“A village is a work of survival, of crumbling and repaired corridors, curling up hills for protection, for worship, community, for beauty and time to remember its story. Places built for protection are beautiful. Beauty is a kind of camouflage.”
Jerilyn Jurinek
What, René, did I get out of staying in Wassard Elea’s apartment in the hill town of Ascea, once home of pre-Socratic philosophers, Zeno and Parminedes? The plan was to come to a stop, to sit in the garden, to make no plan. I would see what happened next.
Like other artists I know, I have many roles in New York and in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In New Jersey I am a professor to students, philosophical friend and formalist among colleagues. In New York I function as painter, poet, and historian in and around galleries, artist organizations, and as informal apprentice to Maestro del‘arte in Renaissance arts, Francesco Santoro. All that plus the rush of institutions to return from Covid has been wild.
My work in painting, drawing, and writing centered around improving classical underpinnings to an expressionist sensibility. This gave me a view to maintaining civilization’s values, and the active principle in beauty which is restorative and healthful. Ascea gave me a place to honestly see, coming just short of representation, as I received impressions of life lived in curving, climbing streets generation after generation. A village is a work of survival, of crumbling and repaired corridors, curling up hills for protection, for worship, community, for beauty and time to remember its story. Places built for protection are beautiful. Beauty is a kind of camouflage.
There was so much rain I wondered about mud slides, and floods. Every morning a new crop of fallen fruits landed on my back porch. But I persevered. I was fine. I made delicious meals from the local mercado down the road. René left on the kitchen table an enormous bowl of lemons he picked.
In “my New York” story, the present struggle changes daily, in the glare of LED lights. Who has time to feel before a new story takes its place? I live in an 1873 building in Manhattan, the King of Greene Street, it is nicknamed, lit by skylights and big factory windows. How it comforted me to live in the older section of town while I put together a picture of western civilization, spending time with the artwork in Italy when I could, reading Machiavelli, Burckhardt, Grimm, Castiglioni, and Alberti.
But in Ascea, how to say time visually, as the stones reach one at a time around the curve as the level rises, leaning away from my eye, then out of view, as the building on the right greets its neighbor building across the way, waving some wash, like a “wink” from the upper railing. Perspective, light, shadow, and textures are my tools. I experience each change in the stone walkway, as it climbs, levels, turns, climbs again. As Klee says, ”a line takes a walk.” It is my way of spending time with the village, not just in it. My coming to a stop helped me to see life here in the rhythm of its necessity.
Only a contrast from my life will restore me. Zeno the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher of Elea thought that there were few things. There is merely that which explains changes in conditions that affect them. I read an essay by my host, the late Lars Aagaard-Mogensen, on art and conditions of seeing, making, and naming. It is my first encounter with his work, and I look forward to reading more.
I will find a few drawings of the forty-five I made in Ascea, from which to paint throughout the next year. I will exhibit a few of the drawings with some quotes, in a library show in lower Manhattan in the fall.
JERILYN JURINEK is an Adjunct Professor in Theatre, is Lecturer in drawing at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers State University of New Jersey, where she has taught drawing for over 20 years.
She has five paintings of Rome subjects in a July 7-29 show at the Prince Street Gallery, with the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. She has served as historian for the New York Society of Women Artists which will have its Centennial in 2025. There will be a September exhibition at the New Amsterdam Public Library, in lower Manhattan. Some of these Ascea drawings and quotes from philosophers will be shown.
She will work with Maestro Santoro in Renaissance Art classes this summer for the sixth year.
She has drawings and paintings in collections in the United States and in Europe.
She writes on art, civilization, and being a painter.
All ink or watercolor drawings are 10” x 4” 5” X 7” 7” x 10”
Bravo Jerilyn!