Creators & Destroyers

Charles Caldemeyer
Oil , watercolor, and Encaustic, 2005

This painting belongs to the artist Charles Caldemeyers body of work titled Structures. Like all the Structures paintings there is a push and pull of ideas, colors, media, textures and whatever else he can use to get the audience in a minding firing stand still. If we begin in the lower panel on the left we see a guy with a marching drum stand beside an entrance where it appears that the artist is looking out at the audience. On the opposite side of that panel we see a classical or greek flute player juxtaposed with a cubist looking guitar player. All of them are arranged in a cave that alludes to hell with its serpent like textured walls. I can’t help thinking of the idea of marching to one's own drum and how we pick up various cultural beats only the way.

As we climb our way up to the next level we are confronted by a painting in a painting of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes. As we try not to look at the beheading we stare over the ruins of what I believe to be rome. Are we to make a connection between losing our heads and the Italian renaissance? If so I’m not sure what to conclude so I think I’ll move up to the next level where I’m confronted with more classical characters, like leda and the swan and a nude painter painting bacchus the god of wine. And beside this drunken orgy of gods and humans we see a train car and caboose suggesting that maybe humanity’s lust for pleasure is about to come to an end.

Finally, we climb the last stairs, we are out of breath and we start to hope for a conclusion only to find some men building more stairs. But wait, are they creating them or are they destroying them. Is the top panel the beginning? Did I start at the bottom and I should have started at the top? I’m left thinking there is some great narrative here that can solve the great societal problems if I could just figure it out. Maybe I’ll climb back down to determine if they are creating or destroying?