Advance copies have arrived!

Anticipating the release of John Ransom Phillips: Ransoming Brady in April. Several advance copies arrived while I was away in Egypt. Lovely to behold! It is gratifying to know that the studio's efforts created such a fine book. Couldn't have managed it without Nik, Caroline and Donna. and of course special thanks to Alan T.... looking forward to working together again soon...

Peter Franks on Ransoming Mathew Brady

Chair as Self-Portrait, 2005, oil on canvas, 62×46 inches

In his latest series of paintings and drawings John Ransom Phillips trains his psychologically keen and historically informed eye on a figure at once central and peripheral to American art, the photographer Matthew Brady.

Reflecting on Brady’s notable but in some regard overrated role in the photographic documentation of the Civil War, as well as his prominence before and after as a New York-based portrait photographer whose clientele was top-heavy in the rich and famous, Phillips teases out the pathos, and the bathos, underlying Brady’s artistic achievement and social persona.

As well, Phillips casts Brady against the figure of Walt Whitman, contrasting the poet’s bold aesthetic and personal gesture against the photographer’s more conventional social role—a role that, nonetheless, Brady’s artistic achievement transcended.
Phillips proffers this dialectic as a quintessentially American problem in art: the bold or the safe? The challenging or the acceptable?
Thoreau or Emerson?
Ives or MacDowell?
Ginsberg or Warhol?

—Peter Frank, Art Critic and Senior Curator for Riverside Art Museum

Egyptian Travelogue: Sitting down with Emily on the Nile

I am finishing my journey with Emily much earlier than I had contemplated. But it has been so good, so full of adventure that I will miss the daily connection and its intensity.

The last hour underlined a special kind of creativity for the last week. I have been collecting bits and pieces of information, parts of poems, random thoughts on Emily by others or myself.

I had no idea how I could use these when at the conclusion of our writing together (me acting more as a scribe) this poem began to emerge, coordinating all of these leftovers that before had no home.



was i not self-published?
you say my punctuation is ambiguous
and my capitalization capricious
but i know what i am doing
these poems shift and change,
lean right or left according to whom they are addressed
they live in letters, breathe as objects,
manifest fully with multiple perspectives
you can read them, but don’t edit them
their line breaks are for your eye, not your sense of propriety

Egyptian Travelogue: Emily and Papyrus

I am reading Emily Dickinson and feel her presence not only across my glass table but everywhere I venture, though crowds still seem to eclipse her. We are in a different landscape from Amherst.

In the process of fathoming her poetry; I feel enormously the need to push beyond paper. Papyrus as I have discovered is a perfect medium to express dimensionality/new circumferences. When I portray a house, rendered more or less in its actual existence on paper, I am pleased with its external dimensions.

When I portray the same image on papyrus, I seem invited to "open up" the image through wiping, rubbing and blotting. Using gum Arabic rather than water assures a torrent of image obliterating liquid that will not destroy the fibers of the papyrus, but will create the capacity to get inside the house without leaving its outside existence.

After blotting, I see images fading into the fibers thus providing me an opportunity to obliterate the image and celebrate its after images as something closer to the content of what I want. The house becomes a home. " Nature is a Haunted House—but Art is a House that tries to be Haunted." In other words, paper provides a surface reliability; papyrus celebrates dimension or in Emily’s case, larger circumferences.

Egyptian Travelogue: Working with Papyrus

What I like about papyrus is its receptivity to blotting, even eviscerating the image and leaving but its ghost. Unfortunately I had no really good rags for rubbing here in Luxor. so I had to use my underwear.



T shirts were less effective than underpants but I could get marvelous effects from both. Hanes proved superior to Calvin Klein.

Gradually my underwear began to take on the look of large, spontaneous watercolors; blotting, pressing and rubbing had left residues of the painted images and I began to wear these cast off garments when I felt lonely.

if you look closely, you will see the original painted images imprinted on Calvin Klein, Hanes and some cheap brand that is undecipherable. even more do these colored shapes come alive when I move (size 34 underpants, medium t shirt and medium tank top).