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The "Large
Diamond" paintings began in the summer of 1993, when it was planned
that one of my classes in the fall of 1993 would be a graduate
seminar on the spiritual in art. I was now filled with the roar
of the life of the senses and of the mind—and what is spirit if
not both of those pulsing together in our bodies between earth and
heaven. I decided to make a backdrop for the first class
meeting. It would be enormous (it’s 126 x 126 in.) like stage
backdrops are supposed to be, with flesh on the left, mind on the
right, earth at the bottom and heaven at the top. I somehow
imagined myself standing in front of it at the first class meeting
to introduce the subject of the seminar. By the time the
semester started a certain timidity set in and I never used the
backdrop. By January of 1994, however, its size got me going on a
series of paintings of this 126 x 126 in. size.
(My son Anthony had bought a very old, abandoned house in West
Oakland to revive and live in. Before the revival, I took
advantage of the opportunity of an empty, ruined house with 12
foot ceilings to photograph this and the other "Large Diamond" paintings.)
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Body and Mind, Earth and Heaven
June 7-14, 1993 |
Shanghai
I
came from remembering a trip down the Huang Po river the
summer before, in 1992. In those days, the river was filled with
long trains of abandoned freighters chained together, rusting silently
in the night. This painting was to express my feelings of the
space, the texture and light of that. Nowadays (2004) and with
the rise of China as a very major economic power, those ships are
gone.Source of Power
was made because I wanted to show the power my new life had
brought to me, and to bring to life again the life-symbols I had found
in the small collages of the late 1950's. One of those symbols
was of a seed sprouting that was also a phallus rising--the power in
my male life then in my early manhood and then again now in my early
old age. I made this, with the spiraling roar of life coming out
of my crotch: the source of power.
On the lines in an old man's face--a memory of a youth's
ambition
was made because I wanted to seek
and show the origins of the lines in my face which are the lines
grooved deep in my whole body itself. The texts are:
Top: “Of the
three ages of man, there is a fourth—now.”
Left: “In the lines of an old man's face, the memories of his
youth's ambition: apocalypse, ecstasy, utopia; lines of color,
light, fire carved in flesh and blood, lines of hope and fear cut
in mind and soul"
Right: “The lines
of youth etched in an old man's body tell his fate—the phallic
driving in his flesh—and show his destiny—to build a world of love
and care.”
Bottom: Lines of
love in veins and blood, worn in flesh by time, carved in bones by
death, all the dark and all the flame now, then, always, forever."
Other paintings in
the "Large Diamond" format, of which photos are not available
were:
Shanghai II, January 9, 1994
Hangzhou I, or The Face of Male Hunger, February 4, 1994
Four paintings about cunt, March 20, 1994
There was one more
"Large Diamond" that was to have been about Kandinsky and his "In
the time of the great spiritual." I never could work it out,
and only the top part survived. It became the cover
illustration for the catalog of my Oakland Museum Retrospective in
2003.
K in Diamond
February 12-16, 1994 |
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