Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (43 page)

Aloysius painted sixteen more blue raven scenes on smaller standard sheets of wove watercolor paper for the
mutilés de guerre
series. Nathan had already started to frame the pictures, but he would not mount the series in the gallery until the morning of the exhibition. He wanted the entire new series of blue raven pictures to be a surprise display.

Aloysius painted
Apollinaire in Flight
, the scene of four blue ravens perched on top and around the rough stone marker and the grave of Guillaume Apollinaire at
Cimetière du Père Lachaise
in Paris. The ravens had enormous watery blue wings with intricate patterns, waves of blue hues on the mane, and very sturdy claws similar to human hands with traces of veins. The crowns of the four ravens were covered with gauzy bandages, a semblance of the actual wounds of the soldier and poet. The gauze was created with a slight wash, and then faintly outlined in blue with a wide soft brush.

Four raven claws held bluish paper scrolls, and on each scroll the title of a poem in rouge,
Le Pont Mirabeau
,
À la Santé
,
Zone
, and
La Maison des Morts
, published in
Alcools
by Apollinaire. Naturally this was my favorite painting in the entire series because the scenes and composition of the portrayal honored a great soldier, art critic, and poet. Apollinaire died on November 9, 1918, two days before the armistice and the end of the First World War. The poet was buried only about two months before we arrived for the first time in Paris.

Aloysius created
Totemic Wounds
, an incredible totem of blue broken faces, a monument to honor the
mutilés de guerre
and the soldiers with monstrous head wounds. My brother painted only two vertical totem scenes
in the entire series. The totem pictures were about two feet high. The
mutilés de guerre
totem was painted at the center of the Champs de Mars between the mighty Eiffel Tower and the
École Militaire.
The painted totem was located near the actual site of the Paris
Exposition Universelle
in 1889, and in 1900.

Three giant blue ravens were painted and posted as honor guards at the base of the monument. My brother painted rouge chevrons on the cocked primary feathers of the ravens. The blue beak of the raven on the crown of the totem was fractured, and only the lower bony shard of the beak remained as a hideous scoop. The totem was painted wound by wound with the broken blue faces of soldiers, the grotesque cheeks, jaws, noses, foreheads, and massive scars mounted and interconnected on the totem as a spectacle for tourists at the Eiffel Tower and cadets at the nearby
École Militaire
.

Blue Horses at the Senate
, the second vertical totem, was a similar portrayal of native and
mutilés de guerre
warriors between the gardens, circular pond, and the French Senate in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The painted faces on the totem were blue ravens and native warriors who had resisted the military crusade and federal detention on reservations. The blue ravens and warriors were mounted and portrayed on the monument with the tortured and broken faces of wounded soldiers.

Aloysius painted and connected the blue ravens and broken faces of soldiers on the totem to the semblances of Tecumseh, Chief Pontiac, Geronimo, Little Wolf, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Chief Joseph. The names of the warriors were painted in various hues of rouge and caught in the nearby trees and shrubbery. The name
mutilés de guerre
was painted seventeen times in faint blue and in motion around the monument.

The native warriors were original and visionary portrayals, of course, because my brother never pretended to paint or depict scenes of authenticity. The soldiers were painted from visual memory of the masks and broken faces of the
mutilés de guerre
. The signature faces and features of soldiers and warriors were fractured and ghastly on the totem, an avant-garde portrayal and not merely the guises of naturalism.

The
mutilés de guerre
were teased as gargoyles and prey only by children, and sometimes pious speculators teased the presence of war demons. Consequently most wounded soldiers on the river ducked their faces in the
presence of children. Some of the carved stone gargoyles were animals, dogs, goats, monkeys, wolves, but most of the figures were fantastic creatures that diverted water on cathedrals, a grotesque ornamentation that once represented evil monsters, and that curse of representation was delivered to the wounded soldiers of the First World War.

