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.