More stuff learned it seems

Scince this autumn, when we went to NY, and I spent 5 hours in the Metropolitan Museum, I've pondered the exhibition of Giorgio Mordani works in the Lehman collection. I find these simple still lifes and few landscapes that he did between 1920 and the early 1960s fascinating: they're grayed out, with some limited color range and contrast; the brushwork in the still lifes is is made of long strokes, left to right, with some up and down movement. In the Landscapes the brushwork is more vigorous.
What I think he does is what Merleau Ponty and other positivists talk about "describing more to understand better." To Morandi you have to look beyond the repetition of subject matter and the tonality. What he's done is limit himself. Part of that limitation is to ask himself What it is that he needs to do in a painting - what is a painting? So with this limitation of artistic vocabulary he set out to translate the intensity of his gaze onto the canvas: that is, the canvas becomes the site of a translation of the object through the subjectivity of the painter. For Morandi I think the task is that this gaze not be a glancing blow - in a way his method is the opposite of Monet's: not impressionistic though certainly not given over to detail. I feel I really know the objects Morandi paints, even though the duration of his application is belied by paucity of detail. what comes through in paint is the density and silence of the objects and their arrangement.
What I've pondered is how to apply this to myself. Certainly it's a lesson in paint - and paint is a lesson in life. I ask myself What is essential to me? What can I limit myself to? The thing is not to paint Morandis anymore than Morandi painted Cezannes or Cezanne painted Pousins. Morandi's work is entirely unique to himself. Much as Sean Scully's work is: you know what you'll get with him, but you're surprised all the same.
And so it is.
Along with this I've pondered Donald Kuspit's Art Criticism issue of the last year - a survey of the last 90 or so years of art making. I'm surprised at how conversant he is with Freud Klein and Bion; and it's that association he makes with art as healing that strikes me in his whole argument. Basically he argues against the formalism that took hold in midcentury and the ironic vantage point that brackets that formalism in the 1920s and the 1990s. I've approached art in formalistic terms for many years (the subject of painting is paint, the materiality of the materials, etc) and I have to say that something in Kuspit's argument touched me. Certainly I've thought of my art as a psychic necessity for me but have not considered whether it might heal those viewing it. Jami has helped me here, pointing out how Out of Chaos, the painting I painted in chapel, affected the congregation and her. It's true, people approached me afterwards and commented on how moving it was to watch during the week's services the painting change and unfold.
Kuspit's text has made me look more closely at Beuys and Rauschenberg and Hesse, as well as wondering what I've accepted too readily in Johns and Duchamp.

details, ephemera, remnants

Art, as times I forget, is response, at once to outer projections and inner needs: a language of symbols and colors, tendencies toward an unknown goal - as Jung pointed out in the Mysterium (alchemic image of dreams). I forget and forget to respond, feeling an ideological urge, which only when it's suppressed, exhibits the conjunction of inner response to outer need. If the gist of postmodernism is in fragments and ruins found, then language is best borrowed and burrowed into, and there lighted a cozy fire, a good chair, and a glass of Bulleit. Our images are myteries, babel on: might be said. Suffice. Sufficient.
Who can read that: the uncertain sound St. Paul indicates in I Cor 13? A French horn, probably.
So I find that over the years I've sought to build my artistic vocabulary: quoting Cezanne, Goya, Lynch, Chardin, Perlstein, advertising.
I cannot write this out. I've just got to paint.
I paint, and then I look at along with the viewer.
As Jami reminded me the other day, when I said that a painting is not wall paper with a frame: one of my favorite paintings, a Daphne (depicting the moment where Zeus turns her into a tree to save her from the advances of Apollo) was bought because the purchaser liked how it went with her sofa - she could care less for the mythology or any other detail I told her about it. It went with her sofa.
And so music is chosen for its background sense, whether Mozart or Sinatra; and so many things function as background. What is foreground?
Are we human beings foreground? Are we background to other people's drama? What would it be to be foregrounded? At any one time what do we see and what, right before our eyes, do we not see? What are we missing now?
Berkeley said that "to be is to be perceived": the implication being that God, who sees all things, causes all things to be. Ponty addresses this problem of perception: that we exist not in opposition of subject to object, but that our bodies make a totality of perception, and that we are at once limited and expanded - or so I seem to be gathering. An impression.

