Second stage of Oil Paint

Its hard to tell in these pictures but they have been all repainted in oil, adjustments made and I'll probably go with this. I remade Stations 6 and 10 to make more of a movement and add to the tumbling effect.

The Proximity to the Cathedral

makes it all seem like I am interested in the Religious function.

But as Freud said, I think,-- something like, "religion is poetry turned wooden."

Last entry made me think of Piero

Who is never that far from my mind.

Expulsion from Paradise

A friend suggested Massacio as an example of the Pathos the Stations contained.

I looked them up to find that one of my most beloved images is changed by restoration to what seems more of a Fra Angelica. This my first impression.

It is a poignant example how every thing changes. The Last Judgement of Michaelangelo was changing to the point of not being able to be seen at all, now again is changed in it's cleaning.

So these examples of fresco that first influenced me so, now contain a different lesson.

I remember when I last saw the Massacios or I guess I didn't see them as they were undergoing this cleaning. There was a big corporate Olivetti sign in the Church declaring them as the sponsor of the work!

Anyhow reality keeps changing and certainly our's is vastly different from Massacio's time but it seems the restorers wanted the Massacios to be more modern, more like us.

Story in a Line

The line of a cartoon has an immediacy which hasn't seen since the Midieval times. Van Gogh rediscovered it again for art, see below.

A cartoon reminds me of the way an idea is discovered and -- then works, I mean believed. I like the under notation which is in deep space, like wandering.The flat shape or color then comes forward and it is lassoed by the thickening line and-- bang on the surface as what is meant!



I think Van Gogh was not a very facile drawer. He really had to struggle and he at one point would scrawl a line around something he was trying to draw to make it "be".

Gauguin was doing something similar and it went back and forth and soon became part of the post impressionist style, of a line surrounding color. Actually maybe going back to a borrowing or validation in Medieval style or folk art.

Now Matisse and Picasso carried this line forward. Picasso definately locating it's beginning in Spanish Illumination of Medieval times. They exaggerated it and it got thicker, wider more aggressive.

I think it has to do with the idea of going back in the mind--into the forest of possibility and coming back with something-- drawing a line around it-- making something more definate.

Mondrian is a special case started out pretty traditional but with Van Gogh's line and kept exaggerating and exaggerating--till his line that meets a most modern surface as in later Lichtenstein.

American Fresco

...is a title I've toyed with. Not for these Stations but for the Paumanok Reeds, last years work, of a similar gravity which the Stations are growing out of.

I began my exploration in the 1970's as an artist visiting all the frescoes in Italy.

I have always harbored the naive sentiment that-- I wish I could do that.

I love Piero and Giotto, Massacio and Mantegna. Fra Angelica and Signorelli.

I liked the chalky hard surface which makes a shallow negative and positive space of painting.

I liked how the unrestored brokened out sections lent an abstraction to the whole. Here I have taken that formal relation as a aspect of reality in ever changing moments, which art tries to preserve.

Any way I've said more of this else where, it all seems to come together.

New Beginning

I've painted over now in oil the under surface which finally little is seen of?

I've knocked them back to the sea. A funny analogy.

They seemed to come so fast I distrusted them.

In an old master painting one "knocks it back" with a sienna stain. I dislike that illusionistic method and instead scrape the surface then paint over it. There is still a sense of what is under and I think the surface just gets stronger.

So I'm just starting over rethinking each step once again.

Wanting to insert a level of, the leaves in between somewhere.

Im also using oil paint now so it all slows down.




And back into the Reeds.

A Single painting #2

For some time now, in different guises my paintings have been about the juxtaposition of three painting surfaces.

1. A Utopian forward looking formal reality ( the blue square) that here is actually seen in it's negative phase, though it still comes forward to meet the 2nd surface which is--

2. A surface of present Reality which is constantly changing and affected by the Future (Utopian or Classical) and Past (Romantic) relationships.

3.The past or Romantic is the underneath or drawing, the distance, what is gone into-- to find, maybe a dream.

So these three surfaces interchange spaces and in fact I suppose are seen as One. One surface is constantly dying into another. Reality being in this scheme a constantly changing thing.

This above form is the content of the work which parallels many or most literary narratives from Romantic to Classic.

It is in fact the Western Romance Quest itself which goes back into to find. Finds and brings back an Idea and in painting connects this Idea to a Surface which is painting.



I found this validating reality, unselfconsciously in my painting of the 1980's. This spacial journey became a narrative in my work and returns to a more abstract reality once again.

I made a series of paintings in 1993 called Villa of the Sun, which used this scheme as, Fate, Freedom, and Power, a triad I discovered in Harold Bloom's description of American poetry through a schematic idea from Emerson's criticism.

Fate is the winter phase of reality. Freedom, the poet at height in the Sun. Power is the fall into Sunset and the position of the Sublime. The is a counterpoint with the seasonal motif which this journey shares.



This three part reduction made a kind of triad which reminded me of a Duccio painting I knew.

This cross configuration is interesting compared to the recent "Stations". Then it was about a horizonal "passing" juxtaposed to a vertical--stop! or here! A realization or resultant light from epiphany or sublime like experience.

A Mythology Reflects Its Region.

A mythology reflects its region. Here
In Connecticut, we never lived in a time
When mythology was possible -- But if we had --
That raises the question of the image's truth.
The image must be of the nature of its creator.
It is the nature of its creator increased,
Heightened. It is he, anew, in a freshed youth
And it is he in the substance of his region,
Wood of his forest and stone out of his fields
Or from under his mountain.

—Wallace Stevens, A Mythology Reflects Its Region.

Of course it is not "about" this anymore than it is about any particular narrative. I hope it exists for itself as painting.

Paintings In Order of Stations

Select for larger image.

The paintings follow the form of the Stations more than the specific content.

My own figure who I've called Crispin after the Wallace Stevens poem, The Commedian with the letter "C". It is about the impossibility or difficulty of this type of depiction. The figure blends with a Walt Whitman like representation walking the Bay Beach wondering or wandering through the reeds, leaves or grass.

It's finally about the painting. Here there is a mystery of different spaces-- colliding and ordering themselves, into positive and negative surfaces.

Commedian as the letter "C"

Here follows some lines from a long poem by Wallace Stevens.



Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil.

What counted was mythology of self

Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea

The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,

some starker, barer self

Crispin
Became an introspective voyager.

Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.

He came. The poetic hero without palms
Or jugglery, without regalia.
And as he came he saw that it was spring,

His western voyage ended and began.

Was he to bray this in profoundest brass

Scrawl a tragedian's testament?

proving what he proves
Is nothing, what can all this matter since
The relation comes, benignly, to its end?

1 through 7 and bottom row 8 through 14

The top are 1 through 7 and bottom row 8 through 14.

and new step

A Sketch

The "place" of the American Poem

It has been said the 'place' of American poetry--Is the beach, the line between the land and sea.

Im using the East Hampton, Long Island, Bay Beach and Ocean here.

Here is Stevens in Decorations in a -- Cemetery


In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

William Penn

Something strange I've just discovered. I had to go back to PA to get my birth certificate a few years ago.
These images are from the State Museum we used to be taken to as a boy in Pennsylvania.

Different images of another Hero

From a little museum in Taos, NM.



In a dress, as a farmer, looking like the Quaker William Penn of my own youth in Pennsylvania --from cartoon to tragic. Many figures seem to blend to one.

Formal step

Blocking the stained canvas with masking tape.