YELLOW

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Il Funambolo (The Tightrope Walker)

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.

White Horse Rider

INTERIOR PAINTING, Oil on canvas, 16 x 12″.

This painting is an actual memory of riding a very large white horse which I eventually fell off of while galloping at full speed. I was small at the tyme, and had never been on a galloping horse. He was a beautiful horse, all white, large and fast, generally acknowledged to be the fastest horse on that farm. I included a Roman-type background with lots of color -in this sense I am a ‘man of color’- and the blindfold to indicate my (and your) general cluelessness as a human being.

Strangely, he had a feminine name, Nora, which riffs nicely off the horse as symbol for the soul, its feminine and masculine aspects. So we were returning to the farm after having been out most of the day. We were a fairly large group, hot and sweatty all – in a movie, we might have constituted the posse’ which is going to get its revenge. At some point my sister and brother took off like rockets, they had agreed to race the rest of the way back. Nora saw this, and inside her own soul decided that no one was going to beat her back, and she took off like lightning. Taken completely unaware, I groped for the reigns, which were really long, and caught the very end of them. These I tried my best to pull back to stop Nora, but far as I tried to yank them back, there was still slack between the bit in her mouth and my little hands. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Well, I think we’re looking at a major accident here…’ whereupon I fell off of the world’s greatest horse.

It struck me later that if I had opened myself up to Nora in some way at that moment when she had taken off, I might have stayed on her -I mean him- and completed that ride. The issue was ‘opening up’ to the soul, allowing oneself to be guided by it, not the other way around. But instead I fell off, gashed my chin horribly, and I still hold the mark.

When your soul takes off on you -and who knows when it will- are you ready to stay on it? That was the lesson, and I remember being so impressed by the fact as I looked up from my splattered position on the ground, Nora had come to an immediate halt, it really was important to her to know how I was. This painting, now in Houston, is dedicated to her for providing one of my great life memories.

Falling Man

INTERIOR PAINTING. OIL ON PANEL 36″ x 24″.

This painting came to be relatively quickly for an ‘interior painting’. I painted it while I was constructing a ladder out of concrete in my backyard, which almost broke my back. I later painted that concrete ladder (with bright latex stripes!), and while I was doing that during the day, I was painting this image in the evenings. Some people have called me a symbolist but I dont really think they’re right, tho they might be slightly right. I remember I was reading a book on Egyptian mythology at the tyme (note top of ladder). People falling have always entranced me.

Untitled

INTERIOR PAINTING. OIL ON CANVAS, 16″ X 12″

This painting grew out of an older painting which I was never really satisfied with, an image of a ‘red man’ holding a broom and standing somewhat incoherently in a forest. I had actually spent alot of tyme on it, but it never really convinced me, and gazing one evening into that image, I thought I screed this fleshy nude there beneath him, and decided to call her out at the risk of losing the Red Man. (If you look really closely, you can see a palimpsest of his head just above her head).

I did lose him, but I gained her. I much like this image, which is to convey the idea that we are all of us lost in some way, no getting around it. Leaving her naked seems to increase her lostness, not that I planned it that way, since I never plan these things. I gave this painting to my Mom Peg even tho she never really trusted my images. After she died, the painting passed on to Tony Grimaldi who has it on his bathroom wall in Kansas City, Missouri.