Don't ignore the calculator

Looking at this reproduction I can see some things I want to change in this painting - or else do different in another one. This figure is problematic - too much like a Bond figure, too conventional. I don't know why I didn't see this in the beginning. That's what happens over time. Sometimes things that seem problematic hold up; sometimes what seemed essential isn't really or is the weakest part.

I am a yankee doodle dandy

Last night we saw fireworks after the game. We saw the game too: an illustration of the importance of pitching. The local nine played well, scoring all their runs in one inning; however their pitching could not hold the other team within one run. In a world of six billion people, where at least 500 million in this hemisphere are familiar with baseball (and Japan and Korea, where major leaguers are beginning to show up from as well), you'd think that there'd be more than 20 people who have the wits and skills to get professional batters out consistently. But you'd be wrong. One of those 20 people did not pitch the 6th for the Bulls last night, which was a pity. It amazes me that in this vast population set, how rare pure baseball skills are.
For instance, I've been able to catch the Braves on TV 3 times this summer, usually on ESPN or WGN, when they play the Cubs, and each of those times I've turned the channel on and there was one of the Braves pitchers, pitching in the 7th or 8th inning, protecting a one run lead with less than two outs and a runner on first; each time disaster has followed. It think it's been the same reliever, MA, and I can only wonder, "Do we not have anyone else we can send out to protect a one run lead - someone who might actually be able to protect a one run lead would be good." Here's a major league club with a reasonably large payroll, and they can't find a pitcher in 500 to 700 million people who can ensure that the starting pitcher gets the win.
Still there's something wonderful about going to the ball park rather than staying at home and watching the game. Even minor league games are a treat. The next best thing is sitting in a local dive, at the bar, eating some wings and watching the game on a flat screen, engaged with the other patrons, swilling down Hennepins and Rogue Rivers. Aside from the wave, which no bar patron would ever do, the experience of being outdoors, in the bleachers, looking through binoculars or trying to guess what just happened when I looked away at my Merleau-Ponty, (last night a squeeze play occured - they pulled off a squeeze; which made the experience of the pitcher giving up three runs in the next half inning more bitter) is without parallel. I hate the wave - it has never seemed like a good idea or much fun: more an insistence on joining the crowd, the mass of sheep being lead to the slaughter: "Join us in our lemming like inertia; give up your brains and attentiveness to what's actually going on." - they seem to say. A siren call that crashes the game, the odyssey of the season, onto the rocks. " No I'll not be part of your wave! I will not join in your totalitarian group think." Giving up three runs took the life out of the team, and it was apparent that from the 7th inning on, that the players were in a hurry to see the fireworks.
The Braves in the 1990s had that mentality, that even giving up three runs, they would not give up. Glavine expemplified this, as did Smoltz, that they would hold onto the game like a bulldog with a steak. If the other team did win, they would be mentally spent. I knew I was seeing something special back in that decade. Something I may not see again for a while. Certainly the Braves have some good young starting pitchers in Jurrjens, Campillo, and Hudson (who's not really young anymore), but the bullpen remain problematic. We've been swept by the Phillies twice (we're supposed to be sweeping them). The only thing more frustrating than being a Braves fan must be being a Mets fan. They're supposed to be running away with the division. We've swept them! And we're awful. That's a comparative awful - an awful phrased in terms of being in contention. Before the 1990s the Braves had been awful for most of the 1980s - an awful phrased not in terms of contention, but in terms of playing fundamental baseball. I believe that awful in terms of contention is tolerable, even enjoyable, but awful in terms of being fundamentally sound is nightmarish and not enjoyable.
