1975 THE TROPHY SERIES

(the Voice of Silence)

Ritual wears the symptomatology of neurosis, compulsion of the waking existence. This work deals with the use of mythical figures to twist things identities, expectations to mix wit and warning. The inanimate in meaningful charade of the living, the artificial in tenuous reference to the real. Already acient when Western civilization was born “An allegorical incantation” and a kind of mouning for the loss of mythical experience. History verging on myth, the strata that time deposits. Artworks mediate between culture and nature, deconstructing socially constructed identities. Seminal influences of Duchamp’s last work, Etant donme’s Ephebic a post Cocheau statement informed by dioramas and peep holes. These works were decoders of the relations between art and the cultural industry. Goddess Ceres presided not only over the growing grain, but over the souls of the departed---she gave life from the Earth and took it back to herself again. Associated with her was the mundus in Rome. This was a pit covered by a stone which was raised three days of the year to allow the spirits of the dead to come back to the world above. A prehistoric connection with the offerings-pits of the Greek world. The Etruscans concieved the idea of communicating by this pit with the souls of the dead. Picabia image, not quite apparent, emerge like rubbings from a tombstone.

76.1. VENTURING BEYOND THE KNOT

This work deals with the goddess Ceres presided not only over the growing grain, but over the souls of the departed---she gave life from the Earth and took it back to herself again. Associated with her was the mundus in Rome. This was a pit covered by a stone which was raised three days of the year to allow the spirits of the dead to come back to the world above. A prehistoric connection with the offerings-pits of the Greek world. The Etruscans concieved the idea of communicating by this pit with the souls of the dead. Picabia image, not quite apparent, emerge like rubbings from a tombstone. I lived for 3 months in a cave of an artist friend on Crete.

76. THE ELEMENT OF TRUTH

The title was a logically irrefutable statement, to approach the condition of truth. Closed forms are vessels of implication. I created convex shield, based on ancient Roman and Greek markers along the path of culture—of cultivation and it’s failure. Perceptions both chronicle and infiltrate this subculture with its codes of body language. Allegory takes the form of heraldic pattern with a manipulation of elements near the frontal plane. Complex patterns achieve a kind of philosophical purity. Embracing paradox, I utilize an enveloping and isolating. Over scaled Ben Day dots speak of the mechanizing and distancing of the gestured in painting, liberalizing the bipolar nature. Realities not compartmentalized but flowing.

79. RICTUS

(Greek cross)

The composition, taken 120 degrees apart of an equilateral triangle. Probing our assumptions of artifacts. It is the object with its blurring of inside and out. Sculpture, fossil as well as symbolic adversary become the originating and recipient half-vessels. Based on the Greek myth of Hephaestus, the lame child who was born to Zeus and Hera (or Hera alone in some accounts) and was cast out of heaven by Hera, who thought he was ugly. He would later become Zeus’s blacksmith and the subject of Aphrodite’s affection.

78. YOU KNOW THE DEVIL MAY CARE

portrait of Alexander the Great

THE SLEEPING PSYCHE by Francois Edonard Picot Elisions in the paint infuse the figure; Nature’s structure signals the beginning of being able to pair desire with possession, Control over one’s environment, one’s destiny. Form acquires a soul. It coalesces and emanates. Ethnographic assemblages of diverse materials, from animal horns to worn clothes, suggest erotic fetishes, pandering to tourist fantasies of “primitive” sexual practice. The vertical dimension is emblematic of the upward aspiration of totemic images. A quality of the secretive creates a quasi-sacred set apartness, based on Bas-reliefs. The work features gazelle horns, in representation of the star cluster in the constellation of Taurus.

80. THE SHE-WOLF AND PASIPHAE

Drips succumbing to gravity’s pull, serve as visual tether. Within our nature, contaminating if not inhabiting the escapist, all- to- human aspiration to higher things. I decontextualize and deform ordinary objects into esthetic concepts Black outline marks ameditation on death and age.

