Artists Registry

Although I live in California now I'm a NY born and bred (Manhattan) fine artist. I lived in Tribeca for 14 plus years since graduating college and graduate school.

Just two days after the WTC tragedies I began a 5 month emersion into creating this work and then unveiled it at Pasadena City College-- where I happened to be that year's visiting artist in residence. I'm a career artist/painter-- a very serious one and this is a very serious work-- created from anguish.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001,
A TRIPTYCH IN MEMORIAM.
a personal insight and commentary
on the making of the 3 paneled work.

By Milo Reice

Note- First!- the essay below references studies and other works (figures) however these are not included on this site but anyone curious should go to my personal internet site-http://web.mac.com/milocalifornicus - and look at the WTC heading-thank-you. This work is very large thus it is a major work, and although it is not entirely painted being created primarily with what one would deem traditional drawing materials as well as with paint I think of it as a painting as much as I think of it as drawing in monumental scale.
When I created this work I approached it as I approach all my drawings and similarly- my paintings as well. Drawings, large or small should at best be amalgamations of lyrically drawn lines, and lines drawn awkwardly, fully realized and rendered passages, with passages roughly hewn that despite their inherent abridging nonetheless fully define the forms they delineate. In short, a good drawing should be the harmonizing of balances and imbalances, the marriage of opposites, and the melding of the ugly and the beautiful.

I painted the September 11th triptych to memorialize the attacks in New York City, Washington D.C. and the field in Pennsylvania though my work may seem to accent the attack upon The World Trade Towers. But, in fact I “painted” it as a universal cry against all terrorist activity everywhere- hoping to create a work relevant to protesting any moment of monumental grief, past, present or future.
In a sense, I was motivated to paint this work “A Triptych In Memoriam” way back in 1972 when I was an art student in Italy living with an Italian family who owned a small hotel /restaurant in the hill-town of Pistoia where the locals gathered treating it as the local piazza. Day after day sitting in the dining room learning some Italian, meeting the various townsfolk, watching the television,- watching the 1972 Olympics! and then the unimaginable happened!
The killings of young athletes by masked terrorists were so gruesome I thought I’d never forget it. And, indeed, memories of the scene kept dogging me in the following weeks at art school in Rome.
After several months of battling the recurring images
in my mind, I began painting, and in 1973, I finished Violence In Munich, a large work, though its antecedents were clearly Picassoid and of a classical vein, was a youthfully vital and an honest attempt to create a universal cry from a terrible event.
Over the ensuing years I’ve come to consider it my first “real” or mature-work as an artist. It’s dear to me, and over the years, I never showed it publicly, displaying it only at home or in my studios. But this past year, while preparing work for my German gallery I “unearthed” it and shortly thereafter sold it (not in Germany but in Los Angeles however). But unexpectedly, the sale brought to a head a nibbling pressure in me, or more accurately, a persistent inner clamor to paint something “political” again, something universal.
And so, shortly after my wife and I’d settled into our new home we’d just purchased and I’d my new studio I began several studies towards a painting examining political bombings in Northern Ireland and perhaps elsewhere in the world. I got as far as a few drawings--no more than elaborate “chalk” sketches notating towards where I thought I wanted to go. I also drew some figure groups and two promising studies of patriarchal figures huddled together under or near a rain of flying shrapnel (figures #2 and #3.)
Where these would have taken me, I can’t say, except that I knew I wanted, eventually, to create a large work of life-sized proportions.
Then, on the morning of September 11th, wakened by an
urgent phone call to turn on the TV, my wife and I and two
guests who’d stayed the night, stared in numb disbelief as one, then another seemingly innocent plane sailed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, torching them and causing billows of smoke and fire that burned into every watcher’s memory. Like the rest of the country (and world) we watched the television images hour after hour, day after day, hoping against hope that credits would eventually roll and we’d realize it was just a movie- proving the volcano of hell that had descended on us from heaven, making rubble of men and women, streets, homes, offices, dreams, and shattering our great country’s invincibility was merely a drill at worst.
Though I live in Southern California now, I grew up in Manhattan and after college and graduate school returned there for the art world and my career. While my first gallery was in Soho, and my second on 57th street from 1976 until 1994 I maintained my loft-home/studio in Tribeca only blocks from The World trade Center.
As a Manhattanite I saw the World Trade Center towers being built ultimately coming to truly love the “ugly” two of ‘em over the years as I shopped by them, banked ther, and used the subways under them. So, painting the 9/11 triptych was not a conscious decision but preordained, a writ from the ether and so one day in early October, I woke up and noticed I’d been working on it- already for several weeks as if in a somnambulant state.
Due to the miasmic mist of that infamous day’s horror that beclouded my thinking, I honestly don’t recall making the first marks or deciding what the work would look like. Possibly, my earlier explorations into a “bombing” painting, my being a New York Native in a different land, triggered some unconscious drive affecting my first days in front of the blank panel.
What I do know is that there is an unfinished smaller painting (figure #4) that I started and then abandoned, along with two other stretched canvases, blank but scaled to the abandoned piece. Clearly, I had begun an erotic triptych conceptualized around a couple of honeymooners or lovers stopped short by the bomb, but despite the possibility of its being a true-life scenario, I ultimately scrapped the idea, not wanting to be trapped by pictorial content that might derail my intentions and most certainly alienate most viewers completely destroying the commemorative power I would hope to achieve.
Instead, I chose to re-begin the third panel (eventually to be called The Hope.) I surmise I chose to start with this panel to avoid the plummet of depression I knew I’d face when depicting the Rubble.

