The Nautilus Planet Detail Oil Painting,
Abstract Expressionist Pointillism:
Nautilus Planet
Oil on canvas, Staten Island Period, 1970
Seen from the bottom unrolled on the Autumn Lawn one afternoon
with a wood 1"x1" on one side and a part of a snow roof-rake pole on
the other.
Click here to go to the Staten Island Period Table of Contents.
1970. My friend was back. He had allowed me to house sit his apartment in mid town Manhattan for a couple of months.
Time to move on.
I had been talking to an old School of Visual Arts classmate of mine and persuaded him that I would be an excellent room mate to share the expense of his huge loft somewhere on 29th street or some street like that on the West Side between fifth and sixth avenues.
I mean this time I had room to work. I started by buying a roll of pre-primed canvass and stapling it to the wall. I found an old cabinet somewhere in some junk pile that had a white enameled metal top to it and brought it back and used it for a palate.
I had the back end of the loft and shared that with the cat's litter box. Really stinky, but I couldn't complain. my bed was a couple of planks on saw horses. At night I would awaken to the sound of clacking rails. A theatric costume depot was across the gap beyond the window and in the yellow light I could see thousands of garish costumes whizzing around a bend in the overhead track as they filled orders for the next night's shows around town.
The former classmate and I started to argue or rather he started to argue at me. We were of different mindsets. He disliked something about me, I couldn't dare guess, but I insist he was being unreasonable, but he had been down on his luck and I supposed that he had a right to be. It got worse and worse. After a while, I figured I couldn't take that kind of abuse without some sort of training one how do deal with that type of case, so I moved on.
The next place was a house in another part of New York City, an Island as well called Staten Island. There were about ten people there already and the place was so big it could hold ten more. The rent was low enough and you could almost have a reasonable existence if it weren't for the fact that everyone there was pretending to be a hippie. What we used to call plastic hippies. The kind that went through life doing nothing and pretending to be cool. It wouldn't have been so bad in the 20th century if the plastic people all went home and left the bohemian life to the struggling artists and poets who looked like that because they couldn't afford anything else.
I was able to finish Nautilus Planet there. I had been working carefully with the color. For the first time, I was using a whole table top for a palate instead of holding one in my left hand with a fist full of brushes. I used the entire surface to express color, while at the same time using an "implied line", a line that isn't drawn but rather is only seen because it is the boundary where two different colors or tones meet. Here the implied lines would spiral out from a vanishing point on the horizon as the spirals observed in a chambered nautilus sea shell. It almost in an indirect way became as Seuratte's technique of pointillism, but in an expressionistic way. The white primed canvas showed out between the colors, so to finish the work, I went over each space with a darkened umber or sienna. All in all, it was several weeks worth of work. I think six weeks.
Finally I earned enough taxi driving (see my essay "The Night I Picked Up Andy Warhol in My Cab", click to go there) to get to France, then to England, then to Ireland, Holland, Belgium, and so on and so forth. For a while I was able to stay in the Pacific by singing in the Paris Metros, going to the Islands, getting kicked out, going back to Paris the same way around the little planet Earth. I lost the drawings I did in Samoa, the three paintings I did in Fiji got stolen in Indonesia. All I can say is keep trying to be an artist and you'll really get somewhere. So far I've gotten more than two hundred thousand miles.
The other canvasses I did at the loft were lost when I tried to sell them at a flea market in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina on the Outer Banks, which I called "The Oucher Bonkos". The owner, who also raced souped up cars, had thrown them away when I couldn't get down right away when he phoned me to do so because he was taking them off the wall of his warehouse style flea market. His wife had liked the paintings and had allowed me to try to sell them at the flea market. At the time I was working two jobs and couldn't get down there for a month, thinking they had just stored them in a corner somewhere. Instead he had thrown them away except for Nautilus Planed. It had survived, a little worse for wear, in a sort of a lock up with a dirt floor.
Let me tell you something if you ever get there, if you're poor and have been on the move you've got no rights. For example, they didn't allow me to vote down there because I didn't own a car. They needed a driver's license for identification and you couldn't get a driver's license unless you owned a car. At that time all I had was a bicycle, so I didn't get to vote. Same thing with the guy who owned the flea market. I don't know, maybe a lot of you out there might think he did the right thing and the other work should get tossed as well. Actually I did get rid of a lot of it myself, but I gave it away! Anyhow, life goes on and it's more important to be producing new work then to be curator of the museum of the past work.
I like the way Picasso did it: he just bought a villa, filled it up with artwork, and then moved to a newly purchased villa. Now that's what you call Villa Nova.
The Outer Banks had a certain beauty in some of the natural spots, but the natives and the visitors both were in a state of denial while they were hanging out in the rest of the place. The blistering sun beat down on a man made desert of roads, sand everywhere and rickety structures. Every time a storm blasted by, another few beach houses would topple into the drink. The local people weren't bad folks except for the inevitable exclusivity people get when they live in closed societies. They thought of themselves as the beach people and most of them despised visitors. A lot of locals thought it was really funny to sport a bumper sticker on the car reading "Welcome to our beautiful beach. Now leave!"
And that's just what I did after a bunch of beach bums moved in across the street of our rented house in a place called "Collington Harbor" and started a crack house playing class z hard rock, huge speakers at maximum (hearing aid mode) volume with maximum base 24 hours 7 days a week, throwing whisky bottles and beer cans in our yard and everywhere else, doing u-turns on our typical lawn of salt-resistant grass-on-sand and once even what looked like to me a couple of them knifing a guy and loading his limp body into a car. The cops just laughed at me when I tried to get them to do something. They went by a couple of times and that was that.
So it was goodbye Outer Banks and hello Ludlow, Vermont, where they didn't like you if you were a flat-lander so then goodbye Ludlow and hello Claremont, New Hampshire, where THEY didn't like you if you were a flat-lander (it didn't matter if someone came there from the Rocky Mountains, in their brain they were still a flat-lander anyway), so then it was goodbye Claremont, and on to the next place.
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Oil on canvas, Staten Island Period, 1970
Seen from the bottom unrolled on the Autumn Lawn one afternoon
with a wood 1"x1" on one side and a part of a snow roof-rake pole on
the other.