JOYCE

It's hard to put in to words what James Joyce meant to my father. Throughout my life, my father was reading his worn and beloved copy of Finnegan's Wake, re-reading Ulysses, or reading some of the many companion books on how to read Joyce. This is a sample of a life's work dedicated to Joyce; to the idea of history, Sigla, the beginning is the end, to return unto ourselves, riverrun, and to the humble hero HCE ... Here Comes Everybody

Stephen Grillo on painting the Wake: "In my Wake paintings, this concept of figure-ground presents another fortunate parallel. Figure-ground is the relationship, in any art form, of the dominant marks, colors, textures, etc... to the surface or support that is its unified field. I think of Joyce's Sigla as figures, and much like Chinese calligraphy, characters functioning both pictorially and as references to the text; the heavily textured and indeterminant landscapes, unified by all-over color, establish the text/ground. It's a metaphorical wedding of the plastic with the verbal, the liquid with the solid, time and space, and, obeisance to Mr. Joyce, the tree and the stone."