85. FANTASIA IN BEDLAM

34” round &7” deep encaustic

Antlers sprout from his forehead, in a moment of middle-aged introspection. This totemic attribute, periodically shed in the life of the elk or moose as a hopeful sign of regeneration. Mark making that are hallmarks. Human beings are given animal attributes. The polyglot quality is echoed, the veritable embodiment of recycled materials.

In 1958 a dig in Turkey in the town of Catalhoyuk (Chah-tahl-hew-yook) The houses were from 19,500 years ago. The houses were packed so close together residents had to enter through the roof and they buried their dead under their houses or in them. The end of the ice age was 11,500 yars ago caused a change in human cognition. The roots of civalization were planted with the first crops of wheat and barley in a control of the food supply. This forsed people and animals to gather near rivers oases and other water sources. The “edge hypothesis” people move to the margins. Permanent human settlments predated agriculture by at least 300 years.
In 1980 a drought caused a drastic drop in the Sea of Galilee in Israel exposing Ohalo II. Radiocarbon dating suggest a small yar round camp for hunter gatherers existed 23,000 years ago. 14,000 years ago the first settlements built with stone appeared in modern day Israel and Jordan by Natufians. In1150 the Levantine Corridor between Jericho in the JordanValley and Murrreybet in the Euphrates Valley. The bull was used to simbolize nature- and of people to over come it. In the1970’s Cauvin’s Dig, in Northern Syria found evidence for an earlier Natufian occupation underneath the Neolithic layers. The transition from Natufian to Neolithic contains wild bull horns. A revolution of symbols which led to new beliefs about the world. Representations of death and wild animals to overcome their fear of wild nature and of their mortality by bringing the symbols of death and the wild into their dwelling thus rendering the threat psychoolgically harmless.

This reversal is indicative of “the inner struggle,” George Bataille, wrote “at the center of the labyrinth you find yourself.” I often give prominence to seams in the structure, using claws, cow teeth, rams horns and glass eyes. Animals have mythology, human characteristics, amalgrams of animals attachingfragments to paintings turning the paintings into sculptures. These works derived from the animal and fragments of memoribilia. The Ionic friezes that encircle Greek temples reference logos, or badge identity. Peepholes filtered with magnifying glasses, mirrors or kaleidoscope for peering into address perception as camera obscura. Classical myths “as metaphor for the primordial grief, fear and violence of mankind. The sculptures straddle the boundary between real and fictional worlds. The viewer is meant to feel uncomfortably big and reduced to a state of dream. I combine different levels of finish to enliven the viewer’s engagement with illusion. In ancient Hebrew mysticism, the # 9 was used to represent truth against each other. The function of the disk to decorate a shield, symbolizing dominance over wild or evil forces.

86. NATURE MORTE (contemporary fossils)

Where thoughtful manipulation and heartless exploitation begin. Grass is the beautiful uncut hair of graves, this is the tasteless water of souls.

Doch du und die Lufte, ihr habr kein Haus, But you and the breezes have no home.

I lived for 3 months in a cave of an artist friend on Crete.
I joined the cult of Demitor at the cave of Perstephony in Athens.
In anciet Greece, the Mediterranean conscience gave rise to a two headed divinity. I explored universal and spiritial themes in 1975. The opacity of the layers of reality making one order infiltrate the other. The image always occurs at the front of two fields of force. Drifting toward myth and departure of gods, through life to after life. A violent ripping of signs frim the sites of their primary significance. I used the a drawing of a stalk of wheat as my signature for that year and for letters of correspondence. Reversal of the traditional understanding, conferring an important function upon the universal symbols of myths. I began from Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” A woman conducts the waves from a platform in the water as white as a milk skin, rubbed-so the gray under painting may emerge subtly, like the venus blood, that return to the lungs for oxygen. I created objects based mythology derived from Christian and Eurasian myth. The open –box form could become a quasi-magical receptacle of energy. I based this series on Andre’ Masson’s painting “THE LABYRINTH 1938, in which Masson placed the labyrinth within the body of the Minotaur.