From studio notes relating to these paintings...

January 2, 2009.
Lac Ouareau, very late night.
Reading and looking at all the notes for “Where will you go and how will you get there?" (#4 August 2008). We all know where we are going, and we find out how we got there when we have arrived.

Noticing the program for “Dr. Faust” a couple of years ago in San Francisco and remembering the opera…
Artists try so hard to make their work novel by using formal inventions to make their work new. But formal inventions to make new are always disconnected from the absolutely new of direct personal experience.

So, tell your life, you know no other. And, use formal invention to get flash? None of us are flashy in the soul— just poor beggars living and dying with the most love and the least pain we can get.

 

January 4, 2009.
Lac Ouareau, afternoon.
Thinking about what to do to start a new painting, looking for some fresh paper by looking in the pile of old stuff leaning against the studio wall, came upon #22 February 2002. Trying now to think about what to make of it to tell its truth—make “Old crystals of dead cum dried on the walls of the dirty pink room at the top of the Harrison Street house.”  

 

January 4, 2009.
Late night.
Make the first state of #1 January 2009. “Five bodies and eleven skulls from Vesalius.”
Instead of cutting up #22 February 2002, I used the Vesalius printouts left over from last August, plus a few comments found in the heap of scraps from last spring and summer.

January 4, 2009.
At the end of the late night (it’s really tomorrow).
There you have it, all the cum streaks have a black death streak in them. Damn! Damn! Damn! But, it is what it is. And, the life diamond floats serene above.

January 5, 2009.
Montreal, late night.
#1 January 2009, “Five bodies and eleven skulls from Vesalius.” (final state)
I resolved the formal problems in the painting, first by putting in the yellow ochre areas, and second by adding a blood streak in the center of the death streak in each of the cum streaks except the one coming out of the yellow bordered skull in the crotch of Vesalius body #3, the Cuckoo Queer. Yes, his cum is dead, although from his left hand falls a streak of white with a streak of red in it.

January 6, 2009.
Lac Ouareau, late night.
If I knew how to draw it, what would I draw?
How much have I new to draw except the past?
So far to go, so much to live, so much to make.

 

January 7, 2009.
Lac Ouareau, night.

Looking at #1 January 2008,” Six bodies…”
Body #1 (red skull) is infinite longing.
Body #2 (orange skull) is doing the best I can.
Body #3 (yellow skull) is me Cuckoo Queer
Body #4 (green skull) sums me up.
Body #5 (blue skull) is the hole in the world at my end.