Anna Pierrepont Project on the Road is finished

To complete the pictures for the Anna Pierrepont Project on the Road, I set out from NYC on two beautiful days in late August.

The first trip was to Morristown, New Jersey and the second trip was to Phillipse Manor, New York. Morristown was chosen due to the town being the site of a post-independence military encampment for the American army under George Washington for over a year. I attempted drawings of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette in conversation and another monument of Thomas Paine writing “Common Sense”. Two attempts to draw the Paine failed. I then made a quick sketch of the statues of the three Revolutionary war generals. This drawing was more satisfactory but was not completed. The second trip to Philipse Manor was to visit Sleepy Hollow cemetery. I had never been in the Morristown area before, but had lived briefly in the town of Sleepy Hollow just south of Philipse Manor when it was named North Tarrytown. Morristown is a dynamic, ethnically diverse town surrounding an historical town center, Morristown Green. The Washington statue is installed on Morristown Green. Philipse Manor is a suburban community by a local railroad stop adjacent to the Hudson river. The cemetery is on North Broadway, a continuation of Broadway that extends to the Battery in Manhattan. There were no traffic lights and no sidewalks, so entering the cemetery was tricky, becauses cars drove fast in both directions on the double lane North Broadway. The cemetery, the resting place of Washington Irving, was beautiful. It sits on a hill with a forested valley to the west. The first image I drew was of a white marble angel holding a scroll. The second image was of the statue that made me chose to travel to the cemetery, a Union Soldier on a pedestal, standing in front of about thirty graves of Civil War fatalities.

The juxtaposition was extremely poignant. A woman drove up while I made the drawing of the Civil War soldier and asked its meaning. I swept my arm in the direction of the graves, which spoke “far above (my) poor power to add or detract”. She rolled up her window after a quick glance and drove on. The framed drawings were delivered to the individuals that requested them in Kickstarter. I thank all of those who viewed and participated in “Anna Pierrepont Project on the Road”.

Welcome to the Blogpost related to the Anna Pierrepont Series on the Road.

In this blog, I will keep the interested community up-to-date about the progress of the Kickstarter campaign. Thank you for your interest. I will also update this blog with local activities that are taking place associated with the Anna Pierrepont Series. To view the overall intent behind the Anna Pierrepont Series, please review Blogpost of 2011.

I attach additional images that have been created in NYC as a part of the Anna Pierrepont Series. If you wish additional information, please email me at skrib1@att.net

The full image featured and discussed in the Kickstarter Campaign

Henry Ward Beecher from Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn, NY, 11" x 14", Oil Pastel on Bristol Paper, 2010

This fellow seems to be Brooklyn Heights patron saint with his advocacy of abolition of slavery that set the stage for the Civil War and emancipation. This is a odd sculpture, with the big guy in his large cape, standing solidly on his feet and the little slave urchins grabbing towards him over the top of the pedestal. I have drawn Beecher a number of times. The flag behind is a particularly exciting motif, I love drawing the reds as it flutters. As I draw, people pass by who have just walked over the bridge or are from the neighborhood. They seldom are in a rush. They take notice of the sculpture and walk by, keeping their thoughts to themselves.

Union Soldiers from Civil War memorial on Battle Hill in Greenwood Cemetery [Brooklyn]
11" x 14", Oil Pastel on Bristol Paper, 2010

I visited Greenwood cemetery during the height of fall foliage on a brilliantly clear day. I drew for a third time, the large memorial to civil war soldiers on top of Battle Hill, a major battle site from the American Revolution. I find myself attracted particularly to the mustached swagger of the confident bronze civil war soldier leaning upon his weapon.

Seated Lincoln [Newark], 11" x 14", Oil Pastel on Bristol Paper, 2011
This is a statue of the Great Emancipator that sits in the shadows of the US District Court for the District of New Jersey in Newark, on Martin Luther King Road. I teach a drawing class in the early summer in Newark and for the 1st time, I made a drawing along side my students. It was an experiment to see if revealing my approach to drawing could help them elevate their game. The results were mixed. The Emancipator dejectedly sits in this work and can be sat on like Alice in Wonderland in Central Park. However, the strip that the sculpture is situated in is forlorn. No one sits with it or on it. These days, people stand by the statue every day and scream about economic injustice and urge passing cars to honk their horns for jobs and opportunity. Newark waits emancipation.

Introduction to the Anna Pierrepont Series of Works on Paper by Howard Skrill

The drawings posted in this series, the Anna Pierrepont Series, were created as I wandered NYC. I carry a folding chair and materials that can fit into a paint smeared backpack. The works are drawn from statuary that I have come upon in my wanderings. The pictures are created, usually on site, through a visual interaction between myself and the work that I render. I did not start this project with any specific intent, I was inspired by my intense love of the challenge of representation. The statues were selected in the time honored academic tradition of drawing statuary, due to their static nature. The sculptures I rendered, in time, began to be selected for representation due to their inherent poignancy.

I came to realize staring at a statue of a historical figure, monument to the dead at a cemetery, religious sculptures in churches and/or museums or adorning 18-19th century buildings, that the works are uniquely declarative.

If a figurative sculpture is commissioned and put in some random corner of the world, even if it is forlorn or forgotten, the method of creation and the iconography of the work speaks volumes on how the Patron (and artist) saw him/herself in relation to his/her life and times or how a society viewed itself.

Some of the works I draw are extraordinarily odd in the ideas they articulate through their subject matter choices. They can reveal sanctimonious or deeply prejudicial world views, that were so deeply ingrained upon execution that they resisted introspection. The worlds evoked by these works can be excruciatingly personal or profoundly perverse. My intrusions into these worlds are profoundly transgressive. I am, after all, an anonymous man carrying a folding chair, with a backpack. And yet, the sculptures endure, interacting perpetually with a world in flux. At some point, I encounter these works in their nooks, unfold my chair, open my backpack, and struggle to translate their appearance into an approximation of crude markings. The results are a product of an imperfect struggle of representation, resulting in images frozen upon fingerprint smeared pieces of industrially manufactured paper.

I call this series the Anna Pierrepont series. Ironically, Anna does not have a statue dedicated in her name. She lies in a grand sarcophagus on a forlorn, forgotten hill in Greenwood cemetery surrounded by the crypts of varied Pierreponts and Jays. I don't know much of Anna Pierrepont's life, but her crypt, enclosed in gothic filigree of an august red sandstone, and surrounded by her familial minions scattered below her, is a fitting moniker for this series of works. I visited her a couple of times, walked around her imperious crypt, curious about her relation to a certain John Pierrepont Morgan and awed by her majestic internment.

Wandering free, stepping over the weeds and loosened stone around her crypt, realizing that while alive, she certainly would have insisted on massive gates to guard her from the likes of me, I appreciate her utter exposure. The insistence on being remembered led to this hilltop crypt and her remembrance. The fact of her perpetual residence, ensures her remembrance, it just does not control how.

The first image is the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln that stands framed against the cast iron and other pre-war buildings of North Union Square. I sat in a wire chair, in a crowded and dirty public seating area and drew this picture during the spring time. An older man approached me, as is common when I work in public, and talked of his artwork, as he observed my effort to capture the changing lights and colors reflecting off the bronze object's surface and emerging from the lights, colors and shades of the surrounding window ledges.