Friday, June 18, 2010

* the new large piece has been cut down a bit in size and proportion... thats not a bad thing-- just my studio reality-- a matter of real estate, if you will... having rearranged the studio and measured, etc, it looks like this new work will measure about 70"x 124"... fine. i also have stretchers set up that measure 60"x84" and 45"x84", so this sweeping landscape evoking space i've been dreaming up is now (more or less) ready to go... still working on some of the smaller (24x24) pieces, but today will (largely) be spent stretching canvas... another question: how to fully exploit exposed, unprimed (raw) canvas? i think of newman's examples in the stations of the cross suite and that raw canvas created a stunning contrast... yeah. it will be an interesting day...

* tuesday night i checked out a reading by novelist francis levy at the writer's room. you never know what you'll get when a writer steps up the the microphone- but, as i suspected, levy (reading from his upcoming novel, Seven Days in Rio) delivered. his is a literature born out of a stifling intellectual curiosity and funny as hell... his language is at once poetic and vulgar, feverish and refined. i also had the extreme pleasure of reading his essay in the spring edition of American Imago, recounting his 29 years of psychoanalysis with a "Dr. S." not having engaged in such pursuits (being somewhat content with my psychic shortcomings...), outside of having read some of freud and jung, i was moving in uncharted territory, but the sheer weight of meaning in levy's prose and his insatiable sincerity made for a candid, beautiful read.

* i've been re-reading phoebe hoban's biography of jean-michel basquiat on the subway, to and from the studio of late. it's been, perhaps, 12 years since i first purchased and read this book... on this second reading, 12 years older, though probably not wiser, i'm finding her premise (more or less, that basquiat was a visionary naif, martyred within an artworld run amok) just this side of ludicrous. lets be frank-- a young artist is given space, materials and wads of cash and cache'. not to mention exhibitions, catalogs, the attention, he so obviously desired and... he's a martyr?? exploited??? rubbish... he was a young dude who couldn't turn off a drug problem, so he didn't have the time to really become the artist he, perhaps, could have become. thats all. nothing more and nothing less...

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

life is short. so, perhaps, paintings should be big... in the next day or so, i'm going to staple up to the wall a canvas, roughly 6 foot by 15 feet. i was going to go whole hog and go for 18 feet, but realized i might run out of wall... fair enough. 6 by 15 feet- gorgeous proportions and (excluding the installation i did in '05 at POST at 11'x43' on the walls) the largest work i've yet attempted.
there is the seduction of quixotic adventure in the offing here. this is exciting on such base and purile levels. but exciting it is...

i'm a very physical painter. canvases (and their supports) are put up and taken down to be laid out on the floor for pouring and the loaded slapping of housepainting brushes, bought at the hardware store. orientations shift day to day- minute to minute. this will be a very different endeavor. the canvas, firmly stapled to the wall, will become a wall itself. part of the challenge will be to deal with this fact- to face the "wall" and it's reality.

newman loved to pontificate that it wasn't size he was after, but scale. well, yeah... that sounds good and indeed, that is part of the enterprise. but size is an undeniable factor and i'm interested in seeing where that takes me and where it takes this work.

for good or ill...

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

a late start to getting out the door to the studio... so, yeah, dennis hopper and louise bourgeois dead and now we can add peter orlovsky to the list of the gone and remembered. sadly, very little has been mentioned thus far on his passing. in a way, thats fitting, given his life story. if orlovsky is remembered at all, he is remembered for many things- his gentle soul, his empathy and his 3 decade relationship with allen ginsberg. you can add to that, his madness and the sparse body of work that is his poetry, maybe in that order... like all the Beats, his output was spotty on quality and heavy and hard with sentiment and feeling. but as with most of the Beats, there was true beauty to be found. if you can find his piece,"frist poem" (misspelled, as much of his writing was...), read it a few times and then meditate on it. it's a golden, lyrical work-- as strong as anything written by his more celebrated contemporaries.

2 weeks ago i was staying in north beach, san francisco, walking the same streets and hanging in vesuvio's and city lights and remembering these poets and freaks who gave me so much as a much younger man... in 1991 (or thereabouts, it's a bit of a haze...), i met peter, gregory corso and ginsberg at a reading and book signing. corso was crazed and mumbling, ginsberg carried himself as a stoned academic (fitting) and peter sat smiling, cinematically handsome-- as i recall, now and then patting corso on his back, as if to placate and mellow out the youngest of the Beats-- his hair grey and uncombed, sadly incoherent.

as a young-ish poet, trying to establish myself and publishing for the first time, it was a heady, tragi-comic evening... but encounters with true poetry sometimes are.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

dennis hopper and louise bourgeois dead-- a day apart. thats as much as i have to say right now...