Baseball is a team game, a game where players must come together to play mentally tough: no card games back in the clubhouse, no looking at the ant hills in right field, and no throwing a fastball over the heart of the plate on a 3-2 count (and no swinging at 3-2 curveballs in the dirt). Those 1990s Braves taught me never to give up. That the opposing batter is hoping you'll give in to anxieties about throwing a strike and give him something easy; that the other team hopes you'll stop extending at bats when you're down by three runs - that you'll stop thinking and give into desperation. What a beautiful thing that mindset of devotion to a goal was to see back then. And it's true that the current Braves team could get it together and come back The NL East is a weak division with four teams in the mix.
But it seems unnecessary. I no longer project my longings onto a baseball field. When I was a kid, I projected strongly - as if Hank Aaron at the plate or Niekro on the mound were the sum of my hopes for nailing down my identity: alas, too many Jim Nashes and Biff Pocorobas populated those teams, all too ordinary and frail human beings upon whom no one should project their hopes - not that projecting hopes on the performance of others is healthy - it isn't. Those 1970s Braves teams are one reason I'm seeing a therapist now. In the 1970s Atlanta's sports franchises left a deep masochistic scar on millions of children: why else would anyone go to a Van Brocklin coached Falcons game but for the shear punishment factor: the brutally ineffectual running game, the wasting of Tommy Nobis's talents; and then the Pat Peppler/Marion Campbell coaching debacle. How did Rankin Smith make so much money in the insurance business if his running of that team was a reflection of his running of his business. And the Falcon's are still bad. Blank now runs the team as hopelessly as RS ever did. This last season may have been the Falcons most aimless and futile ever.
When we moved to Durham, one of the ministers we went to hear preach openly declared himself a Falcons fan. He's a good guy, intelligent, earnest, with a touch of humor; how then could he make that declaration. At first I thought it was some verbal slip, but he's since repeated it. I remember how in the 1970s or early 80s the Falcons threatened to move to Jacksonville - and I thought, "please, please." I also wondered how any town with any sense would possibly want the Falcons. The Falcons were like that L'll Abner character with the consonant heavy name, who constantly had a cloud over his head and whom disaster followed everywhere. I didn't care about the bare economic value of a major league team, no matter how hapless.
It's wonderful being in Durham now where I don't have to care if the home team wins. Minor league games don't count in the same way as major league games count. The minors, as I've written before, exist in a mediate place, non-ultimate. The fact that the games are not ultimate make them more enjoyable and for different reasons: the narrative of careers beginning and careers ending; the curiosity of the final score - how little it really matters in the grand scheme of things, the relationship of how the club's fate is tied to the needs of the major league club. The major league club can take that young righthanded starter and put him in the bullpen or give him a start; or take that 1st baseman to fill in for an injured starter. The minor league team cannot take anyone willingly off the major league roster. Is the minor league team in a pennant race? Doesn't matter. If someone roots for a minor league team with the ultimate concern of winning a pennant, then they've misplaced their hopes. This is what Niebhur talks about when he (and I think the idea is original with Kierkegaard) speaks of sin as giving ultimate concern to things that are not ultimate; and giving non-ultimate concern to objects that are ultimate: treating one's relationship with God as one thing among others.
Anyway, last night we're at the game, and I've tried to save as many weight watchers points as I can for beer and hot dogs. We went for a brisk walk on the American Tobaccy Trail and I was ravenous by the time we got into the ballpark. I ordered a Red Hook ESB and two hot dogs (it was $1 hot dog night) - I had enough points for one more beer and a cup of pop corn - the infamy! The Humanity! By the time the game was given up for good in the 7th inning I wanted another hot dog or two, some fries, another beer. But we soldiered on in solidarity.

