Villa-- Symbol and Narrative

It seemed a narrative resulted from putting landscape and object or figure together. The repeating of those elements seem to result in a simplifying symbolism.

These reductions I'd use in different ways. Making a figure of the different parts. And then I came upon how the parts made a world which when I used them in their seasonal phases the paintings seemed to revolve.

This idea I use to this day.

This reduction was also a fragmenting, and I used a metaphor of Fresco breaking and cracking. I had surrounded my self in this world idea and came upon the Villa as a world.

The Singer of the Sun 1991

These paintings were The Singer of the Sun 1991 at Anne Plumb Gallery.

Suns and Planets

The still-life idea in later work was later called Suns and Planets.

The shells were often found out in Long Island, shells which seagulls would drop from the air, break and be able to get to the contents.

I would string them on fishermen's rope I would find on the beach.

The Still-life

As I had been painting this still-life for a number of years now, I got the-- I guess, poetic idea that the ritual was akin to a religious or mythic type event.

I thought the idea seemed as setting up an altar in respect to the ideas of life and death.

There on the shore of where Whitman made "Thou Orb Aloft", and "Seadrift" Poems.

They easily equated my painting direction.

The Singer

was first going in the direction of the seasonal as related to evening and night, etc.

These all were prior to the Singer of the Sun. They never made it and I guess buried under other paintings.




I had this on the wall for my show at Anne Plumb in 1991. All blue and white sky and clouds like the Giotto Chapel, and this sunset , then decided to take it out.

It has been troubling me ever since.

"In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,"

 Wallace Stevens.

Making the Singer of the Sun 1991

The figures were made at this 10' scale. It was part of the abstraction. I saw the color field spreading to the edges from the centered flower of the 1989 paintings. To me there was black and white underneath as drawing might be. It took a while to get to the surface one might say where the painting achieved its feeling of presence and being finished.




I guess I had gone out to make more plein air paintings on this process. At some point I changed to the cumulous clouded background. In my finished group all had this background which made it like the Giotto Chapel in Padua. A sacred chapel of an American ideal. Sacred here is not moralistic but a reverence for, and thus discovery of a reality which "sufficed" as Wallace Stevens says. "Stevens was concerned with the question ... the world now that our old notions of religion no longer suffice."

Figure

I would have to go back to 1970 to my schooling at Visual Arts.

Paul Georges, The Figurative Alliance. Up to 1978 I was a figurative artist. Then in 1979 I began making more abstract things. In 1983 I began making paintings from the landscape again in B/W and figures would appear in the swoosh of paint.

I tried different times to make something of this and when I thought I had suceeded I was either defeated by my own critical conscious, or others response. My reaction was to make an abstract formal Quest much like Abstract Expressionism. So the figure I present now here-- is an outcome of all this foreground.

In 1988, again I would try to make a figure usually out in California.

I had an idea of a figure of imagination, a blue figure.

There was a Piraeus Apollo I found in the books and It became a model or ideal. He was coming from the reeds. A essay by Paul de Mann on Wordsworth and Yeats I think lead me back there.

The Figure

By now the figure was a theoretical challenge.

As I've said else where I arrived on the scene under the prohibition of Clement Greenberg in regards to the figure.

The formal canvas had become the figure itself and the representation an inner figure. Hence my inner B/W paintings.

I had spent 10 years painting with Paul Georges as my friend. There was no greater force in the figurative opposition.

In my own painting everything seemed to be moving forward again to what I now saw as the outer reality of the figure.

This figure had all kind of political consequences as "whose figure" and the new criticism moved towards race, gender, and a power schema of reality.

In reading Stevens I found a piling up of metaphor that identified the hero-- that figure the creator made in ones mind-- with the Sun and the Sun with a Flower. These were symbols of height like the season of Summer.

My figure held Flowers up to the Sun as Identity with height. "the virile young poet", as an ideal.

He took on attributes of Walt Whitman, or maybe just 19th century idealism I remembered from my Pennsylvania youth.

Besides all this it was a formal Quest. I used my self as a model as this was easiest, having no available models.

The figure came from a shallow space of the sketch or trying out-- to a clear line and shape aligned with the surface.

A long lineage from Greek Vase to Raphael's neo classicism to Ingres-- through degas Picasso and Matisse to finally Homer's American classicism and as a strange swerve-- Walt Disney's space was very similar to the overlay in 1980's painting.

The Seasons 1990

Summer, The Sun.

Winter, Death

I had still-lifes from the sunset phase and went out to make one at night. There was Spring, also but the image has been lost.

Strange how from this perspective it seems every painting knew it was on the way to this end in the cruciform.

That there was this final reality, at least in my own painting idea.

The Cross Form

Not sure exactly how I got here.

I had read since 1986 books on Structuralism and Deconstruction. The idea that language was horizontal and the idea was a vertical moment had been with me for some time. When I saw this physical representation of the idea I stuck with it.

I worried over the seeming religious imagery but was actually wanting to be prior to religion. In that this was a structure of the human mind.

Like Indian forms.

Adding the Still-life

Having made Black and White paintings for the last 10 years-- there was literally something behind it.

This was my first direction.




I wanted to make something of this painting out of doors..

None of these paintings made it.

I guess the first clouds, leaves, waves.

The Horizonal ongoing Black and White, 1990

was a spilling out of the memory or romantic space and later became horizonal.


These were the beginning stages of the horizonal bar of the cross form.

Emerson Circles

"The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.



It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms.



One moral we have already deduced, in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace; that every action admits of being outdone.



Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens."



1985, I made these paintings. I think the narrative nature of these paintings stuck in my head they seemed to have resurfaced in 1990 in a progression of the theme of time and the leaves.

The Sunflowers and Daylilies used in Studio Paintings of 1989 and 1990

I worked on the Brooklyn Waterfront at 25 Jay when I came back to NY each fall, from 1984 through 1991, when I moved up the street to 68 Jay.




I had used 'blow ups' from parts of paintings to create a 'stop in time' as Wordsworth called it or a similar feeling to what I termed as the surface of the painting as a truth, in the clap of hands, meaning here, now!

Now I wanted to make that vertical moment physical, equated with the painting surface.





I used the still-lifes I made out in Long Island. Here the sunset for Autumn.






Already I had started to use things from direct observation again, as the watercolors from Italian Cities I'd made in 1988 with their sunset colors.

I used the blown up Lilies. In one painting called Two Days Two Lilies, now at the Federal Reserve in Washington, I realized one day that the Lily I'd been painting was a new one. Strangely I'd never realized that. I always thought it was the same one. This realization made a marker in time similar to the formal elements in my work. (see older post)





Never use photos. I guess this was an exception though the painting never made it to completion. I never made a B/W Long Island landscape that satisfied me in relation to western lagoon paintings.