Aloysius painted four native warriors on marvelous blue and rouge horses in the ledger art style of natural motion. The horses were in natural motion at the background of the totem near the gardens of the French Senate. The entire scene was vertical, and the wispy blue wash of the watercolor paper merged with the totem of warriors and broken faces, and appeared to float in natural motion with the blue and rouge horses.

The portrayals of the two totems concentrated on the blue ravens, the soldiers, and horses, but not the presence of tourist or cadets at the
École Militaire
. Naturally, there were always tourists near the Eiffel Tower and the Jardin du Luxembourg. My brother explained that the scenes were visionary and ambiguous, and not depictions or renditions of public events.

The portrayals of blue wounded soldiers and native warriors were revolutionary because the scenes were elusive and ethereal representations, otherwise the picture would have been an excessive mockery. Native visionary or avant-garde artists would never paint only to anticipate the praise of cultural realism or the care and conceit of authentic cultural memory.

Saint Michel trounced the devil with a sword and the sturdy wings of an angel in the sculptural exhibition at the monument and fountain in Place Saint-Michel near the Île de la Cité and the River Seine. My brother transformed that tourist square with two nude war widows,
mutilés de guerre
, and blue ravens.

Saint Michel the Blue Raven
was the only portrayal in the series that my brother painted at night. We walked around the fountain and square many times and noted the poses and gestures of the seven sculptures. The muscular devil at the feet of Saint Michel might have captured more tourist attention than the other smaller statues on the crown of the columns.

Aloysius mostly painted in the morning light, but he could not create the scenes he wanted for
Saint Michel the Blue Raven
, so he decided to paint at night in the faint light of a single table lamp. The scenes of the blue raven and war widow saints were heavier, and the hues of blue were darker than the other portrayals. The wash was a faint hue of blue, and the course of
water in the portrayal was created with a bloom or backruns on the paper. Late at night he painted the visionary sculptures near the fountains with a darker hue of blues.

Aloysius painted the four columns of the monument with mushy hues of rouge, and the two winged dragon fountains were transfigured into two blue and nude war widows. The nude statues pointed toward the conversion of the four statues of virtue into blue ravens on the crown of the columns. The statues of virtue, prudence, power, justice, and temperance were deposed by painterly mutations of the
mutilés de guerre
into four wounded soldiers with huge blue raven wings, elongated beaks, and with one enormous claw that reached over the columns.

Saint Michel was always ready to fly and slay the devil in the liturgy of many faiths and religions. Michael was a crusader in Judaism, the spiritual warrior and tricky angel of death in Roman Catholicism, an archangel in Protestantism, and a creator, prince, and patriarch in Mormonism. Saint Michel the winged archangel was fully engaged in a monotheistic duel with the husky devil at the fountain, but the figuration of celestial creatures and magical flight were much more memorable in native stories. Yes, more memorable because the imagined characters were transformational in trickster stories and never represented in sculptural monuments. Stories, and the continuation of creative scenes of transformation and natural motion, were the most honorable sources of cultural memory.

The trickster was an ironic native saint, an elusive character in the best visionary stories. Tricksters were androgynous saints, wild beasts, pests, creators, healers, demons, the necessary contradictions of nature, and in constant motion or transformation in the marvelous scenes of native stories. Native tricksters were more reliable in the end than the winged saints of monotheism and monuments.

The trickster saints were elusive representation in visionary stories, and monotheistic saints were either obvious ironies or the unintended ironies of pious concoctions and doctrines of theologians and plucky politicians.

Saint Christopher and many other saints have been sidelined in holy history, a serious demotion in the hierarchy of the priests, but tricksters were never ousted in native stories, and persisted as teasers of arrogance and piety. The blue ravens were stories of evasive tricksters and forever abused the masters and mavens of naturalism with the testy delights of irony.

