1969 ACOLYTE

A discourse on nomadism, shamanism, issues of identity and secular foundations of society.

Plato’s Cave posited an inward capacity for truth beyond the contingencies of mere appearances to ultimate realities. The subconscious into subjective. Abstract renderings, dedicated to propagation of artifact and ritual. All forms of reality are potentially implicit. The coiled energy field of linear patterning, seem topographical. In Western society, attempts were made to purge color from art and culture because of its links with sin, vulgarity & infantilism, all the way back to Aristotle.

In 1947, a Bedouin, Muhammad “the Wolf,” discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls ( information from The Book of Enoch) in Khirbet Qumran (comra) and prompted the subsequent realization of a dealer, who sold them through an ad in the Wall Street Journal, in 1956.Their have been over 20 more caves found since then. In Acolyte, a combination of caves; a structure of concave and convex forms. The chthonic TEXTURED black/brown is tempered by swarming whitened strokes, which bring to mind phosphorescent sea life. The work deals with lost, or repressed memory, with subtle and complex relationships between society, popular culture and the human psyche. Acolyte is a journey into an alternate perceptually heightened enigma, the unpossessed, awaiting and resisting definition. Shadows represent a menacing self-interrogation. A primordial world becomes a repository of thoughts and feelings that float below the surface of perception. Our ancestors dipped their hands into animal blood and communed with their spirit world. I became obsessed with slathering on paint with the bare hands. My experiments suggest enigmatic myths or ambiguous rituals, which reference folklore of pre-Judeo-Christian rites. I started using sulfur which I found when heated liquefies to be used as a top surface. I use it as a reference to the fluxuating states of matter as it opposes edge and field drawings of burnt wine bottle cork.

I used substances like salt and ashes that act as residual traces of the life -blood, born in bone, colored by iron. My early work used carbon as a symbol of organic chemistry and it’s reference to life’s dark, incubating visions of gestation and birth.” Borrowing from Burchfield’s technique of using perforated masonite & small drawings to build large paintings, I would take seeds and press them between two sheets of rag paper and perforated masonite under cinder block for two weeks. The juices left a ghost shadow of the seeds. I used seeds from raw vegetable and fruit, the inedible part of the vegetarian diet. I imbedded the seeds in beeswax and carbon after they had dryed between two sheets of rag paper. This technique left silhouettes in the paper like the shadows of people left on walls after dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.

I used Inuit throat singing (technique allows singing to hit more than one tone at a time.) as back-ground sound for the openings.

Mondrian, “When the object dominates, it always limits the emotion of beauty.“

1. Occuli Lupi (The Eye of the Wolf)

I used charcoal and beeswax, creating a moist, cellar-like, darkness that serves as a sort of counterpoint to “enlightenments,” beyond whose boundaries darkness still reigns”. The wolf symbolizes the primordial: be it instinct, death or brute natural force, as theory comprises the strategies that civilization vainly seeks to contain.

3. Pinholes in the Curtain of Night

The subject of the piece stems from Picasso’s GLASS OF ABSINTHE 1911 SERIES known as the Seasons painted after the mistress Francoise Gilot. zzzzzzsymbolic children under a stranger more fearsome element sky. Left his black outline marking a meditation on death and age falls across the voluptuous form of his much younger lover. The ladder and rope as well as the faded stars above them, another painting made during a personal crisis. The human hand is analogue for the clock hand.characterized by instability and visual disorientation, rendering the world unreal. Astounding physical destruction fostered a sense of insecurity and loss of confidence. Urban context embodied the crisis of the period in examples of rupture Pinholes in the Curtain of Night , the separation between art and reality smeared. Life and death become virtually what is masked as we mature. I evoke rather than depict the quiet drama of family. This work deals with what is vivid and In Brueghel’s “Icarus” everything turns away. I used this in setting up dialectic encounters between adolescence and adulthood. Faintly colored images challenge ambiguity and subject. I try to achieve the miniaturized world of childhood and make it inhabitable.

4. THE BLACK MIRROR

Evocation of Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby, on cosmic entropy. Technology receives a dualistic treatment, a high spirited guerrilla campaign against corporate and governmental control of information. Prompts troubled questions about meaning and control, control of words, control of thoughts, control of self. Control of or by others in the same language community.

5. BEES IN A HIVE OF GLASS

A temple of activity, the hive is seen in raking light against an impenetrable blackness. Inspired by “Perilous Night “gesture enacted a Cagean valorization of noise crossed with a famous 13th century portrait sculpture of a Buddhist priest, whose exaltations of tiny images of Amida Buddha was a way of visualizing prayer. The negative space recedes in a Cocteau-esque interior. Borrowing from Burchfield’s technique of using perforated Masonite to paste small starter drawing onto large pieces of Masonite to enlarge an idea. I would use the same technique but instead used two sheets of rag to sandwich seeds from fruit. This would leave a stain from the shapes of the seeds on which to build, suggesting a mass or teeming organic life. Didactic as it is with Cage, inducing the viewer to look at nuances that are usually overlooked.

6. COLD WIND

(a sense of imminent collapse of the essentially corporeal subject.)
Haunted by the search for tedral and my mother’s choking from lack of air during regular bouts with asthma inspired this work. We lived between two towns in a no-mans land, without a phone. Originality, intuitive touch and rhythm with a luminosity in murky hues, strick the eye, even at a distance too great to be decoded.
Forms seem to flicker in the mind like flames. Sobriety conceals aspatial delirium, a reality, as much emotional as optical. Embroyonic form sweeps across fields of grid marked lines; that allude in my imagery to microscopic cultures. To express certain attributes of matter immersion is sheer physicality, compressing the space around the viewer.
I emphasize the physical difference between the bodies. The air of rationality that attends their formal arrangements also reduces the psychological complexity. A view that art can be healing in times of tension and violence. The mystery of nature. A watery flood of paint flowing down the surface evokes a primal flood at the first moment of nature.

BURCHFIELD COLLECTION (Buffalo State Teacher’s College)

6. Vous leur donnez la vie ils vous donnent la mort

Both leaves and seeds appear, giving the work a tension of detail. Small organic shapes suggesting fragments of larger images that recall chaos. I reference the order that exists in patterns too large to see. The dance of death, most often associated with Hans Holbein and Thomas Rowlandson.

“ Moon of the soul, shine on the coliseum of my senses. My dark will make, reflection from your stones, the single beam of all my life.” Kunitz