Category: Redmond’s Art
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More of Redmond’s Fax Art
These are more scans of the fax art that Redmond did, courtesy of Janice.
Redmond had an eye for art in places other people wouldn’t think– he was always finding beautiful little objects in the world, or turning discarded objects into something beautiful.
He found an old fax machine, made collages, and then fed them through the fax machine– the result were these gorgeously strange, totally Redmond pieces of art complete with splotches of toner and all sorts of beautiful disfigurations. I was transfixed when Janice showed me some of them in real life and she’s scanned these additional pictures:
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‘A Lithuanian Christmas’ – by Redmond, age 13
Redmond wrote this wonderful story at around age 13, and was kept and shared by his mom, Janice. It was read at the memorial service by Emma Sweeney.
A Lithuanian Christmas is not for the weak stomach; its main purpose is to weed out the weak from the strong in the Lithuanian culture. To be considered strong at Lithuanian Christmas dinner, you must strive to be the best at three things; eating fish, drinking vodka, and driving home. After a while Lithuanians got pretty good at all three and if you weren’t you didn’t get invited.
A Lithuanian Christmas dinner is a traditional homage to a time before communists or Nazis when Lithuanians were proud people, a race of simple farmers with hot daughters and national alcohol tolerance rivaling that of Ireland. The traditions performed today can be traced back to that glorious time. The dinner consists of a 12 course meal. A daunting feat for the aspiring Lithuanian, before anyone mentioned every single dish is fish. 12 different bizarre, ancient eastern European recipes for sea life, each one more intimidating and potentially hazardous than the last.
After dinner comes ‘Chaltus Baltus’, or in English ‘cold white’, described as the national pastime. Vodka. You are not asked whether you want straight shots of hard alcohol, you are simply served and expected to have emptied your ornate, massive Lithuanian shot glass by the time the host returns to refill your glass. There’s no stopping until the alcohol dries up. When the alcohol dries up, the musical portion begins. The men sing the songs they learned as boys in Lithuania, passionate and somber. Everyone is quiet and still, remembering the past and the hardship.
Lithuanians are a persuasive hard -drinking people, and literally don’t take no for an answer. So when the thought crosses an aspiring Lithuanian’s mind: ‘what if I can’t?’ ‘Or don’t want to?’ In regard to surviving a Lithuanian Christmas, they may find comfort by telling themselves: ‘it’s not up to me and I’m going to end up doing it whether I like it or not.’
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Redmond, the artist
These are a few selected piece of art from Redmond that Janice was kind enough to share with me. We’ve been planning to continue adding more.
Redmond was always making something and his work used all sorts of innovative materials– he had an incredible eye for diamonds in the rough. (Takes one to know one, I guess!). I remember him telling me about being holed up during COVID and not being able to go out to get materials– when Janice and I were talking about it, she showed me a few Marlboro cigarette packs that he’d used– with incredibly beautiful effect– as a kind of gold filigree.
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“Is this thing on?” ingenious Fax Machine Art
Two works that Janice showed me of Redmond’s that I found to be absolutely gorgeous. If you look carefully in the 2nd panel you can see the figures in the upper left hand corner, and the streaks of messed up toner that almost seem like layers of wheatpasted posters on NYC sidewalk sheds.
Apparently, Redmond found this fax machine somewhere (either a barn or on the street), and experimented by making collages to feed through it.
I was just struck by the ingenuity of it– not only to rescue this object that we almost universally think of as useless, but then to basically ask, “Hey… is this thing on?”
We’re in a time of a lot of nostalgia for old early digital era things– it’s tempting to say it’s because people are sick of contemporary technology but I suspect it’s just that we like anything that seems kind of old– but at this point, it’s like almost a cliché to bring a Canon Coolpix digital camera to a party. Chunky, pixelated VCR text.
Child’s play!
It’s not a contest, obviously, but… Redmond just always had a way of ahead of the curve