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When Richard Sturm and I met in Buffalo in 1965, our rustbelt hometown had begun to buzz: newly arrived artists and writers, many associated with the avant-garde Black Mountain College in North Carolina, infused the University community with enthusiasm for innovation and collaboration.
Buffalo became a lodestone, setting up a force field I remember from motifs in his early drawings incorporating the non-dipole magnetic field, weather maps, itineraries to buried treasure. Rats with hearts superimposed on them like the red ochre handprints in Paleolithic caves. Diagnoses, diagrams, digressions, dotted lines.
Our collaboration began as visual conversations, pushing drawings back and forth across tables, adding images, adding words, navigating and correcting course, sometimes turning the page over to work on the other side. Between the War and Woodstock, we spent time marrying Heaven & Hell.
When he moved north, our conversation continued in the form of a seven-year project, 'See All The People', a suite of my poems which he illustrated. I visited Richard often in Toronto during those years, via the Greyhound bus. I supplied the dots; he supplied the lines.
In recent years, he has discovered his own dots: a new vocabulary from an ancient lexicon of light, a way to unite disparate elements into a single image, as Dante's topological system does in the Commedia while anatomizing the dynamics of his specimen vices and virtues. He has devised strategies to see both through and with the eye.
How both to challenge habits of seeing and to restructure, amplify and slow their extinction, metamorphosis or glide? Sturm's answer elides foreground and background to over and under, a fabric of and for the eye, at once the front and back of a tapestry.
These images – these studies – do not conceal crisp banalities for nonce diplopia algorithmically to discover a la Magic Eye®; instead, they lift boxtops off jigsaw puzzles; they contemplate the mythical through blizzards; they walk the talk.
Daniel Zimmerman
9.19.2004
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