1981, Achilles/ Shield

1981, Achilles Shield

I have never left the ideas in these paintings behind. I lament the loss of much of the actual physicality these represented-- that formality though these were transgressing upon those rules of the time set by much Greenbergian rhetoric.

I constantly go back to bring these around again.

 John McCracken made the resin and fiberglass Shields. They came somewhat from a remark by John that artists wore their paintings on their arms like Shields. I was interested how they snapped the romantic surface of the Black and White to a present surface, reconciling the two opposites into a NOW! and we would clap our hands, NOW!

from Clouds, leaves, waves.

myth like in California. West

of all those other homes.

Tents set here, and whales sing

against that Christianity, 

as culture wastes, an older faith renews.

Ajax and Hector, silhouetted

on this urn, childlike Achilles, 

in profoundest disappointment.

I saw the Black and White as a continuing surface which the Shield brought to a fore, as cropping to the surface.

1980, Hector / Tent

These were never shown in a gallery and were pretty much ignored by me also I skipped ahead fast .

I like to see that even then the positive negative magic was important.

They make sense in how I got from the paper paintings to a starker tragic, idea and then onto a idea that comes into being as my first real discovery.

I recently visited some Petroglyphs in NM and remembered how I liked the similar reversals of space. I imagine the Indians pecking the rocks seeing the negative and positive spaces changing places. I think they would have seen it as magic like I do myself.

The reversal also creates a oneness of opposites. It creates a feeling of being apart of everything, especially out there under that big sky, day or night.

We talked about how artists hold their paintings on their arms as an identity.

I remember how J Campbell described a young brave in a hut dreaming his name. Being given a shield or name.

I had draw the figure for years and within the Greenbergian era this was suppressed and keeps coming out in my work which becomes it's meaning in a big way that repressed desire to draw.

The strokes of my arm across the canvas made drawing which I saw images in and as a kind of automatism which leads to another phase of the painting in 1981.

1979, after the Iliad

At this point I think I thought about Comic/ Tragic oppositions.

I liked the Heraldic feeling of the Iliad, the color but also the Tragic severity of Serra and the Black and White prevalent in NY School painting. 

I saw the relation of an Idealistic or Classic Newman and a Romantic Pollock juxtaposed as one identity, in a cycle.

These later in Northrope Frye I would see characterized as the seasonal, or Mythic. Bloom said, the seasonal is a root of Myth as it tries to explain the change from life to death and around.

Pandarus Breaks the Truce, spray paint and Flashe on paper, 1979

This was an interesting year for me, as I was trying to figure out the differences between abstract and figure.

 I made these paper paintings at a mansion out in East Hampton. I had a job painting the exterior with some artist friends and an extra bedroom upstairs was my studio.

The Forces are Displayed, spray paint and Flashe on paper, 1979

I had been a figurative artist the prior 10 years but was always coached by Paul Georges at the Figurative Alliance  as to how the abstract was the thing to grasp as an artist.

The example was Piero della Francesca.

I lived downtown Manhattan and admired Richard Serra and Frank Stella. I knew the color field painters  and so between the figure which was not all that compelling in this fast world unfolding--  finally the abstract won out.

Odysseus Hears the Sirens, spray paint and Flashe on paper, 1979

Julian Schnabel said to me at a party for Larry Rivers, 'I hear you are a figurative artist-- ,' well figuring that out was my art for the next couple years. It also became the time trying to wed abstraction to the figure. It takes a mind willing to dwell in the difficulty, and what I thought that was-- finally what Art was, has come apart once more.

These paintings have to do with what I was emerged in-- Brice Marden, Serra, Stella, Thorton Willis, and some stuff Gary Stephan was doing, also there was a painting of Jack Tworkov I liked--  and the street art of Jean Michele Basquiat and Keith Haring, and much more-- I know. Even more I was into Greek Pottery- The Three Mile Island thing was happening and the Richard Serra sculpture was at the Rotary at the Holland Tunnel.

The Gods Go to War, spray paint and Flashe on paper, 1979