I am aiming to make this a shortened 'round.
Many of the details can be viewed in a longer version preceding this.
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.
