"Handing Me One of the Halves, He Spoke the Single Word, Drink": Translation #23
1969

Between 1959 and 1976, Jess produced a series of thirty-two works entitled Translations. These works, he explained, “translated nineteenth-century images through time to the present.” Their sources, like much of the artist’s work, were reproductions from his large, disparate archive of black-and-white book and magazine illustrations, postcards, and old photographs. “Handing Me One of the Halves He Spoke the Single Word, Drink”: Translation #23 is based on an illustration by J. Augustus Knapp found in John Uri Lloyd’s 1894 book Etidorpha, or the End of the Earth. Jess copied the image onto canvas with a pencil and then painted it in a heavily impastoed, paint-by-numbers style, filling in the original black-and-white illustration with an assortment of lush greens. The text on the back of the painting, also from Lloyd’s book, concerns time, eternity, and the human soul.