The Danté Project: Book Design project by Daniël Jansen van Vuuren and Ettienne Koekemoer. Text and Artwork by Judith Mason. Editing by Johan de Lange.

INTRO TO THE DANTE PROJECT:

These are all things I have heard or been asked since I started working around The Divine Comedy in my 20’s. I am now in my 70’s and as ensnared by Dante as ever. I am not a Dante scholar, nor a mediaevalist; I am no longer a Catholic, and not really a fan of allegory, anyway. 
So what draws me to this ancient poem, this moral and political nightmare culminating in a vision of heaven? Perhaps it is because Dante is such a passionate hothead – my favourite sort of person – and his anger, his exasperation, his inclination to gossip, his self-righteousness, his humour, his vanity, and certainly his longing for transfiguring love seem as immediate to his readers now as ever. I wish I had known him in the flesh, but am glad to have met him on paper, even if a lot is lost in translation, and his speech inevitably a dim echo of the language he helped to create.

Had I lived in Florence during his time I would have seen him chatting to his clique of friends, or scribbling a bit of La Vita Nuova at a tavern table. I would have pretended to have known him, dropping his name into conversations with friends so artfully that nobody would have been fooled for a minute. I would have jostled up against his wife, Gemma Donati, at the fish market, craning to see what she was buying for supper. When he was exiled to Ravenna, I would have followed him, walking on the dreary mud-flats some way behind him as he swore into the Adriatic wind; hoping, somehow, that he would turn and see me and, passing the time of day, talk to me of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, the Papacy and treason, of Beatrice and unrequited love, of gentleness and violence, of damnation and God.
But I don’t need to be a sad groupie, stalking the short, assertive jack of all trades and master of verse. I can read it all, and in his absence, feel free to add to, subtract from, argue with, refute and applaud his towering vision, because it is simply beautiful poetry, the sort that intrudes into the reader’s mind in luminous fragments, making sense of the present. This happens in unexpected ways. When I fall asleep I am inclined to fold my arms across my chest in unintended recollection of Buonconte da Montefeltro’s gesture as he tumbled, dying, into the Archiano river. When I see teenage sweethearts at my grandchildren’s school, lost in each other’s eyes, I recall one of the final scenes in the Paradiso, where Beatrice flings a last bright glance at her beloved before taking her place in that most august of school assemblies, the Celestial Rose. When I watch the wives of disgraced politicians “standing by their man”, I think of Gemma, bored by talk of her husband’s dead love as she attends to her housewifely duties. I wonder if she could read. Probably not. When I reach for a definition of art I find it in the last stanza of the Comedy – “Substance, accident, and mode unite, fused together…”, enabling one to grasp some notion of transcendent reality.

Some of the poetry acts on me like music, phrases like a theme from a love song, Credence Clearwater, or the Missa Solemnis. “Now from the grave wake poetry again”, I found myself quoting when South Africa became a democracy (and once I recovered from the ‘flu!). “Beauty past knowledge was displayed to me” when I looked at my new-born children, and when I saw paradise flycatchers at the dam. Chasing mundane images on a drawing board are sometimes accompanied (vaingloriously) by Dante’s startlingly accurate description of the creative process: “For when our intellect is drawing close / to its desire, its paths are so profound / that memory cannot follow where it goes”.

Too often “in my heart such envy used to burn, /  … I reap the straw whose seed I sowed so rife”. Watching newscasts with their often un-relenting Islamophobia, the words “there with a solemn and majestic poise / … the master souls of time were shown to me … by himself apart, Saladin”, speaks to a respect for adversaries we have lost and a generosity of spirit that we could use. The She-Wolf, that “rack for avarice, gaunt and craving”, lopes unbidden into my mind when I read about Darfur, deaths of drug cartel youths, disposal of toxic waste upon defenceless shores, or the sale of contaminated medicines. Art’s great gift is to allow us to retrieve snippets of experience, shaped by word or image or sound, so that we can make sense of life, and feel less isolated in our joy or terror. Walking in the Himalaya was vastly enhanced by my inner ear reminding me that the Heavens declare the Glory of God, and that paddling through a stream was like inhabiting the Trout Quintet. My own tastes, except for rock ‘n’ roll, and cricket, are grounded in the classics, and that  is why my references may seem eclectic. They are not. They are simply mine, and I know of friends who count Quentin Tarantino, Miles Davis and Marilyn Manson as their avatars, their Virgils. As long as one’s mind is furnished, it does not matter where the stuff comes from. Dante has been the bedrock that  much of my imagination rests on.

Ettienne Koekemoer, my friend and critic, has bought work of mine over the years. He owns a copy of A Dante Bestiary that I had illustrated for Casper Schmidt, a South African poet and psychiatrist who published it in New York in 1990. Some five years ago Ettienne mentioned that he would like to see the Bestiary realised in a larger format, as oil-paintings accompanied by free-standing pieces that would develop from the drawings in the original book. Perhaps, he thought, the end result would make a good 60th birthday present for partner Richard Berger, an art-lover and collector, who would appreciate the oddity of having a diorama of Inferno in his lounge, Paradise suspended as an axe-blade above his dining room table, and the moral quandaries of Purgatory on his bedroom wall! I also think that Ettienne was seeking a means of revitalising my work, that over time had degenerated into a place of safety. I had for many years longed for the opportunity to let rip creatively, to have reliable funding for a big project that would take a few years to work through; to have the logistical and emotional support to deal with the challenge as best I could; to have a fellow craftsman bring his architectural and design skills to my intuitive imagination. I never expected it to happen but it did, and the following memoir/meditation/ random history will try to describe the process in part, as well as my own views on where we succeeded and where we perhaps missed the mark. Needless to say, the three years it took to complete the work was the most exciting time of my creative life. It was also almost intolerably stressful on occasion, and I learnt more about myself and the art of manufacture than ever before. My patron, who analysed every idea with me, sourced materials, provided work space and sculpted the free-standing pieces, travelled the same roller-coaster of elation, frustration, fatigue and disappointment that I did.

