Art by Jedidiah Alford.
Dante’s Divine Comedy may be the most influential and irreplaceable book in the Western canon. The grim epic’s fingerprints are on nearly every major work that followed it, from John Milton’s Paradise Lost to T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” James Joyce – about as far away stylistically as you can get from the dour Florentine – wrote that, “I love Dante almost as much as the Bible. He is my spiritual food, the rest is ballast.”
Birminghamians will soon be able to lump in artist Jedidiah Alford with that group. The local painter will be presenting 29 ink images depicting scenes from Dante’s Inferno, as well as four-to-six new oil paintings, at Crestwood Coffee Company on Friday, March 14.
The Inferno has already been depicted by a number of artists – and some sublimely ridiculous video games – with the 19th century French wood engraver Gustave Doré foremost among them. Like NBC’s Hannibal, Doré’s engravings are simultaneously stately and unsettling, baroque and visceral.
Alford’s works in ink diverge massively from Doré’s standard. Instead of crisp, clean depictions, Alford makes good use of the medium to create scenes that imply perpetual motion. There are swirls and eddies from infernal flames and the River Styx, and it’s echoed in an emotional directness in the drawings, as Alford plays up the overflowing passions that landed each sinner in the Inferno. Like Dante’s famous pair of doomed lovers, Paolo and Francesca, Alford’s art calls forth restlessness without ease and violence without ceasing.
There are times when the ink works have a comic book – or Iron Maiden album cover – level of intensity and dynamic kineticism, which makes it a fun (yes, fun) and accessible addition to the litany of grim illustrations of Dante’s masterpiece. And who can’t get behind the idea of their neighborhood coffee shop being filled with images of Hell?
Crestwood Coffee is located at 5512 Crestwood Blvd.