"The
Family Curse" The Angelochs of Woodstock
By Jay Blotcher
He
pauses wryly to mention that his maternal great-grandparents also
worked in pen and ink, but were excluded from the show because none
of their work survives.
When
Angeloch began to evaluate work for the show, he explored numerous
criteria for making his final selection. One day he decided that
subject matter would unify the work. Another day, he decided that
medium would be the deciding factor. Again, he realized his tactics
were far too narrow. “I realized the only thing that really
was going to work was to chuck all that and just go with what I
really responded to.”
Playing
curator for family work meant a measure of sleuthing that stirred
old spirits. Eric Angeloch prodded his parents to unveil older works
that had been in storage for decades. As he pawed through their
artistic pasts, he rediscovered works that were dissimilar in style
to his parents’ best-known pieces. For instance, by delving
into old sketchbooks belonging to his father, Angeloch found compact,
intimate figure drawings that veer significantly from the sprawling,
feral landscapes for which Robert is best known.
One
major challenge for Angeloch was to title the pieces. The extant
works of his grandparents were commissioned illustrations that lacked
names. Additionally, parents Robert and Nancy, Eric chides, were
not particularly imaginative in naming their own pieces. By way
of example, Angeloch palms a 1959 work by his mother, a composition
in oils of eggplant and fruit that suggests a student of Cezanne.
She has simply dubbed it “Still Life,” without any identifying
number.
CONTINUE....
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