1977 Port of Shadows

Ominous text power resides in its prohibited existence. Based on the writings of Kerouac, Hip without being slik, intelligent without being corny. I was developing, not a piece of my pain had shown yet. They pretended to disaffiliate from the social lie. Eschewing the lions and the Shriners. A coterie argot to exclude the common. I worship the pure and the physical energy. Burn like fabulous yellow roman candles, exploding like spiders across the stares. In the middle you see the blue centerlight pop. A disgueirsed disqust and boredom with life.

Alexander Trocchi, a Scottish writer who chronicled lives of the down and out, “CIPHER OF REGRESSION” to and from the spectator. Beat culture that emphasized the dark side of the American dream. I sought immediacy and intuitive synopsis rather than reason and calculation. Imagery freed from the constraints of the conscious mind, we do not simply take in the intended message, but change the meaning to suit our own needs and this is why the popular is popular.

I’d take a sheet of paper and just make a clear composition made up of figures, arranged in strongly polarized poses. Summory forms can bypass focal attention to strike the amygdale directly. A shorthand to pick up the rhythm and intervals, as pictures interweave elements of mid century abstraction. I found compelling photo images and put them against featureless, single color grounds The protagonists imply narrative, as postures convey anguished states. The relationships between sexes, raise issues of power and control. The backround color echo pain, sign of danger and precarious position.

Forms weave aggressively in & out of an inexplicable coolly backlit scene. Kant abstracted from sensations, “ isolated by the effort of angst-laden Existentialist Man symbolized by the silloette of a person or persons in a doorway in backround. The lone, idiosyncratic chorus set in counterpoint to the logically ordered society”. Mixing art and literature, transcendence is only possible as an extension from the concrete to produce a more complex connotation. Negative space calibrates the figure floating precariously in undefined space. The sharply delineated form stands against the hazy brown background like a silhouette. Aureoles of radiant energy give a sense of amplitude and evoke doors and portals.

95. GUARDING THE FOX

I fashioned paintings in the style of Etienne-Jules Marey’s early continuous-motion photographic exposures. Experience and duration merge with wavelike rhythms in the orange haze of mercury vapor security lights. Based on the fox, a sacred animal of the Shinto religion of Japan. It is a reflection of man in a nimbus of darkness, diffused, while the center remains sharp. Objects occur on the luminal or threshold of space, pushing the viewer to the periphery of the work. Meaning becomes intuitive, thriving on improvisation. Black grounds peek through layers and serve to suspend the moment of isolation. I borrow from the Asian design principle, showing earth overhead.

99. POUR LE POETE INCONNU (For the unknown poet)

Twin dancers are the central focus on a Mayan stepped black backround, kicking up their heals. Surrendering to the putatively instinctual. Rimbaud’s systematic derangement of all the senses, borrowed from the ancient mystery cults. The swelling and deflating visual rhythm, animate figures reciprocate each other in a slow dance of advance and recession, with emphasis on the interactive marginality of origin, as serial of repetition, as space recedes into an interior shadow.

101. PUTTING A RULER TO THE HEIGHT OF ABSURDITY

42 x 52" graphite, oil and feathers on gessoed stonehedge rag

That which appears vast and endlessly deep or that which is perceived yet not obviously visible. Events which maintain both transient interaction and dramatic presence.

103. ECHO AND NARCISSUS

54 x 78” (Oil & encaustic on polypropylene and mixed media)

Forms find echoes throughout the surrounding scene. Edges are shared by object and space. Tilted axis around which everything else finds its taut equilibrium. Theintervals that separate bodies and their posture. Colors bring the entire image forward, up to the surface. Echoing, Duchamps ‘Nude Decsending a Staircase’ which spoke to the ephemeral nature of objects. I took the story of Echo, a gifted talker, who distracts the goddess Juno, while Narsissis speaks with the water nymphs. Upon discovering of this, Juno curses Echo so she will always have the last word, but never the first. Echo is taken with Narcissus, but when she tries to speak, she can only repeat his last word. Using semiautomatic imagery, in the animate quality of the unfixed. A visual current for the eye to ride hovers in indeterminate space in search of body. The expression in a moment by a series of adumbrated figures is the hollow parallel echo. A woman’s body echoes the wavy lines on the wall behind her, which in turn echo the sweeping curves of the open front of the robe. Flowers in the vase imply an exchange of energy with the woman.