Crazy busy again, and so between commissions and online Xmas shopping, I managed to bust out this new Ghost piece today, for the fundraiser tomorrow.
It struck me I could call these works a kind of 'Goughic Darkitechture'.
Priced at a $100, all proceeds go towards the San Diego Art link, which is a splendid little organization with its sights on promoting the arts here. Details from the link.
"the Ghost of Medusa" Oil on Canvas 12" x 24" The mornings are starting to cool, and a dense mist hangs over the wild palms.
I love this time of year.
I've been in a bit of a fog myself this past week, waking in the middle of a night in a frenzy, freaking about the last minute preps for the forthcoming exhibits, living on four hours a night, and beginning each day swirling palettes and consuming copious amounts of tea.
I shalln't truly find the sleep of the dead until the last stroke.
I suppose I'm a man possessed-off the charts and obsessively compulsively picking at the scab of everything I do.
There's some of that in this latest piece I suppose-'The Ghost of Medusa'-though truly its something I've been working towards for twenty years. There are half realized traces of it in drawings I did as far back as 85, it's eerie. Was it prescient or just self fulfilled prophesy? Who cares-I'm in love with the piece-it feels like the herald of a new direction. It's realisation was organic and as natural as breathing-if I must annotate though, it partly has its foundation in the quote from Jack London's novel-'The Mutiny of Elsinor'', which I discovered very recently. In it he says-
"...Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Mayan-Lie (illusion)"
For myself, those words encompass perfectly life's deflections from the shadows of the night. Along with my continuing obsession with the cosmic resonance of the number three-(Medusa was part of a trinity of Gorgons), I should relate that my dead friend Martin had completed a drawing of Medusa before he died. It hadn't occurred to me until I was working on it. The arc continues.
I have perhaps two more pieces in me before delivery date-though something of a backtrack in the sense that they shall compliment the last gasp of the original Theothanatos series.
'Ghost V-The turmoil of Years, '85 and '92'Acrylic on canvas 11" x 14"
Just as the last Ghost felt symbolic of a year, this one seemed distinctly placed between 1985 and 1992. Both of those years of course were significant in that Martin and Ian died in them. There's an arc there, and the yellows and blues seem part of a palette that embodies the garishness of the times,heightened by the muddiness of monochrome. Hopes dashed.
It's always been my intention to work like this, i'ts as close a relative as I can get to ambient, avant garde Jazz I suppose-speaking in terms of form and texture, making tangible those things that aren't,
I'm enjoying the way the paint develops the forms, almost in the manner of a Rorschach ink blot, morphing into an organic mass. The series continues to deconstruct, into I suppose the figurative abstraction every artist evolves to.
Began the next Ghost piece. It has a macabre resonance which prompted my wife to make comparisons with the tree from Spooky Hollow, although the only hollow that was inside me when I painted it,was the realisation that its not 1979 anymore.
There's something oddly definitive about that particular year which has always left an indelible mark on me. I guess I would have been twelve, so it was pre teen, but the sound of the times through the music, the movies, my burgeoning hunger for understanding over what life was about was just beginning, and of course it was the end of the 70's.
The final year of innocence then?
In the 90's , I chose to set Post Mortimer in that year, and It was enough for Billy Corgan to write a song about it, so I really must do a post about it one day.
Took a breather, to catch Alan Bennett's satire,The Madness of King George III at the San Diego Old Globe theatre last night.
It's a wonderful piece of work of course, depicting a caricature court of buffoons,fops,sycophants and treachery that showed amusing parallels with contemporary circles of power, but what an extraordinary performance by the lead actor-Miles Anderson.
Disquieting, manic, vitriolic,poignant-I can't recommend the play highly enough.
I've a day of catching up on shipping orders. Still, I'm deeply relieved by the fact that it shall be completely undistracted- after over a month, the house is empty again.
Appropriately, here is Japans sublime 'Quiet Life' from the turn of the 80's.
I'm a coiled spring. The last threads on a rope, one drink too many, a bough ready to break.
I'm on the cusp everywhere.A month of toxic affrontary has rendered my nerves as sensitive as the wounded fingers of my hand.Its all just noise of course-I own nobodies myopic world view-nor can I change it. People will try and impose it none the less. My tongue is swollen from my clenching teeth.I've long since lost my nose to the spite of my face, but I fall further down the cracks of my own oblique obscurity.And whilst my contemporaries become media darlings, I realize it's petulance on my part, that I feel left behind.Meanwhile,ants invade my studio,like little black beads from a Dali painting, scattering in an ordered chaotic frenzy.It's like my disposition manifest. I'm Antsy.
The work by comparison is cascading out of me like a rich, delicious waterfall. I've no notion where the forms are coming from. It's like my disposition manifest.And I'm feeling furious at the world-I need to stop reading crap. The news here is a like a huge bloated worm feeding the bigotry, widening the chasm between truth and the myth of America.
I realise I'm saying this nine years post 9/11.
I painted 'Blind Liberty' like I was having a shower, except the waters are stained and brown like an open sewer, spilling oil, blood and tea. I wonder if I'll ever feel truly at home here.
I discovered this morning that RAW is featuring my art on their home page this week, which is accompanied by an interview. I tried to keep it frothy-it gets tougher to answer 'where do get your inspiration?' without sounding like a scratched record.
Barely any air flow through the studio today, so I'm feeling dizzy on the turpentine,or it could be my enthusiasm for the 'Ghost' piece which is almost complete. I'll be premiering it at the RAW show this Friday.
I'm also showcasing the other two smaller Ghost studies I produced in May. I was so dreadfully disheartened by the lack of bids on EBay for these,so I'm really rather hoping they'll find a more discerning audience at exhibit.
I'm in love with this piece. For me, it encompasses the essence of this series-the collision between the physical and unknowable. And the paint is taking on a life of its own-I'm almost a slave to the strokes my hand is making. In a fit of inspiration, I decided to create a thick impasto of glued applique, to give it some textural form. I wanted the form to seem visceral, as if it was materialising from some ectoplasmic matter.
The latest piece has felt like a revelation for me-it's almost a sister piece to the merging skull compositions I've been working on-Trinity, Life After Death and Disambiguous foresight with the exception that it feels like I made some sort of evolution in my painting.
Apart from when I've included the skulls in a figurative environment, the background element has always felt detached, like an object oscillating in a none space-its relationship has only been measured by color or what I would call a theatrical backdrop to instill an ominous grandeur that isn't there.
With this piece, I feel I've bridged that gap-making it seem like the space around the skull has fossilized and somehow biomorphically suffused with bone. Hard space if you will.
I was also trying to introduce a spiritual element as a counterpoint to the cold hollow skull motif, working on the notion that the cavities and shadows harbor echoes of thoughts past, almost in the same way phantasms haunt an old room following some emotionally traumatic event.
As a result, I've entitled it 'Ghost', I'm delighted with the result, and shall develop the piece to larger scale as a part of this particular group.
Here's that wonderful abstract piece of avant garde also called 'Ghosts' by David Sylvian from the early 80's. Hard to believe that anything so odd could ever be in the charts, but it was a different and better time then.
