OHA 1979

The Boars Head Dream

Art:  1979
Media: etching & aquatint (hand-printed from a zinc plate)
Size: Plate image size: 24 in. H x 18 W

One extant proof, collection of the artist.

The print was made in response to someone, probably a student, who left a black & white photo of a severed boar's head in my flat file* in the printmaking room at the School of Art, University of Missouri, Columbia. (*a wide shelf drawer used to store drawing, etching paper, etc.)
~
Note by the artist, Dec. 28, 2018: I think the self-portrait, of my face, is not especially well drawn; the skull above my head, and the skeleton, at upper right, are reasonably well done. But the sentiment was clearly evoked. I don’t remember if I had actually dreamt this, in a nightmare, or if I did the imagery as an intellectual response to the happenstance of whoever had left the disgusting photo in my flat file among my papers and prints.

~
My ten-page M.F.A. written thesis, Graduate School, University of Missouri at Columbia, offers insight, and yes, it was from actual nightmares: ‘Topical Sources and Aesthetic Considerations in my Works, July 1980.’

My writing section titled ‘The Jewish Experience’ begins on p.1.
On page 2: The Boars Head Dream. Etching & aquatint, executed fall 1979. “This grew out of innumerable actual nightmares I had regarding the Holocaust. Often, in these dreams there are Nazis and Gestapo-like men, roundups and herdings of Jews into stations and onto trains, resistance and killing. The nightmares are permeated by a tremendous fear and sense of dislocation.

The etching is a portrait of myself screaming or yelling, with a boar’s skull firmly rooted to the top of my head; the boar, or pig, is an unclean animal within Jewish tradition.

To the side is a human skeleton, hanging upside-down, and connected to its head is an ethereal sphere held up by a pair of eagle’s claws. Inside the sphere is a swastika. The eagle image was used in Nazi decoration atop poles in military mass-demonstrations and for insignia on uniforms.”