Mythical Zeus said I am certain this is impossible.
The authorities said beyond any shadow of a doubt.
Mythical Zeus said I have no memory of being here.
The authorities said you have been here thousands of times.
Mythical Zeus, in flux like a wavery obsidian shadow, said I am certain this is impossible.
The authorities said we constantly retrieve your fingerprints, alongside other evidence.
Mythical Zeus said perhaps I know this location by another name.
The authorities said possibly you have forgotten, an easy mistake to make.
Mythical Zeus said why do you – how strange – you would speak to me of memory.
The authorities said possibly you have have been deceived.
Mythical Zeus said why do you – how strange – I am not aware of mistakes or deception.
The authorities said we can be of great assistance with this – with you – with clearing your name…
Mythical Zeus said I am on a search-party mission to rename & reactivate thought-forms previously declared abandoned & lost. And I am not lost.
The authorities, concurring, said we wish to save you from your illness.
Mythical Zeus said I am not aware of any illness.
The authorities, concurring, said please sign the form giving consent.
Mythical Zeus said what will be done based on my signature if I sign.
The authorities said whatever we deem consequently necessary to deactivatethe current situation.
Mythical Zeus took a deep breath, diving like Johnny Weissmuller into the multidimensional ocean, on his search-party mission to realign & reassign thought-forms previously declared abandoned & lost. Alone, he did not feel abandoned.
The last line of the poem places the images in context. A figure in motion as if underwater in a multidimensional ocean. A figure suspended like an angel above a medieval landscape, swimming through the air.
I am now 50% complete working on the B&W roll of 5′ X 33-35′ paper. When I complete this second roll of paper I will have a diptych. I considered a triptych but talked myself out of it.
Brushwork with inks & gouache + drawing with water-soluble graphite pencils create different blacks and different whites in contrast.
I repeat & develop two images that begin the first blue roll of paper. The moon-ish figure and the dna figure (below) & seen above.
A fountain springs from ‘bird-human’s’ hand and at the same time is a swan’s neck.
Within the fountain or swan’s neck a series of images depict a beast ‘vomiting’ a seed which shoots into the earth (mound), takes root and rises.
The green bit of tape shows the 17′ mark. Animal shapes and double faces. A joker or fool. Figures in the mound. ‘Watery spray’ opening into what comes next…
Being 50% complete with this roll of paper equals being 50% through completing a triptych. The plan is for visual poetry on the third roll of paper. The challenge now, in completing the second roll of paper, is to move away from intricate detail.
The idea is to keep track of my hours (with the pen & the book) after each day’s effort.
I’ve organized (with high-tech paper clips) the rough sketches and ideas to complete the second roll of paper. I don’t know yet how I’ll use these ideas – deliberately composing or spontaneously expressing.
Previously in progress:
Beginning where I left off @ 25% with this face & beginning to elaborate.
Ceremonial crown inspired by the European deer-god idea Cernunnos. Antlers look branch-like as well.
I told the painter, who had lived on a boat in England’s waterways, my idea for a poetry video about JFK’s widow in Dallas. I want to use a passage from my mother’s journal about tree shadows. She walked past a garage sale and picked up a book with pages blowing in the wind. It was Jacqueline Kennedy’s biography. She took it as a sign & told her ex-husband, a cinematographer, about my project. He traded time and expertise for my paintings & we worked on many projects, over many years.
I spent ten months, mostly working in silence, creating this painting (& drawing) on a long roll of inviting, warm paper and felt how it used me as a channel. While writing the artist statement (below) I encompassed multiple perspectives concerning the work, probably with a focus on how and why. This material is from a pdf I assembled to promote the work.
As this mystery in blue appears beneath my fingertips my planning designs go up in smoke. The hypnopompic stage of waking illumines the space behind my forehead with images and textures. I begin working sessions with these. Or I simply wake after three hours sleep and begin where I stopped.
I name the painting Druidica. Then Druidica Blue. Then Druidica Blue: Deja Vu. And finally Druidica Blue: Deja Vu (Cave Art for the New Psyche).
In this landscape of the psyche I unearth longing: A quest for the unknown where I imagine belonging. Dripping, staining & flicking the brush I depict shadows cascading across the cave wall. I tumble influences: Prehistory tumbles into the Celtic tumbling into the Medieval tumbling into Modernism of the early 20th Century. I situate myself in art history addressing postmodern amnesia. I re-imagine now.
My journey to this point begins with a shattered ankle. Following surgery I draw page after page of two-dimensional spirals morphing into three-dimensional forms. I investigate spiral symbolism and discover a prehistoric language chiseled into stone. I discover: Newgrange on the River Boyne; Rudolf Steiner’s mystic-trance history of Hibernia (ancient Ireland); Three Cauldrons of Poesy transcribed in the Middle Ages, reportedly of Druidic origin now in Trinity College, Dublin; Joseph Beuys with healing language performing Three Pots for the Poorhouse inside an abandoned Edinburgh poorhouse; Sinead O’Connor singing her incisively poignant Famine. It occurs to me this painting joins the 21st Century to an older type of consciousness.
I begin the 35′ (width) X 5′ (height) painting by dividing sections to be completed one by one. After establishing a pattern I lose control and frame the spontaneous narrative in a more nebulous manner. The painting is flowing the same yet not the same. Perhaps mirroring the work of the psyche. One enters at any chosen spot engaging re-imagined folklore, symbolism, magic and iconography. I work using the blues of art history: Giotto, El Greco, Chagall and Picasso leave their calling card. I kneel to blot standing suddenly writing the poetic phrases I hear, arriving from an unknown place.
