#1 July 2010.

July 7, 2010.
Lac Ouareau studio, late afternoon.
Begin #1 July 2010.

1. Prepare the place...
Examples are Temples, Churches and Mosques. Turn on the lights focused on the painting table (the altar)—see the paper—oh my God, it’s so BIG.

2. Prepare the tools...
The paints, knives, atomizer and brushes

3. Begin the ritual to invoke God...
He’s still in my crotch, the core of life and death, and it’s watching the death part rise that’s so…

It’s the egg so vast, the sperm so small…

July 8, 2010.
Lac Ouareau, late morning.
The July 7 note began—“It’s the egg so vast, the sperm so small…” The July 8 continuation is, “the end so sure.” And so I decided to cover the meaningless blots and stains at the lower left of the egg with a white ribbon carved with the death cross.

July 9, 2010.
Lac Ouareau, night.
Start with the pyramid that was to have been the blocks of the times of life with one near the bottom on the right as the death mark. But the image becomes instead the pyramid of “This is the Beauty” with the death mark gone mostly in shadow.

July 10, 2010.
Lac Ouareau, afternoon.
Reading Yishu, the Magazine of Contemporary Chinese Art…

That world of curators, scholars, critics and gallerists is not my world, their mode of talk (they call it “discourse”--how much more intellectual and authoritative sounding) is not mine; and I realize that my worlds--yes, of discourse--cannot be perceived in theirs. My origins are in early 20^th C. modernism and the early 19^th C. Romantics, the roots from which my time has grown now more than 65 years. Their roots are in post-WWII modernism and its post-modernist deconstruction. They are still in the young sprout stage. What will be their tree and where its fruit when they are old?
 

July 11, 2010.
Lac Ouareau, early morning.
Put in the red dot at the bottom center of #2 July.
And the red dot with the gray “wings”, that is the farewell.

July 12, 2010.
Lac Ouareau, afternoon.
Now, with the red dot at the bottom, each time I look at the painting—this morning, this noon, now late afternoon—the painting “locks” more firmly. And that is what I want, the painting (paint, form, content) locked for good.

The problem with painting as poetry, when they are your life statements, you don’t want to lose them. 

#2 July 2010

#3 July 2010.

#4 July 2010.
 

July 14, 2010.
Lac Ouareau, night.
Begin to work on #3, July, 2010
I heard…
“In the heads of old dry grass new seeds are always hidden.”
This is my teaching career for the next years… and my art, too. Both are my life, old dry grass with next year’s seeds in it. And as for the painting, I ended up with one very large seed.

*

Histories are what writers write, and each writer writes differently. Handwritings vary, and so do histories—the handwriting varies by early training, personal muscle configuration, marking instruments and the speeds of their use. The histories vary by the early training of the historian (what matters to the Ph.D. committee: biography or economics, politics or style), by the historian’s personal experience in the world (job opportunities) and in the soul (the mother’s love, the child’s fears, the broken heart—that backpack of experience we each carry full of the stuff only we know and a lot we don’t)

July 16, 2010.
Lac Ouareau, evening.
Make #4, July 2010.
Seeds sown and sprouted in the child, then flowered in maturity and scattered again by old age for the times to come.

*

Sometimes in the flowering they bleed.

And for music in the studio for working on this painting, there should be Gregorian chant—a Church to receive our sorrows.

And a star above… how our trite wishes have all the truth.

I did not put in the star, but noticed next day a random blot where it would have been—a black blot in a semi diamond shape—the death star. I didn’t need to put it in, and it was not the trite immortality wish for a bright star but the trite dark death fact after the flowers have bled.

 (And the gold band remembers my wedding ring.)

Click the image below for paintings August 2010

#1 August 2010.
Acrylic with collage on paper, 30 x 44 inches.