CUZOR - Lot 47

CUZOR STEVE CUZOR HENRY FLEMING'S BATTLE Dupuis 2024 Original plate no. 43. Signed. India ink and white gouache on paper 48 × 62 cm (18.9 × 24.41 in.) The baptism of fire took place. Henry was scared, shot, saw men fall, suffocated in smoke... But he stood his ground, the Southerners retreated, and he's proud of himself. And suddenly, here they come again! The two large horizontal panels, at the top and bottom of the page, offer a striking contrast between the tired Unionists struggling to get back on their feet and the gray wave about to overwhelm them. I wasn't interested in a realistic color scheme with blue and gray coats, green grass and red blood. It's not the realism of the Civil War I'm after, but the evocation of what war is, in the 19th century as in the Middle Ages or Homer's Iliad. Henry's reflections on this page are ageless; they are from every battlefield. S.C. Beyond Steve Cuzor's qualities as a narrator, how can we fail to be impressed by his talent as a painter of atmosphere? A quality all the more astonishing in that he works his original pages in "strict" black and white, i.e. he doesn't dilute his ink. There are no washes here: the gray we think we see is only in the reader's eye. On the page, black and white, sometimes juxtaposed in solid tones, often interpenetrating; black pierced by a flash of light, a reflection on a cap; white broken by the glare of a shell. To achieve his effects, Steve Cuzor doesn't shy away from any technique, achieving a panel of optical grays of striking variety and subtlety, even to the point of atomizing the black to an almost imperceptible level, like those particles flying in a beam of light in a forest, or turning the battlefield air into fog of war. The atmosphere then devours every stroke, and everything that separates one shot from another, a soldier from his enemy, is a subtle difference in the application of this atomized black and white. Better than a painter: a draughtsman of light. Alex Alice