A Fragment from July studio notes...

July 5, 2006.

Montreal, afternoon.

From an old, undated note…

At the top of the page, in ink:

Not everything comes out the way that we would want. With this way of painting, sometimes the painting tells things I don’t want to hear. This one says, “Think about death because that’s what you’re going to get.”

 The page is continued in pencil, evidently about a painting I don’t know which one :

And the painting told me—

We are fighting, Death and I. (That’s him on the right, me on the left.) He is certainly bigger than I and has already nearly done in the nymph (but the river flows out between his toes, he cannot stop it despite himself). Yes, that river, see there the sperm in its foaming rapids that gives life to my roots, and my blood flows up and branches—yes, the male (that’s me with the red dot and the flames), and the female (that’s her, the tree with the leaves and the fruit), and the sun that blesses all, for which I reach. Yes, I spring out of the earth and blossom and die. But the sun and the earth and the river, they go on.

 The battle of life against death, of renewal against time.

 

This painting--#1, September 2003,
might be the final stage of the painting in question…
everything is gone but the menhir and the stream of sperm.

 

 

---

Directory to all Fred Martin's Art.