Once somewhere in the Vatican Museum I saw a box of stones gathered in Medieval times from the road of Christ’s crucifixion. Although my scraps may be only broken pieces of an unknown language, they--like Christ's rocks--are  fragments of a human passing. Christ's rocks are a source of 2000 years of history. Mine will not be. However, since I have no immortality like Christ's but want my traces to survive for a time like his, I will try beauty to give them a grip on hereafter.

Other paintings from June 2005...
 

                                                       Notes about this painting:
                                                           Studio notes, June 9, 2005.
I had wakened early with the determination to make a full size painting of the screaming of failure—I envisioned a large black spreading shape of smeared black—but instead looked at State 3, #13 May 2005 which has never satisfied me. I wrote:

 Yes, old men paint with fingers and spit, their brushes are like dirty mops, their knives like plasterer’s trowels, and they use old nails to gouge… and all to say “I will not die.”

and went to work. The flower pot needed a line of red made with a brush like a mop, and the dead twigs needed a few tiny green new leaves made with a knife, a few tiny white new blossoms made with a small, raggedy square brush. Looking at the painting afterward I remembered how it began. It had been the flesh of my cock in this time of life, the image soon lost to become at last the flower pot with the dead plants now returning to life. Yes, I will not die.

Notes about this painting...
June 11, 2005. Lac Ouaureau, night.
Begin #4, June 2005.
The parade moves on, times change, the concerns of the present
are the forgotten of the past. What, then, is left for those once present
but now past? In the beginning of my work, I wanted “the eternal.”
If Plato and Jung could have archetypes, why could not I?

Well, here we are at the end. So, what’ve I got?
A flower pot of dead twigs,
five very small new leaves and three tiny diamond blossoms.
In the meantime, the present concerns itself
with “international investigations.”

Simply remember all those artists of the first and second
“Art Bank” catalogs that I made for exhibitions
in the late 1950's early 1960's. Where are they now?

June 12, 2005. Lac Ouaureau, 2:00 am.
Working on #4, 2005.
Thinking about last night’s painting (#4, 2005),
cover over the center with “The room is dark and empty.”

June 12, 2005. Lac Ouaureau, 7:30 am.
Complete #4, 2005.
No, the room is not dark and empty; the center is filled with origin.
Mark the lower right with the yellow circle.
Make that be my sign for now... craqueleur and all.

Notes about this painting...
June 16, Oakland, night.
#5, June 2005
“All is over and long gone…”*
everything dies in the autumn sunset.
__________________________
* from Delius Idyll,
":Once I passed through a populous city…"
as Delius adapted it from Walt Whitman

June 17, 2005. Oakland, noon.
Thinking about #5, 2005 from last night.
Old men paint with their fingers and spit,
sometimes knives or nails, a brush or two.

June 18, 2005. Oakland, night.
Complete #5, June 2005.
Put in the young plant.
Cut its roots into the blood earth with a sharp nail.
It’s “Youth and Age.” (Remember Giorgione
and Titian and the "Ages of Man" theme.)

Notes about this painting...
June 21, 2005. Oakland, late afternoon.
#6, June 2005.
In this silence, in this age, the light of old time passing.

June 22, Oakland, late night.
The sense of old time passing
and what people remembered dies with them;
 of the things you had and loved, your love dies with you ;
of the things you made, later people make anew in their own strange ways.

Complete #6, June 2005 with the darkness
and the “death star.”