Spafford's Iliad

At a Seattle art gallery, showing through the end of the month:  Michael Spafford's "Iliad Series" of woodblock prints--and some oil paintings and drawings.  Here's a description of one:

...Zeus brooding over a black, blank world. Zeus is an engaged god, awash in desire. The world is blank to him because there are no battles in it. His eyes are dark holes cast downward into a larger dark. Halfway through the past century, when religion appeared to be fading from human affairs and even theologians debated the prospect of God's death, Wallace Stevens, in "Sunday Morning," mocked the idea of needing gods in the first place: "Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth./ No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave/ Large mannered-motions to his mythy mind."
...
[Spafford] drew Zeus in profile, whispering the battle dream in Agamemnon's ear. Zeus' lacy beard turns up again as smoke from a funeral pyre. In the final frame, the god again broods in heaven, looking down on the dead, their bent knees raised toward the downward vertical projection of his face.

Between the first and last frames are ritualized yet raw forms of combat, reduced to a streamlined, formal essence, each its own kind of common tragedy. Sword, tongue and phallus serve terrible ends. Black cuts into white space and shadow imposes itself on light. The forms are silhouettes, a strategy Spafford employed decades before Kara Walker. His are nearly all anonymous, swimming in a tide larger than themselves, trapped in their assigned parts.

Spafford does not illustrate the text. He replaces it with a pictographic code that is both prehistoric and completely new.

And if you don't happen to be in Seattle this month, see these pictures on the gallery's website.