IRVING STETTNER: 'SELF PORTRAIT' by Irving Stettner

Sunday, August 19, 2007

'SELF PORTRAIT' by Irving Stettner

Poet and painter
World forsaker
With beauty my goal
I follow in the footsteps
Of my maker
Born in Brooklyn
Reborn in Paris
Now Japan is my home:
Perpetual pretty
Gal watcher
Debauchee of cameo dawns
Devotee of of blue-tipped morns
Daily heavy walker
Incurable cosmos stalker
Entwined in the sublime
I touch the divine
And now today
In this very verily month of May -
I must sing
Or bust all my springs!

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The Life & Work of IRVING STETTNER

A very warm welcome to the world of Irving Stettner - poet, painter, cosmic sage, who Henry Miller called 'a real artist..far more interesting than a Picasso or a Braque'! This space is devoted to Irving's countless watercolours, sketches, poems, stories and publications which took him from the US to the Pacific Islands, Japan, and France. His work can be enjoyed in galleries, cafes, and private collections all over the world. Oliver Kinghorn describes his time with Irving in the prose piece 'Introducing Irv'. Poems, stories and artwork are regularly updated to give you a constantly engrossing doorway into Irving's beautiful world.

INTRODUCING IRV by Oliver Kinghorn

How does one introduce a fellow like Irv in so many words? How can you begin to put words to a thousand things you've been inspired to do, think, feel, scream, dance, cry, paint, love and live? A thousand things I've learnt from STROKER and the unique spirit of friendship and love of life that this magical little magazine has spread through all those happy, pink, lovely souls who've found it. As it says on the back page of every issue, "From the Ghetto to the 4 corners of the Earth!", and usually accompanied by a fairytale ink drawing by editor and chief wizard Irving Stettner, hereafter called Irv (though I once heard of an early nickname of his, 'Irv the Swerve'. I like that.) Anyway, how did I get to meet the STROKER?

Living in mountain Japan, the 'roof of Japan' so-called. Beautiful, backward country world of Nagano high up in the central Alps, and a small town called Kasuga lying between Asama-yama and Tateshina-yama, two sprawling, indomitable, lazy mountains that hold the eye of those little mountain towns like the Queens on a chess board. The immortal world of the country farmer - seasons and rituals, generosities and clannishness - a living antiquity. Freshly out of university and living abroad for the first time in my life, everyday was an experience of a thousand new things - the rice harvest or 'inekari', pounding rice cakes on the Emperor's birthday, walking the hills in winter, tatami mat floors, bamboo groves, shinto shrines, hawks circling over the rice fields, the exquisite and overlooked ritual of taking one's shoes off at the door, the 'onsen' hot springs...

And one day at the end of August 1997, my then partner Chie Yodogawa told me of a show going on at a local library, an exhibition of paintings by a foreign artist who lived in the little town of Kasuga with his Japanese wife and young daughter. A bloody foreigner and an artist too living up here in the same mountain town at the edge of beyond! I wanted to know more about him instantly. My mind was racing. What if it's mindblowing? What if it's disappointing? Will he acknowledge me? A future friend here? It seemed I already wanted him to inspire me. In fact, remembering it now so vividly, it seemed I'd been waiting to meet someone like Irv all along without ever really knowing it...

Asashina Folk Library was an utterly unique building. Built in the style of an old oak cabin with thick timber walls, imposing beams in the ceiling, furniture hewn out of tree trunks and driftwood in the gardens, amongst totem poles and other esoteric sculptures - a little gem of a place. I spent hours there every week pouring over the artist's monographs: Klimt and Klee and Munch and the norther Europeans whose colours run so deep and rich through their paintings, and the lighter, more meditative and amiable colours of the Mediterraneans Dufy, Matisse and Chagall. Still today you would be able to find the smudges I left on the corners of the pages where I used to take them back to my little studio apartment at the foot of Tateshina-yama and use them as inspiration when painting. Here was somewhere to stimulate the muses and kick start the creative process in a world where, frankly, farming and family are more consequential to the average man than art and ecstasy.

