Image + Words

DRIFT

oil on canvas, 68” x 72”
Private collection

There are so many inspiring paintings of bathers, from Renoir to The Death of Marat; Degas to a particular early Blue Period Picasso; to Wayne Thiebaud, Bonnard, Rembrandt’s Hendrickje Stoffels lifting her dressing gown to step into water, Antonio Lopez Garcia.  More than anything for this picture, the prose poems of Paul Valery inspire it, not so much the one titled, The Bath as the one titled Laura.  And also the cyberneticians, whose thoughts were hanging around me at the time like paper lanterns,  describe actions as planned and unplanned, as steering and drifting. When I began this painting I was under the sway of Humberto Maturana’s talk about drift. In a context of human action, in the process of unconsciously drifting in life and in thought. 

And then too,  the invitation to drowsiness and forgetting arising from the heat of the bath, the solitude (which is so important to Laura who may not otherwise appear), the bath as a place of escape from the world, a shrine, of deep mental quiet, purposeless wandering of thought into its extinction in the vagaries of poetic weather. Vagaries. The color pink, or rose, the chair where an absent witness sits, or once sat, which is now a rack, the bra over the back of it, a casual trace of ceremonial undressing, the least generous of tributes to clothing.

Here where sacred and profane love form into one, the ideal detaching from the objects of the world: this exact hairbrush, this squeezed washcloth, its color escaping its form, that exact carpet, its sequence of colored stripes, a charm bracelet, how it fell as it fell, and felt slippers on the floor, as they were stepped out if, the labor of those that built the room, tiled it and put in the plumbing, everything suspended between being remembered and being forgotten.

JUNK

acrylic on canvas, c. 100” x 68”

I had an inspiration going downhill on Midvale Avenue around seven to do some paintings while I was driving one Wednesday evening to Frank Hyder’s studio in Northern Liberties to draw from the model with him and with Tina Newberry and occasional others while listening to Enigma, which seemed more or less to be some guy and his girlfriend making techno-wall-of-sound music out of next to nothing but a bunch of electronic equipment in a garage, thus we are known to ourselves thereafter (if to nobody else), as the Enigma Group.  Some of these drawings were good, and one of mine hangs in Harvey Horowitz’s house, of a standing woman painted in ink washes, and year by year this large drawing fades a little more from the sun.

When this inspiration struck, I pulled over and sketched out about twenty paintings which I would paint in the following year.  Three of these were Junk, Trash, and Garbage.  This one is Junk.  I painted this on Maplewood Avenue with the help of Nancy No, who was my peerless studio assistant in the days when I made it, and we had fun pouring out some early big, thick, murky parts on the canvas flat on the floor to get this painting going. Junk is a large painting, painted in two parts that are joined together.  It is made to be a vertical painting, but it also looks good sideways, which is how it is alternately presented on the website.

There seem to be tributes to Anselm Keifer and Julian Schabel in this painting, in the blackish mire (Kiefer) and broken dishes (Schnabel), but this painting is on its own, not trying to be anyone else’s painting, and it is not about anything to the exclusion of anything else, except to the inevitability of junk, of everything becoming junk, with a lot of unconscious inspiration going, of unconscious meaning prevailing, that is percolating through mere felt excuses for its existence into a solid reality, with meanings arising as it goes, the last being the unhinged door which, at the bottom, begins to refer to itself  without even trying, as the lid of a sepulcher.

One of the finest bits of Beatle-wisdom is in Paul McCartney’s inspirational song Sing-along Junk which answers “Buy, buy, says the shop window,” with, “Why? Why? says the junk in the yard.”

The mica was collected around the from the steepest slopes along Wissahickon Creek,  and under the Walnut Avenue bridge.  The mica was cleaved from chunks. 

I had been doing figure paintings, many of my daughter Greta and her friends.  This painting shows Greta doing her algebra homework. She is seen in a three quarter view from the back, and wearing what she happened to be wearing when I asked her to pose – hooded sweatshirt, LA Angels baseball cap, fly-girl earrings.   The over-the-shoulder seen-from-the-back pose was partly inspired by Dali’s several paintings of Gala seen from behind, and particularly from the 1930’s when he and Gala had left Paris to live in a claustrophobic fisherman’s shack, both intimate and alienated , cut off from society, in an abstract space like the abstract mental space of mathematics.

 The etheric cogged wheels turning mechanically, is like her thinking, projected into space. The color is saturated, the hat and earrings, and even the wheels in space in front to Greta’s face, are not chosen or symbolic in intention, but seem to accrue meaning on their own.  In retrospect, I’d say that this painting is more than anything, a symbolist work, in the psychological pre-expressionist sense of the work of the Symbolist movement. 

The use of the mica proceeds from my dissatisfaction with the physical accessibility of the surface of my paintings to the viewer. I was dissatisfied with the relationship between illusion and accessibility.  Thee painting is protected or absolved from sharing too much its space with the space of the viewer.