Comic Sublime

The Long Island subject became mixed with the Western paintings.



What is interesting to me is that the Sunflowers became a reduction. A symbol of passing.

Soon I began painting a western variety of Sunflower, and the Madrid paintings became a western version of the Long Island subject. I had a new home. This look back I guess is somewhat of the fact that I am an Easterner still though displaced and without a place.

There are those that would take exception to the title of this blog being Long Island or Paumanok. To them art should be about art which I agree with though there is a degree that the place is a spirit like in Wallace Stevens poem which I come back to once more.

A mythology reflects its region. Here
In Connecticut, we never lived in a time
When mythology was possible -- But if we had --
That raises the question of the image's truth.
The image must be of the nature of its creator.
It is the nature of its creator increased,
Heightened. It is he, anew, in a freshed youth
And it is he in the substance of his region,
Wood of his forest and stone out of his fields
Or from under his mountain.

—Wallace Stevens, A Mythology Reflects Its Region.



In 1997 I tried to make the most streamlined versions of my work.





Painting for itself was pretty much out of style. Everything had some kind of political message. These were shown here and there but seemed invisible to people as just Painting or the content just Poetry.

Villa Fragments

I took off for the west part of the year again. The Anne Plumb Gallery closed and Tony Shafrazi liked my Western Paintings so I went in that direction. I had a show of western paintings at Shafrazi the following September.

The fashion for big paintings had stopped and I was asked to make smaller things.

The fragments were that result, but also a more concise version of different things.

These were never shown but still exist in good shape.

1990, 1991, 1992

1992











1991



1990



Black and White progression.

Going back to pick up the Black and White

1991 Singer of the Sun.
I have to say I almost forgot this was the opposite wall juxtaposing the Singer with this more Symbolic representation of the Romance Quest, as described below in more detail.





These paintings were coming out of the Seasonal crosses from 1990.

I had come across Emerson's triad of Fate Freedom and Power. Realized it's connection to Bloom's triad of the Romance quest.
Wallace Stevens had all this contained in his poetry as a diagram of reality. I was reading Notes to a Supreme Fiction and Bloom's commentary on it. His Stevens book is very good. Especially the Preface and Coda.





I started to work in a negative direction, I called the boarded up sublime. The article Bloom wrote on my work took a lot of heat. The Sublime is very complicated and I began to be more interested in an intellectual sublime that was beyond not so much in a mystical or romantic way but just in its complexity.

Thomas Weiskel wrote a very good book explaining this called the Romantic Sublime. He goes as far as describing a Freudian sublime wrought from the Family Romance it all quite thrilling and as I said complex though it becomes simplified as one understands it and sees it's what one thought all along! So I was having alot of my feelings verified.





It was the romantic in my mind. The black and white drawing. The remembered, what was behind.

Not much of this has made it. Alot was destroyed, and others cracked from so much overpainting. They were really about trying to figure something out.

Briefly, the idea of each moment containing the whole of existence in the dream, reach for height, and fall of every idea.

I started to actually see reality in this. It probably was too complex for art-- well Im still on that trail, it getting simpler along the way.

Villa of the Sun

Villa Paintings here.

http://bottsideas.blogspot.com/2010/03/villa-of-sun.html

on way to the Villa

from He'D fiLLed it Up! 2009


Villa whole and fragmenting umph!
it repeated it self made another swerve
traveled back to the ole fish shaped
island to see what had changed
to continue his heaven

dreams of unknown
escaping profane
He, Ho! major man at helm
hero on his head
sparagmos

was the term he'd found
rending apart, the hope
the coming down
of thought
into comic sublime

Experiments with Major Man from Notes to a Supreme Fiction by Wallace Stevens.

None of this finally made it but was distilled down to the final Villa of the Sun paintings.

from clouds, leaves, waves. 1996

from Villa section, 1992

The Singer of the Sun,
the idea in summer.
The poem, the self, the same
passage into Autumn
into the Sun itself.

What wine does one drink?
What bread do you eat?
the sublime comes down, flattens
to the place and the spirit formed, there.

29.
The Villa of the Sun
a boarded up sublime,
a spirit storming in vacant walls,
stepping out, singing in the sun,
finding shells, making a still life,
walking in the sunset, reading poetry,
sunflowers near face, reflecting.

Gazing into sunset, blank
upon the sand, head up to sun,
head now lowered,
back of the head, a hat as halo,
a bird on a finger
held up to the sky.

Seeing the island through a
bower of leaves, arcing--
the poem reflects its region.

Puffed out play-actor
of counter-sublime
a curtain, a recurring death
of painting
sways a moment, in slim belief
the sublime being boarded,
big bent nails
banged into heavy wood.

1992 Villa of the Sun

I made these paintings somehow between two studios, moving from 25 Jay to 68 Jay and also my year split between CA and NY.

Between my Gallery closing and teaching at UCSB, and a new western content of Yosemite and Big Sur added.





In 1992 I showed Villa of the Sun at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Leah Douglas curated the show Carter Ratcliff wrote an essay.

A lot going on. And all these paintings between.




The studio I moved to was like a war zone for the first year. I painted among the ruin. From this distance I see it had alot to do with the fragmenting aspect of the work. The bright nature of the work was always an Irony to me.




Rummaging through all the repeated
images, hardened to cartoon shape
the sincerity worn, the moment’s
come down-- clarity, clouded,
BUT SUN, set to shine, or created, the

VILLA, in the Sun!
interlocking puzzled, surface, breaking
into MYTH
America’s dying into America--
dying and, BANG

gone to America!
and buried in its mountains
and shining through
the radiant LIGHT--
Juggled Diamonded Light

Plunging

from Road Movie 2001




The western paintings would become the "Western Jaunt" shown at Shafrazi in 1993. And Ro Snell in SB, CA. I went in that direction after 1992. Oscillating back and forth from east to western influence of my plein air paintings each year..

1992-3 Creating the Villa-- taking off

to the west.

I had my show in 1991 The Singer.. and was disappointed by the response which was quiet, the withdrawl of the economy, and the closing of my gallery of 10 years.

I went to California to teach. I began making the plein air paintings out there. They lead to making a new direction, but I still had the Villa to tie those ideas of Long Island up in to an idea.

These pictures of my studio Ive found show the many ideas going on at once.




That "at once" was what I wanted to make.




I was still on the path of a figure and had this idea from the Greek vase and another direction at the same time of the composite.

End of Paumanok

until 1995. I went West. The Anne Plumb Gallery closed and the end of Soho art scene.







Wish some of these had made it.

Figure and Still-life

I set up the stillife I was working with in LI over the summer.




None of it made it except the idea in my poem. 1992


carrying the paints
down the beach, then back to the car,
He’d done this so many times before
the scene of a fiction,
He’d forget, he’d do it again

the pitcher was blown over
the changing season,
painting the skull, water bottle and bread
with a sprig of holly,
Paul, thought it from Chardin or Manet,