A college friend Erez Sitzer, has become an artist. He paints. Sitzer an Israeli who has traveled the world over, going to South America and Asia, has come in contact with shamans, spiritual teachers (Carlos Casteneda, Terrence McKenna , Tom Robbins and undoubtedly scores of other people too amazing to be famous). Now he lives near Himeji Castle in Japan. To reproduce his original oil-paintings (which often take 3-5 months of care and effort), he uses giclee, a French term used to describe a unique continuous-tone printing technology for creating fine art prints. Gicle? literally means ‘nozzle’. This refers to the 4 million, 15 micron droplets per second which are sprayed through a nozzle onto archival museum quality watercolor paper.
The effect seems to be a fluid blending of earthy colors and swirling maelstroms that hint at the rich tranquility underneath the mundane. (Perhaps Erez should try depicting the Houston suburbs sometimes!) Interestingly, although Erez and I took a lot of courses together (including an Asian studies and an art history class), I knew him more for his poetry and his writing than for visuals. In contrast to the evermounting everwidening clutter of my dorm room, Erez’s rooms always seemed Zen in their simplicity (helped, no doubt, by the fact that Erez gave away every book after finishing it). About his inspiration, he writes:
After returning home from the forest, I began to draw pictures; not as an artist trained by years of study, but rather out of a strange compulsion, like something a storyteller might feel when pulled along by visions beckoning for expression. The pictures developed slowly and after several years I began realizing that they formed a narrative, a story, and that sharing this story was the responsibility given to me by the name AMAZANGA
To Mr. Sitzer, I owe a single debt: introducing me to a classic in comic history, Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody.
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