Bob Cozzolino
Curator, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art
When I was a little boy I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I memorized their names and patiently taught the adults around me how to pronounce them. I had a collection of dinosaur books, plastic and rubber dinosaurs of varying sizes, and plush dinosaurs to take to bed. I drew them, considered what sounds they’d make and imagined what they would look like moving about in the real world. This is before Jurassic Park and other hyper-real simulations of prehistoric beasts: my frame of reference was the stop-action movies of Ray Harryhausen and the numerous Japanese monster films that popped up on Saturday afternoon TV in Chicago.
Naturally, my mother thought it would be perfect to take me downtown to the Field Museum of Natural History and show me the dinosaur bones on display in the long hall of that 1912 classical temple of a building. I had my favorite, not the T-Rex but the Brontosaurus, a large and -- to my young mind – peaceful beast. As we entered the exhibit hall I was suddenly struck with absolute terror and a sensation of being out of my body. It was a thrilling mix of feeling completely exposed, suddenly tinier, and aware that anything could happen at any moment. The dinosaur hall was larger than any room I had experienced, the space unfathomable and distances ungraspable. I felt like prey, wandering into a place far out of my scale and realm. And in the center, massive creatures rose to extraordinary heights, lit so as to suggest slow subtle movement; heavy, brooding, presented matter-of-fact. Not the hands-on, intimate, kid-scaled brightly-colored and education-driven dioramas that museums favor today. These were gargantuan beasts stripped down to their dirty skeletons to let you know that they had existed. Their unmitigated realness possessed power. I clung to my mom’s leg and made sure she was between me and the dinosaurs, lest they creak to life and crane their long necks down to have a bite of little boy.
To this day I am convinced that this partially explains why I study, write about, spend hours with, and grow more absorbed with art. And it relates to the art that attracts me. I seek out objects that fill me with wonder, quicken my pulse, and challenge my notions of the real.
Later, when I visited The Art Institute of Chicago as a high school student, I had similarly visceral and emotional, but less terrifying, experiences before paintings: absorbed, lost inside the image, with reality quieted and fading at the edges, projected into paint and color; hearing sound emanating from canvases; and mystified by the miracle of a riveting image that seemed to simply have appeared, rather than been made by human hands. Art holds me because it still retains that capacity to transform my everyday experience in harrowing and joyful ways. I will continue to be here until that feeling fades.
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art
