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In the mid 1950s, I think my images of
despair and ruin in the city were the reflections of my struggle with my
sexuality. In the streets and gutters, the basements, tool sheds and vacant
lots where I had learned of sex from the time of being a very small child, I
had been taught that the intensity of its power was directly related to the
depth of its degradation. Thus, I came to believe in my soul that the very
power of life itself came from the fact of its utter damnation. I think now
that the reason the ruinous Western Addition of pre-redevelopment San
Francisco was so overwhelming (in fact, “numinous”) to me was that it
exactly represented in the outer world the condition of my inner world.
In the late 1950s, the Western Addition
landscapes in oil on panels became
collages in watercolor on paper because I
found that a collage language could better express the flow of my
visual/verbal experience.
It seems to me now in hindsight that I
left off painting the external wasteland of the Western Addition as the
unconscious image of my inner self and began a new visual/verbal language in
order to reach a new goal—the "soteriological fragment” (soteriology
is the branch of theology that deals with salvation). Each night when I
came home from work, I would make six to ten small
painting/drawing/collages, following the image wherever it led, but also
pushing it toward the longed for image of my personal salvation.
In the first half of the 1960s, my
collages, drawings, etchings and paintings became more complex. The
development of imagery which had been spread across six or ten pieces over
one or more nights was consciously compounded into a single piece usually
over several nights, and took on the task of creating the image of the
homestead: the family portrayed as the lives of Joey America and Venus Genetrix in their land of “The Little
House in the Greenwood Grove” and “The
Harvest Barn.”
Looking back, I see now—and knew
then—that all my work in the world during those years was to make a place
for my family, and all my work in art at that time reflected that same goal:
making the picture of the Western Homestead as the symbol of the house and
life for my family. I guess, then, that this art was a reflective one like
the Western Addition landscapes—the representation of an external world (in
this case an imaginary one) which unconsciously to the artist portrays the
world of the inner self. However, and unlike the Western Addition
paintings, these collages did not mirror despair but reflected the actions I
took to conquer despair.
And so with the self secure in a
homestead of its own, in March and April of 1971 my first wife and I took a
trip around the world. By the fall of that year my art was full tilt on
images of the wonders of aesthetic travel:
Baalbek, Shiraz, Isfahan, Peshawar,
Lahore, Agra, Jaipur, Kashmir, Rangoon, the
Borobudur, etc. I have never
gone back to the Western Addition except once or twice as “emotion
recollected in tranquility” (and anyway, the old Western Addition’s all torn
down); nor have I returned to the work of the homestead (it’s all built now
except for perpetual maintenance). Thus, with its home secure, the self
could begin the journeys I made in my late 1970’s
A Travel Book and
From an Antique Land.
I resigned from my job as Director of
the College at SFAI in 1975. (That was the job they now call Vice President
and Dean of Academic Affairs plus the job that is now Vice President and
Director of Student Services.) At about that time, I began one day to try to
fix a very complicated painting which had gone wrong, and wandered into
“Dynamic Symmetry,” the Golden Section, and many of the other old and
mystical systems for the discovery of the apriori harmony of the
universe. Pretty soon and for a year or two after, I was painting planets
and solar systems and pathways of transcendent light. Then in the later
1970’s I began to explore the Tarot as an archetypal system in place of the
personal signs and symbols I had developed in the late 1950’s—signs and
symbols which had become empty habits. Looking at that 1975-1979 work now
in relation to my place in the world then, I would say that its function had
been to try to compensate for my loss of a place (my job) in the temporal
world by the establishment of a place in the eternal one. Because my daily
world had fallen to pieces, it seems I felt I had better try to evoke a
transcendent one.
With my first wife’s illness beginning
in August of 1982 and her death in November of 1983 (and my becoming Vice
President and Dean of Academic Affairs at the Art Institute in January of
that year), the focus of my work turned to despair and incoherence, crashing
among such opposites as the little books On Beauty and Dirt in the
Gutter, the first being what my senses told me was my actual experience,
the second being what I knew I was. The whole thing ended with a group of
portfolios made in at the end of
December 1991 and early January 1992. I
called them dust, ashes and the flower which knows the
secret—each a collection of the
ashes of the past lit by a distant light of hope.
With the beginning of my relationship
with my second wife in March of 1992 and marriage to her the following
December, and with the enormous rushing back of the energies of life that
came with it, I once more began to engage all the images and the themes, all
the visual languages and methods of image making that I have ever used, all
working since early 1993 with a much higher physical/tactile flexibility and
strength than I could ever imagine before 1992.
This brings me to now and my sense in
early January of this year (1999) that what has developed over these last
seven years may have now become too often an easy and empty habit. I realize
that I had begun to think of my work as “Just another mucking around in the
paint as if it were a Rorschach blot to find another clump of genitalia.”
So, using “forced choice” to sort this year’s work into the categories of
“sex,” “death,” and “other,” there have been 31 sex pictures, 10 death
pictures and 20 other kinds of imagery (mostly landscape). That’s a lot of
genitalia. But the deaths are new, and some of the sex pictures also have
death in them.
Thus it might be that as the work of the
1950s—60s can be seen as a part of the preparation for mature life,
this
work now and for the next decade and as long as there may be to come may be
a part of the preparation for age and death.
I saw a show of Morris Graves at the
Legion of Honor sometime in the late 1940’s. I remember that he said in the
catalog, “I paint to record the beings of the inner eye.” Looking back, I
see that I have done what Graves did. Art has been for me to mirror on the
outside the concerns of the inside so that as I do it, I learn what they are
and afterwards remember. |