Vines & Vénus piquée par un buisson de roses: Galerie Flore :: Brussels
A painting, like a garden, like a lover, gives what it gets.
Vine Pictures
This vine grew on Naxos as though it were the first vine. I was on Naxos to do research for my ongoing project, A mind divided is no temple to Apollo. The vine thrust from the earth behind the house where we ate and slept. I was reading Sonnets to Orpheus at the table behind the house.
« Blatt meiner Worte » « Leaf of my word »
I began drawing the vine; writing it, as light shifted above and below. I say below, because I was sat with this vine on the edge of a cliff, and, from our perch, sky and sea moved together as the hours passed.
« Wave whose sea I gradually become »
The sea and sky moved together and never move. I saw the vine as a consolation, an apologia for hard geological time that was tended to us by Nature. I drew it every day, and with time the vine became like an organic version of Barnett Newman’s « zip », something a person could grab onto whilst the universe revolves in its cold and perfect Real.
Back in the studio, as the drawings developed into paintings, the paintings split into two directions. One, a quiet geometry of sea and sky; the other, the life of the vine, the leaf of my word.
Vénus piquée par un buisson de roses
Eroticism does not exist within an image. A picture operating as a vessel for the erotic must defy the consumable and open up an ambiguous visual space of comings and goings, apparitions and disparitions. The written word, the schema or the sketch are created with a line drawn from the mind to the world through the hand. This line is a seismograph of humanity, upon which the cognitive and the bodily dance.
Making these pictures is sensuous. Drawing my way from erotic memory into physical space, I must feel my way around as though in the dark. Using pure silver –a night metal– I weave flesh and thorn as I oscillate between expressive and mimetic “writing”. A painting, like a garden, like a lover, gives what it gets.