20 X 16 Acrylic and Oil on canvas. 2000.
This is a painting of me painting, trying to break through as it were, with the help of the moon. Sometimes I think I’m approaching a new image, one I might fall for, only to scrub it and rebegin again. The idea is to not trick yourself into believing you’ve arrived, and so stay busy arriving. In this the moon is my ally, coming and going in all of her guises.
This is a small interior painting, in acrylic. I had spent some time painting landscapes from life, and this was one of the first ‘interior’ paintings I did after that. Spiritual dimensions might open to the seeker, especially through art; I was reading The Outsider by Colin Wilson at the time.
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.
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!
