Betty Branch catalog (6-21-23)) - Flipbook - Page 14
— Of the Spanish-born American modernist sculptor
José de Creeft, we encounter the brief “Creeft’s Night,
a ceramic,” and on another page, even more succinctly,
simply the caption “Rodin” amidst illustrations exploring
the anatomical fragment in sculptural form.
The proliferation of media imagery — photographic
reproductions with hand-scribbled annotations, textbook
illustrations with extended descriptive captions, as well as
both quickly executed sketches and highly finished drawings
by the artist’s hand — combine to create a mélange of creative
influences.
As intimated, the graphic facility and raw immediacy of such
imagery in the notebook, as well as the overall variation and
experimentation of design, are both striking and captivating.
Drawings and sketches are in places executed on thin, almost
translucent papers, and taped or pasted into the volume
such that they can be folded back to reveal other imagery
beneath, and at the same time create new compositions
and alternative juxtapositions. Bits and pieces of paper
containing information of all sorts — book illustrations,
photographic prints, typeset quotations or hand-written
notations, for example — are inserted side by side or even
layered one atop another, creating a narrative collage of
remarkably unique, raw, and vigorous graphic power. Both
visual and poetic language intermingle and merge in a process
of amalgamation and intertextuality that produces new
meanings, unique renditions, and complex insight.
As pages are turned, the pace of looking, reading, and
experiencing the journal speeds up or slows down with the
density of paraphernalia and information. A cacophony of
montaged material alternates with more extensive written
passages — sometimes a poem or letter or commentary
by the artist herself. At other times, a newspaper article,
catalogue excerpt, scholarly text, or piece of writing by others
informs, speaks to, and expands upon the artist’s ambitious,
encompassing, and inclusive accomplishments. Selections
from the notebook are transcribed throughout this publication,
providing a sort of map for exploring the ground and terrain
of Branch’s art. The tone and tenor of these writings range
from the overtly humorous newspaper clippings (one from
the local Roanoke Times more concisely addresses the artist’s
embrace of the female nude than any scholarly dissertation)
to heart-wrenching revelations of anxieties and depressions
(a consistent or cyclical aspect of the artist’s lived experience
and all-too-human relations that inform her best and most
compelling artworks).
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