P277 Diary of a Fossil Woman

P277 Diary of a Fossil Woman
20x18" oil on canvas
private collection

March 16, 2001: I started a painting (P277), a twisted women with great holes eaten into her joints. In spite of her condition, the woman continues to scribble lines, pictures and words, disappearing into a great spinning blue vortex.

May 15, 2001: I take a cup of coffee up to the studio and tidy up a bit before settling down to the painting, P277, which has been abandoned on the easel for so long. At first I followed what I had started to do, where the arm crosses the body...but it appeared flat or stiff, such an important place, and in the middle of the picture, the path to the gesture. I turned the painting the way I had originally drawn it, landscape-wise with the face down, but the woman seemed to be falling out of the bottom. What happened to the image? I turned it back up again, with her head at the top, and it seemed right. Then, on a whim, I added a lozenge shape inspired by the Mayan inscriptions I saw in Mexico. I worked the arm differently, so that it was joined by webbing to the body and the lozenge, which in turn is joined to the body by its own webs or veins. How strange it looks, a discontinuity. But it is right. Something is happening to the woman, something permanent.

At first, having been away from the painting so long, I laid out the wrong blue on the palette, French Ultramarine. I stared at it for a moment, another discontinuity, then replaced it with Prussian. But I wondered what the Ultramarine tube was doing at the easel with this painting.
May 23, 2001: When I got home, I settled down to my painting, P277, and completed the entire central portion, which now disturbingly resembles the entrails of a sacrificial victim, although I will staunchly defend the effect as a fleshy fossil thing. My quest to depict pain may have reached its logical conclusion, since all the possible guts have been spilled, but of course I will continue with these shapes until I have finished with them or they have come to represent something else in my mind. I simply cannot let go of the flesh tones, and these colours alone make everything look, well, fleshy. And the twisting, coiling, knotted shapes have always appealed to me, though they admittedly tend to look like brains and viscera.

Paleozoic Series