|
From my studio notes about making this
painting....
|
Source images for #2 April
and #1 May. |
Source image for #2 May.
Watercolor and pencil on paper,
9 x 12 inches.
Title on the source image
is "pre-primer of the
beginning".
In colonial days, the first start-to-read's for children were a
tablet fastened to the top of a stick. This one for me was a
square with the four rivers of life that flow from the mountain of
paradise with the heart at the center... flowing into my cock and
down into the world. The whole image was one of my earliest
statements of my goal to bind the lusts of my body to the promises
of my heart. |
The origin of #2 May comes from the lower
left image in the set of ten from the 1958 "Cock Book-Horn Book" group
on the studio wall that was the source of #1 May. Image at left above
is the complete set on the wall, and the particular "Horn Book" image
from that group is on right above.
May 9, 2010.
Lac Ouareau studio, later night (after completion of
#1 May).
Think about how to make the 1958 “Cock Book” now, when
I have had a comparatively long lifetime to experience its source…
“It” is my cock from the first moment the boy the second house down
the block played with it when I was six… and when I was eight and
we were nude together in my basement doing what he called a “fuckers’ dance”
that our hard cocks touched and mine first turned on.
*
|
#2 May 2010.
Acrylic on paper.
40 x 27 inches.
|
This is the physical Lac O
studio, but it is also the mental light and space of a single light
glowing over the altar in a cathedral--and here comes the
next painting (#2 May 2010)—the “haptic” of the 9 x 12 inch
watercolor in the 1958 “Cock Book-Horn Book.”
I had built the image out of the 1958 Horn Book image at the bottom
left of the 1956-57 Very Early Collage-Landscapes in Transition
pyramid still on the left side of the studio wall.
I heard, “It was what it was, and it is what it is—my path to eternity.”
May 10, 2010.
Lac Ouareau studio, early morning.
Back to work and completion of #2, May 2010.
I heard, “The cum comes through; it always has, it always will.” I put
the black death diamond in the hazy gray area lower right, and put the
cum drop breaking through its center. And in a blot still wet from
last night at the upper edge of the luminous disk—the disk glowing on
the altar from the light in the cathedral—I found a cum drop on its
way beyond death to the valley above that is the cunt of eternity.
|
So that’s the “Cock Book-Horn Book” series today. Where have I come
out on the plan to give myself life again by “summing up” all the old
work? Certainly not where I had planned,
using the technique of the
1985 watercolors with rice paper tracings.
No, it is even as I had thought
a few weeks ago that “you can’t go home again,” when I began to try and
already fail (see #2 April). It’s because home is always only now. I
can’t get all the past out of my blood, all the roaring’s still
there—and all the tactility in the work I’ve made these last eighteen
years, and the “haptic” work that started it all
that February
afternoon 63 years ago in the basement of the old Art Department—all
that means that to sum up the past means to make it as I am now.
* Sure, it faces death now, and didn’t then. That’s why now to make all
that old new with all I have learned since.
|
