The Painting
l The Conversation
Two old pals, one talking, the other, half-listening, in a bright room. One fella gets the chair the other prefers the ottoman. A love of dogs is obvious as a painting with many favorites hangs prominently on the wall. In real life, outside the painting, the room too is filled with many dogs, many red dogs who travel through the house as they please. They please to travel in a pack, as dogs will, heading somewhere very in particular. Though the cousins may appear to be living in another larger painting on the side wall, in fact they are sitting together outside in the dark, watching the bright activity indoors as well as their own occasional thought. The boots, which by their diminutive size you can see could not possibly belong to the fellas, were left deliberately near the wall, by me. They wait, at the ready, for my next move.
II The Fellas and How the Story Came Together
Conversation grew in an afternoon on East Houston Street. It was a digital day and my chore was to become more familiar with Photoshop, an effort to relieve Steve of some of his web-readying duties. I invited some old friends to help make the fiddling around more enjoyable. Steve and I have scanned scads of work spanning five decades. The central figures, if you can indeed discern which I might have considered central, are two fellows in conversation. These guys showed up somewhere in the mid nineteen seventies. I was working in the sculpture studio at Sonoma State University and was enrolled in a sculpture class so I could do some work of my own. I had been making large figures in ceramic and plaster; Owlman and The Howler came from this period. I was imagining a series of larger than life size figures populating various areas of the university campus, tied together by their glances. The concept was that if you followed the gaze of one figure it would lead you to the next. You'd go to the figure the first was looking toward, look in the direction it was gazing and find another figure, go to that next figure, and so on. I expected that by the time they had all been visited, a story would emerge. These figures were maquettes for this immaterialized project. Now these fellas are about how people, long time friends have the benefit of knowing and being with each other without necessarily having to pay each other any mind. They are a talker and a thinker. The guy on the left, he's talking away, enjoying his own story and the sound of a story well known, well told, without a care that his audience, his long-time friend, who has heard this same story many times over the years has his own thoughts at the front of his mind. He likes the sound of the words rolling into the space and around him without necessarily coming too near, so near that he'd be distracted in his own, very important thoughts. They're a happy duo, both thoroughly enjoying their own conversation, happy for the company and the time alone.Very old friends. I hadn't quite known Ward and Merle back then, but they were to come into my life in the next decade. A couple married for a very long time who always told stories over each other, never noticing, never bothered that the other was talking away. It was tricky for me knowing which to pay attention to, difficult hearing enough of each story to be ready for a comment when the story came to its conclusion. The fact that the same stories were told many times over was helpful as after a while you really could piece them together. Most of the stories they told were old, though sometimes they'd stump you with a new one, making replies, again, ever so tricky. In the sculpture, the fellows never were any place in particular. In my plan they were going to sit on their make-shift seats out on the lawn between the creek and the lake, east of the art department. The fellows looked good out in the green field with the low sky overhead, out north of most of the buildings. Their photograph was taken in a show I did with my best friend Meg, and fellow art student, Bett. The guys were, at the time, sitting on a glass shelf, in a glass case with other smaller pieces. For my Photoshop lesson, they held their conversation in an average room next to a large plate glass window. The room looked too bare and of course the idea was giving them more of a place to be so I sorted through more scans looking for the rest of the story.
III The Laughing Man
An optimistic fella who, should he be asked, prefers to tell a long story. He's told many, honing his anecdotes over the years. He won't be turning his chair around to have a polite conversation as both he and his companion have their own thoughts to think as well. They have been sitting together quite a long time and know this about each other and it has become their custom. His thought propels him into the tale he as he swings around to find his friend just breaking a smile. What he doesn't know is whether this expression is in reference to the story he himself is launching or one that's just set off in his own mind. Without a care, he continues.
IV Three Dogs
Need I really tell any more stories about this trio in the painting on the wall? Heart Head, Kicking Dog, and Three Legged Dog, old friends from the Bodega studio days, continue to woo me. Their smoky crinkled surface draws my interest in life but I couldn't really explore their burnt hides in oil, that surface, the best possible outcome of my favorite glaze, is best left to the dogs in sculpture. What I could carry here was their profile, their shape, the tender valor of good dogs.
