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.
