#1 May 2010
Acrylic on paper, 40 x 27 inches.
Scroll down for the painting and notes,
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From my studio notes about making this
painting....
May 8, 2010.
Lac Ouareau studio, night.
Make #1 May 2010.
 From
the 1956-57 Very Early Collage-Landscapes in Transition, my 1957
experiences of the decrepit and abandoned pre earthquake and fire old
mansions of the Dolores and Western Addition neighborhoods of San
Francisco that have been here on the studio wall this last two weeks
(see photo at left), I made #1 May and heard, “A boy’s
got to do what a boy’s got to do.”
*
May 9, 2010.
Lac Ouaureau studio, afternoon.
Come back to see #1 May 2010…
OK, the studio is for the dark—as in Frank Barron on the Unconscious
in his The Shaping of Personality: Conflict, Choice and Growth
(Harper and Row, 1979)—and yes, like I saw last night, #1 May
is a self portrait. Although not the me in the 1956-57 Very Early
Collage-Landscapes in Transition as I had consciously intended
last night, but the me now as I looked last night at the me of 1957.
I saw last night that the only way forward—I have
been thinking of so many ways these last two weeks—was to stop looking
and thinking about ways to build a collage out of all of the 1957’s,
but just to go “haptic” as I had at the end of #2 April when it seemed
that was the only way to get to anything. And so, last night, that is
what I did.
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#1 May 2010.
Acrylic on paper.
40 x 27 inches. |
And now come into the studio to look at the results…
When I came in here and looked at it, I felt the urge to open my shirt
and pants so the mirror—that’s the painting—could see me and I could
be what it shows… and if more work were to be done, to do it here now
with the hungry fact of my flesh against it.*
Well, I kept my clothes on as I put the painting up on the wall and
the painting showed it wanted the cum stroke in the foundation. And I
heard that what the painting shows is, “Blood makes cum in the house
of the life of the body.”
Getting started to work on it, I heard about the painting, “You
think it’s so wonderful. Well, it isn’t.”
I put the cum stroke in the base. It’s all risk to get it right the
first time because there can be no second.
I didn’t get it right, there had to be a second. |
And so now it has become the womb with egg and sperm and embryo and
all and everything.
You’ve got to stop fussing it so much. Let the whole take care of the
inadequacy of the parts.
Looking now, two hours after I started, where am I now? The painting
is probably a wreck. I think when it’s dry, take out the cum line in
the base (it’s been superseded by the two drops above the red which
has become both blood and embryo), and replace it with the motif of
the red bar with black spray and single red line with traces of white
engraved in it (the sign of the fertilized cunt as in #2 April.).
And so I did it. And as I did I heard, “Oh my children, pray, pray for
Daddy.”*
Night.
I came back to see it. The painting is finished.
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Click the thumbnails below to see and read about the other April-May
paintings.
#1 April 2010 |
#2 April 2010 |
#1 May 2010 |
#2 May 2010. (detail) |
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