P259 Figure Painting Fossils

P259 Figure Painting Fossils
20x26" oil on canvas
private collection

September 11, 1999: The new painting, P259, is progressing well. I began it almost on a whimsey, something to fool with after the intense work of P258. And I felt I should do something with the underpainting on the canvas, which I started at the Artists Colony this summer. The artist in the painting is bent over under a great burden, seemingly. The sky, which usually represents the future or escape to us, has petrified to a great folded mass, crouching on her shoulders as it secretes its eons of heaviness into deeper and more convoluted folds of stone.

Is the woman trying to hold up the entire sky by herself, the weight of a future graven in stone? She writes or paints or engraves on a canvas or tablet. Something emerges, the stone record she will leave behind. There is a furtiveness in her expression, as if she has stolen time away from other responsibilities to make her art, the markers she will leave behind her. What else is there? She works for others, shoulders cracking under her burden. She places herself last, scratching furtively at the stones when she can find a moment. Her shoulders are bowed and deformed under the weight of others problems. She has no time to do anything for herself except make a few marks in the rocks she moves or leaves behind.

September 28, 1999: As P259 shapes up, I am torn between assigning it to the Visage Series and the Paleozoic Series, as it has elements of both. It is a Visage making a Paleozoic painting, actually. The painting will have to show on the back of the panel she is working on, a trick that will work well, as there is a bit of inside-out going on elsewhere...the hand, the body cavity. Perhaps it should have been called the Visceral series. The character is twisted or morphed like the Poser figures in my three dimensional computer program. A few times, people have mentioned that my figures are almost sculptures, or would make sculptures, and I suppose that is true, even though I work at keeping a certain flatness to the perspective.

The viscera patterns are equally ambiguous. Flipped one way, they are convoluted organs, but with the shading and highlighting reversed or pick-up colours changed, they resemble the parts of plants, leaves and petals and stamens. Perhaps the creature is making note of the stupidity of the social monster, so falsely and elaborately clothed, yet ignorant of the basic structure and working of things. The guts remain the same, though society does its best to make them look different or make them disappear altogether.

October 1, 1999: What is the artist writing or painting, I have been thinking all morning. The fossil record, a recording of the spiral. A luminous fungal green emerges, patina and sgraffito.

October 3, 1999: Last night, after alternating between household chores and painting all day, I completed P259 at about 12:30am. As often happens in the last third or so of a painting, everything fell together, and my puzzling over the arm and the upper left background was resolved, with scarcely a thought, by the crimson and red that has come to represent the fossils.

But this speedy ending would not have occurred if, the night before, also in the small hours, WHAT she was painting has not suddenly appeared, right out of her own breast, a version of what she was feeling, in the fervent green incandescence of creation. The artist, feeling the past in a primitive curl in her chest, creates a mirror image, but re-written to the present. Perhaps she, too, is becoming a fossil, huddled under the intricate increments of the shell she has built over the years.

Paleozoic Series