Patricia Jane St. John Danko - Up from the Marshlands

As a child, Jane Danko played in the marshlands of southeast Texas, cutting cypress knees and vines with her hatchet and fashioning these and other things from her beloved swamp into sculptures. She collected snakes in mayonnaise jars, made decorated cigar boxes with lace, buttons, and swamp things, wrote poems, and went to Catholic school, where she was generally considered to be a strange little girl. Her Catholic school education continued through her first undergraduate degree, culminating at the Jesuit Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City.

She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile, and has also lived in Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil. The rural closeness to nature and parochial schooling of her childhood, and later years spent living in Mexico and South America, are reflected in her work, which raises penetrating questions about the validity of contemporary religious orthodoxy, its influence on western culture and thought, and the pagan roots of Judeo-Christian mythologies. Her work explores the most personal, yet universal, of human issues, those not easily articulated, but clearly existing in memory, instantly, and often disturbingly, intuited and recognized by the viewer. It focuses on the iconographic fusions and the unbroken continuum of symbols that have existed throughout history.

She knows that her own beliefs and questionings color the work, and is delighted to be a part of the very phenomenon that so fascinates her. The inconsistencies that abound in humankind's most profound and intimate sacred beliefs, and the cultural stereotypes that permeate those beliefs, are frequently the topic of her prints, many times addressed with an irreverent, though always respectful, humor. Her work is a search for personal faith, and an expression of faith in our ability to overcome our inconsistencies and stereotypes to reach a fuller understanding of the consistency we have with our own ancient history and belief systems, through our enduring symbols, thus better to understand ourselves, and to achieve the calm and peace that understanding always brings. Jane's work has been exhibited in North, Central, and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. She currently lives in Texas, USA, and Galicia, Spain.

After a lifetime immersed in the exploration of symbols and mythologies, I found timeless and universal themes in these prehistoric gems, as well as private mythologies in the stone itself, causing an almost delirious exploration of textural possibilities in my work. At the same time, personal allegories born of the flora and fauna of Galicia began to emerge in my imagery, many times centering on the flower of the tojo, a plant considered sacred by the ancient Celts and other civilizations for its long, sharp thorns. And in many canvases I painted my love for my adopted land, a personal exegesis of the gallego landscape, especially the streets and surroundings of Cedeira, the town where I´ve found so much happiness.

But even while this happy romance continued, I began to feel a discomfort with my work, a disquiet I was at a loss to explain. Something was missing from my imagery; something intuited, almost palpable, in earlier years, was no longer there. I continued to feel, and still do, a connection with, an allegiance to the powerful talismans that prehistoric peoples left in the stones of Galicia. But even by virtue of these gems, I had not found the connection to ........ what? The more I wondered, the more questions, nebulous and without form, swam around in my head.

Then, in April 2005, I submitted my application to the renowned Basque artist Agustin Ibarrola, to be accepted in the workshop that he was to give in the Contemporary Arts Museum of Union Fenosa in A Coruna. He selected me to participate, and in July I spent two glorious weeks with him and 19 other artists, painting, sculpting, working intensely, transforming industrial scrap discarded in the warehouse yards of Union Fenosa into works of art. We created so many pieces that our mentor requested another warehouse to store and exhibit our work, which he was immediately given. The days passed, and we alternated seamlessly between hours of hard work to somehow finding ourselves gathered around Agustin, listening to his wonderful words while he shared with us his ideas and theories of art, his days and years in prison during the Franco dictatorship, his philosophy and reflections on being human and the importance of life....... then suddenly he would send us back to work and without blinking we would return to our artmaking.

The maestro, who celebrated his 75th birthday with us, was always in our midst, every day, watching as we worked, explaining and demonstrating on the makeshift blackboard all of the formal elements of art that eluded us, and talking to each of us, individually, while we worked. The first few times he approached me were almost frightening, because of the tremendous respect I have for him, but before long I was anticipating and longing for our private conversations about my work. What did he tell me? That he loved the textures in my work, but that I needed more variety of texture across the surface of the image. That my use of expressionistic line was very “juicy,” and to hold onto it.
There was much in my work that he liked, but he always ended with, “More forceful.” But, “How?” “Look and you will see.”

