Jana Millstone never got to meet her biological father. At least, not really. He passed before her first birthday, leaving behind a body of work in watercolor and pastels, and a name—Max. The watercolors would hang in the house, but she would call someone else “Dad.” And for most of Millstone’s life, that was that. But tonight, with the opening of Max and Me at the Lexow Gallery, the artist unveils her latest collection of work, a new series created in posthumous collaboration with the father she never knew, in search of the man he was.
“The only thing I’ve really had is the paintings he left,” Millstone says. “And I’ve had this nagging desire to look underneath and see who this person was.” But what started off as a standard group show, with Millstone’s work on one wall and Max’s on the other, turned into something altogether different and much more involved.
Comprising 18 large-scale tapestry-and-canvas works created in the last eight months or so, Max and Me sees Millstone taking Max’s work—pastel anecdotes from barracks life during WWII, watercolor portraits of exotic gardens and beautiful dancers painted while posted in India—and incorporating it, piece by piece, into collaborative collages with her own work. The result is an image as metaphorically layered as it is literally.
Floating Toward Joy (pictured) is actually a combination of four separate works. The man’s portrait is lifted from a sepia pastel made by Max, as the palm trees in the back are taken from one of his watercolors. Scanned into photoshop and tweaked by Millstone, the images are then transferred onto canvas and stitched into a tapestry then decorated with Millstone’s own fabric art garden imagery. An embroidered poem adds the final touch. “It’s an unusual dialogue,” she admits. And, ultimately, a limited one.
“I did not find my father,” Millstone says, but she found an understanding and a kinship in the craft. “The common ground was the art,” she says. And in the man’s work she found a sweetness of personality, altogether the portrait of a kind and gentle person.
“There’s a language artists use and it’s impossible to be conveyed in words,” she says. “But working over his hand with my hand, it was like seeing his emerge under mine.”
Max and Me opens tonight at the Lexow Gallery at Unitarian Universalist Church, 3975 Fruitville Road, Sarasota, with a reception from 5-7pm.