The Hope would be/is poetic in tone- an image of some future day perhaps when the sun is rising on a new day- when people are either remembering, or re-conceptualizing or both,- The Towers,- the site.
Now like many artists, I have subjects I like to depict, those that I long to depict, and those to which I’ve returned for a second, third, even for a fourth time. And like other painters, some of my studies having started as sketches or little paintings, only to evolve into unforeseen major works. I’ve a backlog of product to draw and improvise upon. which Sometimes I do consciously, but more often it’s serendipitous- which is what happened with a small 1999 triptych called The Architect and The Builder. For 2 years after its making and after 2 months of work on The Hope. while just beginning work on The Rubble. (the central panel) in an eureka of recognition I noticed that I’d unawares drawn inspiration from its small central image, (figure #5)- remodeling the two figures’ poses perhaps, but not their careful scrutinies,- their meditative particulars though, for the 9/11 triptych.
Now, originally I didn’t model the two figures on any particular “characters” wanting them to be “just people” - musing over their architectural model- two archetypes standing in for Frank Loydd Wright and some patron or builder. However slightly transformed for The Hope., I simply added a third figure - the female looking out the window serving to pull in the outside world, hence enabling me to depict the Manhattan skyline denuded but bathed in the yellow of a new day.

Sometime after Thanksgiving, as I was preparing to paint The Rubble, I looked up a slide of a painting I’d done in 1989 (Figure #6)- one work from my 15-painting series based on Homer’s Odyssey. It was a portrayal of the Odysseun heroe’s funeral cairn made, in a sense, of a rubble of stones and potsherds- a monument more celebratory in tone than tragic. It was, after all make-believe death,- the death found in myth, not from within the immediacy of TV images and newspaper headlines. No- my evocation of ground-zero had to be closer to the “real thing”- made of crushed and pulverized “stuff”: ash and twisted pieces of metal, remnants of broken things both recognizable and abstracted objects, and body parts.
The images kept forming and reforming in my head. Beginning to draw and paint them was hard and It grew harder still as they materialized on the canvas. When the panel was completed, I was drained, I was exhausted, and I’d felt as if I’d trudged through an open Dantesque pit- as much as one could be proud of one’s work born of other’s misfortunes I was very gratified.
But there was still another challenge. Since I’d begun
creating this panel, I’d known that I wanted to insert something three-dimensional- some metaphorical visual addendum in the middle of the mound of debris. But what? I’ve gone this “insert route” before and knew it took very careful scrutiny- the object had to be integral to the painting’s design and content and it had to somewhat “cosmic” (in the hippie-word sense). I tried out any number of objects, painted several little images too, rejecting one after the other. Then, again my subconscious yielded the perfect solution!
O.K., I have been asked dozens of times whether the insert--a plastic envelope containing what looks like pieces of rubble--is from the debris of the 9/11 disaster. And the answer is an emphatic “No.”
But in its symbolic power what it is is perhaps as powerful and ultimately as affective as it tolls in similar measure of disaster and tears. However I must admit that although I knew it to be absolutely a correct move, I felt some trepidation about using it; at age 15, during art studies in Italy, my class was taken to see the ruins of Pompeii, the city that was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius’s eruption of 79 A.D. The visit to Pompeii was a great experience and a moving one. But for me, it amounted to something like a miracle as well for as a future fine artist and painter I’d found there my ancestral home tied to and linked with Rome.
