Whys, Wherefores, What-have-yous

Sometimes you come across something so strange that you want to know less what it means than how it came into being and why. Such, Old Ken submits, is the case with the oddity visible above, a kind of collage created by my Russian friend Pilaf Stroganoff. In any case, what follows is an extract of my conversation with Pilaf where he explains how this odd image came into being.

Pilaf Stroganoff [PS]: "Well, Ken, a few weeks ago, I was looking in my fruit bowl and saw that a number of apples had gone bad. I was thinking of just making them into a pie, but then I remembered how apples and potatoes are supposed to have very similar consistency. So, since you can make prints with potatoes, I figured apple prints would be a logical step. Thus, I cut three apples into thin, vertical slices and trimmed down the edges to make a kind of tiled mosaic rectangular surface.

"With this support, though, I wondered what image I should then create. I though about apples and their mythological connotations and gravitated to the story of the tree of knowledge from Genesis.



"So, I got a brush and ink and drew a quick sketch of an apple tree with a snake in it on the apple-tiles.

"But, by this time, I realized I was going to have a difficult time cutting the apples with sufficient precision to print anything interesting. So, I figured I would just make a little picture.



"I started to paint in the sky with blue acrylic paint, but then realized that I could allow the natural color of the apple to serve as 'clouds' such as you can see in the lower right hand corner.



"Then, to fill out this little pictorial environment, I added some green paint to indicate foliage ...



"And then red for the apples."



"By this time, though, I felt like I was indulging my tendency to not know when to stop with things and I'd compromised the integrity of the original image, which was interesting because of its simplicity. Thus, I decided I should the figure of the tree away from the ground, which you see here.



"But, one step back to basics led to an orgy of image-indulgence. I decided that this poor tree needed to have a full environment—a little Garden of Eden—in which to live. So, I not only made some animal accompaniment pictures (such as the tiger and the apple-tile buck) but also then layered on some real plant leaves to serve as tropical vegetation. Don't you love it?!?"

Well, we need not answer that question. And however "crazy talk" we might think of Pilaf's ultimate image as being, what is interesting to Old Ken are the associative structures of his process. First, we get a practical association based on materials (from potato printing to apples), then a mythological one (from apples to the Bible), and then a pictorial association (oxidizing apple standing for clouds). Next, things get literal in a couple of different senses. Following the terms of the Biblical narrative, first of all, the "tree" is fitted out with a fuller garden environment. And then, in a different kind of literalness, real plant parts are used to represent plants. I call this a recipe for crazy!!