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.

fragments of an idea

You can go to a museum and see old paintings of Mary and the kid. They follow a program of representation that goes back to depictions of Horus and Isis. Something about her fascinates me - but only in so far as alterations are invited: alterations that mirror the modern sensibility: that she smoke - as in the bottom image; that she be really pregnant when depicted - as in the middle; and that, as in the top image some ambiguity rest on the image. The mirror is my own preference for implying this. Mirrors have a long history in art. I think of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding for starters and more currently Brockhurst's Adolescence. Picasso used a mirror in a depiction of Mary Louise Walter.

process

This painting, which I refer to as a variation on Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew, now hangs in Jami's office. I worked several years on this painting, off and on, rolling it up and putting it away only to unroll it and work on it - I alternately hoped and despaired over it. For over a year it was in Casey Thompson's apartment in The Village. And when he left CTS I rolled it up to put it out of my mind: I thought that I would gesso over it and painting something new on the canvas one day. And so it was, when I moved into my studio in Decatur, that I unrolled it, restretched it and began to work on it again. And what happened is that I figured out what to do in the middle of the canvas. The bottom is the final and current state.
Among the curiosities about this painting now, is that I've stretched it and restretched it so often that in the final stretch, I discovered that it was no longer square. The black edge along the bottom that tapers along the side going up s an attempt to reconcile this offness in the finished piece.

Two paintings that are now different than a month ago

Talk about bleached out. Above is a madonna that I'm now repainting. The face will be the same, but the child, the pose, the weight, the color of the compostion are being radically reworked. I'm a mad scientist. Actually I was unhappy with the results, and though Jami loved this painting the way it was, I felt uneasy. I needed to change it. I liked the face as well, so I tried to save it. Soon I'll post my re-working.
Further above, at the top of this entry, is a view of my studio. The painting with the standing dark figure on a yellow disk is now entirely different. Now it is a single figure in profile that fills up the canvas - in a Hippolyte Flandrin kind of way, flanked by flowers, stars, a kitten and a bunny. It may now be the most ridiculous thing I've painted.