The Fifteen Minute Break
The Fifteen Minute Break
Stolen while being framed, this is a painting from the horizon of another painting. It was an experiment I tried. Actually a couple. I did one of my paintings, and as usual, hung it on the studio wall so it could dry. So I stretched this extremely oblong canvass, which I don't usually do, I actually usually prefer square ones. Placing it end up on the easel, I used the former painting as a visual reference, as if I had hiked to the distant horizon within the painting itself, and painted this landscape. It looks a lot like the desert regions here in Southern California.
Heat Drips into the Desert.
Oil on Canvass, Greenwich Village period, New York, 1966.
A Photo of the painting I got the background for "Fifteen Minute Break" from. It was the horizon on the right side, at the time it was dark blue but later I stumbled come light blue over it to make it a daytime sky.
When the painting dried I thought about it again. It needed a figure. I decided to take it to painting class at the School of Visual arts and I think it was while I was painting the four "Checkmate at Dawn" paintings. I heard a shuffling on the stairwell and rushed out. It was Paul Hooper on a fifteen minute break just finishing a cigarette (which you shouldn't do without washing your hands, lots of oil paint is toxic). He agreed to pose for me but I had to hurry up. So I sketched in the portrait in about seven minutes, but the unfinished effect blended perfectly with the mood of the landscape.
So the experiment was a success. To bad I forgot about it until now. It's a good technique. I have done that before, blending the real with the abstract.
Look at that blank expression in his face. That's the way you get while painting lots of times, really wiped out. Or perhaps he was concerned about the Vietnam situation. It was Spring of 1966 and the war was, as President Johnson put it, "escalating". We were certain that it would grow into a third world war. Most of us thought the only exemptions from the draft after a while would only be people like medical or engineering students, that the artists would go first. So maybe that's the look I saw in his face in those seven minutes. Worry.
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