O for a muse of fire

Here we are at Memorial Day: three days, Saturday, Sunday and Monday of liberty from the soul crushing atmosphere of work and social expectation. I exaggerate with a far flung hyperbolic turn of phrase when I say "soul crushing." Or do I? These three days are a tonic to the week spent, for me, scanning test responses and, for the last two days, assembling typed responses and irregular responses in the proper packets for distribution to scorers.
O the menial jobs I've done while maintaining my art: loading hay, making aircraft parts, telephoning for PBS, and scoring basic skills essays. The last activity has the virtue of being done with well educated people who are in a similar boat, and there's at least a smidgen of an acknowledgment that you know something. Where else have I worked with the possibility of discussing jazz, abstract expressionism and Hegel? But squeezing my brain into state required slots takes a toll. After a week of doing this my head actually feels numb. Right now there's a tingling feeling on the left top of my skull. It began yesterday around 2 pm and it continued on through dinner at Vespa, an Italian eatery in Chapel Hill, where I had spaghetti with tiny calamari in it. I tried reading Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception again and again, only to reread several passages I'd reread before (the hazard of not having a book mark), before giving up and going to bed. My head tingled numbly on through the night.
My only relief is drawing. Lately I've taken to drawing ribbons, lots of ribbony sheathes and mobius strips, winding and (in)(con)voluting. I think they symbolize for me a kind of structure that is both exo and endo skeleton. I feel keenly the need to paint. When I go into these Italianate warehouse buildings where I score tests, to the big lofts with hardwood floors and large windows, I relish the space, and I wish that I had a large canvas stretched out before me, rather than a desk with packets of tests. Lately I've begun to appreciate the work of Cy Twombly and his large caligraphic marks and swirls. There are a couple of really great Twomblys at the Chicago Art Institute. These are difficult paintings to appreciate for the noncognoscenti, but I see them as an enlarged passion for the page: the musings of thought we allow ourselves when we're in the process of working toward something. Twombly's paintings say that the process itself has merit and operates aesthetically without having a product, a Telos. Of course there must be some Telos, but it could be unknowable, or unnamable: as Jung said, a symbol tending toward an unknown goal. This is the same language Freud uses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to describe the mechanism of drives (actually Zilboorg uses this phrase in his introduction to BTPP): that they operate at the behest of some unknown mechanism, something repressed that is trying to make its way back into the ego's consciousness.
My goal is to paint and draw, to create, with as few constraints as possible.
We both look forward to the day we can live on the beach and write and paint. Nothing unnumbs the mind more than the crash of the surf and the light of the sun off the water.
Now I'm off to shave and shower and we're going to see our friend Joey down in Smithfield where the streets are paved with ham and lined with streak-0-lean, bacon baking in the sun on lakes of pork and beans. We'll likely take in the Ava Gardener museum - my way of touching base with the chairman of the board. Ring a ding ding. And then we'll enjoy even more time off - the luxury of going into Sunday night without the feeling of work in the morning to oppress us. With that in mind I propose a Sinatra liturgy that begins with Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week and ends with 'Scuse me, while I disappear, as the benediction.

