No. 126: Beautiful Losers. He had three not unattractive female friends--Abigail Crunch, a cultural critic for a small local newspaper, Gwendolyn Witt, a playwright, and Noreen Nosegay, who sometimes wrote poems. One day he made the lighthearted mistake of referring to them as his beautiful Muses, whereupon they insisted on mounting a beauty contest--vaguely derived from the famous Olympian Judgement of Paris, where the goddess-contestants were Aphrodite, Hera and Athena. He knew it would all come to no good--though he took some comfort in the knowledge that whatever his choice, it would be unlikely to result in anything so dire as the Trojan War.
No. 125: The Shift. He had been longing to paint clear and clean, but don't want to make monochromes--like Claude Tousignant, who was one of his heroes--or stripes, like those of the late Guido Molinari. who was another of his heroes. A couple of days ago--in the course of the same day, fortuitously--he became excited, first, by the shifting stripe pattern on the end of a box of tissues (the stripes were meant to be truly vertical, but had been given a wrenching by the way the box had been folded and glued). Then, a few hours later, he saw this photograph--while browsing through an old New Yorker magazine from August 24, 2014--of "the remains of a house," which featured the same shift as the tissue box. Now he saw how he could paint his stripes, giving them the same deviated shift: not just as decorative composition, but rather as a subtle symbol for the times being so "out of joint" as they clearly were. He was even contemplating building the shifted-chimney structure as a brick sculpture--a companion piece to his shifted stripe works. He'd exhibit them together.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)