Out of some great forgetfulness came this blue sandstorm. In remembering the ancestral I multiply shades of blue. I hear chanting in the echoes.
I relate the process of this artwork to projects I have previously created. In creating cinematic poetry videos I worked (with the editor) to compose performers & surroundings in tandem, in motion, defining the wide screen. The one hundred and twenty B&W linocuts I carve and print for my ‘wordless poem’ Never More Together jangle in unison, though pages apart, connected like cars in a train. I exhibit three Moleskin accordion sketchbooks twenty-one feet in length. On a white wall intricate ink drawings unfold across pages revealing thematic and kinetic relationships. A later series of paintings on canvas makes me wish for the emotional & receptive texture of paper.
I read a magical quest poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats. I rewind videos of the River Glyde in County Louth. I follow ancestral footprints down to the river, set sail for the new world and arrive (as Irish Wonder Tales often begin) A long time ago…I sponge Prussian blue, cerulean blue & ultramarine blue into a receptive & emotional texture until the sea-sponge runs dry. I infuse the blues of art history with a dream of the ancestors. I work a thin brush with round-tipped hairs – texturing the Gaelic mermaid wearing a halo who rises in time outside of time, holding a seashell, vibrating the monumental and mythic. Steeped in lore.
Mirrored images create a jazzy yet alchemical rhythm. I play with the Celtic propensity for seeing in doubles. In visible and not-so-visible relationships. An oracular raven divining portents – a Celtic warrier wounded by an arrow to the heart – a figure aiming a divining rod into the blueness & a herald sounding the (Irish war-horn) carnyx – in nearby spaces one discovers their mirrored doubles. Birds navigate the oracular weightlessness of air.
Energies flash between life forms at the molecular and heroic level. Also in my painting you evidently can get milk from a stone. The dolmen’s udder nourishes the Druid. Metaphorical mysteries nourish the audience. The molecular and heroic awaken the unknown. The painting addresses postmodern amnesia with signs, sigils, and symbols.
I read of who Taliesin might have been and then The Salmon of Knowledge. Water-soluble graphite releases a quivery chiaroscuro of premonition. I paint and draw both freely and controlled, both somber and subversively zany. Ancestors dye their skin blue with plant ink. I rinse my hands.
I squeeze tube after tube of Windsor & Newton white gouache dry. I work with gouache, inks, watercolours (in tubes, pan & pencil), aquapasto medium, graphite crayons & pencils, archival drawing pens, some acrylic, some candle wax. I discover baby food jars of blue & white pigment from a long-ago egg tempera painting class.
A channel forges its way into me causing me to dream this dream. I discover the roll of paper is longer than expected. I continue kneeling. It is finished. After ten months I am exhausted. I have translated my longing.
I envision this work, framed & illumined, welcoming an audience. For inquiries visit here & scroll down to my email.
@ The Redwood Theatre, Toronto. Like unscrolling the forest one lives in, seeing it for the first time.
I don’t know if I mentioned instinctive & expressive brushwork building the composition.
For the cover of her book with a theme – dreams, running throughout the powerful, prophetic poems.
I selected the drawings from two sketchbooks filling simultaneously, slowly, sometimes on the subway, sometimes in a cafe.
I work in these sketchbooks, as well as accordion sketchbooks, on and off, sometimes obsessively & intricately, sometimes less so.
I love ink drawing and the history of ink drawings – the contrast of line, design. To be honest I don’t want to do ink drawings, it’s inescapable & too pleasurable. An addiction of sorts.
My early heroes were Aubrey Beardsley and later Jan Toorop.
Today I find myself mesmerized by the line of Pict or Runic art and the heavier B&W contrasts in lino & woodcuts.
I have a book from the early 1900s & the author is railing against modernity in ink drawings.
He’s right about traditional, technical skill but quite misses the point.
The quest to return to what was lost in our origins is not determined by accuracy in depiction.
Just before Jimi Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner
A wave went through the crowd. He’s here.
Sleeping girls with feet caked in mud stirred.
Boys asleep with long wet hair awoke. He’s here.
Potheads spinning up looked down.
Potheads coming down looked up. He’s here.
Country Joe and Buffalo Springfield and Melanie
saw something moving like a river & coming into view. He’s here.
He spoke without using a mic. Ask not what your country can remember for you. Ask what you can remember for your country.
The crowd applauded and gave him a standing ovation.
‘Inauguration Day man,’ the guy next to me said.
I looked at him closely.
The pottery in the next to last image is of Cucuteni-Trypillian neolithic heritage. I thought it played off the idea of ‘pothead’ as well as being a vessel the motorcade passed through. The images superimposed over JFK in the third image are the Sri Yantra diagram and a detail from the Book of Kells representing JFK’s ancestry. JFK loved poetry and read for pleasure so these are perhaps fitting images of tactile and spiritual deep time.
I do not claim copyright on original images. I have created new, non-commercial artworks for the purpose of parody or commentary.
Arise from her in swirling, serpentine eddies. A ventriloquist.
She unties a boat on the shore. The underground river.
Languages of illumining clarity speed into each other like blood in water,
As vast and translucent as the Northern Lights.
& For reasons both utilitarian and mythopoeic
The face in the mirror anticipates leaping.
& Distance swimming through shadow-lands,
Beneath the precipice of shallow, atomic time,
Within and without darkened chambers & coincidentally
Light reflecting upon ancient vials.
& Our spines an unbroken chain of receptor cauldrons.
& Her gift. The mirror.
Paul Klee catalogue (1951), Giorgio de Chirico painting ‘Song of Love’ (1914), photographic still from Jean Cocteau’s ‘Orphee’ (1950), pictured: Jean Marais and Maria Casarès
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