painting is about paint

the last judgement you'll ever need

This is a bad polaroid of a painting I did in the summer of 2001. I painted it in my office on the 8th floor of a web company. The company down the hall was closing and they had this large canvas frame, which they'd removed the painting from. I asked for it and they gave it to me. I took it too my office and stretched the canvas onto it and gessoed it. And then I painted this evocation of Greenwich Village. I had been to Manhattan that April and I loved the energy of the "City." The guy in the middle on the bottom is checking his watch - and the judgement goes on, unnoticed by most of the people, who carry on with their lives: an "end of the world as we know it and I feel fine" moment. I've wanted to transcribe that REM song into a hymn for years now. I have this image of a whole congregation singing the chorus, smiles on their faces. Avoiding a fiery judgement has never been a good reason to be a Christian. You can avoid a fiery judgement in most scenarios by being more moral, more rule guided - as if the God of Grace, for whom whatever righteousness we might contrive is filthy rags, would give a shit about what we ate or didn't eat, who we picketed or didn't picket. The religious impulse that is guided by moralism, and hence by the need for fire insurance, is the same impulse that straps bombs onto people and blows up a market, or that counts human life (life created in the image of God) as cheap, because that human doesn't agree with someone's moral list.
A good reason to be a Christian is because Jesus effected you so deeply that you feel compelled by that love to love God's creation and those who bear God's image - in short thankfulness is the guiding motive. These are the kind of people who can sing the end of the world and I feel fine. These are the kind of people for whom the judgement passes as a second hand sweeps across the dial, but for whom life is too precious and too much to be cherished to notice or to respond with fear.
This painting is now in a friend's home in McLean, VA. They've hung it in their stairwell. I hope soon, when Jami and I visit friends in DC that we can stop by and visit this couple and see this painting.
I may have a gig preaching this Easter. I can't preach often enough. And I'm excited because there are so many texts in the liturgy available. The revised common lectionary people touched all the bases: Isaiah 25; Jerimiah 31; Matt 28; John 20; Psalms 114, 118; Col 3:1-4; 1 Cor 5: 6-8; Acts 10: 34 ff, Luke 24 - dive right in! I'm enchanted by all of Isaiah 25 (not just the passages they selected) and I'm thinking of the 1 cor text - if only because it is echoed in the eucharistic celebration: Christ our paschal lamb is sacrificed therefore let us keep the feast. I love that banquet imagery: I love it because Jesus so often uses feasts to characterize the kingdom of God and because the last supper binds us all in history and over the world in Christ via the Holy Spirit with Jesus. We are going to keep a feast. We are going to be filled. This is the judgement: that God is generous but people are stingy; that God gives freely but humanity feels compelled to hoard. While we have become fixated on death, God brings to life and restores to health. In God no one dies, but we taste life forever in the presence of Christ. And how should we therefore live our lives if we believe this, if we believe that the resurrection is the hope of creation's restoration? What will knock us out of our fears? our fears that cause us to join the hoarding crowd. Is our faith so weak and miserable, so grounded in contingency, that we blanch at living out the words, at living in a world where abundance is the reality and scarcity the lie? How we've reversed the two, and it bombards us in our newspapers, our movies, our books, our politics. But the power of the resurrection is something different. It is something different than resuscitating a corpse - a parlor trick. The resurrection is a new fact of life, but a fact as old as creation, that death is not the final event and the fear of death does not lead to a love of humanity. There is no image of God in the fear of death - these two are not the same. God is sovereign over death, though death is not a created thing. Death has power over human beings only when human beings think that they exist without God. Death is a negation, a nothingness - as Barth points out in CD 3.3 and In CD 4.1. Death rules human beings when we become convinced of our own rightness and the corresponding wrongness of other. Like Schubert's Erlkoenig we would rather take by force than lose in an argument. When we think we exist independent of God, we cannot take no for an answer from another human being. We cannot tell ourselves no, and we lie to ourselves and others to maintain the illusion of autonomy.
Who will free us from this?
Jesus, whose life is the unique expression of God's sovereign servanthood, who lived out a life of obedience and love among us, who showed us the Father and gave us the Spirit: Jesus in his life death and resurrection leads us to that place of generosity, where we see and can rest in what God has given us. Where we can express the gratitude we are called into - that there is abundance, that there is enough, and that we shouldn't be afraid of scarcity.
Let us keep the feast.

OK now the Danae is finished

Ok I went back into the Danae and changed the color of one of the falling books from yellow to a lavender with a yellowish spine and corner tabs. I love this painting. I think it will look great in our new home in Durham. Even though we don't have a new home yet, and we're still living in the old one. And our old one is still unsold after three days. Where are these people? This place is a bargain. I hope one day to do a painting as rife and recondite with symbolism as Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, Time and Folly. What a wonderful painting. I also hope to become more expressionistic like DeKooning. But the end of it all is continuing to find and use my own voice - to be wary of working in the vein of another.

The Lucretia Sold

Finally this painting hangs on a wall in Atlanta. I wrote about it some months ago, despairing that it would find a home. But now a businesswoman wants it hanging on a wall in her house. So much for it being too painful.

Prodigal Son

About the same time I painted the banner for the church in Covington, Billy, the minister there, asked me to paint a parable - the prodigal son. I was loosely thinking of Rembrandt's Prodigal while I did this, though there's little resemblance compositionally, I used the welcoming gesture of a father embracing his son. I added a reflection of the older son, scowling. The soon to be slaughtered calf is visible, as are a guitar and playing cards (symbols of the Prodigal's profligacy. The Prodigal Son thwarts our expectations. We side with the elder son - a pulled up by the bootstraps, nose clean, eyes dead ahead adept of moral accountancy. We look at the Prodigal through dim glasses and see only warts - he is the convenient receptor of our projections: wastrel, dirty hippie, bum - all the things we're afraid of finding in ourselves and bury deep under the surface. To embrace the Prodigal is to embrace moral failure - that is, the possibility that you're just like anyone else, in need of forgiveness. The question is: how can we be like the father, willing to break cultural norms of honor and shame and extend to the weaker position mercy. We live in a society that punishes weakness. Our foreign policy is driven by not showing weakness and projecting power. Our motto: never let them see you sweat. For all the people championing "Christian" values - the big value that Paul voiced "when I am weak, then God is strong" is left in silence. What would it be like for Christians to revel in their weakness: to parade the weakness of the church instead of complaining that we're not powerful? What would it be like for us to investigate weakness, to privilege weakness? These are the questions the Prodigal asks us.

