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From Studio Notes, January 2006 |
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What I saw this morning on waking was a locket of my now graying scraggly lengthening pubic hair… saw that I might make a painting by trimming its scraggles and encasing them in heavy gel like those old gold or silver lockets with a crystal cover over a lock of hair from the dead beloved. Well, maybe in this case just some ashes and some tangled lines in the gel… and blood? Will I ever have to give up blood, too, like semen is going? It’s not awfully big. Hardly more than life size, this locket to hold the hair… * Remember the other day and that whatever I paint I should always feel it in my body as I work. But also remember that other thing I’m always supposed to remember—“Make it outside yourself.” That is, in more technical language, “Make the objective correlate of inner feeling.” And that is, in the way language rises as I work, “Make what the hermit soul knows who needs no lamp to search the world because the truth is always in the promise of the heart.” I want to feel it with my hands, look at it with my eyes… No, make it only on the paper. Make the locket, hang it on your breast where the promise of a lifetime goes… * Ah, well. What I set out to make—the image of a locket of my pubic hair—and what I came out with—Dido of Carthage’s locket of the tree of life—are two different things. But, that’s what my art is for, to find out what I did not know. Yes, Dido of Carthage, I will remember you—the “eternal woman leads us on”—and I will wear your locket until I die.
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