|
1986-91, The Time of Mourning
1987-89
Keeping and Giving Away the Arch of Life...
Click here for 1986
Click
here for 1990
Click here for
1991
 I bought my first computer
in 1987. 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 making that branch of the Tree of Life
already more than a year before (see 1986,
Last of the Spring). 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 then 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 dot matrix and my scanner four inches
wide and hand-held) with painting. A few, even, from time to time I
gave away.
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.
I began with
pamphlets—one On Beauty, another about Dirt in the Gutter
(the then two poles of my inner life—and broadsides… imaginary
postcards from Italy: Rome, the gardens at Tivoli, Venice. Each copy
was the same image and text, and each was painted differently. I read
a review of
Lagerlof’s Ideal Landscape, Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and
Claude Lorrain, and set out to make ideal landscapes scanned
not from her book but from pages of The Art Bulletin. One
image was an ideal image about “bring back Palladio”… Jean and I had
been to his Villa Rotunda as the dream mandala villa of the center of
the soul. Another of my images was scanned from an early 19th
German print of a ruined tomb on the Appian Way… I made it an image of
death—even the tomb was a dead ruin—and transcendence into the clouds.
Aphrodite, Dionysus and Priapus
(my family portrait)
Undated last half of 1987
|
The Geography of Beulah
Undated in 1987 |
Dragon Song I
July 1988
|
Dragon Song II
July 1988 |
Dragon Song III
July 1988
|
Dragon Song IV
July 1988
|
|
There is no music of that power...
July 1988 |
Untitled
April 28, 1989
|
Verbal Color
July 15, 1989
|
Click here for 1986,
Venetians, Romans and Others
Click
here for 1990, Old Tombs and Others
Click here for
1991, Ashes
|
