Here I am like Virgil in Hades, walking on tinder's whilst feeling the heat ,still a mad dog and an Englishman staying out of the midday sun whilst pushing to forge my day in it.
You can't see, but in between the heat and the madness, I run old films on my computer such as the Agony and the Ecstasy-Chuck Heston acting through his teeth, whilst chewing the Sistine Chapel with his cold dead hand, Rex Harrison as 'Enry 'Iggins playing the Pontiff.
It's quite epic and splendid actually, the melodrama not diminishing the awesome crippling scale and magnitude of Michelangelo's 5,000 square foot fresco one iota.
Even through the paint spattered glow of my 16" monitor, my jaw slackens at that accomplishment, whilst my little twelve piece vignette of internal first world turmoil dwarves like an anonymous pallbearer in the 16th century.
Or even this one for that matter.
Sometimes reaching a ceiling is just a reminder of how dense the shadows are cast beneath it.
"The night will always win.
The night has darkness on it's side"
Elbow
You can't see it yet, but I never had a painting defy me so much before. Shall I tell you, that we've had the most torturous, tempestuous, taciturn, tantrums together. A veritable Tempest in fact, which-given the theme and adjunct velocity of recent events-is as close to tapping the vein as nicking an artery with a straight razor.
I think of Manson whenever I hear "straight razor", along with "boxcar" and "jug of wine", which-given my inclination to the latter-means he's constantly in the shadows, even when he isn't making the news for pending nuptials to a 20 something Mansonoid.
I digress.
The shadows is certainly why then, the new one is behaving so precociously willful, since my every intention with the last series was to exorcise black from my palette...in more ways than one might imagine.
Naturally, the dark is a constant periphery for me, the oily slug of lamp black-an oxymoron if ever there was-my default. Why that is I could attribute as much to some unfathomable predisposition as much as the dark pockmarks stung by life, but there you have it.
It took the faux Frieda Kahlo exhibit at Liberty Station to shake me of my doldrums, shine a beacon and all that cliche jive. My word-all that pain and bitter disappointment, embellished by other hands in garland hues, light dancing in every corner, vivid brilliance illuminating sharper than a boxcars glass shards. Misery by proxy.
Except, afterwards, I scrawled something on a dogs ear, about her legacy seeming like the suffering theater of female empowerment in the face of misogyny, but it felt misogynistic to even pursue the trains thought.
It struck me that in all things, it's too easy to cast shadows.
In that light, Vincent begins to almost make sense.
"The sadness will last forever."
Van Goghs proported final words to Theo
This shall be my first Halloween for some time that I am not exhibiting anywhere.
Enough ghosts and demons currently in the studio at any rate.
There's the ghost of Vincent for instance, pinned to my wall, glaring accusingly with one withering eye. The other one-his left one-is looking resigned, filled with marine-flecked melancholy and suffering. That particular eye haunts my own work right now, imposing itself into each canvas like the plucked orb of Horus.
Did Vincent truly suffer I wonder?
The romantique parable is of his self imposed exile in Arles amongst spud headed peasants, harboring Daddy issues and a gradual realization of the gargantuan shadow cast by Rembrandt, whilst his search to capture light in liquescence and Oriental line became the vainglorious quest of a failed alchemist. All on his brothers dime I might add, until he ravaged sibling good will and stipend on Absinthe, harlots and Japanese art prints.
Not the suffering of brokeback tilling of fields from dusk till dawn with the peasants he gilded, or even the nine to five for poor old Vince, just the artifice of the syphilitic Libertine in a garret, the actor slumming it for the Academy.
Vincent the artist messiah, the flameheaded madman suffering needlessly, and dying penuriously wretched to save the future of contemporary Art. Vincent a standard bearer for greatness equated with drug addled, ritualized self sacrifice. Vincent the veritable Lou Reed of Modern Art. Vincent and the second shooter, because a death doesn't truly become a myth without a hefty (over)dose of conspiracy.
Mischievous brats with bad aim or not,there go Rothko,Pollock and his ilk making martyrs of us all.Or at least suffering taken to its histrionic, ignoble endpoint with Granto's trite Eye-jaculations;
The residual misery stain's the 20th century and beyond, thicker than impasto, making soothsayers of passive observers hoping to unravel an element of raw human truth amongst the chaos of stumbled ill rendering, whilst faded print's of sunflower's hang innocuously from a million vestibule wall's.
Fuck you Vincent.
