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Battenkill Book 2: January

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BATTENKILL BOOK 2

Gerald Coble is a visual artist living in a rural county of Upstate New York. The wall-size window of his tidy studio looks out over a fast-moving bend of the Battenkill River. As a subject, the Battenkill runs through much of his work in drawing & collage. As image & sound it permeates his daily activities.
Coble's latest published work is the Battenkill Book 2, from Pressed Wafer in Boston. Its theme is as current & close to Coble as the river below his window; it is also as old & classic as the hills of China.
Each opening of this over-sized paperback presents the reader/viewer with a 2-page spread, a hand-held diptych. Each left-hand page is predominantly empty white space; while the right is a collage of 2 drawings in black ink, each created on separate pieces of paper, then pasted onto the page. One drawing is round & is centered above the other, which is in the shape of an oblong frame lying horizontally. There are 31 pairs of drawings, one set per page, made for each day of January, 2008.
The drawings are not realistic & contain no apparent verbal messages. Nor are they purely formal, or decorative designs. But they do prompt a reading as they progress from page to page.
The round, upper shape suggests itself as the sun, or moon (or both?). The drawing beneath it can be taken to represent excerpted landscapes. In this generalized reading one can identify suggestions of woodland trees & branches in varying light. And the trace of natural forces, fast water, wind & weather. My preference is to see all this at night, with moon light. Since first looking into it, I've read this book as a nighttime story, pervaded by the moon.
With this elementary scene set (whether in day or nighttime) we can begin to explore what each turn of the page shows. And to see what that could mean.
In contrast to the right-hand pages with drawings, all 31 left-hand pages are blank -- except for 2 rubber stamped images (one, a pair of snap peas, crossed in the shape of an "X", the other, an impression made with a wine bottle cork). Aside from advancing the book's story physically, these images could allude to Coble's interest in food, gardening & the domestic life. They also present a touch of Dada, or at least, of humor.
Continuing the page turnings, we notice that the original scene setting -as in a one-act play- remains the same. Only the drawings change. Continuing with my nighttime interpretation, I note that the moon is most often dark, the drawings within it are closed or tight, self contained by the circular form. To the contrary, the river drawings (though also framed) are looser, more open & most often appear to be parts cut from a larger, kinetic whole. These have a gestural look, calligraphic & sometimes spontaneous. The occasional use of collage adds dimension, varies & complicates the surface, & adds real shadows (these are less obvious in the book's reproductions than in the original artwork).
The essential story in the drawings is between Light & Dark. Embodied in black & white shapes & forms, these 2 cosmic opposites are compressed & arranged in designs that elicit real reactions, genuine feelings. For each viewer these feelings can be read as meanings. The drawings never resort to the use of emblematic devices or sentimentalized symbols for their effects. There are no "moon river" cliches here.
With the page as the basic unit & 2 simple, geometric shapes with drawings inside them, Coble creates a month's variation on the theme of moon & river. Just as poets & nature writers use nature's cycles (for example: the sequence of the seasons) as expository devices to transmit verbal meanings in poems & stories, Coble uses visual means to express his meditations on moon & river variations. The concept, "theme & variations", is his nominal subject. It is also his working method. Both are presented visually. Using line, shape, form, & texture, predominantly in black & white (the "colors" of a page of text) he has translated the experience of moon & river -- not into words-- but into a series of drawings that are to be read as visual or optical poems.
The highlight of this book is in how its visual structure clearly & plainly enacts its theme. Coble's approach favors the eye that reads, over the mind that speculates. His graphic moon & cinematic river are plainly readable. They can be appreciated aesthetically as individual drawings or read discursively as a text. The perfect aptness of this structure provides a diversity of readings & accommodates a multitude of meanings. All of which makes for an ample & generous book. From the point of view of a working artist, the structure is also a model of reusability, a form infinitely extendable, like a diary. I hope that its author turns to its use again to create more Battenkill books.

Each of the 31 works that Gerald Coble has created is composed of two elements, images of river and moon juxtaposed. Each image, with its own shadings and shapes, creates within itself a feeling of tension and repose, while at the same time communicating a single and remarkable totality. Startling is the materiality of the work, the shock of subtle black images -- yet otherworldly -- less innocent, perhaps, than heading to a perfection of differences made whole. The result is 31 fascinating works, each revealing the artist's capacity for imaginative leaps that always prove right. Found here is a unique sensibility.

In music, perhaps the greatest form is thematic variations, to take some thematic cell or core and to study, examine, develop, recreate, explore, and expand it with all the invention and originality possible in its creator, especially accomplished in great masters of theme and variations like Beethoven and Schoenberg. Since it is an art of transformation, its changes, of course, depend upon some sustaining of the continuity of the initial form, its unending and recurrent presence, however hidden it might seem to have become at times. It is, therefore, also an art of sameness in difference, of how the moon is constantly altering and always returning to what it has always been throughout its history, of how a river, though constantly flowing, always rushing on, is yet restrained by its banks, even should it flood. The Battenkill is never the same and always the Battenkill. "Panta rei," Heraclitus wrote, all things flow--by which he also meant in all transience there remains something enduring, something of the same: if nothing else, the flux itself, the essence.
Coble's art develops visually this sameness in difference, the continuity that is possibly revealed must profoundly through transience. His work is a visual theme and variation with deep musical implications. He has been interested throughout his long career in series, in making image after image of the same core figure, no two of them ever the same.
Battenkill Book 2: January is an artist's day book, a visual chronicle of what he saw for the thirty one days of the first month of 2008. Its format is a simple one in some respects. Perhaps it would be better to call it elemental. Each of the thirty one images consists of two pages. On the left is a seal which includes two bean pods crossed in a kind of X, figures one assumes he derived from his gardening and the kitchen. This almost gentle seal is unvarying. On the right, however, drawn in the vertical rectangle of a page, there are two figures, much "grander" if you will: the top, circular one is the moon; the lower, horizontal rectangle contains the waters of the Battenkill, the river which runs behind Coble's home, always present to eye and ear, never more so than in winter.
There are no more profound figures for transience and the constancy of change than moon and river. They are among the most fundamental images, haunting human thought and feeling since art began. But Coble's ponders them freshly, though with the same gnomic condensation of the first philosophers, of that world when art and thought were one. Yet what makes Coble's exploration especially powerful is the way in which the two images, moon and river, are juxtaposed with one another, placed in a form that never changes while both constantly do so. The artist's inventiveness on each page and from one page to another is astonishing. Each image, in a sense, depicts change against change. Sometimes the images nearly mirror one another, the moon (in a sense always "full") almost river like in the brush work. Sometimes, the moon and river appear to be different only in geometry, one otherwise rhyming with the other. In other drawings, the two seem more to clash, to be in some nearly cosmic tension and anxiety. Some images are almost calm; others are disturbingly stormy. One can almost feel, at times, the wind blowing, gusting. At other moments, one senses, despite all the movement in the brush work, winter's stillness and quiet. No two days feel or look the same. Yet we are always looking at the one moon, the one river.
Maybe the greatest pleasure of this book, therefore, is the joy one feels watching an artist work his changes on a world that itself is endlessly changing. His formal constraints--the core theme of moon and river, the format of the two pages, the circle and the rectangle, all in their telling way "primitive," fundamental and primary--have inspired in him an inventiveness that resembles the variations one hears in the greatest music. For this is above all a lyric book, an endlessly original song of change by a master.

like the river it pictures, this book flows from page to page - like the moon over that river, this book illuminates the work of a master artist

this book is modest in scale and design, but rich in vision and execution

this is a book to live with

ben e. watkins