This statement accompanied a series of paintings shown in 2007 under the title "Pronk."  To see images from this show click here.

To return to the Statements page click here.

On Pronk

 

“Now feels like a good time to pick a word or phrase, something short, and go after

it, using the available equipment of intellectual retrieval, to see where we get.”

                                                                        Nicholson Baker, The Size of Thoughts

 

 

Pronk is an old Dutch word that means sumptuous or ostentatious.  Pronk still lifes

(pronkstilleven) were products of the latter half of the seventeenth century, still

lifes that reveled in luxury, overload, and decoration.  In the paintings of Jan Davidsz

de Heem and Willem Kalf this specialized genre crystallized into sparkling displays

of fruit, flowers, and rare Chinese porcelain.

 

In seventeenth-century Holland a man of fashion was called a pronker.  In Afrikaans,

which grew out of seventeenth-century Dutch, to pronk means to strut your stuff.  At

some point pronking (or stotting) became the English verb we use to describe a

stiff-legged vertical hop that juvenile springboks (springbok is Afrikaans for

“springing buck”) do when they are feeling playful or threatened.  It involves

opening up and displaying (with much ostentation) a secret pouch of white hair

near the rear end.  Accompanying this display is a burst of scent that sounds like a snort.

It’s kind of tempting to think of pronk as an onomatopoeic word when it’s connected

to the sound of snorting.  In fact, in the Spanish translation of P.D. Eastman’s classic

children’s book Are You My Mother? when the little bird comes across the steam

shovel, instead of the English “Snort!” it says “Pronk!”  Indeed it takes great effort to

avoid viewing much of the history of Dutch art as a string of silly sound effects.  The

seventeenth century alone saw artists with names like De Bloot, De Bliek, Donck,

Doncker, Flinck, Schriek and Vroom.

Cornelis Pronk was a Dutchman commissioned by the Dutch East India Company to

come up with some nice designs for porcelain.  The porcelain he designed is called

Pronk porcelain and is decorated with paintings of flowers, birds, insects and ladies

carrying parasols.  It is exceedingly fine chinoiserie and its production proved so

costly that it was abruptly discontinued.

 

In music pronk is the contraction for progressive punk, and in sports it’s the

nickname for a Cleveland Indians hitter named Travis Hafner.  Travis’ nickname is

another contraction combining the words project and donkey.  There is a Pronk

chocolate bar sold in select stores throughout Cleveland, and even a mezzanine

section in the Cleveland stadium designated as Pronkville.  It is said that cries of

“Pronk!” fill the stadium whenever Travis steps up to the plate.  At this I am

reminded of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s Casey at the Bat: “Then from five thousand

throats and more there rose a lusty yell; it rumbled through the valley, it rattled in

the dell.”  Lately, however, there is little joy in Pronkville.  The Cleveland Indians

missed the playoffs the last two years and finished fourth in their division this

past season.

 

Rattling around in the dell of my own head is the thought that pronk might be a

useful aesthetic category for assessing art in general, and my work in particular.  Or

it might be a useful contraction for product and junk, a combination that appears

frequently in my paintings.  At any rate, I have come to see myself as the juvenile

springbok stretching its legs, the seventeenth-century Dutchman of fashion strutting

his stuff, and I am armed now with a label that expresses something between a burst

of enthusiasm and a snort of derision.

Pronk on,

Robert Amesbury, 2007