Skeletal Trees

The title Skeletal Trees is taken from the poem, His War, by my father, Houghton College Professor James A. Zoller.  In it, he writes about the unseen toll that the second world war had upon his father – a civil engineer who arrived in Nagasaki in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing in August 1945.  Within the context of the poem, I see “skeletal trees” referring to both the annihilated landscape of Nagasaki and to the “blasted lungs” of my grandfather.    

The diagrams featured throughout the exhibition are taken from a series of civil engineering drawings my grandfather drew as a student, prior to serving in the Army Corps of Engineers.  They functioned as graphic equations to determine varying stresses and movements that structures would undergo when built.  The drawings are disciplined, austere, and above all else, practical and purposeful.  The central panel in the 9-panel work, “A Man Who Measured” is one of these and is the impetus for this entire body of work.

As I’ve done with other titles for singular artworks and exhibitions alike, I’ve appropriated words from one of my father’s poems.  I do this not only because I admire the way he uses language, but because the additional generational layering makes the work more potent and meaningful.  Outside of the confines of his poem, however, the words Skeletal Trees hints at a multiplicity of images and associations when considered in combination with each painting.  It is in the midst of this ambiguity that I feel my work operates most effectively.

The diagrams become winter trees, armatures, crucifixions, genograms, skeletons, maps, blueprints, glyphs, and runes.  Within these fluctuating associations and suggestions lies the beauty of these diagrams and their transformation within a new context.  They are drawn, layered, buried, eroded, obscured, erased.  They are recreated, reclaimed, restored. Each of these painterly processes acts as a metaphor for memory, loss, and the ritual of remembrance, while cementing and preserving the memory of my grandfather.    

I bring these works to Houghton as an offering –  an offering to my family, my hometown, and the community that helped raise me.  While these works have a defined starting point, it is my hope that they speak to the universal themes of memory, loss, the need to communicate, and the desire to understand.

-S. Zoller, June 2018

“His War”

James A. Zoller

My father returned from that war

in a cloud of radiant dust.

In the days of the Empire’s setting sun

his troop ship steams to port in its afterglow.

His war – the story he carried inside

but never told.  Never explained.  Silence

absolute, a cancer, as if his story like Japan itself

has been shredded, vaporized, cindered

in holocaust.  Sun, unleashed.

Now we assemble the pieces of his war,

the skeletal trees, the oily pools

the sudden aging, the blasted lungs.  How, 

born on the wind, shall that story unfold? 

“His War” taken from Ash & Embers (Cascade Books)

Copyright 2018, James A. Zoller, printed with permission