A selection of paintings...
March 2005
All paintings are acrylic on paper, 44 x 30 inches
Scroll down for the paintings, click the
thumbnails
for larger views.
#1, March 2005
It is the trunk of the tree of life, growing
out of my skull. And it makes
#6, February
look like a cartoon (which it was meant to be). |
#2, March 2005
It started as "the loss of all you
ever loved," and with having on the
wall in front of me
#6 February along
with a failed painting of the Isle of Cythera
I had made after Watteau. |
| |
From my studio notes while
working on #2, March 2005...
March 10, 2005. Oakland.
That’s it. The word “soul” means as many things as there are
people that use it. Mine is not the soul of the “soul singer” nor of
“soul food.” It is not the soul of the TV evangelist nor of the
minister of the affluent Episcopal Church nor synagogue nor mosque.
Mine is the “soul” of the Existentialist philosophers who although
they never use that word it is near to the soul of the existential
human being. Thus, mine is the soul which like some say of God, is
“not this not that”—but real.
My soul is, then, that in me to
whom a fate befalls and which makes as best it can a destiny.
|
|
|
#3, March 2005
"He does not talk"
| |
From my studio notes after completing #3,
March 2005.
(The painting is really state 2 of
#6, February 2005)
March 13, 2005. Oakland.
Late afternoon.
I made so many pictures then of the springtime of life—the
blossoming pomegranates, the departing sail; must it now be the
autumn… the ripe fruit, the arriving ship? Let it be so!
[I had thought, when I first thought of this ten
minutes ago, before I had the pen and paper to write it, that it would
be a gentle, sentimental, nostalgic lament for all we loved that is
gone. What a surprise, this full harvest of fall.]
Go make it out of the head of death itself…
follow the sunrise in the golden egg of forever.
Dusk
A bird in the twilight tree.
Find your live cry
Or you will die.
*
I have no job—and if I don’t have something to
do, I don’t know what to do. And, among all the possibilities of
doing, don’t die!
*
I am going to come to the defense of some
traditions:
1. Art may be for lasting… like the Valley of the Kings.
2. Art may be for the single soul, like all of us are after Martin
Luther said we may talk all by ourselves directly to God.
3. What’s next? Tell your rotten story as a Glory, like I have told
mine.
*
Well, anyway, it’s early sunset.
Just get drunk and eat.
Here as the sun goes
down, the last flames in the high sky beyond the horizon… whoever is
nearest the fleeting sun is brightest. But the next nearest, although
tiny and dim are as real as any.
Too drunk by now to
think a thought… but it has been three death paintings to tell what
comes next: inspiration and the Sunrise in Forever.
|
|
Shortly after painting #3, March 2000 at my studio in Oakland,
I went to my studio in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec.
The snow was still deep, but by the time the next seven paintings
had been completed, the thaw had begun
and spring would be soon.
*
The idea came right after I got there to work from
my fragmentary recollections of Lao Tze. In one big painting fit
during four days I made #s 4-8, March 2005.
I have included my mis-memory of Lao Tze's text
below each painting.
|
#4, March 2005
Bright, white, watching the four,
Be like the mother bird
Circling o’er. |
#5, March 2005
The spirit of the valley is undying,
Drink, it is ever fresh. |
#6, March 2005
Was going to work on the third of the fragmentary memories
of Lao Tzu, ("…I do not know its name and call it…")
but instead got…My big dick with heart
and sperm in the wheel of time.
Added late night: The time star
(It's that almost invisible pale yellow diamond upper right.)
|
#7, March 2005
…I do not know its name and call it… |
#8, March 2005
Began as:
Last journey west (Lao Tze's departure as recounted by
Ssu Ma Chien (or however they used to spell his name)
Became:
The last journey west is the last sunset.
(The subject was to be my
skull—in the style of
#2, March 2005—and
with smears
of graying yellow ocher moving upward to an eternity sun;
and with a preliminary formal plan to
“let it drift upward from one to another to little to dust.”
However, that’s not how it came out.
Next morning I put the little green tip on the brush, and the painting
became
"Wouldn’t that be sweet, my
art still calling from my grave.
And, it is a lesson to me, what my life is now for."
#9, March 2005
Easter Sunrise
Morning of March 27, 2005
|
#10, March 2005
Night of March 27, 2005 |
From the studio notes for
Easter Day, March 27, 2005
Morning
I will try to paint the Easter Lilly.
By evening, had painted it.
Night
I thought of this a few days ago,
but it matters now as much as then—
If I could learn to draw, if I could learn to paint to let the feelings
out…
Late Night
So it will be, as day passes away…
And
So it will be as night passes also.
But there was one more thought and painting
in the crossing of the months
from March to April. The thought was
in the last of March--
We are like
trees, each individual growing differently,
all coming to the same end.
*
The intent
was in the first of April,
to make the rotting log that we will be--
#11 March/1April 2005
What I got
was the egg.
|
|
