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March Issue 2006
A Book Review: Cornices of Charleston: A Tribute to the Architecture and Light of the City
by Lese Corrigan
Cornices of Charleston,
The Paintings of Susan Romaine & Photography of Jack
Alterman, Upper
King Publishing, 2005, $39.99, 120 pages.
Jack Alterman
Susan Romaine
Painting, architecture, photography, collaboration, documentation and history all come together beautifully in this one book. Even more present is the sense of being lifted up by the artists as they pay tribute to the grand architecture of Charleston. This city has her well documented church spires reaching upwards as reminders to go beyond. Other buildings followed suit with the decorative details, dates and names emblazoned on their upper edges and now two artists have brought these reminders down to earth for all to see without straining their necks. As a camel kneels to its rider for mounting and a ladder offers the first step up, Susan Romaine and Jack Alterman have brought the cornices down to the level of all in a manner as though the buildings have bowed and curtsied before us then lifted themselves back up to the sky.
Susan Romaine
Susan Romaine began painting the cornices of upper King Street with the first such works included in her "Mass, Light and Time" show of November 2002. She fully explored the subject matter in the May 2003 show entitled Cornices of Charleston held at the Addison/Hatfield Gallery after a magical moment one Sunday early am in January or February 2003 wandering, looking for inspiration for her upcoming show. Suddenly she looked up noticing the "light pouring over buildings" against the clear sky. At the Bluestein building on King, Romaine more than saw, she really noticed, the cornices for first time. That sense of looking up and feeling the "wow" from something seen but not previously experienced overtook her. Eighteen cornice paintings resulted. She even hung the May show so that you had to look up at the paintings the way she had looked up at the cornices.
Jack Alterman
Jack Alterman regularly photographed Romaine's paintings for her portfolio. Upon viewing the cornice paintings in April of 2003, he said "these are great." Susan turned to him and said "this just has to be a book. Do you want to collaborate? It needs to be a book about Charleston, not just my paintings and I cannot do them all." Thus a book was born. Later Alterman was sitting at a rooftop restaurant at the corner of King and Calhoun well above street level and realized that this was the height from which he needed to work. He shot for a year over 2003 and 2004 without planning with Romaine which places to photograph but capturing the buildings he was drawn to. He had not shot a great deal of architecture before this although his previous aerial shots were all encompassing.
Alterman then printed his photographs and the photographs of the paintings. He and Romaine set these out together - the series of paintings paired with photographs. They were excited to balance the fine art photography with the paintings and discussed the "three degrees of separation between art photographs and paintings."
Steve LePre saw the loose leaf book Romaine had made for Alterman of the project as a birthday gift and said he could visualize the finished book. This led him to become the graphic layout artist for the project. Thus was born "the dream team" of Romaine, Alterman, LePre, John Doyle and Harlan Greene with Doyle writing the introduction and Greene the foreword. These gentlemen also had experience with publishers and printers, which they shared. Romaine called it the "confluence of creative energy" putting the package together.
This creative energy began years ago. Romaine has been painting seriously for seven years after a career in the finance world, albeit a creative career in that world as director of new product development for pension plans. She took her first drawing class in 1994 then in 1995 studied oil painting. She attended a Burt Silverman in workshop 1997. In 1998, wanting to be more serious about her work, Romaine took a figure class. She was included in the College of Charleston's Young Contemporary Show that year and the following years brought gallery representation, shows and the Gibbes artist in residency for the Poets' and Painters' program in 2003/2004. Her works have found homes in collections across the country aided by her gallery representation in both Charleston at the Wells Gallery and Santa Fe at the Peterson-Cody Gallery.
Alterman is a Charleston native who opened his photography studio in 1980 after studying at the Brooks Institute in California. His commercial photography, travel photographs and portraits are well known. He opened the Center for Photography in 2002 providing courses, workshops and lectures to the community. His works are in collections around the country. He is always searching for a new project and way of look at things.
John Carroll Doyle,
local Charleston painter and photographer, wrote the introduction
for this book that connects the imagery to the past of Charleston.
Harlan Greene, writer and archives' curator, points out in the
foreword that much of humanity has tended to look down and has
forgotten the sense of reaching towards the heavens and soaring
above the frailties of our physical nature.
Romaine and Alterman have given us a memory - a history - a record
of "giants" viewing the passage of time and people,
encouraging us to look up at the giants. Wassily Kandinsky says
in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art that it takes artists
to pull us up the pyramid of evolution to the higher level of
being towards a perfectioning, reaching out of the baser
needs of man to the spiritual nature of the heavens. He also points
out that "at different points along the road are the different
arts, saying what they are best able to say, and in the language
which is peculiarly their own." In Cornices of Charleston
we find the convergence of two arts, just as the rooftops of the
city converge with the sky reaching towards Heaven as these artists
have reminded us to do.
Books are available at Amazon.com, Alterman Studios, Smith-Killian Fine Art, and Barnes and Nobles.
Lese Corrigan is
an artist, gallery owner representing nine artists, arts' educator
of 18 years at the Gibbes Museum Studio, who has written for Carolina
Arts, Charleston City Paper, Art and Antiques and been art editor
for the Charleston Mercury. She was the first executive director
for the Charleston Fine Art Dealers' Association and is a native
of Charleston.
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing
Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc.
Copyright© 2006 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston
Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts
from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts
Online, Copyright© 2006 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved
by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use
without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina
Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.