A Myth of America

I've recently been realizing that my work as a whole is taking on aspects of a myth or narrative I thought in the beginning was no longer possible. Wallace Stevens in a poem says it like this.

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.


My first ideas about Art had to do with drawing the figure. I went to SVA where I had a teacher who held workshops with multiple figures posing. This practice leant towards thinking about a figure composition, and most people drawing there knew art history.

This all pointed to the old Italian frescoes such as Giotto, Massacio, Piero, and Mantegna. Paul Georges, an older artist that attended the workshop in particular talked about the massing of figures in Massacio, and the perspective and drawing in Mantegna. I read Bernard Berenson back then and it was still thought a young artist should go to Europe and see these frescoes in Europe. I saw most of these except the Signorelli in Orvieto which I still hope to see someday.



I returned to the US with the understanding that a universal or national myth or belief, which created these Frescoes was impossible today. As I developed as a painter reading most criticism, the universal was under attack.  I continued to love Piero, and his form I thought to be a modern surface, the hard clearly delineated surface of fresco which create this whole.




It is interesting that this seems so very old fashioned now. There was an even deeper pocket of old fashioned traditionism back then, as the 1970's were also the beginnings of a brand new Minimalism and Conceptual Art. These new trends made figuration look hopeless and Clement Greenberg railed against figuration as regressive.

This all was counter to the Abstract over all painting style predominately going on. I was lucky to come around at the cresting of the wave, at the initiation and wedding of both styles.




My first paintings were naive figurative paintings. I soon progressed to understand the abstraction inherent, necessary to make a more interesting work. At about the same time I became aware of Abstract painting which had separated out these abstract principles to stand on their own.



That time, around 1980,  became to be known for putting the two together. That became the form of my work. Now abstract and figurative are separated once more in 2010. The most interesting painting though I think still explores this idea of putting the two together and maybe the idea is gaining ground once more.

Achilles Shield

It starts here.



I first made a painting of what I thought to be the unconscious dream world, probably a dreaming of what one could or would become.

The most important feeling or idea then was the distance in pictorial depth of close and distant and the clap of hands feeling in that recognition of the surface where it all comes together as one. I made black and white automatic like paintings though I realized soon they derived from the abstract expressionists and surrealism.






I juxtaposed these found images with a shield made of resin and fiberglass, which John McCracken helped me with. The hard surface of the shield snapped the deeper space of dreaming into the real. ( I chose a more chalky surface like fresco for the finish on the fiberglass resin.





The shield was also very much like the hard heraldry of Piero.

A Landscape Vaguely Remembered

I went toward a inner directed remembered landscape, such as Pollock and de Kooning could be seen as. Kiefer and Schnabel along with myself and others felt we were putting an image back into Abstract Expressionism, as Susan Rothenberg could also be seen as doing as Guston had a few years before done.





I made striped hard edged grounds, a form which I then intruded upon with my brushes and created a new varied surface in relation to the stripe which was a remnant of the shield's immediate surface.




A circular composition was discovered and then a double super imposed over top as an overlay like the Universe and stars. I still strived toward some figural relationship and a Vase shape became a surrogate of that. I began this piling up of metaphor back then as the Vase here besides a figure is a world unto itself in the circular universe.





I remember liking the Medieval Book of Hours form and felt it centered one in the world. The sky above and the constellations mirroring the world below all as one.

Woman with Clothes Blowing in the Wind

In trying to achieve even more of a depth, I started painting purple and blue stains which were masked by taped squares which were over layed by the black and white paint, when the taped mask was removed the blue under became in tension with the black and white surface seeming to come forward to meet it.

There was a inhibition towards picturing of an image that too closely represented oneself and as a result we took or appropriated figures of others as stand ins part of the surrogate process and simulacrum in the much discussed critical theory of the time.

I listened to Philip Glass a lot in my studio and the Nocturne painting with the zip was related to a Mapplethorpe photo of him after an idea of the Minimalism of Barnet Newman and a Romantic feeling in the early music called "Etoile Polare".

Philip grafted his Minimal style to the Operatic which I thought possible for myself.




I saw Goya's figures as speaking to me and as his process of dropping ink into wet paint made accidental figures like I saw in my own paintings beyond my control. Goya gave my own gesture more authority and originality and the sincerity and authenticity all were words which were discussed and these paintings in reation to them.




The most important relation though still is formal in how the exposed blue square makes a tension with the black and white surface as it seems to come forward to meet it. There was also a speculation which went back and forth between ambivalent extremes whether the square was blocking or exposing.

Outer Direction of Colored Flags

In 1987, Zuni /Goya was the name I gave the series. I had made a somewhat Indian blanket design superimposed over the landscape.

These were very concentrated years and being so immersed it seemed these paintings were the next year a bursting to the surface for air.

I added the counter flags and a new even more complex surface sandwiched in between came into being.





The black and white had the look of striped shards I find now in New Mexico. I called the painting a title with Sierra Nevada in it which was Goyas title for something of his.

I had driven from California that year through New Mexico but I was immersed in these ideas already. I had already been drawn to Pollock and his relation to the west.




