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1986-91, The Time of Mourning
Romans and others, 1986.
Click here for 1987-89, Keeping and Giving
Click
here for 1990, Old Tombs and Others
Click here for
1991, Ashes
On the last day of December 1985, I decided to
return to my old images of Venice, the symbol for me of sensuality and
the aging of time (click
here for those), and the images of Rome which had been my eternity since the early 1950's. I began
with Venice in that ending of 1985 because it seemed old Venice would
best represent the state of my dying senses in those years of mourning
after my wife's death in November of 1983. And, because I was--as
I had been in the mid 1970's after my first ten years as Director of
the College of SFAI--in the midst of a life of chaos and change, I went
back to the system of
"pre-established harmony" I had invented in 1974-5.
So the method for the spring of 1986 was to make a
group of random watercolor sketches, make a colored ground to put them
on, and make a grid for the "pre-established harmony" to put them in.
And because the etchings of Canaletto were an intrinsic part of my
Venetian imagery, I used fragmentary photocopies of some of them in
some of the paintings. Same for Piranesi for the eternal ruins
of Rome--whose work I had first seen in the original in the Bancroft
Library at UCB when I was struggling for my teaching credential in
1951-2--and for which in 1986 I used photocopies from a book of
Piranesi etchings Jean had given me for Christmas a year or two before
she died.
All paintings are
watercolor on paper, 39 x 24 inches
Click here for
directory to all 1980's paintings.
Click here for
directory to all paintings
Scroll down for the paintings, click the image
for a larger view.
The Romans...
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Piranesi I
April 12, 1986
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Piranesi II
June 22, 1986 |
Fragments of Life...
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Rainbow Seed in Dark Heart (detail)
Undated in 1986
(Private Collection, Montreal, Canada) |
Last of the Spring
Undated in 1986
(Collection Oakland Museum of California)
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Old Dark Warm Mud
Undated in 1986
Months passed, the
Venetian paintings ended more or less with the “Last Lesson.” Spring
came and I made a Piranesi, a picture of a flower (Rainbow Seed in
Dark Heart, above), a picture of a golden ring on a black stele in a
sunset sky (or was it a dawn?), and a picture of a branch of the Tree
of Life (Last of the Spring, above) as sign of the season.
The end of the spring
semester came and I made my first trip to China. I made Piranesi II
when I got back, but after that my job at SFAI occupied my every
waking second for about a year (we were going through one of our every
ten year disaster/shakeups). In 1987, I bought my first computer. It
had become possible for an individual to write, typeset, illustrate
and print his own work, and I thought this would solve the foremost
problem left me after that branch of the Tree of Life already more
than a year before. The problem was that I had to keep my work—I felt
that if I lost a single piece, the arch of my life would fall—but that
for the confirmation of the art which was also my confirmation as a
person, it had to be something people would like and want and have
(yes, sure, it’s pathetic but true, “Love my art means love me.”).
But, for anyone to have a piece of my art would be my loss of that
piece and would threaten with collapse my so precarious arch. By
making a computer-reproducible art, I could both give my art away and
get love, and keep my art and so keep my life. I made many pieces
this way, combining computer printouts of text and simple pictures (my
printer was 9 pin dot matrix and my scanner four inches wide and hand-held)
with painting.
The rest of the
1980's and the first two years of the 1990's were exclusively with
this combination of computer printouts and painting.
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1986-91, The Time of Mourning
Click here for
Venetians, 1986.
Click here for 1987-89, Keeping and Giving
Click
here for 1990, Old Tombs and Others
Click here for
1991, Ashes
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