No. 50. Mental Blocks. It was clear, even to him, that he was regressing. Recently, he had painted from Kleenex Boxes. Then he commissioned his mother (his mother!) to knit gigantic woolen balls for him. Now, in his search for the elemental, he had spent far too much time and effort fabricating solid wooden cubes--each 2' x 2' x2'--which he laboriously painted in clean, pure colours. In the end, they did not delight him.
No. 49. The Moon pictures palled quickly. He soon began to loathe painting. The brush felt like a lead pipe in his hand. One day he asked his mother if she and her friends could knit him some very large balls in assorted cheerful colours. She told him they probably could, but that so much wool would be quite expensive. He said that was okay. She also told him the task would take her and her friends quite a long time. He said he didn't mind waiting..
No.43: He was working on a thick, lozenge-like panel of wood. At first, the paint went on easily, like whitewash, but gradually became more viscous--like toothpaste, and then like cement. Cloudy shapes kept forming on their own, appearing, sometimes, to billow out towards him like a heavy fog rolling into a harbour. He walked to the back wall of the studio and stood there studying his unstable, unmoored painting. It was then he noticed the skyline of some unknown European city gradually forming behind it.
No.41: The Eluard Eagle. He had secured a huge sheet of corrugated cardboard—his favourite material—upon which to paint a profile of French Surrealist poet Paul Eluard, one of the writers he most admired. He came to see, however, that, viewed on its side, his Eluard became a rugged mountain landscape, with the poet’s glittering eye now transformed--appropriately, he thought--into a soaring, swooping eagle.
No. 40: BEYOND THE HORIZON. When he wasn't making art, he read. During the past month he had become enthralled by the long, tragic plays of Eugene O'Neill. At one point he was even tempted to frame a photograph which was signed "From Eugene O'Neill, with love"--even though he had written the inscription himself. Tennessee Williams had done that. He had written "To Tennessee, with love from Eugene O'Neill" on a playbiil, long after O'Neill had died---and had framed it.
No. 38: Skywalker.
The ordering metaphor for his career was the ladder. Oddly enough, his ladder didn't reach--as did the ladder in the famous etching by William Blake--from the earth to the moon. His ladder was more like a walkway through the sky, from which he frequently slipped and to which he had to hold on for dear life.
No. 37: Zarathustra in the Mountains.
He had been reading his Nietzsche--always a danger to him!---and had set out, as a consequence, for the mountains. Nietzsche's sonorous words, spoken as his prophet, Zarathustra, came to him as he climbed: "I am a wanderer and a mountain-climber (he said to his heart), I do not like the plains and it seems I cannot sit still for long. And whatever may yet come to me as fate and experience---a wandering and a mountain-climbing will be in it: in the final analysis one experiences only oneself...."
No. 36: The Contagion of Purity
Yesterday he ripped a small blank page from one of his notebooks and folded it in half, to use as a bookmark. The shape of the white paper--with the crenellation running along its top--pleased him greatly, especially when he stood it up on his worktable. The next day, he built the page again out of plywood, this time making it twenty times as large as before. Even while he was painting it white, he was beginning to find himself deeply disturbed by its simplicity, by its morphological purity. Indeed, the more he gazed upon his perfect white wall, the more upset and angry he became. In the end, the whiteness of the wall prevailed while he, its maker, began to go mad. Eventually, he turned into a rushing, feral creature, continually mocked by the perfection of what he had made.
No. 34: Ah Sunflower! It was a momentary madness. He took out a huge loan, and had three gigantic sunflowers fabricated in plastic. He also commissioned a vast white vase from a local ceramicist. When he assembled the piece, it looked more like a tropical hut than a sculpture. He was hoping for a kind of Jeff Koonsian experience, but ended by being George Sanders in The Moon and Sixpence.
No. 31: Pride Goeth Before a Flaw. Sometimes his intermittent Rodin complex led him to attempt heroic sculpture. But whenever he entered what he suspected was really the realm of hubris, he felt ridiculous. Moments after this photo was taken, he took a massive sledgehammer and pounded his new Jeanne d''Arc into powder.
No. 25. Song of Myself. He often thought about writing his memoirs, but the task seemed a daunting one. In his mind, the keyboard swelled to an enormous size, and he saw himself having to leap about on it, jumping from one key to another---like Archy the cockroach in Don Marquis's Archy and Mehitabel (1927).
No.6: The Layered Look. He decides that for six months, everything he makes will be in layers. He even pours himself a gigantic Pousse-Cafe--a cocktail consisting of four liqueurs of differing densities, the thickest and heaviest one at the bottom, supporting all the increasingly lighter ones above it.
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