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Scroll Down For Paintings numbered 8
through 15, June 2008 with studio notes about the paintings
All are acrylic on paper, 15 x 11 inches
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 #8, June 2008. |
June 11, 2008. It is sex that drives us out of childhood into time, from a timeless Paradise into the living and dying of the generations. * In 1956 and at the Oakland Museum and matting the Esther Fenner Fuller collection, I fell without noticing out of the Battle of the Titans. I had dozens of small rectangles cut from mat board to make the windows for Esther's prints and drawings and had nothing to paint on and painted on those little pieces of cardboard. After the 6 Gallery show with fifty or a hundred of those little things (we had lots of museum installation generated bits of plywood in addition to the mat board pieces), somehow for so many years and now again, those small things became my format and size.
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 #9, June 2008. June 11, 2008.
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 #10, June 2008. |
June 11, 2008. A revisit of The Urn
Overturned. And then remembering the manuscript dealer who called to say he had bought Jim Elliot’s library and archive, that it had something of mine in it from Dilexi and how much did I think it was worth. (How should I know?) Now, maybe twenty years later, I wonder if he had a copy of the Royal Marks announcement, and who may have bought it, and for what reason. It will never be an “art historical object,” because I have not made nor will a mark in the history of styles that since Vasari is art history in the West. Any mark I make is only the mark of the times of a man’s life, and there’s certainly no art history in telling my story as every one has a life story which is theirs and not mine.
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 #11 June 2008. June 12, 2008. Lac Ouareau, night. "The rest is only pretty, only message matters. "Seeding and budding, sprout and trunk, branch and twig and then the flower then the fruit. Then the dark and rain and snow—we will triumph. "Night falls, day follows."
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 #12, June 2008. June 12, 2008. Lac Ouareau, late night. "So much to see, so much to know So much to do, so far to go Before the night" (With evening star) |
 #13, June 2008. "Look at the sunset-- follow it and die. But listen: the dawn is roaring at your back."
June 13, 2008. Keep the dawn coming, the signs and
symbols,
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 #14, June 2008. June 13, 2008. Lac Ouareau, morning. "Seed to sprout Bud to flower Fruit to fall and rot to seed to live again" If it had a title,
it would be |
 #15, June 2008. June 13, 2008. Lac Ouareau, morning. #15, June 2008. Remembering the 18 x 18 inch “Little Gray Home in the West" except that when I looked it up, it turned out to be ""The Little House in the Greenwood Grove" See about the 18 x 18 inch collages ► |
About
the work of the years 1961-65 There was a goal to my work I did not know; there was an image there I did not see. The goal was my growth from the sailor to the good husbandman, and the image I did not see was the picture of that process. I did not know the goal no matter how ardently it was desired because I knew only what I was that I did not want to be; I did not know what it was I would become. I knew I would die in the polymorphous ocean of a sailor’s lust burning in my blood; I did not know that the fields and orchards of the Sonoma of my childhood would be the aurum nostrum to tell me how to live. Teleology is the study—the knowledge—of the growth of forms in time from their origin until their extinction. I think now my paintings 1961-65 show the teleology of the forms of my life as I became a husband and father, a householder and a man. The alchemist looked into the alembic; I looked into a square of paper on the studio table. Our methods differed but our goal was the same. Out of the nigredo that is the true source of all my life never to be denied and forever praised as origin and food for every day, my goal like the alchemist’s (Continue ►) |
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◄The
Little House in the Greenwood Grove, 1964