No. 103. Look Inward, Angel. He spent all of Christmas day painting an angel. He meant it to seem beatific, a gentle, compassionate angel who might be grateful for its existence and eager to bless its maker. He wasn't really all that surprised, however, when his laborious angel caught fire under his hands and brought an avenging heat to his chilly studio. He had made a demonic angel. "It suits me better anyhow," he told himself.
No. 102. The Orgone Accumulator. He was still feeling listless and ant-climactic after having experienced 100 sojourns in the Tabletop Studio. Then he remembered how much faith some people had once put in the restorative qualities of the famous Orgone Box, devised by one-time Freudian disciple, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. The Box was made of alternate sheets of plywood and copper. Somehow, according to Reich, if you sat inside the Orgone Box, it would serve as an accumulator of the vital--essentially sexual--energy that was floating through the universe. Sitting in The Box, Reich proclaimed, was good for everything from restoring lost vitality to curing major diseases. He figured he'd give it a try.
A Note on Orgone (from Wikipedia):
Orgone is a pseudoscientific and spiritual concept described as an esoteric energy or hypothetical universal life force, originally proposed in the 1930s by Wilhelm Reich. As developed by Reich's student Charles Kelley after Reich's death in 1957, orgone was conceived as the anti-entropic principle of the universe, a creative substratum in all of nature comparable to Mesmer's animal magnetism (1779), to the Odic force (1845) of Carl Reichenbach and to Henri Bergson's élan vital (1907). Orgone was seen as a massless, omnipresent substance, similar to luminiferous aether, but more closely associated with living energy than with inert matter. It could allegedly coalesce to create organization on all scales, from the smallest microscopic units—called "bions" in orgone theory—to macroscopic structures like organisms, clouds, or even galaxies.
No. 98. Water Lillies Now. It's been two years since he was in Paris--how quickly the time passes!! It was while browsing through the Musee de L'Orangerie, innocently enjoying the Derains and the Soutines that, almost by chance, he found himself descending the stairs into the museum's Monet Room 1 (Adorno called it a "mausoleum") and finding himself awash--almost against his will--in Monet's "Grandes Decorations," the Water Lillies. He rather wished it hadn't been quite so overwhelming an experience. Since returning home, he had always wanted to pay some sort of tribute to that epic body of work in his own practice, but had never found a way. Then, a few weeks ago, he noticed a frieze of violet water lillies splashed along the sides of a box of Royale tissues. They had been painted crudely, without conviction, against a listless green background. He set about copying them--on a vast, Monet-scale. Their cheapness, their downright tawdriness both fascinated him and rather disgusted him. Well, that's perfect, he thought.
No. 97. Tunisian Light. One day last week, he remembered--he just suddenly remembered--how much he loved the paintings of J.W. Morrice (1865-1924), and decided to paint a homage to him. Morrice had been born in Montreal and had died in his beloved Tunisia. His paintings were invariably small, but his own hero-worship painting was going to be as big as he could make it. He struggled with it and worried it (like a dog with a bone) and pushed it and scraped it and pummeled it and distressed it until--like squeezing a lemon--it finally gave out what he thought of as some real Tunisian light.
No. 96. The Weasel Monument. Six months ago, he received a commission to design a monument to the political process in America. Initially, he had no wish to be either satirical or (therefore) disrespectful, but as the sculpture progressed--he had decided to make a huge ceramic--all his restlessness and anxiety about the upcoming US presidential election came to the fore and he ended by making (it was as if the thing had a life of its own) a gigantic weasel. He felt sure his work would be rejected--and it was.
No.95: Knossos. He took a short ab-ex holiday yesterday and worked all day long on a big, knotted, very rapidly executed painting titled Knossos. He had been to Knossos in 1987, had visited that lugubrious palace on his way to see the Nikos Kazantzakis Museum in the little Cretan town of Vavari, which is just 12 km. from Knossos. Kazantzakis remains his favourite writer. Knossos is not, however, his favourite place. It had never felt like King Minos’s Pleasure Place to him. For him, Knossos was a dark, sinister place, more like a gigantic mortuary than a resort for athletic, pleasure-loving Greek youths. As he painted, the shadow of the Minotaur kept crossing before his reveries, blocking out the sun.
No. 94: The Ball Game. His admiration for the work of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was now of very long standing--and continued unabated. Lately, he had begun a project called "The Modernist Romance" (suggested by Freud's "The Family Romance") for which he selected, isolated and, as far as was possible, duplicated certain details--painterly stage props--from modernist paintings he loved. This week, he was happily plundering de Chirico's "The Song of Love" from 1914, excerpting the green ball and building one for himself. Unable to maintain de Chirico's purity, however, he added white stitching to his, thus making it, pointlessly, into a giant baseball.
