. Many of those works have been framed and displayed to our ongoing delight. For nearly thirty years, before we moved from Albany to Puerto Rico, Grindle's large woodcut print hung over the fireplace in our downtown home @75Grand.
A quick tour of the book showed us many Grindle works that we had not seen before: drawings, paintings, sculptures, linocuts, gravure and more. We did know that his studio is a treasure trove, packed with an ever increasing legacy of his art production, so much so, that you'd sometimes wonder how he found the space to make new works.
Interspersed among numerous carefully lit, museum quality illustrations of Grindle's work, made by Albany photographer Joe Purtock, are more casual photos of the crowded studio which Grindle took, that clearly demonstrate just how much art he has created and the processes involved. A further surprise was finding what seemed to be a story wending its way from start to finish. Careful inspection proved this to be true. Normally when opening a new book, the first step is to look at the Colophon: publisher, date, credits, ISBN. Then Contents: chapters, titles, etc. Finally, the Index, just to see what extra might exist.
Contents tells us that Dane has written a story with a Prelude of three sections, the first part of part one immediately caught our eye: The Artist-Dominatrix. O.K., we thought, this is going to be interesting. The other parts of the Prelude include: It was an Accident, she said; and Class Notes: The Ballad of Eloise. We couldn't wait to find out more about Eloise. Is she the Artist-Dominatrix?
Section two is titled Interludium Pastorale, and also has three parts: Road Trip, Docents in the Gallery, and Curtain Call.
Over these many years we did not recall Grindle mentioning Joseph Dane, so we were curious to know more about him. A quick trip to the Authors pages at the end of the book helped. Dane's brief auto-bio says that he and Grindle were high school friends and that over the years he too, has acquired a number of Grindle's art works which he too, treasures. Apparently Dane taught at the University of Southern California and is now emeritus. He says he imagined that constructing the book with Grindle would be a struggle, but in the end found that his words and Grindle's images complement and support each other, almost as if on their own, without authors' interventions. Grindle in his bio, says that Dane approached him with the initial idea of making a book, and as is his wont, he meant to tell Dane, “No, absolutely not.” That sounds like the Grindle we know. However he ended up saying he'd “think about it,” and now he has a pile of books to add to the accumulata of his shrinking studio space.
Back to the story. Who is this Eloise? Why is she a dominatrix? What kind of artist is she? What was the accident? What was that class where the notes were being taken? Where did the road trip take her? Who were those docents in the gallery? And what happended at the curtain call?
To answer those questions, let's begin at the end, on page 124.
“The cupped applause of the audience, perhaps the listeners, polite as they are trained to be, echoes in the upper galleries.”
To give you any more of the story, would be to give too much away. Buy this book. Read Dane's full story for yourself. Look at all of Purtock's images, which are like a studio visit in themselves. Study closely the individual works by Grindle, carefully annotated with date, title, medium and size.
You can purchase a copy of the book from Amazon by following the link below
(click on book title or the book cover image)
SKETCHBOOK by Allen Grindle and Joseph Dane ISBN 979864660004
As Grindle himself says at the end of his bio, “The words and the images speak back-and-forth as they should. A good balance. A good book. I can almost hear the applause coming from the upper balcony.”