Another, "Go 'round"

Slide shows for me have always been a cathartic experience, like a psychoanalyst's couch.

I never know what is going to come out of the discussion. Here the discussion is with myself.

This statement is a lot like the philosophy of the Romantic space "going back into" a depth intertwined with the Classic coming back to a surface of "what is found."

The slide show usually takes place in a darkened room which begins a musing on the process of a painting, coinciding with a process of a life.

So here goes. If I suceed in interesting you, I hope you will dig deeper into the first, 'round, I called American Fresco, back further on this same blog.

Landscape and Drawing

Each 'round has a theme and this theme will be Landscape and Drawing.

I started at School of Visual Arts as falling into a nest of some of the best figure drawing of the time. I drew 3 times a week for about 5 years and continued the practice more sporadically for the rest of my life .

I met Paul Georges at that drawing workshop at SVA in 1972. We went off to Skowhegan I as his assistant and there I tried to tackle the Landscape which had been mastered there by Alex Katz. Later that summer I painted with Fairfield Porter. That solidified my direction.

Paul Georges

Fairfield Porter

I didnt know this then but my process has pointed the idea out. One sits in the landscape and tries to find a shape or shapes that will represent what one sees there.

When one draws this shape and is convinced one draws an especially hard line which brings the subject into reality to the surface. This become what one was looking for. Later Harold Bloom recounted this as the Romance Quest, I had read ideas of it in Joseph Campbell. He called it the Heroes Journey.

80's Painting

I am aiming to make this a shortened 'round.

Many of the details can be viewed in a longer version preceding this.

http://bottsideas.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2010-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&updated-max=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=25

I began making Black and White Landscape paintings. I had a studio on the cliffs overhanging the Pacific Ocean in Santa Barbara CA. I was teaching there at UCSB.

I painted the Ocean beach and the Lagoon which emptied into the Ocean and became a Archetype in my mind for a dreaming place.

I didn't know what I was looking for and these are of a search.

I read a lot even then and was taken by Emerson's Circle essay and of course Nature.

I saw the landscape as representative of everything , the universe of everything, and the circles drew this together.

I tried to go deeper and had been experimenting with purple stained canvas. I maked off squares and painted on top. I pulled the mask off and the resultant squares intrigued me.

They made a space from deep to present and this I explained with a clap of my hands as a coming to the surface which was thought to be the truth of painting.

That epiphany of sorts I made plain by flags of color which made a figure overlayed. This I think was what I was looking for the figure in the landscape which was still not plain to me.

I started to use sunset bands of color. I some more complicated way my paintings were mourning a landscape which was always passing never to be true or to stay-- always changing.

I began making site paintings at the end of the 80's and they made me turn to the outer world which my work then became a juxtaposition of.

I think you can see an idea I approach now and the Four Season paintings I made in 1990 seemed to make the idea whole.

At some point I saw I was making the same Romance Quest, Harold Bloom talked to me about, my paintings seemed to be re enacting the sequence. I felt this was a validation of something larger than myself.

Larger like a metaphor which we hold common associations from a Comparative or Archetypal perspective. The fact that this idea has been discredited is a major problem for painting.

Many just are left out, others who understand-- as it is a educational problem, as we are making this all up and there is a lineage involved. Those that understand at the same time are enriched by the associations.

The Singer of the Sun and Villa of the Sun

I had been reading Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens for the last 5 years.

There is a much larger story about the Paumanok paintings and it has been expanded for years now.

But it started with the juxtaposition of the "Sea-drift" idea I saw as Romantic and the Classic "O Orb Aloft " poems of Whitman's. They juxtaposed dark and light very much like my paintings.

I made a sequence of this idea and it became my new narrative paintings.

I bounced back and forth from more formal to more content related paintings.

The Villa of the Sun were more formal.

I made what now I saw as a whole World of all the ideas revolving much like what I write here. I was reading Stevens especially when I painted Villa.

Bloom talked of how American poetry could serve as the content of the new American Religion . Religion here as used like Art or Poetry before it became cliched or as Freud called religion "repeated as wooden." Anyway I coupled this general theme with my own forms which joined each other.

I liked this as I had seen there was a belief I had been following which would now get much more complicated. I use the word belief tentatively as art had largely been about the loss or impossibility of belief in our world. This was the "end of painting" and the "end of Nature" after all.

