This small painting is all about ‘the urge’, the ancient force; and I hope it shows my love for Max Beckmann’s work, one of my painting heroes. I had recently seen a retrospective of his in Paris, a truly memorable experience, one great painting after the other, each one full of sumptuous color, high dark/light contrasts, and invented imageries straight from the psyche. One was a beautiful self-portrait holding a horn, and I sort of riffed off of that here.
This is another one of my thick paintings. As the painting slowly developed, and this sort of wonder-scape started to crystallize, I found myself looking for signs of people somewhere in the image, but I couldn’t find them.
Why I should need people to be there was a question I never really confronted, anyway the scape by itself kept feeling ‘almost resolved’ but never quite. There arrived an agonizing period lasting months where I would turn the painting upside down, like its possibility better than its ‘true orientation’, and bang away at it for another week that way, only to revive its old orientation again after reconsidering its possibility in the wake of the new changes. What was once a rough sea at the bottom would become a turbulent sky at the top; I seem to be attracted to unintended images.Thus my fictional landscape oscillated back and forth between this and that, a truly insane rhythm with special appeal for the Libra, which may indicate the world’s inability to satisfy me (or us) deep down.
It occurred to me at a certain point that the painting felt quite oriental, even though it had become too complicated for that comparison to really hold. It got to the point where every time I turned it upside down, I liked it better than the way it was right side up. I think in the end the painting got mad at me -too much paint- and so I finally surrendered and signed off.
But a few months later, when I happened to be looking at it on its side, I thought I spied the double-image of Dante & Virgil, always seductive to me those two. I held my gaze tight on that spot for a spell -partly in order to coax them out, partly to be able to recall them in color later. This to let you know that the painting you are seeing here is a bit different, now it has in the lower right corner the image of Dante and Virgil, but everything else -the bright yellows especially- remain.
cari tutti, che pensate di questo quadro?
INTERIOR PAINTING, OIL. (16 x 24 inches)
I fought this painting tooth and nail, which is to say that I messed with it for a long tyme, and in fact, most of it is painted with a knife, that is quite thickly. The bottom left of the painting has been repainted, so this image shows it in an earlier state, which at the tyme I believed to be finished. At some point -I was a little drunk- I attacked it again with the knife, so that now that lower left quadrant is even thicker, the architectural stuff has been covered up, but I like it better, more raw, more real.
I started this painting upon my return from my last trip to Italy, which was in 2004. Of the many trips I have made back to Italy (some, or none, of you know that I grew up in Rome) that trip was decidedly my worst. This was one of the Study-abroad trips that I occasionally get to do (we stay in Tuscany and travel around to different cities and I teach our American students Italian there). Generally we bring about 35 students, and 5 faculty, ranging from Art, Architecture, Arthistory…and me.
In some way that I will not try to explain here, I didn’t click with that group, neither with the faculty nor the students. But it was strange since my previous trip there in ‘02 was so great. My mom Peg had died just a few months before this ‘04 trip, and it took me longer to get over it than I thought it would. But most of the students really were alright, I was the one who wasn’t right. They were obedient, believed all the things we taught them, and they seemed disappointed when I didnt want to get drunk with them. In November, when we did our Sicily trip, bush got re-elected. (we were in Siracusa at the tyme, and alot of us went to bed thinking Kerry had actually won.) A few of them actually liked bush, though most didn’t seem to care this way or that. Being someone who saw America in its deathbed, I had to watch what I said.
Back in Texas, I remember it was hard to get my head back into painting -I hadnt painted in 4 months- and this one would be the first. I stared into the blank whiteness of the canvas for a long tyme, thinking I needed a new approach. But I didn’t have a new approach, all I knew was that I really wanted to defeat that whiteness, that blankness, and so I finally attacked it with the usual splatter-method, anything goes when you start a new painting. I got into it, then I tried to scree into the paint as is my want, to see what I might see. After months of diddling, cover-ups, and broken commitments to one image and then another, I finally understood I was staring into a possible map of Italy, and decided to make the land water, and vice versa. It was good because I’ve always loved maps, and I’ve wondered why I had never painted a great big map painting. Eventually I saw the tightrope walker hovering above the water. I thought that if I brought him out, I could make the background behind him look really vast, which somehow turns me on. The image of myself as tightrope walker seemed appropriate enough as I had tried to guide that group through this and that city or situation. You can see a group of people in the background (upper right) whom I take to be my students, but my friend Philip disagreed.
“Who do you think they are then?” I asked him.
“The Chorus.” he said expertly. He was right – there’s something strangely Greek about this painting of Italy.
This is my image of unrequited love. It looks like a movie set inbetween scenes, and the river feels to me like the Nile, which I have never seen. Most words on this topic seem rather sappy, so I’ll just mention that I owned a small truck at the time, like the one in this painting. I was thinking of this very special woman one day while trying to make a left turn at Riverside and South First where I thought I had the right of way. After I lost the truck, it occured to me that fate might have served me well by not fulfilling my urgent wish for ideal love since I probably dont have the apparatus to process its eventual departure. Of course, it took some years to realize that, just a couple of weeks to paint this picture…enjoy!