V. Red Dog
This red dog is one of many efforts I made to bear the loss of my dear Jake. He became red in the first painting I did of him and continued red here. My black dog became red when he died. This red dog roamed his tiny way through one of two mural-scaled paintings, The Cross. The paintings were each forms designed to tell the story of how the world archives its events and strategizes our safekeeping. The Cross and Triptych, painted by Steve and myself as our first collaborations, just began to tell our own stories, how we remembered and hoped and protected ourselves from them. The paintings depicted our ancient history, the hereafter and the wide ocean of stories in between all these places as they play out, stand in, and memorialize our lives and their archetypes. From the Bodega Paintings, a red dog makes his way from a lonely autumn field crossing to a room cozy with fellowship and interesting moments to look into.
VI The Boots
The boots back near the wall are my boots. I first wore them in 1993 when we moved to San Francisco and I wanted to be prepared to run away fast and fight with tough guys. They have given me strength.
I learned this on a sunny spring Saturday afternoon, fighting with doctors in the ER when mom was dying from lymphoma. Something was going wrong, a scratch from her cat became a wound and I insisted she let me take her to the hospital. Previous trips rendered her very reluctant to make another, but she went with me, most likely to appease my own heart-breaking fear. They made her stay on a cold table with no blankets for hours because she was not, in their opinion, an emergency. She was clearly a woman dying, what could they do in the long run. Well, in the short run they could have relieved her of the pain of waiting so long in her fragile condition and the humiliation of showing up for help with a cat scratch when she did in fact know she was dying and that in the long run, it was all a lost cause. After too long I stomped around the hospital looking for the man in charge to make them take care of her. It worked. Then they made a security guard follow us, me, through the hospital and into the parking lot until we were safely back in the car and off their property. Geez.
I wore them every day for nine years, summer in New York City, too. This was my fifth pair of this particular steal-toed, air-soled, Dura-Shocked Wolverine boot. They have given me strength. When I first wore my boots, I realized that I would have to gain some strength to use them best, and that the truest test would be clog dancing. It came quite naturally to me when I took my year of lessons in 1989. Since then I've forgotten the more intricate steps but I can do a pretty serious basic step and find this dance particularly perfect in these boots. My fifth pair of boots, these boots became the painful ones. All the predecessors proved no period of adjustment at all. These took two years wearing the old ones to a frazzle, while my heels and toes took rests. Finally in desperation for boots, no replacements to be found, I made them fit. I understand they stopped manufacturing this excellent boot. I remain most uncertain that it is a good idea to let such a tough pair of boots go. I carry them back and forth from High Point Farm to my closet at home again. They come home when I realize for a fact these are some sort of irreplaceable, I think maybe magical boots. I really can't let them go. Then sentimentality seems so stupid and I lug them back to the farm. I took their picture one day thinking after that I could them toss them out. They're back at the farm right now, in the closet of my favorite room, high on a shelf. I practically cried the last time I saw them, thinking I had finally lost track of them, the shock of seeing my dear old friends undid me. I became ever so clear that these are very important boots. I currently have the new model Wolverine's waiting in the shoe corner for winter to return. But the thrill is gone, these just don't have the same tough girl sure stride the others had. It's a shame. A couple years ago I began trying stand-ins for my boots, looking for something not so hot for these New York City summers, nor as silly looking with pant legs that let a little air up these stifling legs. The search has been a horrid failure and my feet and spirit have never felt as certain.
VII The Red Heads
They're here because they are three. I liked following the numbers, two fellas in conversation, three figures looking on, four red dogs, and five dog figures in profile. And, I wanted another opportunity to paint them.
VIII All in All
I am drawn in by this painting. While there are many things I like about it, it also has many faults. I don't necessarily think of it as a good painting. I can't find a place to rest there. But I am grateful that it was willing to be my first painting in too long a time. My job began to eat my time hungrily in its first year. Soon, I didn't paint at all. Then somewhere in 2005 Steve offered an algorithm for bringing artmaking back into my life. I started with gauche drawings, with oil pastel, wound my way through some paper collage and headed toward digital collaging. One day it seemed those practices were all beating about the bush and it seemed imperative to paint in oil. What I wish hadn't happened here is that I had thought I needed to draw so much. The folks have come out too cartoonish for my liking. But I was both hungry to draw and fearful that I wouldn't be able to find them after so long away from practice. So, this is what came of it.
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