From Studio Notes, February 2006

◄  #4, February 2006 
February 19, 2006. Oakland.
Afternoon.
Concept: A rock. “Inscrutable.”
What does it mean? Well, you’re looking at it.

February 21, 2006. Oakland.
Night.
Can you paint when the feeling is past and only a note like February 19th's “Concept: Rock” remains? 18th and 19th Century French painters made sketches in the Italian country side to use later for “classical” landscapes in their Parisian studios. Yes, they made “machines” of classical themes. Well, now, make a machine rather than the actual--make a picture of  a rock instead of one of death.

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A painting a day keeps the doctor away—and, anyway, what do doctors know?

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When Jean died—I was holding her hand and all through the night had embraced her whispering again and again, “Upward, with every breath, upward”…toward the end that very early morning, she said a few times only, “Oh, God, soon.”

In those days I was still practicing methods for the awareness of “subtle energies,” (practices I have now long since abandoned); and when the end came—I was sitting beside the bed at her left, on the east side of the room—I remember a rushing in space sweeping up to the right, into the west.

There is the New Age talk, the religious assertion and the physiological science of “the great white light.” The talk is of the transcendent experience of dying. The assertions are of Paradise, Heaven, Nirvana. The physiological science describes the epiphenomenon of a dying nervous system. If it be true that the great white light is simply the brain’s representation to itself of its death, how fortunate for us that we get shining light instead of numb darkness.

And so this painting of the ineluctable rock of death is for Jean Fisette Martin. It is the road cut through the dark stone to the great white light as she may have traveled it one early morning in November, 1983.