1989 Colossal Sun

It might have been this seeming conservative direction that led me to painting once more on the beach in Long Island. 

It seemed the most radical of things for me to do. Only painters who actually have painted out side understand the thrill of it all. I was and still paint against the public assumption that a "plein air" painting equates Sunday painting.

Anyway an Image was no longer a problem in the new fallen world of art. Clement Greenberg's ideas had not been over come just forgotten. I was still working in a rather formal fashion meaning to me that my images had a relation to the picture surface.


I would blow up the images from my site paintings in the studio back in NY. I saw the flower as an idea of the painting or figure e.g. what was being painted or object of the painting but was also representative of the structure of the painting itself so the painting was 'of' something but also it in itself, as part of the painting structure.


I obviously aware of the inner outer collision did just that made them collide. The cutting out of the actual heart of a painting is a powerful move. It hurts psychically to cut ones painting. But the idea required it. I cut the painting made a internal stretcher and then inserted the other.

This was more about juxtaposition of this reality to that. David Salle had done similar things and Jasper Johns was on a similar path. I was trying to prove a reality I saw when I painted and started to see the passing change was the model I would seek.


The outer reality, whose image was arbitrary, was now forced upon the inner space making another reality.

Wallace Stevens had a poem, Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself. 


It very much described this moment.


At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.


The sun was coming from the outside.
It was like
A new knowledge of reality.


In 1980's there was an idea of appropriation briefly meaning that there was no original to use to create so to use another's recieved reality seemed more authentic than pretending to authenticity. I'm not sure how useful this all is today. Another's path might diverge here.


I in an earlier painting, 1986, Woman with Clothes Blowing.. had gone through absorbed a Goya influence and Identified with his reality as coupled with my black and white swoosh. 

I continued this here, a figure falling in space, another figure in a stately step forward seeming delivering the Universe or reality itself on a plate?

There were shells and trees I suppose creating an evolving idea of a organic reality spinning off differing levels of image, now colliding with this outer difference.

I was questioning even then the inclusion of Goya image and tried my "own" in Two Days Two Lilies, when I realized there was a new bloom each day.

I was painting the Day lilies in the back and this direct observation ended in this painting.