SAVE the LAST GHOSTDANCE FOR ME

From the introduction - “You can only suggest reality, you can’t show me 

Reality” (George Inness) 

“Nothing is so abstract as reality” (Giorgio Morandi)

After much deliberation I came up with a name for these nocturns - “Ghost Dance”. 

For those who care about historical background the “Ghost Dance” was a ritual ceremony performed by the Lakota plains Indians in 1890. After a century of colonial enlightenment, aka  murder, rape, infection with lethal disease and forced re-location to bug-infested nowhere, most of them were dead. The big dance was a furious, non-stop, full-costume jitterbug whereby the great spirit was called forth to bring back the good old days, before invasion, annexation and attempted genocide.  

It didn’t work that good. White people just thought the Injuns had gone crazy and shot them as usual. 

Ashley Holt, my ex-spat pen-pal and partner in exchanging dark, cynical thoughts, validated this title, writing “ I like the idea of invoking native spirits to inhabit the soil on which junked autos and forgotten American dreams now dwell”  

Me too, knowing full well that I bought and now live (pretty comfortably) on stolen property.  

The backcountry of East County San Diego, where I’ve had a studio for 30 years, is the general location for these moody nightscapes and there is not a more ideal place or atmosphere for what I was trying to say. 

This is where the sun speaks to nature, but the moon speaks to god.  

Weeks after the book was basically done, it came to me that these prints were in fact a graphic novel with no story and no narrative and best left that way. 

Imagine if you will, a long dead native American, shot for dancing. His unquiet soul now floats through these wasp-blown desert border towns by night. Imagine that he is always lost and what follows is what he sees, or perhaps what he dreams. 

That’s the feeling I’m after.

The technique by which these images were rendered my be of mild interest to some readers. The approach is, in essence, nothing but old-school aquatint etching without the torturous scraping tools or the lethal chemistry. I simply scanned some airbrush spatters into Photoshop and drew them over a black-spot rendering of the subject with a pen tool  until there was nothing left but shapes, values and textures. 

It’s a process that kills detail but “The artist should, above all, fear to become the slave of detail” (Albert Pinkham Ryder).

There is nothing here for the art museums, “Art Forum” or the university establishment. I work only for those few who apprehend the world with the same 19th century, *Swedenborgian goofiness as I do. 

All others will be baffled or indifferent.  

This book is dedicated to my brother in spirit, one William Glen Crooks, retired. He was a pithy, cogent critic of art and an old-school landscape painter of breathtaking ability.  He once told me that he had little patience for artists who were always bitching about a lack of compelling subject matter. “I say get your head out of your butt and look out the window. There it is....”

Well, I started with my window and one thing led to another. 

JDA 2024    

* Emanuel Swedenborg was probably nuts, but some of his ideas were enlightened. 

Rich B/W - 54 Pages - 48 reproductions - $16  https://www.lulu.com/shop/j-daniel-abel/ghostdance/paperback/product-p6kzm88.html?q=j.+daniel+abel&page=1&pageSize=4