Treasures from the Vault: Art Cislo

Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, Curator of Prints & Drawings

Art Cislo’s work has been a familiar sight throughout Fort Wayne. Although he worked for International Harvester and Navistar for 32 years, Cislo taught drawing, 2D and 3D design at University of Saint Francis from 2002 to 2013, and has been a regular exhibitor at Artlink and other Fort Wayne venues. In 2008, he received an art commission celebrating the 160^th anniversary of Congregation Achduth Vesholom. Cislo sculpted four bas relief panels for the Temple depicting Joseph and His Brothers from the Old Testament.  

In 2016, the FWMoA organized the exhibition Art Cislo: Expressions of the Heart of Man. This resulted in the purchase and donation of 60 prints by the artist, forming a substantial body of work in the permanent collection. Cislo primarily works in small editions of woodcut and monotype—two processes that are direct in approach and require no press. 

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Cislo attended University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy where classes on the Old and New Testaments made a lasting impression on him. He received a BFA in drawing and sculpture from Wayne State University in 1967. Fort Wayne has been his home for 54 years. 

Cislo’s sources of inspiration in art include Medieval manuscript illuminations, Rembrandt, Edgar Degas’ monotypes, Georges Rouault, and Francesco Clemente, among others. I can easily see his admiration for early 20^th century German expressionists, especially Ernst Barlach, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, Franz Marc, and Emil Nolde. They prioritized the evocative use of line, color, form, and space to communicate inner feelings and personal experiences over mimetic representation. They relished distortion, exaggeration, and subjective description.  

Cislo used an expressionistic style in A Holy Woman. Ever since his school days, Cislo has been drawn to heads and hands, probably for their emotional potential. There is a sense of immediacy as the artist gouged and cut into the wood, creating a decorative pattern framing her face and demonstrating the artist’s love of line and texture. Cislo juxtaposed these stark shadows with soft, painterly modeling through monotype.  

Religious narratives resonated with many of the expressionists, who were working around the World Wars. They sensed these subjects’ power to explore contemporary themes of suffering, existential crisis, and spiritual renewal. Cislo agrees, describing, “I do still believe that these themes (narratives) from the Bible have relevance to the current times—regardless of one’s religious affiliation or lack of—precisely because they are foundational to our Western culture.”ⁱ 

Cislo’s monotype of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect who presided over the trial of Jesus and his crucifixion, is an austere interplay of darks and lights. Cislo cast half of Pilate’s face deep in shadow as we can barely discern his eye. Even on the side in light, darkness falls behind him. This dramatic contrast of light and shadow seems to be a metaphor for the internal conflict facing the subject. Cislo explained, “That is the power of an expressionist style, I think: it is charged with symbolism and meaning not only through its content, but also through the way it is presented.”ⁱⁱ  

Cislo works in monotype alone or often in conjunction with woodcut. For monotype the artist begins with a smooth, non-porous surface, such as glass, as its matrix or base. The artist creates an image out of ink or paint on the matrix, which is then transferred to paper to create a unique impression. Monotypes can be printed using a press or by hand. There are two different approaches to the technique. The dark field manner is a subtractive process. Ink is applied to the entire matrix. The image emerges through wiping away the ink and then adding to areas. The light field manner is an additive process, in which the image is drawn directly onto a clean surface.  

In Bartimaeus, Cislo reduced the scene to its most salient details. The blind beggar in the foreground beckons to Jesus with his extended arm bathed in light. It is an excellent example of Cislo’s use of the dark field manner. He rolled on the ink, at varying thicknesses and then used different methods to manipulate the ink—a sharpened bamboo pen for thin lines, a brush with a solvent, to thin the ink, and his finger. Cislo imprinted his fingertip ridges in the background and in shadows, like hatch marks, on Bartimaeus’ face and arm. 

Cislo enjoys borrowing formal elements and compositions from art history. By working within the tradition of religious painting, he adds further meaning to his works through these associations. Head of Christ Icon is reminiscent of Byzantine paintings of Christ in the wide spacing of the eyes, prominent eyebrows, and flat features, which can be seen in the 14^th century icon from Thessaloniki (https://www.mbp.gr/en/exhibit/eikona-o-christos-pantokratoras-i-sofi/). 

In Cislo’s monotype, Christ is not surrounded by gold leaf, but under closer inspection a series of lines emanate out, like a halo.  

The Song of Songs also known as the Song of Solomon is a poem from the Old Testament. Cislo created numerous prints inspired by this celebration of love. In his frontispiece, the artist contrasted the bold forms in woodcut spelling out the title with lyrical passages in sumi ink for the angelic figures. His prints include deer, gazelles, horses, fruit, trees, and flowers that are all mentioned in the poem. 

In The Song of Songs: Through the Lattice, Cislo depicted a woman, the Beloved in the foreground, and the man seen peeking through the lattice work. The artist rubbed conté crayon on sandpaper, making a powdery pigment that he brushed on the print while still damp to achieve subtle modeling of the woman’s face.  

Cislo is aware of a variety of allegorical readings of the poem and enjoys how his depiction can be enjoyed on many levels. Cislo wrote, “I think that’s what makes art so exciting—the open ended possibilities of interpretation, and the conscious or unconscious decisions that the fabricator makes.”ⁱⁱⁱ The woman is veiled and clothed in dark blue, a color traditionally worn by the Virgin Mary to symbolize her royalty and humility. It brought to my mind Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s interpretation of the Beloved as the Virgin Mary, who personified the Church, popularized in the 12^th century.  

Cislo says that the spiritual is always on his mind. In Self Portrait in Yellow, Cislo takes time to reflect on life, death, and perhaps redemption. The imagery printed in black ink roughly forms a cross. To me, it is also faintly reminiscent of an altarpiece, which sits behind the altar in a Christian church. The altarpiece often includes narratives painted or sculpted in a central panel and hinged side panels or wings.  

In Cislo’s self-portrait, his face discloses the complexity of human nature with simultaneous views of front and profile. The side panels depict Adam and Eve, perhaps a reference to humanity’s biblical ancestors. Cislo stated, “The Adam and Eve figures seem to pop up in my themes at various times. When I was a child, my father had art books that I used to go through over and over. Two very early memories are etched in my mind from that activity: seeing Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and Jan Van Eyck’s Adam and Eve, panels in the Ghent Altarpiece.”^iv A skeletal figure, a reminder of the transience of life, is in the lower portion of the altarpiece format, which is called a predella. In contrast, the scenes in the corners in sepia ink are autobiographical and focus on daily life. 

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