N O G A W I Z A N S K Y
SELECTED WORKS 2017
Brackish Marsh 1
Charcoal and pencil on rag paper
22 x 30 inches
Brackish Marsh 2
Charcoal and pencil on rag paper
22 x 30 inches
Brackish Marsh 3
Charcoal on paper
18 x 24 inches
Brackish Marsh Drawings
Following love and marriage I've been driving from Oakland to the Sierra Foothills for around 15 years. These works started with photos snapped of the Suisun Marsh on Hwy 680 northbound. Gathering thoughts: the visual respite offered by these places that seem to harbor little but grasses, water, light, and birds -- how they interrupt the moving views of development tracts with operatic names (Aria, Ovation), industrial parks, phone towers, billboards, businesses large and small encased in an aesthetic of low-slung uniformity that bracket the marsh on both edges; but also how the marsh itself is subject to the same historical-economic-cultural forces that give rise to these less-pleasing landscape forms; the paradoxical role of duck hunting clubs, which have made strange bedfellows with environmentalists in efforts to protect wetlands from the potential ravishes of commercial development. The marsh as a land form-place-space, also described in various documents with wonderful words and phrases like "brackish," "tidal flows," and "reconciliation ecology," is extending in my mind into thoughts about protection, cultural mixing, the beauty and robustness of 'impurity,' vulnerability and hard-won balance.
Brackish Marsh 4 (egret bathing off Marshview Road)
Charcoal on paper
22 x 30 inches
Brackish Marsh 5 (A day of dread)
Charcoal on paper
18 x 24 inches
Exploring Protest (see also Works 2014-16)
I'm not a flag bearer, but, I'm thinking here of passion, hubris (that of the left too), symbols that we understand as violent but can't honestly disavow. Needing to protest, talk, listen.
Exploring Protest 4 (ambivalent symbols)
Charcoal, pastel, photo-collage on corrugated cardboard
20 x 24.5 inches
Drawing in Oakland, Remembering Richmond, VA
Ink and charcoal on paper
14 x 17 inches
Cityscape (Oakland, CA)
Ink on rag paper
10.5 x 12 inches
Cityscape (Oakland, CA)
Ink on rag paper
10.5 x 11.75 inches
Cityscape (Oakland tree, ruthless times)
Charcoal and photo-collage on corrugated cardboard
15.75 x 17.75 inches
Highwayscape (CA, 80, between Fairfield and Dixon)
Ink on rag paper
15 x 11.25 inches
Highwayscape (CA, 680, Suisun Marsh)
Ink on rag paper
8 x 9.5 inches
Highwayscape (CA, 80)
Ink on rag paper
9 x 11 inches
Highwayscape (CA, 80)
Ink on corrugated cardboard
9.25 x 12 inches
Highwayscape (CA, 20)
Ink on rag paper
10.25 x 12 inches
Highwayscape (CA, 4)
Ink and collage on rag paper
9.5 x 16 inches
Scroll down for more from the Brackish Marsh series
Brackish Marsh 6
Charcoal, pastel, ink and collage on paper
18 x 24 inches
Brackish Marsh 7
Charcoal, acrylic and pencil on paper
14 x 17 inches
Brackish Marsh 8 (egret bathing at the confluence of rivers)
Charcoal and pastel on rag paper
22 x 30 inches
Brackish Marsh 10 (Ovation, New Homes)
Charcoal and graphite on rag paper
26 x 40 inches
SOLD
Tel Aviv Memories 1 (King George St.)
Charcoal and photo-collage on paper
18 x 24 inches
Resilence I
Charcoal and photo-collage on paper
18 x 24 inches
Highwayscape (CA, 80, Paradise Valley)
Ink on rag paper
Highwayscape (CA, 80, Penryn Road)
Ink on rag paper
Tel Aviv Memories 2 (Shenkin st., King George St., Hassan Bek Mosque, Conquerer's Garden, Hebron)
Charcoal and photo-collage on paper
18 x 24 inches
US Hunting Grounds 2017
Charcoal on paper
26 x 40 inches
California highways meet Weimar Germany? Maybe best to leave it to Walter Benjamin, who wrote about Klee's angel in 1940:
"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." (Theses on the Philosophy of History IX)
Angel of History
Charcoal and conte crayon on paper
22 x 30 inches
Exploring Protest 5 (Protest in Red/Vulnerable Symbols)
Charcoal and conte crayon on paper
17 x 32 inches
US Hunting Grounds 2017, 2
Charcoal, pastel, photo-collage on paper
22 x 30 inches
US Hunting Grounds 2017 3 (Rush Ranch, CA)
Charcoal and graphite on paper
18 x 22 inches