No.3. Points of Order. He had recently made a wildly romantic painting called--how the title now galled him!--"Monk Under the Stars." It was a triangular work, an isoceles canvas with pigment caked onto it so thickly and so tightly he could no longer lift it onto his easel for a final disparaging look. He was pleased for a moment by the upward-pointing of the canvas and by the echo provided by the upward pointedness of his easel. Too bad he wasn't a theosophist, he thought. Then he could make a big rapturous Lawren-Harris-like fuss about the wonders of the transcendental, and the upward thrusting of the spirit. Clearly, he was beginning to annotate his every feeling and every fleeting thought and so, as an exorcism--and as a penance--he carved and painted a giant marker which, when he leaned it against his easel, he liked better than anything he'd made for months. How neatly we are cleansed by vulgarity!
No.92. Bluebottle. He decided that despair embraced more motivation than despondency did. Every day he would try again, and by the end of the week he was painting on a large wooden panel, working it so relentlessly that it finally groaned and gave him back a field of images, one of which appeared to be a gigantic blue beetle-shaped, carapace-like object that he he found both beautiful and repulsive in equal measure. The landscape in which the Bluebottle rested appeared to be on some cold and distant planet. The pink, reagent-like cylinder at his left was perhaps, he thought, some kind of life-support canister dredged up from the wetlands of his unconscious.
No. 91. Eyes R Us. His most recent foray into sculpture had upset him. He had wanted to go on exploring sculptural modernism, intending to make something clean and hard like one of Malevich's Suprematist architectural models in plaster--something like his cold, exquisite Arkhitekton Gota from 1923. But no matter what he did, every one of his new works ended up being a goddam face. He would look at it and it would look back. It made him crazy..
No. 90. Diminution. Well, he thought, big is big, and bigness clearly has its majesty, but small was where he felt most at home. It was harder, admittedly, to find the heroic in smallness, though many had done so (Paul Klee, William Blake, Turner in his watercolours, Goya in his etchings). In the case of his new painting, he had exerted almost too much control over it, fussing until his urn-by-the-sea became an apple-by-the-sea and then suddenly sprouted extensions that made the red globe into a jar with paint brushes stuck in it. It occurred to him that without troubling himself for much longer, he could make the brushes into a fuse and then he'd have a rather jolly red bomb resting by the shore. Why would he want that? Because of its inexplicability, he thought with satisfaction.
No. 89. The Big Bouquet. He loved still life painting and revered its long and noble history. He doted upon certain great moments of painterly stillness from the past: the pale bottles and vases of Giorgio Morandi, Picasso's Still Life from 1914 (the one made of grey painted wood and tassels), Gustave Caillebotte's array of Fruits Displayed on a Board from 1894, all those Cezannes, Manet's bouquets, Chardin's mouthwatering La Brioche (1763), Zubaran's hallucinatory Still Life with Basket of Oranges (1664)...well, the list was a long one. His trouble with still life was that he found the pictures mostly too small. However, his own recent still life, Arctic Bouquet, he now began to find oppressively large. The choice of scale had always been a traditional concern to artists--and it remained as subtle a business (full of nice discriminations and endless nuances) as it had been from Roman times. Clearly he had to think more about the size of things.
No. 88: The Carnal Cup. He made a clumsy ceramic cup, big and oafish. It took him weeks, and required 500 pounds of clay. He had to fire it in sections. Building it was clearly obsessive. It wasn’t so much the bravado of its making that seized him, though he found the technical difficulties he encountered to be more bracing than bothersome. Rather, it had more to do with the anthropological eroticism it exemplified. The big cup was a continuation of a long line of ancient votive vessels—from Late Archaic Greece (c.480 B.C.), for example, and from the explicit Moche ceramics of Peru—that offered an in-flagrante-delicto world. His showed a couple fucking in the bottom of the cup. In a normally scaled cup, you’d encounter them as you drained the last of the liquid. Here, with this huge, empurpled cup, you had to peer over the side to see them—like looking into a tide-pool. His cup thus added voyeurism to its list of transgressions.
No. 86: Conflagration. A friend gave him a thousand wooden, poly-chromed dowels. At first he was delighted. The colours were rich and fine. In the end, they annoyed him, probably because they didn't appear to need any further adjustment or manipulation on his part. The dowels seemed, in fact, more like competition. At one point, he bundled them up and drove to the lake. There, on the beach, he sat in their midst, feeling like a dark flame in a rainbow-hued bonfire. When the sun went down, and the fire went out, he felt like a nesting shore-bird.
No. 85 Saint Anthony. He woke up this morning determined to construct his own hagiography. Every studio needs a book of saints. It isn't a about religion, he decided; it's about wonderment, about the inexplicable. The idea came to him in the course of his browsing through some of his older notebooks. He found this little plum-coloured St. Anthony, standing in the door to his cave, in a notebook from 2012.
