1982 Talk at Smith Anderson Gallery in Palo Alto about the 1981-82 watercolors and October 31 1981 "Self-Portrait as Stag"

I gave a gallery talk about the 1981-82 large watercolors when they were shown in Palo Alto in 1982.  The talk and its slides have been lost for years, but I remember it went like this:

*

How I make my paintings…To start the talk, there was a slide of the studio. The door was open and inside you could see the first of the 1981 large watercolors (March 2, 1981 below).  I had taken the slide right after making the painting because I had been so happy to have made the breakthrough into it and what I felt would be a very productive time to follow.

Then there were slides of the interior of the studio, how the peak of the roof comes down too low on the side walls to make space to hang work but how that same high peaked roof and low walls makes a floor space definitely longer than wide and how the floor boards emphasize that direction to make a flow of space like the polarization of a magnetic field… and that this flow of space was the first element of my work in the large watercolors.

The next slides showed how I set my painting—the blank paper stretched on a 72 x 48 inch drawing board—on boxes so that it was about 18 inches off the floor… floating in the studio space the way a compass needle floats in the magnetic field of the earth.

The next slides showed how I smeared some water on the paper, how I put my thumb partly over the open mouth of a bottle of ink, (I had made special ink that was mostly non-water soluble India ink mixed with a water soluble ink so that if the ink got wet after it dried a halo of the soluble color would develop around the jet black of the India ink) and threw the ink onto the paper…

And then the slides showed how I made a few massive calligraphic strokes with a large Chinese brush… a few strokes because Stephen Pepper had said in the aesthetics course I took at Berkeley so long ago that we could perceive no more than five marks as individuals before they start to coalesce into some larger whole—or just mud.

And then the slides showed how I took up the drawing board while everything was still wet and lifted it side after side each of the four sides up and then down until everything that could run had run in each of the four directions… and how close to my body the painting was as it ran in each direction and how much that tipping and tilting and running in the painting was also in me.

Then the slides showed how I sprayed color from a little mouth atomizer into various parts of the painting, joining my breath to the tilting and dripping of the four directions of space, and how also I would mark and smear and paint with gouache what seemed to appear in the tangling of the dripping and spraying and staining…

And the next slide showed how when that first frenzy (yes, it was a frenzy) of activity had passed, I would sit at the bottom of the painting as it now lay back down on the boxes and floated visually above the floor, how I would sit at the bottom of the painting, open my legs and take the painting’s  image into myself and put myself into its image as it slowly dried over the next half hour or so.

Then there was the next few hours or the next day after the painting was dry—what to do with this thing now that the thrill of making was over and the depth of color had died away in the drying in the way that watercolors do.  What to do to bring life back to what had been so glorious only a short time before.  I told the audience of my gallery talk that what I do is “follow feeling,” and to illustrate this had made three slides, the first showing a piece of paper with the words “Follow Feeling” lettered on it in blue tempera.  The second slide showed the paper sinking into a dark pool of water and the words “Follow Feeling” already running and dissolving; the third slide showed the paper lifted out of the pool as the blue of the words ran down the paper to drip and be lost in the pool’s dark water.

And so the following slides showed how I followed feeling and worked into the painting, using whatever skills of painting and sophistications of aesthetic knowledge I had to follow feeling wherever it might lead… either to some aesthetic and (what was the term? the core of the self?) personal content that could satisfy me, or to failure—no matter how smart I might be, there might be only dead mud at the end.

And the painting that I had made as a demonstration of all this was very near to dead mud at the end.  Yes, I had found my body as a tree that was also somehow a stag, and had found near the base of the tree and the feet of the stag a vial of silver water that was marked with a slash of red for life… but most of the image was dull mud and I had been mostly forcing and faking “the source that is the core of the self.”

Click here for the painting

*

And that—“the search for the core of the self as the ever flowing spring of life as the source and goal of making art,” yes, that was what I wanted my audience to learn of the medium and method and outcome of the making of the large watercolors that were all around them in the gallery as I gave my talk.  But I am afraid that my talk was more an entertainment than a revelation; and so I too had simply faked the making of my work for an hour as they had nodded in appreciation and faked their understanding of this medium, method, outcome and goal of a work of which they had not the slightest idea.