Our initial plan was to work very closely with the images I had already drawn in the Bestiary, setting some in free-standing plank format in
front of the canvasses. Then we started having reservations. I was afraid that the enhanced size would add more fat but insufficient meat to the project, and that the rectangular tiles would not integrate with the canvasses. I wanted some sort of device above each tile or mobile, to differentiate it from its neighbours. Ettienne then suggested that each figure be cut out, and set into slots on castors so that an endlessly varied ‘mobile’ of images could move like actors in front of a stage set. The next problem was finding a sculptor or woodworker who would be attuned to the aesthetic of the work, and capable of rendering the wood with the refinement of the original drawings. How much would such a worker cost, and how would he or she accommodate my introversion and Ettienne’s demands? Ettienne, equipped with excellent new woodworking tools and the attention to detail that is his hallmark, offered to do the work.

The question of revitalising the subject matter was easily resolved. Since the format was so much bigger, and thinking about everything metaphorically such in intrinsic part of my nature, we decided not to repeat what the Bestiary had already done, but to use it as a basis for ideas about evil and repentance, destruction and redemption in contemporary, secular ways – which sometimes went along with Dante’s ideas, sometimes challenged them and sometimes went off at tangents at odds with the Comedy.

“Walking with and away from Dante” is an exact description of what we were doing, reading him with the hindsight of centuries, with cataclysms like the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of nations unheard of in his time, and the encroachment of rationalism, astrophysics and evolution thrown into the mix. Into the mix, too, went our prejudices and backgrounds, our ideas about sexual and racial politics and our 80 years or so of practice as contemporary artists in our fields. What would Dante have made of it? I have a feeling that he would have accepted the honesty of our intentions, and not written us into Hell. He would have found a rocky niche at the base of Purgatory, perhaps, and let us argue on. He knew, anyway, that the Earthly Paradise of being able to create works of art was within our reach, as it is with all artists who are entranced by what they are doing.

Work on the Dante project was done in my studio outside White River, and at Ettienne’s home in Cape Town. We commuted for periods of weeks to share in intense episodes of troubleshooting and brainstorming. The project was conceived and created in the mind-space between us. Many of the images we used came after tossing ideas around and then watching to see which fell to the ground, and which took flight. Some, like the enormous spiral we planned to use as the basis for Paradise, had to be scrapped when we began to inhabit the Comedy. It was too grandiose, seeking to dominate with scale and force, a tendency (and a weakness) we share. The longer we pondered, the more fleshy Hell and Purgatory needed to become, while Paradise required a smaller format, greater austerity. We worked from maquettes and sketches, but I, at least, was unable to grasp how the work would look until I began to paint the actual 6 x 2 m canvasses, and their approximately life-size mobiles. This was not due just to my lack of architectural training, but to my need to battle things out in a more open-ended way. Whatever I am doing at any given moment, determines what will happen next. I am not a designer, and find it anathema to conform too rigorously to any plan. I kept on repeating that I “wait for the work to come to me” – a clumsy way of trying to define my creative experience. This remark became a running gag between us, used by Ettienne to chastise me when I was being indecisive, and by me when I thought that he was being too impatient.

The distinction between us is not just that of architect/artist. Nor is it just gender based, important as it is – I will elaborate on this later. We are temperamentally and psychologically poles apart. Ettienne is an athlete, competitive, goal orientated, needing to be in command. 
I am introverted, resentful of authority, and find it extremely difficult to work with other people. I need privacy to get to grips with the marks I make.

Early in our collaboration Ettienne asked me to sketch a trompe l’oeil slash onto the Inferno while he waited. I literally froze. Art making has never come easily to me: each mark I make is born out of tentativeness. I approach the canvas with a degree of fear, and have to break the ice with a mistake or two. The shyness that afflicts my social life is as acute when I am working with forms. My incapacity struck Ettienne as unprofessional; while I resented that he doubted my competence. When I first tried to paint Arachne’s hands onto a sample carved in superwood, the result was something that looked like the cake left out in the rain in McArthur Park – laughably awful. No doubt about my incompetence there. Yet there were remarkably few false starts, and the project began to acquire its own momentum.

We both felt that we were in the grip of an idea, and subservient to it. One evening, during the first phase of the work, we strolled between 
the unfinished mobiles with our wine glasses, and felt as if we were part of a crowd where metaphor and reality merged. It was a very good moment.

There were other good moments – sipping coffee before dawn, analysing the previous day’s work while the lights of fishing boats shone off Robben Island, retreating, white-faced with fatigue, to watch our separate soap operas before supper. Me falling asleep against a door jamb while we talked, and waking late (7:30) one morning with my colleague outside, wondering if I had died during the night. Sharing the workspace with a group of house painters, swarthy, effective looking men, like pirates from the Malay Archipelago, their radio tuned to Kaya FM and mine to the chamber music channel. The pride I felt when they raised their hands in salute as I left for the airport. They made me feel part of a guild although we had hardly exchanged a word. Excellent food, excellent conversation and too much good wine. Fierce debates about everything from the death penalty to why I burnt the beans. And Whitney, the gentle cousin of Cerberus, watching us with one blue eye, one brown, and her snout adorned with an errant scrap of gold leaf.