American artist Jess, born Burgess Collins, studied chemistry at the California Institute of Technology and was later drafted into the army to work on the Manhattan Project.
In 1948, he experienced what he called “the dream” where he witnessed the earth being destroyed by nuclear weapons in the year 1975. Within six months of the dream, Jess quit his job in plutonium production and moved to San Francisco where he enrolled in studio art classes. He first studied at the University of California at Berkeley and later the California School of the Fine Arts under Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Ad Reinhardt and Clyfford Still. Jess met the poet Robert Duncan and began a lifelong relationship that resulted in an ongoing artistic/ poetic collaboration. This relationship galvanized Jess’ combined use of lyrical imagery and descriptive text.
Jess had his first solo exhibition at the Helvie Makela Gallery, San Francisco in 1951.
In 1959, the artist began an important series of works called The Translations Series. The series began with twenty-six paintings that combined enlarged reproductions of photographs, engravings, and literary texts. This painting, completed in 1975 is number 28 in the series which the artist continued to revisit throughout his life.
Crossing and Recrossing the Heart: Translation #28, is a wonderful example of the artist use of mytho-poetic themes, signs and symbols that hasten back to the artist’s early surrealist influences.
Unique among Jess’ most accomplished works, Crossing And Recrossing the Heart contains an important inscription where by the artist explains his particular source material:
Translation #28: from 2 illustrations in Mexican and Central American Mythology by Irene Nicholson: Codex Vaticanus of “Quetzalcatl, the morning star being swallowed by the serpent, earth, as day breaks and the sun returns”, and Codex Fejervary-Mayer of “Lord of the Vanquard, or Lord of the Nose, Yiacatecuhtli, …god of the Pochectas, the traveling merchants… followers of Quetzalcoatl”
Also inscribed on the back is an Aztec poem translated from the Spanish of Angel Maria Garibay by Irene Nicholson and reprinted in Laurette Sejourne’s Burning Water:
“…I offer, offer flowering cocoa:
that I may be sent to the House of the Sun!
Beautiful and very rich is the crown of quetzal plumes:
may I know the House of the Sun, may I go to that place!
Oh, no one contains in his soul the lovely inebriate flower:
sparse cocoa flowers giving their fragrance in huexotzinco’s water.
Each time the sun climbs this mountain
my heart cries and is sad:
would it were the flower of any heart; painted in beautiful colors!
The King of those who return sings on the flowers”
This work has been included in many prominent exhibitions on the art of Jess including: Jess: Translations, Salvages and Pasteups , Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Dallas, TX, April 6 - May 8, 1977; Eight Artists, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, April 28 - June 25, 1978; and the important exhibition Jess: a Grand Collage 1951 - 1993, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, September 12 - October 31, 1993; exhibition traveled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
