The place of these paintings
in my work as a whole:
Between July 2003 and December 2004, I had two museum retrospectives and three gallery shows.  As far as I was concerned on New Year's eve, December 31, 2004, I was done with public exhibitions for a long, long time.  We stayed up here at the lake to welcome the New Year, and after that, around 1:00am January 1, 2005, I went to the studio to paint some New Year's sunrises on scraps torn from one of my failed paintings from the mid 1990's. 
And to write in my studio notes, "Remember, I am not making museum or gallery art, and in the end it is only the image quality of what I know that counts."  This was another way of saying, "Do not consider the final place of your work."  The work is only now, in your self.  Aesthetic niceties and content restraints are not.  This work is addressed to no collector's living room, no dealer's gallery wall and no curator's museum.  The work can be a visual mess and carry content nice people don't speak of like fucking and dying... yet besides eating what else is there in life?

The physical facts of these paintings:
I had been back in Montreal for a few days in early January.  Returning to the studio at Lac Ouareau, and being aware that the kind of paper (Somerset off white, textured, 44 x 30 in.) I have been using for the last seven years has become unavailable to me, I decided to return to the 10 yards x 44.5 in. rolls of Arches watercolor paper I had used exclusively until I had found the Somerset paper in 1997.  I ordered a roll to be delivered to my studio address Oakland, California, but would have nothing to work on here at Lac Ouaureau until I could get back to Oakland at the end of January to pick up the new roll of paper.  I had ten failed paintings from the mid 1990's stored in the Lac Ouaureau studio, and determined to spend the next two weeks painting new work on the backs of the old failures.

The role of text in these paintings:
We hear things in our heads.  Music--Some people hear Elvis, but for better or worse my father trained me away from the popular to the orchestral.  And when I was in high school I heard in my head not the Andrews Sisters but the Tchaikovsky #6, The Pathetique (and most of the other students thought I was).  When I was  in college it was the Rachmaninoff 2nd and the Mahler 2nd, and over the years since it's been most of the major Romantic and Modern symphonic repertoire.   
And then some of us hear words.  Ever since I first began to paint, I have heard sentences that tell me what the painting is.  With these paintings, I decided to write the sentences on the paintings as a way to start.  Generally, the sentence is gone by the time the tumult of making the painting has settled into "What is the most important thing in this thing anyway?"  However, because the sentence(s) meant so much to me to start, and must mean something for the painting even now, I have put the sentences with the paintings on this web page.  At least the viewer if any will know what the painting was supposed to be before it came to be something else.

January 8, 2005.  Lac Ouaureau, near midnight.
I did not invent a new school (“School of Paris,” “New York School”), nor a new style (“Surrealism,” “Neo-Geo”). I have never been part of an army on the march (“Modernism”), nor in the avant-garde of an army (“Post-Modernism”). In this way, my work has never been part of “the art world.”

 I did not “make it new” like automobile manufacturers make “all new” models each year, nor have I made work “new and improved” like annually repackaged breakfast cereals. In this way, my work has not been part of the national economy.

If the purpose of art is to “reveal the new,” then mine has not been the purpose of art. If the purpose of the economy is to “put bread on the table,” then my work has had no economic purpose.

What, then, has been the purpose of my work and how have I fulfilled it? My purpose is to show the ever flowing fountain in the heart by making objects which manifest my heart’s concerns.  These objects, then, I have scattered as best I may across the world so others somewhere somehow like me may find them and in their solitude be reassured of another somewhere somehow like them. In this way, although I don’t make new and don’t make money; I do give voice to the long great sound that is our lives in time.

#8, January 2005 (size 68 x 44 in.
Tonight’s painting, a “poster” under the sign of the heart and the color of the spirit:

Originating text—

Make a painting each day,
tea leaves at the bottom of an old, stained cup,
footprints in windy sand.

I refuse the lesson of the windy sand.

From the youth’s mind [it was going to be cum but I changed it] flooding the land to the old man who sees the sunrise.

#9, January 2005. (size 68 x 44 in.)

The text—

I have no shape,
my only color is dark,
my ache drives your days,
I am the core of you..
(Old paper rotten and yellowing tells my story)

 An observation—

What the tea leaves showed,
what my marks in windy sand revealed
what the spasm of my hand made
what the words bursting from my mouth said
“Well, there’s the shape of your dick, son.”

 Remembering the New York Times Magazine mid 1980’s article about DeKooning—
They have muted painting to become “that most innocent of occupations” (as Hoelderlin told his mother about his poetry).  With these “posters” (graffiti), I have let painting speak my mind.

Poor, dumb thing, painting. They tore out your tongue so long ago. For these few days, I’m giving it back. And in these notes written in my closet all these years, I’ve been writing down your whisperings.

Too bad they’re too vile to reveal.