Look on a Love [Which Knows Not to Despair]
To see the image being discussed, get Issue 24 of NonBinary Review here.
Multi-media artist Steven Magstadt had just finished reading Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, a Victorian novel critical of Britain’s education, economic, and social systems during the industrial age, when he happened upon an 1880s photo of two boys in a garden. In this antique mall find, the younger pensive boy sat on a swing, while the older happier boy stood in the background. Something about that younger boy inspired the artist to buy the photo and in time create the complex and poignant work “Look on a Love.”
Magstadt spent the first five years of his life in a small mid-Michigan city where the sounds of trains and church bells measured the hours. His grandparents and their neighbors were factory workers who commiserated about the tedium of factory work, and the toll it took on souls played out in bars and with the bar of expectations for happiness set low. Though the artist left his hometown long ago, the feeling of being a product of a system that churned out children as if off an assembly line lingers still and may have been the quality that drew Magstadt to the photo.
Using an organic process, based on inspiration from a single item, the artist collects other items that coalesce in time into something more than a sum of their parts. This time Magstadt was adding to his series “Catalogue of Lesser Saints” in which he portrays rather ordinary people whose nimbus calls attention to their holiness as a person, whether a bag lady madonna, a hapless man with an umbrella, or a child on a swing caught in mid-air.
Many of the items used in the piece date from the 1880s or are reproductions from that era: Tiffany and Wedgwood china shards, glass knobs made by a modern glass blower similar to those found on a factory floor, knob-and-tube from an 1880s school house, metal buttons, and ancient leather. Text from a nineteenth-century gynecological textbook and late 1880s newspaper found their places as well.
The artist cut out the swinging boy and pasted him on a seascape etching of ships in rough water that echoed the turbulence of a boy trapped between childhood and adulthood: between the unknowns of parental dreams and expectations and what the future really may hold. Metal printing blocks of animals figure on piece’s capital, while products made from these animals ground the pedestal below. At the crown, the china lamb peers out from amidst a bouquet of pre-industrial nails and post-industrial screws, thorny twigs, and hardened, red carpet threads. In a startling contrast to the meats and suggestion of sacrificial flesh, at the very bottom of the base the viewer sees a printing block idyllic scene of fishing on a lake with vacation cabins on the hill.
The text at the base of the capital reads: Look on a love which knows not to despair. Is this boy’s fate in the hands of a greater power? Haloed and delicately hand-colored, the boy swings above the drama like a fishing lure. His copper leaf nimbus and the swing ropes made of gold thread and seed pearls suggest that at any moment a deus ex machina will snatch him from the dangerous scene. Yet, the tale the piece tells may also be captured in the tiny glass bottle in the assemblage to the left of the lamb. The bottle with the message “Liberty.” Perhaps, like its creator, the little boy will have to grow up elsewhere to find his true home.
Jeanne Blum Lesinski has written books for adults and children as well as articles for print and online publications. She fills her home with original artwork, including “Look on a Love.” When not at her computer, she can typically be found on a bicycle or in a garden.