1988 Italian Cities or "like the leaves themselves..."

I went to Europe that summer and camped around the big cities. We went to Art Museums by day and came back to camp and made watercolors for a month.

I started in Venice and ended in St Tropez. When I came back I went to California to teach. It was funny to draw the same olive or fig branch in CA as it seemed brand new as the European version seemed very old. I saw the leaf as a stand in for the figure I had tried to use but did not. This one is from the Naples Museum.

In transposing the watercolors to painting I developed a abstraction of sunset stripes with the leaves superimposed. The leaves acted as the prior squares and reversed the background and brought it forward, making the inter locking surface.

Later I will say why this became problematic.

But I was already aware of the what was being forecast as the end of painting, nature, and art in general.

Wallace Stevens in the early century was already aware of these problems in communication and what was real. His poetry made sense to me in relation to all this and struggled past to a sense again.

Domination of Black I think was the first poem to impress me. I saw the colors and stark silhouettes of evening.

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. 

It was the poem that expressed what David Shapiro was calling in his poetry,  the Evening Land.

The leaves are probably the most romantic symbol. Harold said Modernism was another Romanticism. I felt at ease in re interpreting it all for myself. There are many poems in Stevens where the leaves figure. They are always skiddish of what could be a looking back to a prior meaning and their cry is a cry of not transcending themselves but existing in constant change.

I wasn't trying to illustrate all this. I would make the paintings and as I titled them I'd remember associations.

I listened to Eliot's Four Quartets as I painted most of it. The droning voice as elegiac was probably as important.

I continued the black and white inner landscapes and called them texts of time.

The sunset stripes or actually more specificly reversed space of the negative space in the leaves. seemed to interrupt the ongoing black and white swooshed direction. A "stop in time" or spots, I read in Wordsworth meant something to me as I already had this experience in Achilles Shield paintings from 1981. Then I related the experience as the clap of hands which equaled the immediacy of the surface.

I kept the vertical stripe which really stopped the ongoing in a transcendt motion which I suppose I kept negative in a way like Keats Negative Capability, but I can't honestly remember. Only in 2005 would I use the positive color zip to express the extreme futurity of the surface.

I suppose also the stained canvas keep the elegiac direction in tact.

These paintings are most definately romantic in their trying to recover lost moments. Painting at that time became to seem decorative, Brice Marden who I was close to at this point was being attacked by many for this.

I think this literate defense is largely a defense of this attack.