“Life is a continuous reel… You can plug in at certain points, see a little bit of it played out, then come in, even inventing your own part.”

—Robert Colescott

Robert Colescott’s monumental quadriptych Pontchartrain takes its name from Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana, the second largest inland saltwater body in the United States; the vastness of the lake is comparable to the immensity of the print itself. Measuring altogether nearly ten feet wide and four feet tall, Pontchartrain represents Colescott’s – and the San Francisco-based print workshop Crown Point Press’ – most ambitious graphic endeavor of all time. Even bolder, Colescott, a firmly established painter, approached the monumental Pontchartrain as his first-ever experience with etching as a medium. “Ignorance is bliss,” Colescott recollected of his brazen decision to execute an etching of such magnitude from the get-go. “I needed plenty of help. I had to learn another craft.” Even Kathan Brown, Crown Point Press’ founder, thought the chances of the print’s success were only about 50-50 and would depend highly on Colescott’s flexibility in adapting to the nuanced and, at times difficult, etching process. Of course, Colescott was equally up for the challenge, and Pontchartrain became an immensely successful feat for the publisher and artist alike, a tour de force that echoes the vibrant panoramas of Colescott’s exuberantly satirical works on canvas.

Although Colescott never lived in New Orleans, which borders Lake Pontchartrain, it played a crucial role in his family history. It was the birthplace of both his parents and grandparents, and the area, especially the many speakeasies, honkytonks, and ramshackle houses on the Pontchartrain shore, served as a setting for his father’s many outlandish stories. Notably, it was on a Lake Pontchartrain steamboat to New Orleans that his father – a jazz musician – played a picnic concert with a young Louis Armstrong. On the boat, the musicians were under threat of having their instruments thrown into the water if they stopped playing “Steamboat Bill” for their audience. “I always thought it was just one of my father’s stories,” Colescott reminisced. “But later I spoke to Louis Armstrong at one of his concerts, and he remembered my father and that infamous picnic.”

 
The enigmatic narrative across the four panels of Pontchartrain reveals memories and stories of Colescott’s past, including his Creole heritage, through a myriad of symbols and characters that emerge like apparitions. Out of the calligraphic fog, two paint cans labeled ‘SEX’ and ‘RACE’ – perhaps the unifying thematic cruxes of Colescott’s oeuvre – appear, joined by a pink brassiere, gunslinging hands, lamps with emerging genies, naked women, yellow stars, faces rendered to varying degrees of completion, a house on a hill, sex toys and a hamburger. This seething imagery accomplishes Colescott’s long held goal of making surfaces that “squirm,” and to the artist, the visual cacophony of Pontchartrain represented a mix of allusion, biography and self-parody. “It’s really about our sex life,” the artist told Kathan Brown. “Sex and race, those are my raw materials. That’s why they’re in the paint pots. But I’m making fun of myself, too, because I can’t seem to get unhooked from those issues.”

In combining his dually irreverent and confrontational sensibilities, his raucous figurative style and caustic commentary, the visual and conceptual accomplishment of Colescott’s first etching is undeniable. However, following the triumph of Pontchartrain, Colescott did not become an exceptionally prolific printmaker. As such, this example of Pontchartrain provides a rare opportunity to engage with Colescott’s unquestionably successful printmaking endeavors, at a scale that mirrors that expanse of the artist’s thematic engagements.