No. 84: Philip Whalen. He had always kept notebooks. He drew in them and copied out the passages he liked from his reading. It was while browsing through Ron Padgett's How to Be Perfect (Coffee House Press, 2007), that he found this: "When asked what he wanted done with his body after his death Philip Whalen (1923-2002) said, 'Have them lay me out on a bed of frozen raspberries'." He found this so winning, so poetically irreverent, so disturbingly charming, that he decided to paint huge text pieces--like handwritten billboards. The Philip Whalen comment was the first one.
No. 83: Nest. Almost felled by an attack of anxiety as sharp and heavy as an axe, he set about desperately winding and weaving a mile of red cable into the semblance of a capacious red nest. It had been like knitting on a more or less obtuse scale. But his resulting nest was as warm as a fire in the fireplace, and offered the pulse, the resilience, of a bodily organ (at first he was irrationally afraid he had knitted his own heart).. Sometimes, when he lay stretched out upon it, he could feel its circulatory beating. Good, he thought. If his scarlet nest were alive, so was he.
No. 82: The Big Apple. Yesterday he set aside his plans for sculptural giganticism and, returning to his painting studio. turned a small still life into a big still life. It gave him more satisfaction than he had imagined it would. He made the big apple white--like a soap bubble, as it it were prickable with a pin--and set it on a rich, golden, egg-yolk ground..
No.80. Uproar. He couldn't forget the dancing geysers that started up from nowhere--roaring skyward almost from between his feet--in the Golden Circle hot springs near Reykjavik, Iceland. He equated those upstart geysers with the domestic-sized icebergs that drifted out beyond friend's shoreline in Newfoundland. What he needed was a way to make these phenomena solid and sculptural. He longed to be able to cast a geyser in bronze, or an iceberg in aluminum.
No. 79. A New Lightness of Being. He had grown too serious, almost dour. His habits had become predictable, his hours of work unprofitably monastic, his anxieties exhausting but unproductive. Yesterday he bought himself a couple of bottles of French Rose (one was a sparkling rose), hoping he might thereby force himself into a certain frivolity. He hadn't opened them yet. He wondered if he ever really would.
No.77. Desert Father. His soul felt cluttered. Ideas swarmed within him inchoate, seldom emerging as usable forms. He needed some kind of cleansing. The only plan he had—as impractical as most of his plans were—was to build himself a small high tower and, like the desert fathers of old, sit on it until he was visited by purification. His hero was the 5th century mystic, Saint Simeon the Stylite, who lived for 37 years atop a slim pillar in Syria. Just to insure the right amount of clarifying discomfort, he decided, as well, to incorporate into his tower-idea the Indian fakir’s infamous bed of nails. The site of his penance would thus be a small bed of nails raised high into the air. He had a great deal of trouble building it.
No. 76: Bells and Spheres. On Monday, June 20, he entered the studio very early in the morning--before dawn--and was astonished to find it packed with enormous glassy spheres, many of elaborate design, with swirls and reef-like encrustations within them. In aggregate, the spheres seemed to emit a low chorus of oceanic sound, a distant, subaqueous hum that bothered him as much as he found it pleasing. If he chanced to touch one of the spheres--and some were warm beneath his fingertips--it rang out with a rasping, bell-like sound that lingered for a long time before it decayed. He worried about how he was ever going to dispose of them, but gradually, over the next few hours, they began to disappear, each one suddenly popping like a soap bubble.
No.75: Crossword. He'd never laboured over a crossword puzzle in his entire life when, the day before yesterday, he looked at one with fresh eyes and suddenly felt he had found an absorbing subject for painting: the puzzle's composition was endlessly shiftable, modular, its graphic rigidity softened and deepened by the numbering of the white squares. What he had taken to be time-squandering blank-filling trap (so akin to the forms so beloved of bureaucracies), seemed instead to be a gnomic kind of utterance, a linguistic provocation, a semantic proto-narrative, a cognitive bit-map. He was cautiously ecstatic. Hadn't anyone else settled upon the same subject?
No. 73. Contra-Narcissus. Having pursued Tatlin for a couple of weeks, he felt the need to make a large-scale figurative sculpture. The result was a prodigious mermaid. He built her on the beach, out of local clay, after which he had her cast in bronze, painted white, and brought back down again to the shore. He found himself bitterly disappointed with her. Her body was okay (he was especially pleased with the graceful fish’s tail he had given her), but he intensely disliked the empty, singer-songwriter vapidity of her expression. He wanted a goddess, a shard of the eternal-feminine. Instead, he’d made a six-ton girl-next-door.