What shall I do for post 100?

Danae, a young woman imprisoned by her father, a king, who is told that his daughter's offspring will kill him. So the king puts his daughter in an impregnable tower. Zeus, who likes a challenge, beams down on Danae in a ray of golden light. Soon she conceives Perseus, the kid who grows up to decapitate the Gorgon, Medusa. Perseus indeed kills his father - but he refuses the kingdom. I've been working on this painting for months and it's nearing completion. Here are two details: her face, reflecting golden light, and her hand, covered with blood.
Only recently has this painting become Danae. At first I began an abstraction, intending the painting to be about lines of color. And then this figure appeared. I attempted to create a visitation or a three graces - but the composition wouldn't work right. Now I've settled on Danae, and it fits.
I've loved this story for years. Along with the Leda story and the Europa story it forms a trinity of Zeus stories. Zeus as light, impregnating a girl with transcendence, ratchets up the symbolism. This isn't some anthropomorphic tale but a tale that comes as near as ancient mythology can to the virgin birth.
In the story of the Virgin the Holy Spirit is often depicted impregnating Mary through the ear. At least the idea is that the Word begets the Word via audation. Nothing's easy - got to go in through the ear. Which ear? I can't remember if it matters, but probably the right ear - the left ear being sinister.
So you think a tradition would have begun of virgins wearing veils over their ears?
Danae was locked in a tower of bronze, which didn't stop her from becoming pregnant. Her father then put her and her son in a wooden chest and pushed her out to sea - but that didn't stop Zeus and Poseidon from saving her son and her.
Later myths tell of Perseus killing his father two ways: one is an accident with a discus or javelin at the Olympic games; the other is some bold intrusion into the king's court where Perseus pulls Medusa's head out of a bag and turns the whole court to stone. When I was young, hearing this story as a small boy, I loved the vengeance of the calcified court; now I prefer that the story of an accident at the games: it has that element of chance encounter like Oedipus meeting his father along the road; or like the Israelite king who hides among his army in disguise only to be killed when an archer draws his bow and releases an arrow by chance.

a detail from a large painting

Here's the central area of a painting that I began in 2002. It's hung in other people's homes, been rolled up in a closet, and finally finished - as far as I was concerned, last Summer. Sometimes the process of painting can be lengthy. Often what gets in the way is some preconceived idea of what I want to happen. At some point I have to understand when that that I want is not what the painting will do, and then try to understand what can be done. In this case, as in most cases, the solution was more satisfying than what I was trying to do. I suppose that often I am trying to something very conventional, and for a while I'm able to be conventional, but then a point arrives where conventionality doesn't work. That's what imagination is for: to give us the resources to overcome the limitations or live with the limitations of the conventional. Perhaps that is where beauty, before unsuspected in life, waits for us, in that liminal space where we are forced by limit experiences to eschew conventional solutions. Is there a scripture for this? Perhaps Jesus is a liminal space.

Paint

Both photos are from my studio. The top photo is a box of squeezed out paint tubes and the bottom photo is my palate - or rather the underside of a mass of paint I sliced off my palate. Note the wonderfully psychedelic array of color, how it smashes together and how various symmetrical patterns are asymmetric to each other. These are all painting byproducts: oddly assembled dried paint and empty tin tubes. Other painting byproducts not pictured are brushes used to the nub, paint splattered floors and tables, odd scraps of canvas. The studio space itself is artifact.

