about Art is my Life

A friend asked me to read over a Wikipedia article she'd written about a mentor of hers, a photography professor, and what struck me in the article was his statement, before each class, that Photography is my Life. He'd say this and the evidence of his life bears it out: he practiced photography and taught it for his productive life. Certainly he didn't have those side tracks into conventionality that I've had.
My life seems complicated (enriched?) by all those things I could do, can do, am doing - that circumvent art production. Perhaps it comes from being around people who don't believe in art - or taking one look at me, don't believe in me. I have learned lately just how much of my life has been made up of the desire of others (thank you Lacan).
I am now concentrating on what my desire is. It's funny: I can imagine people telling me how selfish that is - and then giving me a list of things I should desire - their desire. Didn't they hear what I said - I don't want their desire. After 50 years of pleasing others - now kicking back a bit.

three academic portraits

I may do more of these, depending on how they meet my needs to visualize the mask of entrenched power. I'm fascinated by these portraits and how they serve as emblems. In the last few years I've noticed a trend toward photographs as attempts at capturing the image (reifying the reminder) of a presence. That's what these images are, among other things: past presences.. A portrait is a haunt, a haint - as my grandmother would say. "How can we convey the power," they seem to ask? Or we could say, that they question power - a reminder that any human who may have held power, discovered its presence as fleeting - and at bottom, discovered themselves as impotent. So an academic portrait displays power and impotence at once. It takes power to have such a portrait painted and to be garbed in such a way; it displays impotence in that this is all there is - a guy in a suit.

a painting I went back into

I painted this painting in oil close to ten years ago for a show at Brevard College (my first alma mater). Tim Murray had arranged for me to have a large show there and I was pleased to work up 19 paintings and 60-some drawings and watercolors. This painting, and I admit to an appropriationist streak, was a take on Raphaelle Peale's After the Bath (at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City) - nude behind curtain. I added a cello and altered the color, and the drape was initially a landscape painting, and I enlarged the space of the room. Peale's work is a trompe l'oeil bit of handkerchief covering the nude (not many nudes survive from the early years of the republic: Vanderlyn and Washington Allston being rare exceptions).
This painting kicked around for a decade - shown a couple of times, hung up or stored away. Recently I was painting in my studio, our backyard garage, and seeing it lurking behind a ladder, feeling the despair of its existence, put it on the easel and added a big slathering of paint over the landscape and two verticals of green, a vertical of red and another of blue. I preserved the cello.
Several nights that week, as I was venturing off to sleep, I thought about this painting. Mostly I saw the white paint in the middle, which I hoped would be more active and watery than it is. When I was in the midst of painting it (in acrylic this time, a no no, but after 10 years the oil paint has cured surely) I added the bars of color to simplify things, to help the painting breathe. All in all, I think it's better. I searched for a jpg of the original state but couldn't find it. Ten years is the longest intervening time I've experienced with a painting - although I have a watercolor that is an experiment in chance that I've been "working on" for 6 years now.
I wish this painting well.