David Addison Small's Angeli Terraeby Dr.Bradley A Tepaske

The thirty-second chapter of the book of Genesis records the story of Jacob passing a long desert night in strife with a mysterious ambivalent fiqure=a being once man and angel:

Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.When the man saw that he did not prevail against jacob,he struck him on the hip socket,and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.Then he said,"Let me go for the day is breaking."But Jacob said "I will not let you go, unless you bless me."

Jacob repeatedly petitions his ostensible adversary, saying "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" and then he blessed him.

This account of ancient struggle is singularly appropiate to an introduction of both David Addison Small and his Angeli Terrae. Like the wrestlers of old (not to mention the more whimsical wreslers of Small's earlier works) ,the artist and his ample angels meet in secret and are decidedly earthy.They move in tandem, in need of one another, sharing some elusive destiny.

It is true that David Small posesses a Master of  Fine Arts Degree from the Massachusetts College of  Art.  He is currently both an Associate Professor of Renaissance Art at that alma mater and, by day, most assuredly his kid's most warm hearted instructor as a teacher in the Boston Public School system. 

It is also true that his solitary artistic labors extend late into many a night in his modest, chronically over-heated studio overlooking Tremont Street in downtown Boston.  Any real feeling for David's ongoing biographical experience, however, is best conveyed in personal anecdotes - like that childhood UFO encounter in Westboro, or the varied adventures of the young guitarist whose hands once burst into flames, or again through his own recounting of dreams sufficiently archetypal to make a Jungian's jaw drop.  Thus the "True Life Stories" of this wrestler, who even suffered his own hip fracture by falling on a slippery etching room floor.  (He had to miss the Rolling Stones concert, but kept on painting in his hospital bed ).

This life has always been tumultuous, always unpredictable-except for David's unswerving devotion to his art.  And through all of it, the angels-with all their peculiar mystery, provocation, and suble wisdom-have kindly kept on presenting themselves, always colorfully unfolding and always as psychically alive and capricious as the daemon whose sport with David I have observed for over twenty years.

David's intricate, highly personal, and seemingly overnight production of an etching of the christian apocalypse in an undergraduate printmaking class at the University of Massachusetts marked him immediately as especially gifted, as a visionary in the rough.  And surely no encouragement I ever offered as an instructor of art ever led to such wonderful fruition as the suggestion to David in 1975 that he might enjoy a summer painting seminar in Rechenau an Der Rax with the remarkable Austrian fantastic realist, Ernst Fuchs. 

It was there that David underwent what one can only call an initiation into the Mishtechnik, that pains-taking method of applying alternate glazes of white egg tempera and translucent oil pigments to the panel.  The mixed technique was taken to the peak of  perfection by 15th century northern painters who David deeply admires Jan Van Eyck, Roger Van Der Weyden, Hugo Van Der Goes, and of course, the great Heironymous Bosch. 

It is a truly sensual, even exhilarating media in which to work.  How difficult it would be to describe the subtle pleasure with which a tacky oil surface draws egg tempera from the point of a brush.  Furthermore, the very technique is metaphorical of both the creation and a  gradual fashioning of the human being.  The panel is a dark void.  The work begins with light-microscopic starry bits of titanium oxide-are moved toward initial definitions through a medium poured from the crack of an egg-like suns, or moons, or glistening bones. Earth colors, flesh colors, celestial colors and dimensionality follow in phases of dark and light.  In an unfolding creative process David has always remained open to the influence of teachers and contemporaries like Gregory Gillespie and Mati Klarwein, historically also Blake and the symbolist painters of the 19th century, Max Ernst and the surrealists as well as those favorite Italian masters-Giotto, Fra Agelico and Perugino. 

Angeli Terrae' is composed entirely of Angels.  Some are heavy metal, clearly drawn from models.  These Earth Angels are more naturalistic, more daring, Yes, more disquieting than Small's earlier angelic imagery-those wonderful big guys with their staffs and cigars, but always up in the air or alighting in a remote desert oasis.

These winged men thus represent an ongoing experiment not only in the visual, but the psychological integration  of the archetypal into an embodied masculine type. Simone De Beauvoir once observed that men typically possess a merely intellectual conception of one another. 

The biblical wrestlers with which we began already stand corrective of this, even  as that somber loving angel in Wim Wender's magnifcent "Wings of Desire" longs for communion, for a body, for hot coffee or a good smoke at the kiosk as he gazes down from the glaring tip of a skyscraper. 

David Addison Samll's Angeli Terrae are accordingly one soul's precious contribution to an essential circle of contemporary reflection, an offering in compensation for a merely Heavenly Father who seems long ago to have forsaken us. The angels may not vouchsafe their magic names, but David Addison Small has certainly held them fast until the break of day.  We need not doubt the  blessing.