We pulled up at seven thirty on a balmy summer evening and walked into an Aladdin's Cave. I couldn't keep up with my eyes, so fast did they race around the walls of paintings. For the first few minutes I didn't even notice anyone else there; my eyes just leapt from picture to picture. I couldn't take it in fast enough. Only slowly did the scene become real: a dozen or more folks were chatting and sipping wine from paper cups, tables were festooned with home-made cakes and late-summer fruits, and the energy ebbed and flowedbetween the paintings and the summer banquet and one curious older man rapping away in a bizarre mixture of English, French and Japanese, on his face a smile you could sail a boat over. Was I looking at the artist? What was his name?

I remember being offered a glass of wine, which I took and shuffled away from the crowd once again just to find some space to contemplate the artwork - so mysterious, so colourful, so instantly engaging. I'd never seen such a style before - about thirty altogether, none bigger than a half-metre by the same, shining out like jewels from inside the most modest wooden frames. A dozen words buzzed round in my head - Mediterranean - yes! definitely Mediterranean or European vibes - the Circus - things magical and esoteric - Romany Gypsies - a child's lightness and joy. Looking closer there were stars and moons and suns and clowns and peacocks and magicians and nubile dancers and star-crossed lovers. There were poignant lines from poems, uplifting quotations, nonsense verse, Zen-like koan, and a name or two - Miller, Celine, Rimbaud, Cendrars. A nourishing, dizzying panoply of love and life; fresh, enigmatic, mystifying; a thousand and one shimmerlings and dazzerlings; like I said, a feeling a stumbling upon Aladdin's cave full of treasures.

It felt like the beginning of a genuine journey. I started clicking my fingers and snapping my heels, the way you do once a band has kicked up a rhythm; jumping back and forth from frame to frame, from scene to beautiful scene, from seraphic, exultant, heavenly pinks & violets to fertile, fresh, succulent greens and yellows; moody, jazzy, rhythmic washes of blues and crimson to electric, spontaneous, sexy explosions of vermillion and orange. In its completeness a grand kaleidoscope of colour, veritable feast for the eye, feeling of fireworks and circus troupes, of music and song given a life on paper, brilliant expression in colour and shape of all that we contend with in our love of life - the passionate and ephemeral, alluring and awakening, the love and luck and light and bliss!

Now the words come so easily. The paintings are so familiar to me. They are on the walls of my house. They are my friends. But on that late-summer night on the roof of Japan, just at the moment Irving took hold of my hand and said, "Aah! A friendly foreign face! Lovely to see you here!", and in an inimitable and generous way brought me into his world, I was suddenly tongue-tied and hardly know what to say. "Hello!", I think I said, or "Wonderful show!", or something very vague. "I like all of your work. Very...er...very Mediterranean." Perhaps I was putting out for more information - did he live in France or Italy? Or the Greek Islands? I was thinking Lawrence Durrell, Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Regardless, it seemed to please him immensely. "Thank you", he said, "Yeah, I guess there's a little of the Med. in them, but I really admire the French way of life."

This was my first experience of Irv switching the subject mid-sentence, the way he'd instinctively follow his tongue, even a little cranky in the way thoughts, words, quotes, etc would just spill out. In the years I got to know him since, he'd always been the most unpredictable and enigmatic conversationalist. And so there we were, rapping away about Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller - he was inspired to know I'd read Tropic of Cancer and that I could even drop a few other immortal names, The Collossus of Maroussi in particular, one of Irv's favourite Miller books. And so there with Irv, swimming amidst colours of the Med., amongst stars and angels and lovers and nymphs, we attained an instant chumminess or intimacy, and the feeling is with me as strong as ever today, ten years after. IRV - Friend, Inspiration, Muse, Magician. See you in two minutes.....Vive la peinture!

Oliver Kinghorn
Kyoto
August, 2007

http://oliverkinghorn.blogspot.com/

IRVING STETTNER

Sunday, August 19, 2007

'SELF PORTRAIT' by Irving Stettner

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IRVING STETTNER RELATED LINKS

IRVING STETTNER

The Life & Work of IRVING STETTNER

HENRY & IRVING

THE STROKER

Blog Archive

INTRODUCING IRV by Oliver Kinghorn

"Watercolouring - to affirm beauty's ubiquitous kiss", Irving Stettner

"Paint and sing like a drunk parakeet!"