All that jazz
JEAN KRASNO HONORS THE AMERICAN SONGBOOK THROUGH COLLAGE
As a visual artist, Jean Krasno’s main focus in recent years been on a series of painted collages she calls the “Art & Jazz” collection. Her inspiration, and her titles, come from songs with the kind of staying power that qualifies many as American standards. Last fall, one piece, “Isn’t It a Lovely Day,” took first place at the Ridgefield Guild of Artists juried members show.
The song itself is by Irving Berlin from the 1935 musical “Top Hat,” and Krasno says the version she listened to while doing the collage is from an Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong album she loves.
“It’s just an upbeat kind of song,” she says, before softly reciting a favorite verse; “Let the rain pitter patter/It really doesn’t matter/If the skies are gray/Long as I can be with you/It’s a lovely day.”
Krasno’s rendition has a tropical paradise feel to it. Two lovers, dark-skinned with insubstantial bodies, appear to have fallen asleep in each other’s arms, cradled in a pistachio-green hammock. There are white raindrops and red flowers and a barked hint their love nest could be in the top of a palm tree.
When she exhibits the collages, Krasno includes the lyrics, which creates an odd effect. Detached from the music, the lyrics can read like
improv poetry, especially when paired with the collages that themselves often contain surreal elements.
One of her newest collages, “I Could Write a Book” from the Rodgers and Hart musical “Pal Joey,” shows another darkskinned couple embracing, this time in a bower of flowers. But Krasno wants you to look closer.
In the lower right hand corner, there’s an open book on a desk, with a pen poised over it. In the lower left corner, what may be three mice ride a book like a magic carpet. At the top, loose pages fly away. Krasno says the idea for the collage came to her while listening to one of her sons play the tune on the piano and that she later executed it while listening to the Miles Davis recording.
The song begins, “If they ask me, I could write a book.” Krasno recalls she immediately told her son, “I love the image of that,” then adds, “Plus I had been writing a book that I was struggling with.”
The book is a nearly finished novel set in Brazil with the working title “Secrets and the Disappeared.” Right here it’s important to pause before continuing with Krasno’s improbable story. Krasno writes fiction under her maiden name, Jean Cullander. But her main career — and third public persona —has been as an academic.
Krasno earned her doctorate in international politics in 1994 at the City University of New York, about the same time she moved from New Canaan to Ridgefield. She remains a full-time CCNY faculty member, teaching spring semester courses remotely. She also lectures at Columbia and for almost 20 years was a lecturer and associate research scientist at Yale. She regards her novel in progress as a popular rewrite of her doctoral thesis. It examined secret efforts by Brazil’s former military regime to develop nuclear weapons.
Her first novel, “The
Train to Skeleton Coast,” self-published in 2016, also borrowed from her academic career. The protagonist, a Yale doctoral student, finds her life threatened when she escorts an orphaned child back to his family in Namibia, the arid south African nation that is the location of the actual Skeleton Coast.
Asked how she manages to juggle creative and academic interests, Krasno responds with a verbal shrug. “It’s okay. I can still do all my art and teach and write,” she says. “As a matter of fact, I have a book that just went to the publisher the day before yesterday. It’s called ‘Banning the Bomb.’ It’s about the new U.N. treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons.”
The scholarly book, which has a co-author, is peer reviewed. Her list of academic publications is long and often U.N. linked. She’s written about Namibia as U.N. success story. One of her big projects was organizing the papers of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Her art came first though.
Krasno grew up in Illinois, majored in art in college, then went to Stanford University for an MFA, concentrating on painting and printmaking. It was the 1960s and Stanford was a hotbed of antiwar protest.
“There was a part of me that kept saying, ‘You have to get involved. You have to emerge.’ So I did a whole series of women rising up out the water,” she says.
One, a lithograph from 1969 titled “Woman in Sea,” is now in the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1972, she had a one-woman show at a prominent gallery in Chicago. Then came marriage and two sons. At one point she lived in Brazil, where her now former husband worked for the Ford Foundation. They arrived in Connecticut in the early 80s, where politics and art again converged.
In New Canaan, she joined the national Nuclear Freeze movement, whose local proponents met at St. Marks Episcopal Church. Her involvement, heightened by concern for her young sons, led her to political study, and eventually to graduate school. She says the admission panel was impressed by her seriousness and the high honors she earned in college.
Meanwhile, before her doctoral study intensified, Krasno exhibited a few times at the Silvermine Art Center and took classes there with the master lithographer James Reed, the owner Milestone Graphics in Bridgeport. Lithography (printing from stone) had always been a favorite practice. More recently, Reed printed 60 sheets in different colors that she uses, along with old lithography proofs, in making her Art & Jazz collages.
“I tear the paper. I love the look of the torn edge. I draw on top with pencil or oil pastel. You can smear it,” she says.
One of her favorite collages is of Billie Holiday and is titled “Some Other Spring,” a 1939 song with a torn lyric. “Now I cling to faded blossoms/fresh from worn/left crushed and torn.”
Krasno began the series about five years ago, partly to connect with her sons. Both are musical, but one Eric, is a Grammy winning guitarist and songwriter. The series is still growing. A couple are inspired by Aretha Franklin songs.
She’s also has begun to experiment with sculpture. She has two pieces in the Silvermine Art School Student exhibition on view to Aug. 20. Her instructor is Justin Perlman. Krasno says she went back to school, again, because she needed to learn how to cast in bronze.