Here I am at my kitchen sink in Pittsfield, MA. Age 24? I lived alone in a sweet third floor apartment and gave over one of my bedrooms to painting. That seems like a different life.
Why didn’t I keep at it, you might wonder. Well, paints are really expensive for one thing and probably the more important other thing, in my family my sister was the painter. I was the writer. You know how potent those early designations can be!
I post the purple painting fragment to demonstrate the way motifs endure. I didn’t know when I painted Lady Liberty as a young woman that she would become an urgent symbol of American resistance later on. None of us could’ve known.
How fragile our democracy! How resilient white supremacy! How infecting to our institutions Christian theocratic tribalism! In those days I worried about HIV and how to create a reasonable worklife.
Just as a recent data point: Trump got booed at the US Open. His dictate to the Association to air clips of him with the sound off were foiled by — oh, I don’t know — the internet?
Do you hear that though? Not the booing, but the tyrannical imposition of his insecurity. He KNEW he would be booed. He KNEW the association would bend the knee.
Last summer when friend Lisa and I attended an indigo workshop we stayed very near my last college residence (above). Two Isabella Street, Northampton. Near the railroad tracks. From there I went to San Francisco for a short six-month sojourn before returning east. But while in SF, I worked in a copy shop and had access to what was then cutting edge technology: a color Xerox machine with a color dial. I got an employee discount! It allowed you to make endless variations by changing how color was laid down. To say I enjoyed making collages and then tinkering with them on the machine would be an understatement.
Also talked about here. I repeat myself. I give myself permission to repeat myself.
Anyway, there is that house motif. And below, a photograph I took while still in high school.
Sometimes I wonder (not at all to my credit), if my endless house creations indicate a profound loneliness and inability to connect. What no people? Not even a cat in the window? Or maybe they reveal artistic limitation — living creatures being much harder to render than walls and roofs after all.
At least they have gotten more richly rendered over time!
