Exploration
"Exploration."
or "The Explorer in a Jungle of Viridian".
Oil on canvas,
1965 (The Greenwich Village Period).
The chevron and three circles was the signature I used in those days.
It was from this we got our "logo", the planet Earth under a roof.
Another premonition? Traveling through the interior of Viti Levu in the Fijian Archipelago. It may be. It seems very much like the time Jim and I went hitch hiking to the interior about twelve years after the painting was completed. The sixties was a sort of cross roads, a time when conditions were right to do something with art that might have never been done before.
Others has blazed a trail before me, none of us really quite knowing why. It was, that much we knew, a departure from stiltedness. Of the seeming error of human perfection. Taking art out of the realm of superstition, where the device on the shield benefited it's wielder or the statue became an object of bizarre veneration. Going past the use of art as a mere method of preserving the visual as in portraiture of nobilities or peasantries. Even bypassing the hustlers and the hucksters who weren't artists at all but stood in obstruction under a pretext of creativity, laughing all the way to the bank at those who bought the stuff.
Suddenly there I was at that moment in time, not having to paint "The Night Watch" or a Sistine Chapel or feel obliged to uphold the sixteenth century American landscape tradition, or worrying about staging models for "The Rape of the Sabean Women", or portraits of Napoleons or Blue Boys. No scenes of Dutch alleyways, no still lifes of finery and flowers, no Greek statuary, not even a Rushmore. Well, actually, seemingly, even a case of no big deal. I was just a nineteen year-old kid at an easel in a situation where I actually might be doing something, oblivious little old me, never really done before. At least recognized. I'm sure some Paleolithic cave painter might have spit out some painting of New York City inferences next to the mammoths and the sloths or something. But at least in a couple of cases, I have to admit, and while she was here, Mom tried to get me never to mention it, that I must have been doing in some isolated incidents at least, paintings of the future.
Is this inherent in all of us? Is there anything to it? In answer, it's worth finding out. It seems there are more critical -- more important activities than everyday life.
Kind of way in the background I was, as are we all, detecting a kind of inclination to prefer that everything was all figured out and the routines we find to run on our busy daily lives were all there were. That we had it pegged. End of story. Been there, done that. Mix and match.
But it wasn't. Now for how long I don't know, or my subconscious won't let me try to know, I find myself at one of those moments in time when I can sit down and ponder these things. Maybe it might have been that it would've been the illusion of being a lot more simple if my dear late mother, Marcelle, whom I still see occasionally in dreams (once I dreamt she brought Vincent Van Gogh along to say hi), hadn't worked so hard to preserve my former work during my time of world traveling for about twenty years -- maybe then without these reminders I could been as terse with it all as I wanted to be. Then I might have been just going ahead trying to do what artists seem to do in a quest for beauty or creativity or whatever it is they do. A beautiful landscape, a portrait, a rose, a tire in the art gallery, a urinal in a frame -- I mean, the whole petty little business, the contacts, the slides, the shows, the reputation slowly building over years. Well. It's a business like everything. Lovely cottages with flowers all around, paint poured on the canvas from a ladder in the driveway.
Then it dawned on me. Over a lifetime, really. The abilities of man have hardly been tapped. What if we each have absolutely extraordinary abilities? What if I really have been painting the future? Then here's something that really bothers me. It's one of my first oil paintings, done in the back room at the old Danbury High School art class in the Spring of 1964:
Image 252 in a photo shoot taken May the eleventh, 2002.
Because it seems very much like a premonition of -- how should I say it -- the end of the world. Maybe even the universe.
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