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.
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