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I have discovered that I always need
a project, and my dissatisfaction with my last six months of work is
that I have not had one. So, in mid April (the next painting after
#1 April below) I decided the "project" of my next and most
likely last years would be the "summing up" of my work from the
mid 1950's to now. I chose to begin with the mid 50's because it seemed to me
it was then I began the journey of which the fifty years since has
been the realization. Well, a
project. But execution of a project requires conceptualization of
materials and methods. It took weeks after I had already started the
work, but one early morning in late May (I had already made #2
April and #s 1-4 May) the aphorism came to me as
I was waking-- From now
to look at
then
with all the half century of life since.
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Thus, the late April and all of the May paintings were built
in my Lac Ouareau Studio from photos in my computer of paintings in a few folders in a
file drawer labeled "1950's" in my Oakland studio. The
drawer
holds fifty or more folders, each folder with anywhere from ten to
thirty or more 9x12 paintings/collages of the kind I made in those
days. (Click here to see a survey of this kind of work from those
years.)
I began with a folder labeled
Streets of San Francisco begin to turn into Cock-Book-1956-7?
(that folder became #2 April), beginning
there because it was then that my on-the-spot drawings of the decayed
old mansions of San Francisco began to become images of my sexuality
in transformation from an adolescent "show me and I'll fuck it" into a
mature man building a family, a home and a world.
I was very dissatisfied with
#2 April, but that dissatisfaction gave the drive and impulse
and breakthrough to #1 May and all of the work since.
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