i still can't think but as i'm beginning to get my hands back into nature dirt i'm pleased i can't. 'from nature dirt to acrylic about dirty doin's to nature.' 50 - 60 people attended the 'evening.' i even talked to them as a group. something i've been unable to do. a couple of video cameras going too.
i'm still in shock. the 8 paintings looked great hung in checker board fashion by jim mac. the last one brought in my pickup on the day. it hadn't been started when lowell and joe came for the others the previous week. even some of those unfinished.
i've had difficult series before--well, all have been beyond what i'm capable of doing. this one tho was about rulers, lines & the wrong choice of paint. 'i know a lot about art but i can't draw a straight line with a crooked ruler.' finally for the last 2 paintings i got a $20 48" t-square for dry wall work. a slight improvement. during the time spent getting 'straight' lines (20 across & 20 down) i could have painted at least ten more designs.
to make matters worse the liquitex 'basics' paint i used for the 'background' needed to be painted 4 times compared to my usual 3 coats. i wasn't to know that until i tried to paint out the pencil lines. not only didn't they cover them & my usual mistakes but once a dab was applied it was a different tone than the 3rd coat.
i got erasers of every kind--enough to open a kindergarten--but only ink erasers would erase pencil lines. b-u-t that took hours just to do 1/4 of the lines of 1 painting which also left eraser marks in place of the lines. i did wash out the lines of 1 maybe 2 paintings. of these i had to paint the ground color around the stencil letters.
of course the univ bookstore ran out of the paints & after 2 weeks i found another store that had some. when i had tried regular dioxazine purple by liquitex it was a very different intensity & it took several coats of 'basics' purple to paint over the real color.
anyway some paintings still have pencil lines. others--the darker colors--i painted out and around. irony of ironies the iridescent bronze (real paint) was so iridescent that i couldn't see pencil marks that i began with. so by accident (how my things usually come about anyway) i turned the 4 x 4' panel diamond-wise and stenciled 25 mother nature/nature/nature talks back haiku (upside down--as i had to paint 1/2 of the others, sitting on my bed) around the edges--a color change for each haiku--until i got to the center and wrote 'mother nature laughs' [based on the 1977 'unaloud haiku' shape 'labium'']. one of my 'rerights.'
i had designs (with the same letters of course) for other paintings--which would have presented the letters/words in such a way that they 'stand' out in different ways. what one didn't see in one design/colors one might find obvious in another. but i only had one panel left.
what i finally worked out surprised me (how my things usually come about
anyway--i think i'm doing something else or don't know what i'm doing). the words in the 7 'design' paintings are relatively neutral, that is. we accept them as part of our vocabulary when speaking of nature, the designs too are neutral. i 'gendered' the last design. the only one with a title: 'mother nature's vagina dentata.'
mm 9/6/97'lucky me a freak of mother nature'
ps [re exhibition flyer] the computer at gallery ['htf'] broke down & i wasn't able to see lowell's essay. only 10 pages in 'kyoto journal.' the paintings contain the potential for a haibun; the one-line haiku can come from anywhere. 'fuking' is not a japanese word as far as i know. it's mistyped english. i've been 'dadaku-ed' again.
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