No.72. Corner Relief. Perpetually moved by the work of Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953)--and who isn't?--and especially by his astonishing Corner-Counter Reliefs from 1915, he set out to make a corner piece of his own. Unlike the Tatlins he admired--which were installed in corners--his piece, clumpy by comparison to Tatlin-esque buoyancy, was itself made up of corners.
No.71: The Line of Beauty. He was making large shaped constructions out of wood. He had intended to be rough, relentless and severe, but grace kept breaking in. He recognized, for example, the swooping S-curve of the upper element of the piece to be William Hogarth's famous "Line of Beauty" (1753), and decided straightaway to give up his pursuit of the brut. He titled the work "Harlequin," because of the two huge nails that now looked like eyes.
No. 69. In the Eye of the Beholder. Someone emailed him last week, rather smugly pointing out that his little sculpted rabbit of the week before was "cute" but didn't look like a Giacometti! Since it wasn't intended to, this note made him almost uncontrollably angry--to the point where he spent the next four days making this big, black, retaliatory, dagger-like piece bearing one of his paintings on its handle. He titled the work "In the Eye of the Beholder." A stab in the dark.
No. 68: Rabbit Redux. Having so recently ascended Nimble Rabbit Mountain, he now felt the urge to sculpt a rabbit in honour of that eccentric, peak experience. He started with a big block of stone, but the longer he worked on it, the more of the stone he scraped and whittled away. It was like cleaning a fish--until there was no fish left at all. He thought then of Giacometti, and managed to put on the brakes in time to leave behind a perky little rabbit that was smaller than the real thing. I need to be less ambitious, he thought to himself. Or more..
No.67: CLOUD BONE WHALE. Suddenly, he was painting big again. He titled this latest work--which was twenty feet square--Cloud Bone Whale, thereby heading-off, he hoped, most of the blockhead interpretations he felt he was likely to hear when the painting was finally exhibited. He was quite anxious to discover what his partner, Rachel Rappaccini, thought of it. She seemed a bit put off, he thought, when she finally visited the studio. "You don't like it?" he asked her/ It's powdery," she told him. "Confectionary bombast!" He was stunned. "Confectionary?" he asked her. "Bombast?" "Candy Floss," said Rachel, with crushing finality.
No. 66: NIMBLE RABBIT MOUNTAIN. He and his friends were on a weekend jaunt into the foothills. Someone photographed him climbing a white hillock that he insisted looked like a rabbit. "It's the old paraeidolia at work," one of them said. "Seeing shapes that aren't really there. It's all projection." He hotly denied it. "The hill is definitely shaped like a rabbit," he maintained, and refused to be persuaded otherwise. "I'm naming it Mount Lapin Agile," he told them.
No.62: Red Cabbage. His dalliance with French Classicism at an end, he turned his sculptural attentions to the absorbing world of Chinoiserie, carving a huge Napa Cabbage from plaster and painting it in a brick-red hue that evoked--so he hoped--the reds of Chinese lacquerwork. Despite its colour, the piece reminded him of Hokusai's Great Wave.
No. 61: The Death of Marat. He'd been taking a swipe at French Classicism recently. His latest foray into that august territory was his version of Jacques-Louis David's La Mort de Marat from 1793. He used an old packing crate for Marat's bathtub, and persuaded his least favourite art critic, Wolf Blitzkrieg, to pose as the unfortunate Marat--a wry bit of wishful thinking.
No.60: Big Red. In one of his infrequent forays into sculpture, he laboriously carved and then carefully painted a large wooden representation--as tall as him--of a tube of red acrylic paint He was especially pleased by his rendering of the bits of old dried paint on its surface. And he was proud of the way he was able to reproduce a swipe of black paint lying across the tube's middle. His original intention had been to produce an entire rainbow of carved tubes--a visual chord-organ--the next one being orange, then yellow, then green, then blue, and then violet. But he could see it was going to be a gigantic undertaking--and besides, he was eager to get back to painting.
No. 59: Bound East for Cardiff. His visitors pretty much ignored his giant paintings, so he took refuge, for a few weeks, in the making of a series of small monotonal sea pictures. This one, of a freighter smoking out into the open ocean, he called Bound East for Cardiff, after a play by one of his idols, Eugene O'Neill.
No. 58: Big Bird. His large painting of a monumentally-scaled red bird was almost finished. He was both pleased and apprehensive about the bird's authoritative presence. He could almost hear its shattering call, echoing through the mountains he had imagined for it. Curious about its possible reception, he invited a few friends to the studio to take a look. They talked about everything except the painting...
No. 57: Hero-Worship. He had recently read a blog piece somewhere about a novel by Erich Maria Remarque called Heaven Has No Favorites from 1961. He didn't expect much of the book, but was, in the end, delighted by it--by its robust, swashbuckling philosophizing. He didn't have much success, however, trying to ignite this same enthusiasm in his friends
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