The etching was a development of the black and white but I kept going back to the landscape to see what I would discover there.

I suppose I have done this to this day in black and white abstractions accompanying my recent work.

An Elergy for the Light

The reversal in the outer direction came fast as did the realization of the opposites making a system or world I was operating within.

I had wanted always to go back to see the Frescoes in Italy and in 1988 I did.

I had been deeply immersed in my belief of the impossibility of painting the outer world.

In Italy with the closeness of the paintings and museums I began making watercolors each evening to entertain myself. We camped beside water where ever we could and the humid Venetian air made my first tries. I painted grape leafs, oleander and olive leafs, seeming hundreds of years old, and did this into the south of France.





When I went to Santa Barbara CA that year to teach, I continued and the leaves there were now brand new seeming.

Any way some times it was a glimmer of hope that I could belong in this shimmering world and another half, always having an environmental edge, that it the earth was past its innocence and we were witnessing an end to something. In the next years came the end of God, the end of painting, the end of Nature.

Into the Outer world once again

I moved further into the painting what I had learned from the Long Island painters of the east end of Long Island, such as Porter and de Kooning. I used to go paint in hot afternoons by the cooler bay beach with Paul Georges my older painter friend.

I started doing this again. It seemed old fashioned but I didn't care as the activity brought with it a whole range of intensity and adventure even just as something related to the place to do. The weather changed and had to be gauged, the wind picked up and sand blew, the flowers wilted in the hot sun --the bugs began to bite.










I used this bit of still life I painted that summer, blown up in my studio back in NY as a spot of color in relation to the big black and white ongoing space I continued to paint. I called this black and white the text of time. I read alot as I painted and saw the metaphor of a book in the landscape to be read.

Canvases were juxtaposed this way to that and I cut the middles out of the black and white paintings to insert the color. It was a very surgical process.

I had begun reading alot of poetry by this time and had related the color to "spots of time" Wordsworth used to explain a realization or wakening to a moment.

In the stillife painting I had realized this passing. It tempered for me any concern for the stuffiness of the tradition.
Later in plein air painting a similar metaphor in distance and death arrived to me painting, which I took as a sign these genres were worth continued exploring.




It could have been a part of a cycle. Passing and distance were feelings I explored in painting so far, and here were new examples.

Another painting was called Two Days, Two Lilies-- I hadn't up to this point realized that day lilies died each day and a new blossom took it's place the next.

Each spot or realization of this content was somewhat of an epiphany.

Mythos

A structuralist myth has it that a man walks horizonally-- and stops having a thought, or idea, aha! he might say! That moment to me was the painting itself the exclamation of the idea come upon. Another Indian story says, " everywhere, here, there, the bird flies, where it stops. there the god is.





These ideas of the horizonal, ongoing, like my black and white landscape were then countered with vertical moments, which were measurements of a kind, marking maybe time, seasonal stages of life and death, each marker a realization and mark of that reality.







I took the black and white and narrowed it into an obvious horizon. I had an idea of the surface within the b/w and tried to bring the spatial depth back using negative space and graffiti or mythic type archaisms. I remembered searching for these in earlier work and equated them to a surface juxtaposing them to a heraldic red and yellow shield.

The line of the cloud shape met the Sunflower surface and became 'one' as I saw the picture surface should be, a welded surface. The Sunflower then along with the B/W memory, or passing moment was another " Stop in time," as well as the painting's realization of itself.




The Four Seasons. Mythos has its root in the seasonal. Myth wonders where something has gone.

The Singer of the Sun

When I started painting the sunflowers as an activity on the bay beach near Sag Harbor NY, I was reading Van Gogh as I painted through the summer.

I would also read Whitman with my feet up in the car by the bay.

I was thrilled to find VanGogh himself read Whitman in very much the same way and was an influence in his talk about the oneness of everything in his Starry Night and in the profane connection of the Sunflowers to a peasant woman as the Virgin. I liked all this and a lot of obvious connections were made which most already were in place but I was somewhat afraid to jump into the narrative style I had been evading.





Id gone far enough in all these different ways I thought I could take the style of narrative and let it stream through my work just how it did through my head.

I started to work on my big hero figure. Whitman really or any "virile young poet in the sun" Stevens own evasion of Whitman.

This figure identified the height with the flower he held and the relation to his self and the Sun. This was a similar height displayed shyly in Credences of Summer by Stevens.




I saw this still life set up as an altar of sorts and the activity of setting it up and painting it a ritual of sort.

David Shapiro wrote in, For the Evening Land "You will paint the Americans...Man in a skirt...The dead sunflower almost blocks the sun..and autumn will be the new flag of that nation.


Harold Bloom wrote of my paintings a few years before and a content gathered around my paintings.





There was a passage in his Introduction to Stevens, The Poems of our Climate which described a passage through the same Mythos I speak of here he used Emersonian analogies to Fate-Winter, Freedom-Summer, and Power- Autumn.

I made a more abstract representation of all this in my Pictographs, Sunflower, and Diamonds which lead into the Villa paintings.