Last Judgment

In the waning days of this web company I worked for I set up a five foot square canvas in my office. I had a ninth floor office with a floor to ceiling picture window and a view of South Peachtree Creek. On this canvas I painted a memory of the previous spring's trip to Manhattan. This is no particular moment in Greenwich Village but a feeling of what it was like - for me. As I worked on this and as it developed, people would ask me what it was, and I said, "it's a last judgment." Indeed here's a guy checking his watch. But look, people are doing what they're doing - no fiery molten cascades of molten fiery agonized frenzy. Just people spending time being themselves: singing, biking, loving; out with their cats and dogs. No screaming melodramatic lining up for a great white throne. Imagine. Healing and peace - not damnation and fury.

A Ridiculous Painting

This is the ridiculous painting I made reference to some days ago. It's a wonderfully painted painting: lots of free brushwork, each square inch meticulously attended to, and it's chock full of symbolism. Is it patriotic? Is it an allegory of spring? Is is about prayer and abundance? Note the speckled snake along the bottom of the painting (an allusion to Sherlock Holmes' story of the speckled band?) and behind her head, in one of the blue fields, a crescent moon and between the moon and her head, a green star. It's a lovely painting.

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.

Out of Chaos

Two Summers ago I stretched a canvas that was about 4 by 5 feet and had it set up in my dorm room at the seminary. I began my typical searching out method to see what would emerge on this canvas, but I was dissatisfied: the room was too small to get anywhere on such a large field. I prayed, "Lord, I need a big room." And I thought that I might be able to find a spare room on campus that someone would let me use for a short time.
At this time I was preparing for and taking my ordination exams. During this time Katrina hit New Orleans. That such a disaster could hit a modern city and that the national and state response could be so tentative, faltering and lax, astonished me as well as others at the seminary. Brian Wren, the professor of worship, was planning a week of chapel services devoted to this disaster and he came to me, wondering if I had any artistic conceptions that could be incorporated. In the past I had done visual representations on dry erase board of a text. This time I realized that I had the perfect sized field for representation: the canvas I'd stretched in my room.
I brought the campus to the chapel and set it up, engineering it to a dry-erase board with lots of tape and twine. Over the course of the week's chapel service I painted a large abstract canvas, which resulted in the image posted above. I would come into the chapel at odd hours and work on it, so that it would be constantly changing. What people had seen was being constantly submerged under new layers of paint.
When I had finished the painting hung in the chapel of a month or more. For most of the the year it was displayed at the seminary bookstore. Eventually it was bought by a classmate of mine and now is displayed on a wall in her house.

A washed out shot of a New Mexico painting

This photo was taken by a photographer for the AJC using a very expensive camera, and it doesn't show the richness of the color or texture of the paint I'd gotten here. Photography of artwork is a tricky thing, and I'm not anal about it myself, except when faced with the limitations of what is possible. A painting is superior to a photograph exactly for those elements of surface manipulation and image integration that a photo, when done by a professional art photographer, provides a metaphor for what is seen. A photo of a painting is a double metaphor, the painting being the first metaphor.
Now I know that I said "superiority of painting to photography" and that's bound to cause a stir, but photos have their own surface manipulations and image integrations: perhaps I should have said that the vocabulary of painting doesn't translate well into the vocabulary of photography and vice versa. That is: it's asking a lot of a photograph to reproduce a painting.
Well that was unnecessarily complicated.
What I painted here was a spot near the middle of nowhere. Those from New Mexico know just where this is: near nowhere, insight of the mountains, covered with scrub, the road indistinguishable from the surrounding dust and rock. Overhead is a cloud that appears to be raining, but the rain is evaporating high in the air. Or else there is a cloud 100s of times bigger than the mountains it looms behind. At your feet there is a bit of bone, and in the blue shadows of the thistle a small creature rustles away, out of sight.
A map says that there is a watercourse around here, but you don't see one: but not being one to argue, you call it a draw.

Annunciation

If only I had a better reproduction of this painting. I painted it back in 1999. It now resides in Birmingham, AL. Gabriel comes down in a flame of fire. Mary, well imagine: a young girl receives an angelic visitation and becomes pregnant. There's more going on here than meets the eye: it begs to be portrayed in a sensual, fantastic way.

A large painted head

Here's an acrylic painting I painted on the wall of my former dorm apartment. It's about five feet square. Now it's been painted over by the physical plant. I hear from friends still there that it continues to subtly bleed through the over painting. This pleases me.