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.
