A Premonition of Zig Zag the Clown.
The Departure.
The Departure.
I foresaw a time in 1980 when I would be a street performer in Paris known as "Zig Zag the Clown", in this early 1964 painting.
The explorer must now leave the rainbow land and don the hat of the harlequin in the streets as the arrows in the sky are telling him. He must leave his beautiful world behind and is already approaching the gutters of filthy streets as Dante would approach inferno.
The sky blue hat of the harlequin is an element of the hope that he foresees a way through the fallen regions to which he must now proceed. But even as he embarks, the rainbow behind him becomes a part of the road he must travel and also a help to provide the way through the pathos.
And sure enough, on my two hundred thousand mile journey through the cities of the world, I have sometimes actually passed through rainbows. Once in the air, and several times on the ground. I even have a photograph of the end of a rainbow in a field in Ohura, New Zealand.
Flying through a rainbow was quite an experience. I'll never forget it. The jumbo jet went right through the colors. In my usual window seat that I've taken for each of my over eighty jet flights. As I looked, the colors rushed by, each lasting about four seconds. I missed one of the colors trying to tell the guy in the seat in front of me to take a look. To my surprise the person in the seat in front refused to even glance out of the window. He just hunched over his seat and ignored me. A quick glance revealed to me that apparently no one else was looking either. Missing one of those colors was not worth the effort of messing around with those deadheads.
Zig Zag the clown had a brilliant but brief career. One day I met Zeke at a restaurante universitere, or university restaurant, one of the ways we had of surviving in those times. You kept asking students waiting in line if they would sell you one of their meal tickets. They used to purchase them by the book. Over there they do a lot of things by the book. They have a greater sense of propriety than you'd imagine.
I don't know how he did it, but Zeke, whom I called Dr. Bow Tie, convinced me to go with him, as he called it, "clowning". I don't know why I may have gotten the Zig Zag revelation in 1964, sixteen years earlier, if in fact I actually did. But considering the benefit of hindsight, the coincidences are too great and numerous to be ignored. It would really be neat if my blank canvass was like the basin that Nostradamis stared into to get his quatrains, only my canvasses could actually be seen by others.
I think because before I met Zeke and my old friend, a Canadian I first met in Brittany in 1975, there in Paris back in 1980, I would have set my sights on trying to go to the former Yugoslavia to start painting again. Instead I traveled with Zeke and Murry to Holland to buy a couple of Mercedes panel vans that we drove to Spain, where we lived in a campsite outside of Huelva in Andelucea before returning to Paris in 1981, from whence I departed for Indonesia in 1983.
By the way, a word of advise for those who purchase a used vehicle from an area of flat terrain and drive it in mountainous terrain. You have to break it in to the new terrain very gradually. The mountain hills will drive the pistons a little bit farther into the cylinders than on level terrain and after several months will split the engine block.
Primitive painting from the Connecticut Period. Oil on canvass.
1964
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