ACCOMPANYING ARTISTS

Cary Harrison is the author of a dozen novels including the prize winning Richard’s Feet, and some 200 stage plays and TV and film scripts. The Phantom City is his first short story. Born in London during the Blitz to actor parents Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, Harrison has taught at universities on both sides of the Atlantic and in the process of repatriation to his native Britain, in search of a quiet retirement. He has lived in Woodstock, New York, with his wife, artist Claire Lambe, for the better part of 30 years, commuting to Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where he is a Professor of Literature.


THE PHANTOM CITY: MARK THOMAS KANTER ARTIST STATEMENT

This series of drawings began as a way for me to work “in between”; in between jobs and studio, chores, emails, waking and sleeping. From the beginning, it was, a way to work directly on a small surface, without correction. It quickly became a continuing body of work. This was extraordinarily liberating. I was able to cultivate a mental state of “in-between” alongside the temporal. This way of being lent itself to the collaboration with author Carey Harrison that is exhibited here. Carey’s short story provides the text of our book.

I work through a process that writer and artist George Quasha described, in an essay about my paintings from 2017, as “configuration”. Rather than adhering to the arbitrary denominations of "abstraction" or "figuration", my works configure themselves into being through process: a dialogue between mind, materials and surface. No a-priori ideas are inserted, yet nothing is left out. The finished work then configures itself in the mind and imagination of the viewer. Its indeterminacy forms different images for different eyes, bodies and minds.

When Carey Harrison came to my studio over a year ago, I had already made quite a number of these drawings. All I knew was that the series would be called “The Phantom City”, since the first two pieces I made reminded me of the parable of the phantom city from The Lotus Sutra.

I didn’t share the title’s source with Carey at the time. Much to my surprise, Carey sent me the first draft of his profound story very quickly. In my memory he wrote it overnight, but it may have been several days. Carey’s work does the awe-inspiring trick of being at the same time not-at-all and entirely about these drawings.

Carey’s story, in 31 sections, has a cohesion and poetic circularity, like that found in Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake”. Throughout the narrative arc and within each section these poetics spiral the reader end-to-end and within each portion of the story. I believe the drawings as a series, and individually, function in the same way.

Mark Thomas Kanter, August, 2024