From the beginning, he prohibited us from using ways of working or the imagery we were accustomed to using in our studios. He wanted us to make completely new work using the discarded industrial materials and scrap that surrounded us outside the Fenosa warehouses, without resorting to familiar imagery or techniques. I almost despaired of ever understanding him. He told me, “It´s not that you should discard the imagery that has blossomed out of your new life in Spain, but you have to look into your gut and find the images of the lands that are yours from your roots, and give those images a place beside what has come out of you here.” “But, how?” “You have to find that for yourself. Look in the materials here, search in your gut.”

With another artist, Mercedes López Peón, I took a walk around the scrap piles, looking at what was available for our use: industrial spools of all sizes, that in their time had transported electric cables; computer parts; huge and small wooden planks; junk pieces of metal of every shape and size; and wooden boxes of every dimension imaginable. Then, seeing a box that, if we placed it vertically, we could both almost fit inside, I said, “When I was a little girl I used to love to trace my playmates´ forms with chalk on the sidewalk, and for them to trace me. If we were to trace each other inside this box...?” We painted the box black, got inside, and laughing, bumping, and colliding with each other and with the walls of the box, as we barely fit inside, we each traced the other. We painstakingly incorporated all possible formal precepts that our mentor had taught us on the blackboard, as well as sharing with each other suggestions from our private conversations with him: the continuing of a line from a vertical plane onto a horizontal one; the placement and relationship of planes, the transcendence of line...... And so, Mercedes and I relived the lessons of our mentor, discussing his formal and informal theories of artmaking; we traced, we painted, barely able to move, giggling, sweating, feeling the intimacy of our pressed together bodies, laughing, in a collaboration between formal elements of art and the innocence of our childhood, and the work became delicious play.

We continued to work together on other pieces, using the discarded materials around us, learning, from both the maestro and from the very materials he urged us to use, about the value of process without permanence, even to the making of a “sculpture of tons”: All 20 of the artists who participated in the workshop collaborated on a monumental sculpture, using the massive concrete blocks stored in the area around the warehouses, painting them and directing their placement by means of a crane in one of the central plazas of Union Fenosa.

And so, in that almost unbearable heat of July in A Coruna, in the industrial warehouses and scrapyards of Union Fenosa, images began to spring out of me, so rapidly that I had no time to think or understand what was happening, images condensed into a simbology born of my own viscera, of my childhood in the swamp of East Texas, of my adolescence among the pyramids and temples of Mexico, of my years in Chile, of my pain for the condition of women in the world, of my anguish during the long and tragic illness and death of Jim Danko, of my doubts of faith, and of my belief in a feminine Goddess. It was as though Augustin Ibarrola had caused the deepest part of my being to come out, kicking and fighting, to take form, ripping image after image from my gut, images born of the roots that anchor me to the earth on both sides of the ocean. I began to paint one of the wooden spools, thinking to convert it into a table for my home, for our orchard, as a wedding anniversary gift for my husband. I painted silhouettes, giving form to nothing more than the essence of feminine contours, as if they had been traced on a sidewalk. From the hands of some, reflecting the good humor with which my husband teases me for gesturing so much with my hands when I talk, simbols for speech used by the ancient civilization of Teotihuacán somersaulted out, and from the hands of others, spirals and Celtic suns. From that moment on, the work and the images continued to spill out like white water rapids, and at night in my room in the hostal, I filled page after page of my sketchbook.

Simbology has always been my central motif; the exploration of symbols gives my work its raison d´etre. Through my work I try to intuit that which is not so easily articulated, but which clearly exists in our primordial collective memory, because when we see it we recognize it. I think that it is through simbols that we approach the door to the beyond, because of the intuition that symbols stimulate and liberate in us, giving us entrance to the essence of both the physical and the ephemeral, as indeed the people of prehistory achieved through their petroglifs and paintings, perhaps also in an attempt to open the door to what lies beyond.

The search for the essencial, coupled with reverence for the vitality of nature, is my joy, and the entrance into my viscera that Agustín Ibarrola opened for me consecrates my journey as pure process, without goals or worries: the process of creation of art."

View artwork by Jane Danko at the Contemporary Arts Museum of Union Fenosa

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