Explorations on Oscar Wilde's Salome (a codex of 88 works on paper)

My explorations on Oscar Wilde's Salome.

A Codex of 88 works

Salome.  a folio of illuminated pages by Milo Reice.

     This group is comprised of 88 works; though since these were completed I've completed  4 large-scale oils of life-size figures and plan on doing 6 more as a walk-in installation of 10 narrative works.         

     This codex of works  began as a way to continue with dance paintings and drawings I'd been creating for upmost of a year  (2K09) and occasionally over the last 30 plus years. However every dance image I’d ever made until then had  been about dancing and nothing more, -no specific subjects or narratives beyond a given "emotional" tone or physical  description . S0,

    I now wanted to make a painting where dance was the center of a specific narrative-  where something was occurring between the painted people that was about anything but dance.

      For a long time now- I don't no how long, Salome's story I’ve had the sneaking suspicion-  foot the bill for this type of “dance”-work I now wanted to make. Probably “a thousand years ago” from when I first saw Jeffery Hunter play Jesus in King of Kings, the Salome story has always splintered a little place in the back of my brain. Over the years going to clubs and dance-parties, seeing women and men  dance in countless myriad ways and styles while zig-zagging to beats and frenzy- and me often with them, I've imagined countless frozen moments- images, of dancers over the years and then some I’ve actually made .

     My good friend, Raymond Rizzo loves and knows everything about Oscar Wilde; one night, drinking and eating dinner at his home he talked all about the writer and in mentioning his play Salome, our fervent conversation jumped to Richard Strauss's version and to The Bible as well. Vespa-ing home that night back to Pasadena I decided Salome was my subject.

      Over the next days or weeks I came up with images (all just in my head) of Salome's Dance before Herod- as well as the questions of how'd I paint it, how big the size, etc.  It then became a giant oil triptych (again in my head) with “The Dance”  as the center panel, the left panel perhaps Salome “Flirting” with John The Baptist, quarreling  Herod and Herodias might be the third panel. Fabulous, nonetheless I continued thinking- for surely there were other great scenes or characterizations I'd want/could  include. But how?- for the so many possible moments in the Salome story I'd have to do 3 or 4 large scale triptychs- that I didn't want to do. 

          When I began the first few of these studies it occurred to me that  just in front of me  lay the very solution as to the way of presentation, never mind the why.- Just do a bunch of studies as if planning a number of major final works!; in other words, I should/would ramble through the whole of Mr. Wilde’s play executing one study after another,  creating mutiple elaborations, often repeating poses and polishing them, examining scenes over and over, delineating figural groups and compositions, and so forth. Though ultimately a complete and major work in the form of a large folio of completed works on paper, my Salome cycle would be a chronologically ordered visual diary of the works' germinations and evolutions.

      Once begun I continued creating the drawings and gradually too their borders,- these borders to serve in much the same way as an ancient Greek theater chorus- as illumination,- as added visual and visceral metaphor,... Punch!      When I'd created 18 or so of the drawings I returned to the first and began making the “illuminated” margins for it and the next 9.  That set the pattern, for then on I'd create some drawings: 3, 4, maybe 5 or 6, and then their decorated matts. This tandem approach lessoned the risk of lazily  repeating compositional ideas, and decorations. 

             As I proceeded with this project cautiously and carefully- regarding my own knowledge of the Salomean literature as scant it nonetheless would be inaccurate to say that I didn’t know anything of the story’s complexities; but when I began my first drawings I'd actually  only really been familiar with The Biblical account. That familiarity  was reinforced by movies, albeit sometimes filmed bits of foolishness.

     Richard Strauss's opera (the plays libretto virtually a duplicate of Oscar’s play) I'd seen years before when I was a teenager- once and not since, and I had never listened to it on Lp or cd. Oscar Wilde's play was one I'd missed. So as I worked these drawings I researched the web, read the play, and listened to the opera; as a result I gained insights I’d otherwise not have enabling me to create newer drawings more and more aligned to and enriched by the details of storyline and characterizations more or less new to me. So indeed this cycle of works presented here in chronological order- from the first to the last one made,  is very much a running  record of artistic conceptualization, study, and of incremental discovery.   

     As the finished paperworks accumulated the notion of presenting them as pages of an illuminated book  became an apparent and bygone conclusion. This is why in this folio they are presented in pairs- full page to full page their central drawings (as detail shots) following.

-Milo Reice October  2K11