I don't operate like I'm told to

Try as I might, I fail frequently in life, to follow the dictates of expectations. I don't post frequently. I don't write when I'm told to write. I find I live inside my head, when I'm encouraged to get out, to experience my emotions, to understand why I feel what I feel and why I'm feeling it. And still, as much as I loved and learned from group work in CPE, I fail. Surely I feel it.
I've finished Delueze's big three: Difference and Repetition; AntiOedipus; Thousand Plateaus - and now I'm embarking on Lacan - who once stymied me, as I was reading Merleu Ponty, and my therapist recommended going into Freud instead, which surely was helpful - no one has written more succinctly on the psyche than Freud -and I wonder, What's the difficulty with Freud - people act as if he's beyond them - or else they reside in the comfortable parody that he's all about sex - thus demonstrating that they know no more about sex than breeders of bulls and cows. So I live in my head and paint from my heart. I give you all a petite "a".

tiny paintings

corner closet

an acrylic, 36 x 52, reminiscent of childhood. Childhood has many terrors for some of us. I cannot speak for people who remember it as an idyllic time where an adult remembers being affirmed and taught. Instead I remember feelings of guilt and shame when I remember childhood. I seem to have learned wrong lessons - or not been aptly taught healthy ones. So this painted memory for me contains an element of terror. Perhaps not so for everyone. I remember the closet at my grandparents, filled with quilts, filled with fabric, dark and quiet, smelling like soap. Like bread. Like cotton and sweat.

gargantua

Drawn when I was rating essays
a bull fight with a giantess
devouring the crowd
piagghi [sic] banging drum

tan

before and after

At the top, in a destroyed polaroid (intentionally) is a painting of a girl jumping through a hoop. The bottom image is that painting before I painted a dress on her. I like having both images.

attempts to clothe some figures

a pen and ink wash from 1993

could it be that long ago - but witness the difficulty of capturing the tones

it's a delicate thing

a figure staring into a mirror

her face hidden but for her mouth

mystery and revelation at once

disco drawings

The series reads from the end at the top to the beginning at the bottom. Revelers are stranded on a rock, perhaps temporarily or a bit longer, who simply began in a small club, without clothes, soon in a large group, then exhausting themselves in various diversions. On the rock they wait. It's very Blanchot.

introduction

My therapist refers to a moment in my life as an introduction to adult sexuality - which is a funny way to think of it, almost a textbook kind of label. So I did three drawings, at least, on this theme of an introduction to adult sexuality: basically nude individuals loitering like walruses on the sunny rocks, their pudenda and secondary sexual characteristics hanging out nonchalantly.

bay area nudes

What I did with the color and contrast functions that come in the basic editing function of what microsoft gives us to edit photos with on these things. The bottom reminds me of posters done in the bay area in the 1960s. Hence the title.

title page to an old sketchbook

landscape

drawings

watercolor

sky imagery

theory of painting

aquarius

I drew these while sitting at a table in the reading room of the Lilly Library on East Campus. I was probably sitting there with a stack of periodicals: October, Artforum, Art in America, Critical Inquiry, Flash Art, the New Yorker, Harpers, New York Review of Books, Art History, Burlington, Art Papers, Art on Paper, and other things I find essential for having close at hand on a early spring afternoon.

I should get a scanner in order to reproduce my images more accurately - there's wide discrepancy in how they clean up from the photos and the photos are bothered with shadows and discolorations, so that the reproductions here and elsewhere are hardly indicative of the quality of what I do. Sigh.

I find myself lately whistling this tune. The whole age of aquarius is apparently from Jung, but I didn't know that. What will future youth rebellions, 1968s, summer of loves, pattern themselves after? What will be their content? What old gurus will they borrow from? What indicators of that culture will appear in the previous ten years? Who in the 1950s could have guessed the 1960s? Who in 1955 could have guessed that this war the French were fighting for a colonial possession would become the life of their young boy, who was watching Howdy Doody at that moment. In ten years he's at Khe Sahn. Who could guess that these beat poets would begat Dylan? Or that Elvis would begat the Stones? That we'd go from Peggy Sue to Paint it Black? Or who would guess that segregation, which seemed so natural, so "the way it is" would come to an end. The 1960s didn't just happen. The seeds for it were in the 1950s and 1940s, even farther back.

Nothing remains in stasis. No era of prosperity or good feeling endures. Nor does depression - though depression digs further into the soul, sadly, than good things. Our country will come to an end - or at least the way we assume it is - and are we able to face it, to accept it (because certainly the ones coming after us will no more understand our "principles" than we understand such principles that preceded us as hoop skirts and using Thee and Thou) or will we pretend that we can stand upon the stream of change yelling stop. But it will be a flood.

Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.

water color - drawing - water color

It seemed that I had to make my work more strange

More play. More play. Life is too short now for conventions, for being bound to making sense, for reifying libido, for hearing that voice that demands conventionality. More play. More lines that might do anything, colors that might go anywhere. I've waited too very late. More play. More play.