I. Mercury Preamble: The cost of doing business. A stamp on an envelope. An overlap of areas ruled by the winged messenger: currency, commerce, communication. Perhaps Mercury is aware of the minutia contained in parcels, packages, and correspondences that we exchange. How they are sent, how they are delivered. The scent of a handwritten letter, a paper-cut that dribbled a drop of blood as it was sealed. A scrawled postscript on the back of the envelope. Forms faded now; texts arrive without perfumed ink, though we find new ways to relay what our words can’t. Maybe those tiny elements contain messages within messages. I often dream of mail boxes. I wake up one day, from such a dream, to read an obituary of a stamp artist ~~
II. Howard Koslow. He worked in miniature, painting 4 by 7 inch canvases in acrylic. A host of lighthouses, portraits of musicians and artists, some abstract events rendered to communicate a small-format story. He wanted them to convey a story. Tiny little scenes, that became tinier still when shrunk into 1 inch square stamps. He looked through a reducing glass while painting, to gauge how they appeared at that scale. He did this for over 40 years. There were controversies here and there. A mythological guardian he painted – identified as a “winged genius” – was deemed not suitable for a stamp of the Supreme Court. It looked too much like an angel. And he was forced to remove a cigarette from Jackson Pollack’s mouth – the postal service couldn’t show someone smoking, even if that was how the artist portayed painted. Photos of Mr. Koslow show him at his drafting table, working in tight but highly focused quarters, ideal for the laser focus required by his own creations. I wake from a dream of a mailbox. The dream reminds me of exchanging mail art many years ago, not long before the fall of the Berlin wall. I didn’t need to secret my art outside of my country, like some artists had done to avoid censorship, or to get their work “shown.” But the exchange of such works with others around the world, incorporated into the envelope, or fashioned in some other way within, had opened me up to new creative forms. Years later, reading the obit of this more conventional stamp/mail artist, helps me in other ways. I dial in, once again, to the way skill flows through our hands. We are what we pay attention to; and we are our most repeated actions. There is no mastery of any realm without focus and devotion.
III. I find magicians everywhere. Using sacred geometry and mathematics in their works of art or theory. They are all composers or sculptors in some way. A television writer that learned to write scripts by covering for her jailed mate. An oceanographer that fell in love with sharks and found ways to communicate secrets they had to share. My dead people have much in common, not the least of which is that they are brought to me in strange experiences of synchronicity. I follow their trails, because they have something to tell me, that I sense in the way their messages are delivered.
by Carli Castellani
Originally published May 1, 2016
#4 of 21 Dead People for the Winged Messenger