Aloysius portrayed the statue of Saint Michel at the fountain as an androgynous creature with a touch of rouge on his navel and the enormous wings of a blue raven. Michel stomped on the devil, and the brute underneath his left foot on the rocky fountain mound was the semblance of the pompous Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The Blau German Emperor wore a Prussian Garde du Corps metal helmet with a nasty eagle perched on the crown. My brother touched one wild eye of the emperor with a black tear. The Kaiser in the portrayal might have been reviewed as a mere caricature, not avant-garde or serious art, but the face of the emperor was fractured, nose severed, one eye gouged, cheek craters, crooked teeth exposed, and creased with scars. The emperor in the picture displayed the wounds and mutilations of the war.

Aloysius created a marvelous scene of blue ravens perched on
Le Pâtre et la Chèvre
, or the Shepherd and the Goat, a sculpture by Paul Lemoyne in the garden of the Palais Royal. Seventeen blue ravens converted the sculpture into a war memorial.
Blue Raven Mutilés
was a portrayal of the broken faces of soldiers outlined in faint hues of rouge on the extended wings of the ravens.

Eugène Delacroix once lived at Place de Furstenberg, near the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des Prés in Paris. Aloysius created an abstract blue raven statue,
Natchez Liberty
, in the small square to honor the Natchez natives and the warrior leader Great Sun.

Delacroix painted
Les Natchez
, a passive romantic scene of a native man and woman with a newborn child, and that became the connection and intense cause to honor the natives outside the early residence of the famous artist. Delacroix was aroused by the native culture he read about in the romantic novel
Atala
by François-René de Chateaubriand.

Delacroix portrayed the inactive natives with romantic Roman noses, and painted the same nose on the robust woman bearing the tricolor in
Liberty Leading the People
. Liberty was painted brave, and walked over the dead in a revolution, but the two natives were passive, a sentiment of tragedy.

The Natchez were at war in the early eighteenth century with the colonial French. Commander Sieur de Chépart had ordered the Natchez natives to leave a particular section of land, but they resisted and were ultimately defeated by the French and native Choctaw. The colonial governor
designated the land as a plantation for the cultivation of tobacco. Great Sun and hundreds of Natchez natives were captured, tortured, and enslaved on plantations in the Caribbean. The French sold many of the native survivors into slavery.

The blue ravens on the statue honored the warriors who had been enslaved by the colonial French. Great Sun wore a feathered crown, and my brother painted similar feathers on the crown of the statue and touched the barbs with rouge. Great Sun, the name, was painted in rouge on the base of the statue. Several names of soldiers with broken faces, and names of
mutilés de guerre
, were painted on the huge leaves of the
platane
, or plane tree.

The French presence at the source of the
gichiziibe
, the great Mississippi River, was not the same as the colonial cruelty at the other end of the river. Our ancestors were
voyageurs
fur traders not colonialists, and the union was by trade, stories, and songs, and not by slavery, otherwise we would have resisted the colonial occupation of the French.

Aloysius painted
The Danton Strategies
as a similar portrayal of the bronze statue and stone monument of Georges Danton, the revolutionary, with warriors at his side, near the Métro Odéon on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Danton was a green statue of insurgence and blue in the original portrayal of the series.

Danton faced north and pointed forever in the direction of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. My brother painted a handsome row of blue ravens with huge wings cocked in various angles on the extended right arm of the strategic revolutionary. Auguste Paris, the sculptor, created a determined gesture that became an eternal ironic point of direction and destination. The painted blue heads and broken faces of soldiers were stacked at the bottom of the monument, between the muscular legs of Danton.

The
Fontaine des Innocents
was one of the oldest fountains in Paris. The fountain, once named the
Cimetière des Saints-Innocents
, was located in Les Halles near the Théâtre du Châtelet. Aloysius painted blue broken faces on the six curved steps that surrounded the fountain. The faces were distinct and painted with alternate traces of black and rouge eyes on the stone steps.

Natives were created in trickster stories, a more humane and ironic analogy to nature and other creatures than the solitary and separate creation stories of monotheism. I was raised on trickster stories, and resisted the
dominion of churchy or federal separatism. Trickster stories encouraged a natural sense of native presence, and surely provided that necessary source of pluck and guile to endure the absence of irony on federal reservations.