"Ocean Beach Drum Circle": Giving Shape to the Wind, & other related works, of Christian Joseph-Angelique

Hick Planet magazine

tryna find the grownups table on a hick planet

an unperiodical:

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Saturday, 2020 June 6th

issue 3

This drum circle more often played at Hippie Hill (up around the northeastern end of Golden Gate Park) or near the greenhouse. The session depicted in the foreground (to the extent that this picture depicts the one particular time) was on Ocean Beach, across the Great Highway from the park. “We were just people—not all musicians—’cause I wasn’t a musician: I’d never played music before in my life,” Joseph-Angelique says.

“It was very uplifting, because I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown—and it put me on the street. I’d been working for a couple of years, and the working situation was vicious, and it led to the nervous breakdown. Then I met those guys, that’s what kept me going.”

The picture has a couple of self-portraits in it. In the drum circle in the center of the foreground, the artist is the one on the left of the bonfire playing the gourd. He was with them for two years, in ’06 and ’07. They’d been playing for years and played for years after that. The core group also included three Persians, a French-Italian guy, and a friend of the French-Italian’s.

“And anybody—all shapes and forms—can come and play, even if they don’t play well—sometimes it was funny. Music is a world language; you don’t need to speak the same language; it breaks down the borders. One guy—when he was coming, we’d say, ‘Here comes the tambour.’ And I didn’t know his name or where he was from—and he was coming every day. And that’s what the drum circle is about, I thought.”

The French-Italian’s friend is in the lower right; he always played didgeridoo. On the right of the bonfire, in the front, is the Persian guy who’s playing the shaker; “he always brought wine.” Between him and the fire is another Persian; she’s dancing. In the upper right are a couple of drummers who came along and joined in with the group this time. On the far left, the French-Italian is playing flute. And in between him and the artist is another Persian; she often played flute; this time though, she was drumming, and with the artist playing the gourd “it became like a cavalcade.”

There’s a reddish plant in the lower left of the picture; an object is strung up in the center right side of the plant, with feathers hanging off of it: “First, it’s a cobweb—I made it like a dreamcatcher. I established a relation with it.”

Above and to the right of the reddish plant is the other self-portrait in the picture. The artist is sleeping under the tree, on the dunes near the terminus of the Judah trolley line.

On the right side of the foreground are two figures up on the hill. “It’s from those two guys who would sit cross-legged like that, with their hoodies, so I never saw their faces. Then sometimes they would get up and dance.”

Beyond the beach and dunes are the ocean waters. “It’s a study of the design of waves. Earlier I saw some dolphin. I was talking with the Italian-French guy, and as soon as I told him, in a fraction of a second, we looked and saw this one in a wave. It’s like: the synchronicity.”

“This part is way more complex—way more intricate. Everything’s got to go together—everything’s got to harmonize—

“You can’t have night and day in the same picture, and yet you do. And it’s the composition that enables it, that harmonizes it. It’s because I do what I want.” From at the top of the picture, about three quarters of the way across from the left, to the right edge, and staying to the right of an approximately diagonal demarcation that drops down to about the center of the horizon: including the setting sun, an early-evening image of the dusk sky is depicted. And to the left of that demarcation, the image of a starry, moonlit, late-night sky is shown.

In the upper left corner, a placid, slumbrous Greek-god-like head with fluttering braids seems to effortlessly waft a wispy puff. But then the breath rapidly morphs into what might be the most breathtaking and jarringly novel image of the entire picture.

The effortless and serene wisp rapidly gushes forth—in this stunningly unique image—into a starkly powerful, surging gust. In a thrilling and strikingly original rendering, the invisible is made visible.

“I didn’t know I was gonna make this picture like that. When I start, I never know what I’m gonna get.”

Every Stroke of Pencil or Brush Is a Decision

“It’s about acceptance. And what are we doing at the drum circle? We celebrate this. There’s a place for everyone—for every moment.”

The picture is a print of an ink drawing, hand-colored in colored pencil. Much of the ink drawing is done in a style that the artist refers to as empilage.

The Inception of Empilage

“The original drawing could be taken as similar to a blueprint. The print is larger than the original—maybe two or three times as big.”

In the lower right corner, under the signature, the number indicates that this is the artist’s 385th picture. The date below that indicates that he began drawing it on St. Valentine’s Day of 2009. Under that is the notation that this is the 2nd of two hand-colored prints he made of this drawing, that this is the 5th such drawing that he made prints of, and that the artist did this original hand coloring of the print in October 2010. In the lower left corner, above the bottom reddish petal is the notation that this is the artist’s 12th ink drawing.

Christian Joseph-Angelique

More examples of the artist’s works, techniques,
media, styles, and subjects are to be found at:

chriskyscape.thecoolcompanies.com