And, while my instructor and our two chaperoning nuns were discussing the murals and history of Pompeii with my classmates, anxious to see as much as possible, I stole away into a close by ruined villa. As I stood transfixed by the frescoes’ beauty and history, before my very eyes, a square piece, OH!-about six inches in size, “fell” from the frescoed wall breaking to pieces. Absolutely awestruck, I gathered up the painted pieces and hurriedly stuck them inside my knapsack. I don’t know where I got the nerve. Maybe, at the time, I rationalized that it was just rejectamenta, and that probably they wouldn’t be able to put it together again- “golly! no one saw it happen but me!” And maybe that was true though it was probably not I’d like to pretend it was true though and I’d like to pretend I was a keeper of the flame of sorts. So all the years since, I’d secretly,- privately enjoyed the fragments that I’d coveted but always secreted away in some furniture’s bottom reaches.
When I placed the Pompeiian “packet” into my 9/11 opus, it seemed fated, conjoining one terrible event where thousands died unexpectedly and instantly, with another. Two thousand years ago, wives mourned their husbands, mothers their sons and daughters, friends wept for friends, lovers for lovers, and people their pets, just as their counterparts would in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks. Grief is grief, and the rubble of one horrendous moment if not equals, can stand in for another.
At the top of January 2002 from a small quickly made charcoal drawing which I’d made one afternoon shortly before completing The Rubble, (figure #7), I began working on The third panel- an essentially Rafaello Sanzio inspired composition of large figures arranged frieze-like on the canvas plane, Every time I’m in London England the first place I go to is the Victoria and Albert Museum to immerse myself in Raphael’s great series of cartoons for his Vatican tapestries which over the years it seems I have so absorbed that when it came to this third panel of my work it’s influence was so palpable. To this day I cannot look at my own work without seeing his. As I believe that all artists worth anything are forever producing on the backs of those who came before them I am not ashamed of the Raphaelesque link. - The Watching, A straightforward depiction of four people watching the attacks on television (as so much of the world did) colored in parts with oil-paint and touched with white pastel like the two other panels that make up the triptych is a large scale drawing built I believe like the best drawings, of awkward line with the controlled contour, rough abbreviation melded with the wholly realized, in short- the crude with the sublime.

Finally, I created each of the three panels: The TV Watching,The Rubble , and The Hope, with equal care as if they were three separate works and yet always with an eye to them being integral parts of one big whole. And though each were born perhaps of varied iconographies and arose from different influences the triptych is one cohesive work. That Picasso’s Guernica may have been an influence on this work is both mentionable and irrelevant--mentionable obviously for the political nature of the work and for its color or lack thereof; irrelevant because when I began and painted most of the work, I had no obvious connections to Picasso’s work in my mind. I chose the palette because the color of ash demanded it and because I wanted to avoid beautifying the scenes with colors.
I painted the September 11th triptych to memorialize the
attacks in New York City, Washington D.C. and the field in
Pennsylvania. I painted it as a universal cry against terrorism aimed at the body and soul anywhere and for anytime. I hoped to create a exorcism relevant to any moment of monumental grief.

A Final Note- I have written this essay with as little “art-speak” as possible, despite my passion for and knowledge of art history, and have refrained from pointing out various symbols I placed into the triptych, believing that viewers, and certainly art critics and perhaps historians will draw their own conclusions concerning the inherent iconographies. It is not my job to analyze every nuance of my work in relationship to what has gone on before or since. But for clarity’s sake I mention one thing- When I first began this work I knew I’d be placing the Popeiian insert into the center of The Rubble, and being the classicist I am, that called for classical symmetry! So hence instead of rendering the skyline in The Hope myself, I used a “photograph” and in using a “real” 2001 calendar hanging within The Watching, its pages torn off to September, the days from 1 to 10 marked off The calendar reiterating the date of the attacks, I’d completed and achieved an “art-for-art” dance of punctuations from panel to panel that serves as a subtle anchor for the overall work’s design.

-Milo Reice. March 2K-02. Altadena, California
.