All In
Triage & Fairy Tales
Recently I closed a studio upstate and moved everything to Brooklyn. Or rather, after a period of triage, I did. There was work dating back to my art school days and beyond. Strangely what got thrown out was not the oldest, although I have over the years winnowed those down to a small interesting cluster. There were several paintings that made me claustrophobic….so into the garbage pile. And there were the on-the-fencers. Many I gave away. Those left fell to the whim of the junk men. Who knows where they all went. Almost all the war paintings made the cut as did a few from art school. I’m left with a path bread-crumbed by those remaining. Read that way it’s a messy fairy tale lacking a final chapter.
As a child I was lost in books and forever in the woods, climbing trees, happy in the overflow, the influx of happening and excess of input. Those stories and wanderings have survived in images/videos shelved in my brain. They became a framework for understanding myself in the world as opposed to experiencing myself from the inside.
& then the cusp of awkward adulthood and the plunge into the greater world with its tsunami of incoming. Therein are found the jewels of strange…
…including what crossed your eyeballs and scratched your mind in the process…
2 Heads
25 X 50 2007 oil on linen
& now All In, the big deal fairy tale, tall tale, inside-of-my-head picture. It has taken over a year to finish and is just over ten feet long. One way to look at it is to pick a bird as your avatar and see where it takes you. Try another and see what happens then…not unlike getting up every morning and launching…