I.
IT WASN'T JUST ABOUT THE 60’S
It was about me… me and my big old memory… and my big old regret… and my big old obsession with amalgamation, with alchemy, and with iconography as language.
I appreciate how much the 1960s mean to all of you out there (they mean a lot to me too), but if you like my work because it deals (or rather, dealt) with hippies and shit, you don’t like my work – you like shit about the 60s.
You see those pieces, the paintings that came just before, were about a kid in the 1970’s playing in the abandoned wreckage of a past decade. Those pieces were the process of an adult blending personal experience with an open topicality of icons and events. It wasn’t history or revisionist history or what-have-you, it was language – it is language, pure and simple.
…and, yes, now the work has changed.
Whatever you might think, the new paintings still strive for the spirit of Emerson, W. S. Peirce and Poe! It's still Rogue America. The America I love.
This is the next chapter.
This is the new work.
It is clarity.
It is distemper.
It is giddiness.
It is an open progression from a closed system of memories.
It anticipates the idea of dawn with glee and not without a little terror!
This is the Frozen Moment.
This is not a torpidity of warmth and relaxation.
This is survival.
II.
IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT BLACK METAL
These painted hooligans are archetypes – vessels of expression.
They are simply adorned, no more nor less.
They are fascists as children are.
They are violent as baggage is violent.
Imagine them approaching an abyss with the grand stupidity of untainted enthusiasm.
See their approach as emotion.
Experience the moment of that approach as an infinite.
Now we're getting somewhere.
