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.
