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.