My created thing as Stevens said, "what would suffice, as a fiction knowing it was a fiction and believing in it" This was all somewhat tongue in cheek as the belief was Ironic.

This was my art at this point in 1992. Coinciding with the move of the art world to Chelsea and an even larger expansion into the commercial item.

Western Jaunt

I had wrapped up my paintings up to now into a whole, being the "Villa." A house or architecture of ideas into one structure.

The Villa to me was likened to the memory of Pompeiian paintings I'd seen as a student in Italy. They were an ideal to me of what I naively "believed" art could be in America.

I have kept this naiviety present in my mind.

So that was some kind of completion, 10 years of my painting. I had a survey show in Reading PA at Albright College and in Honolulu HI at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. I had catalogs of my work written by Harold Bloom, David Shapiro and Carter Ratcliff.

I had started making paintings like the ones I had learned with Georges and Porter again. I took off this year making paintings across the country to a teaching job in California.

I went up the coast of California to Big Sur and then made a loop around to Yosemite National Park. After 10 years of making largely black and white paintings, this was quite a hoot.

I showed a friend back in Santa Barbara when I arrived and we laughed at the surprise at what I'd done.

I say it this way as today the shock of doing such a thing has worn off.

I took the paintings back to NY and Tony Shafrazi a NY dealer caught wind of what I was doing and offered a show of what I would make of them.

I started to enlarge the paintings some as simple landscape and other I added a figure which was like the Emerson and Whitman I was familiar with, that American type story. The below painting is 10 x 12'.

Then there were paintings of the enlarged site paintings I made. A large part of the paintings is about perception and adventure and I never use photographs these two things one is not totally aware of in just viewing a painting. This authenticity of experience to be able to say one is alive and saw ones world. If I were going to die tomorrow I'd like to say that. That is the kind of Irony I'm interested in.

Later I tried to make a more Kerouac or Beat type western juxtaposed but the irony of that all became too painful in the sight of the real destruction I witnessed traveling the West. This is an angle I'd like to make more of, as I enjoy the juxtaposition of Beat Poetry with the more Academic poetry of the East.

 A big idea I explored was between the seeing and the gone moments never to return.
I made alot of variations on this fragment theme.

It is the only constant , the change, and it seems strange to focus upon maybe, but also these paintings will only exist or be represented in this reality in today's world. Tommorrow there will be a new reality.



Finally I settled in New Mexico where I started to show them.

New Mexico Madrid Paintings

I started a new series as I got settled in NM. I tried to put everything I'd been through into them.

I had the purple stain from 1986, the Black and White swoosh, The outer world represented by a shard of a passing moment which became a idea from painting the constant passing of time out of doors.

They became a bit like the Villa series a recapitulation of the last now 20 years of my painting.

Night Studio Paintings, Madrid and Aspen

I had for some time been making drawings of paintings this one to that one piled up I liked the way each told something of the other.

I then started to make the studio wall the stars or night sky. It was a bit like the Black and White of earlier work. I like a line of Stevens poetry very much that " death is the mother of beauty " and this has something to do with the stars.

More it is the differing juxtapositions which reveal different things ideas.

The first group of these contained the "world " of the Madrid paintings and the "story" of what I called New Mexico sunflowers different than the farm sunflowers I painted back east.

I started to ever more see the importance of a cyclical form that now enters even my writing here.

The cycle starts with the site landscape, the enlarged studio paintings, the finding of a figure or specific idea, and the heightening of that or deepening with a square motif which has differing forms.

All this now piled up into a cycling and dream in the Night.

A new reality I look for, a new way of seeing.

I made another group after Aspen paintings and then I saw how these paintings could be set upside down and on their sides to reinforce the revolving idea.

Earth Painting, "Fluent Mundo"

I have been interested in Anasazi pottery and saw how it seemed to revolve in the quadrants used to depict a world similar to what I was thinking of.

The earth was there, a world in the night sky the paintings revolving like planets in morning sky, high noon, and evening light.

I was like the Supreme Fiction Wallace Stevens talked of a final idea, " it revolved in crystal" an ever changing moment or truth , it was abstract-- showing off it's form, and hopefully gave pleasure, now it all this exchanging places in the forms it took and showed off to some advantage to some sullen reality.

We now were the guardians of this reality and so a political concern for this Earth .