The Villa of the Sun

The Villa of the Mysteries in Herculaneum near Pompeii was a favorite of many of my old artist friends like Piero's frescoes were. These were Roman and I liked the irony that Pompeii was like East Hampton was to Rome. The red defined a very particular high key in painting's History. A artist would say red like the Villa of the Mysteries which is still hard to define between a cadmium red medium and red light.



The metaphor I took from that example was of a place that served as a world.
The world was made up of the Mythos idea. I like the word mythos better than the seasonal as mythos fills out seasonal to all its meanings and to its central place in a story.






I had described the shield earlier and it had evolved into a diamond pattern and I called this height the Villa Diamonds.

In the Villa I made every different combination which would decorate a large room or Villa.





There is a painting in the group which became a bit like a Duccio crucifix I saw around the time. It was the result of playing around with juxtapositions of the different aspects of the Hero I still struggled to evade or by this time actually make in this different way.





There was a Stevens poem Postcard from the Volcano which was behind the work somehow and I thought I was making a relation to his poetry on a lot of levels or maybe I should say in the ordering of things.


I started to see how I was rocking back and forth between a more narrative form and then in its repetition it became more abstract and Symbol like. These genres seemed to follow my natural habits of naturalistic landscape painting..



Then blowing up the painting larger in studio. Repeating these images in differing orders and juxtapositions which made a more Abstract symbol level.





These paintings took everything to a high symbol level. Most things here are repeated from some other place and the repetition makes this symbol feeling. Maybe now why this is repeated because it must mean something in the scheme or --








then maybe one sees the World I am talking about.

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Western Jaunt

I never set out to illustrate anything. I paint each summer and bring back what strikes me. I started painting in Big Sur because of the dramatic wild ocean and the same wildness drew me to Yosemite for the corresponding mountains.




These expeditions or pilgrimages, one critic called the figure a pop pilgrim, which I liked. They derive from the open road idea then connect to on the road motif of Whitman. I liked this sacred to profane trajectory and it is a real part of America in the sublime beauty and human detritus left as wake behind most of us who pass through.

I was hooked to this summer painting out west and did it for 10 years and more as I still continue adding paintings.

My figure, his walking staff, hat, and sneakers, black clothes of a mixture between James Dean tee shirt and a saints habit.




I've always thought western jaunt sounded somewhat fey, and in looking up the word as meaning-- other worldliness, maybe it fits. The hero figure here a hiker or traveler, all these words, journey, etc are so cliched-- I have always been interested in that relation of cliche to archetype though and here pictorially I am closest.

I had realized the use of the sunflower as a quest object, what one seeks or looks for, in any case what stands out in some significance. Traveling through the Sierra mountains I saw a bird in silhouette fly out into the sun to snag a bug and as it did it flashed Red and Yellow and was so obviously there at that mountain height that I'd discovered the object of my quest. I look for that similar thing to happen to this day.




Mostly there are jays in the Sierra, raucous jays squawking in the quiet woods. I ran across a Stevens poem that equated jays with" thoughts in pines"-- and along with a waterfall spilling in the distance I started to have a content.

It was about what came forward from the landscape and presented itself.





I formally saw a black line separate figures or things out from the landscape as ideas.

This black line started with Van Gogh travels through Picasso and into Johns, Lichtenstein, and into contemporary art.

Carroll Dunham and Christopher Wool use it also in similar ways that I see it.


My figure came from a lineage that was at first the Greek vase, then into the classic western drawing of Raphael and through Ingres and Picasso and what I saw in Disney 20 years ago. I finally liked this simple Disney idea of everything as an overlay which I took as my form having begun in the 80's, when overlay was the chief composition.

I suppose also a surrealist tool which Ive always struggled back to some formal reality or reason.


The landscape was where it all began with a plein air painting and then a repainting and a blowing up of the image. This formal method has yielded my contents to a large extent.

I explain all this over and over to myself as like now. It just gets all the more interesting.

I guess I have to say I wonder what seems the pose of secrecy which I think Johns fame produced.

Yes the didactic mode is boring but I hope my approach is more open or poetic than that.

I think someones reaction to my commentary is another painting or poem and it expands our culture. This thread which went through France and NY Ab Expressionism seems to have slowed or I should say speeded into a production line now at the verge of replicating the whole of the world.

A digression.

The profound contents which have come from my work in the landscape are the idea of distance and what it expresses in death and the passing fact of change-- also death, I guess it is the hidden fact of this part of the natural cycle. Here is a good place to repeat the Keatsian or Stevensian phrase that "Death is the Mother of Beauty", which I suppose is my battle cry.

The ecological disaster I've been aware of since Neil Young's songs emblazoned the environmental movement and the whole earth movement of the seventies and the natural disasters which have made us wonder of our precariousness on the fragile earth. All the more this makes me think that my pleasure at the task I've made myself is worth while. It's what I do in the face of it all.

This year represented a taking off into a new era of my work and a strain continues today, though a constant striving for formal ideas had me continue into a next phase of fragmentation and supplied the next phase of content.

I'd already seen it in the Villa paintings and I thought it could be the American Myth I sought now half heartedly and really only as parody.