Through the Barriers
"Through the Barriers"
A Self-Portrait.
Oil on Canvas,
1966 (The Greenwich Village Period).
I recall that at the time I had already seen several examples of Bacon's work. I was repulsed and avoided looking at them very much. Several of his portraits appeared as though he had some sort of machine that was imprisoning those personages against their will, making them appear as if they were disintegrating, and screaming. Well, I was a kid hoping for a normalistic world of order and beauty and here were all these various artists that for some reason had attained enough notoriety to be shown and it was as though they were bawling me out, oddly enough.
I was being told off by these seasoned vets, Goya, Bellows, Bacon, Warhol and the others. Wake up. It's an imperfect world. I was shocked when I sat at the second easel in the studio and did this self portrait. Wow. I'm not going to paint like Bacon. But there it was.
Maybe I was doing a self portrait of me breaking out of one of Bacon's portrait traps. But then it got more what -- intense? When the work dried, I then was furthered impelled to do something I thought to be a waste of time, "Optical Art". Op art. But I wasn't going to be as meticulous in my experiment as the op artists who, it seemed to me, took months painting a straight line, implied line (not a line but a border between two colors), across the canvass. Why I thought I needed to do that, I don't know.
But I do remember imagining the self portrait to be too monochromatic; too much of one color. So I must have decided to use the op art experiment to get a complimentary color to the blue, orange, into the picture. So I used masking tape. I think I can remember imagining when the paint dried that I should have done two paintings instead of the op experiment, because the orange turned out to be an all right work on it's own as did the original blue dominated work. But when the tape was removed and the touch-ups made, it had the right statement after all.
By that time, in '66, there were already elements trying to somewhat obstruct things. The artwork was not proceeding as smoothly as before. Now the reasons why were all purely coincidental. But those coincidences were happening with greater regularity. I was getting sick and tired of all those coincidences. They were beginning to have a sort of flavor as it were; a familiar stench.
This accompanied with the underlying suggestion that success would only follow conformity. To what? You ought to know. It's ruined the art world.
I saw it before. People who faced incredible difficulties in the arts or fine arts, becoming overnight successes when they would undergo some profound change in their product.
To stay intact, something must be acquired, like becoming unknown. That's the voyage. That's the escape from the swamp; from the snare of the grotesque. I then sensed something not put on canvass, not included in the picture plane.
I stepped into anonymity. I entered into the perpetual voyage. They killed the albatross, but I underwent the voyage of the ancient mariner. I went on a fact-finding mission. I found out some incredible stuff. Through the barriers. The incredible barriers of the pretty little blue planet. What a sticky mess it had become. All because people want to fool themselves into imagining they are somehow powerful. What's wrong with being an ordinary person? You can enjoy a sunset once again, notice beauty in the stars even though they make you feel small. So what?
After all, I can't really tell you what I discovered. That you must find out for yourself. But I can tell you this: Even though the Earth has it's problems, it does have some spectacular views.
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email address: art@paulhallart.com