OP260 Fossilized Orange Chair

OP260 Fossilized Orange Chair
24 x 18" oil on canvas
private collection

October 30, 1999: I squeezed an orange chair onto a small canvas this morning, before setting to work on P254. Yes, I have changed the series designation for this work, since it so obviously belongs to the Paleozoic Series. When I began it, the Paleozoic Series did not exist, so I suppose this is the Prototype. Back at the small canvas on the easel, I surprised myself by carving the orange chair out of its background with French Ultramarine, which I have not used in some time. But then, the Pthalo Blue was a few feet away, over by P254, and I was too lazy to fetch it. The chair, at any rate, is a flow of orange, waiting to solidify into something else. Or at least until the underpainting dries.

November 4, 1999: This evening I spent entirely in the studio, working on P260, the little orange chair painting, and another sketch of a fossilized orange chair, this one sporting an appendage. I am still enjoying the crimson and orange and blue combination, with some of the flesh of the Paleozoic series added. In fact, I would not be surprised to see the orange eventually make its way into the big wall hanging, whose rocks and fossils have gold and rusty tinges already.

November 12, 1999: While working on the fossilized orange chair, P260, I began adding some of the organic shapes I have found in the fossils of the big hanging, the holes and creases and shapely hollows that make them more than rocks but less than living, the solidified parts of once-life. The chair, of course, has always fascinated me as the backward imprint of a being, like some fossils. In P254, the bigger spiral of the original vector has once again reasserted its form. It is squirming with petrified creatures, trying to come alive (again?). The cosmic spiral becomes appropriate, a birthing nebula. But are these beings improving?

Looking over my shoulder at the orange chair on the easel, I wonder if it is transcendent or simply decadent. But decay would not dare blush that fleshy pink, or crease into such a lively pucker. The chair is about to explode with exuberance, an ancient volcano.
I dare not sit down today, but pace the studio, looking from one painting to the other.

25 January 2000: My work today on the fossilized orange chair seemed to alter my own view of the painting. At times chaotic, at times a flow, the form streams in and out of collapse, the most complicated vector arrangement yet to appear in this series. Mildly disturbing folds appear, changing to pleasant bulges. It is the disintegration of the bold and decadent creature, indolent and self-aware, the modern psyche. It is the decadence of the twenty-first century sybarite, admiring its own flabbiness and the disorder of its indecisive shape.

As I paint, I am partly amused, somewhat repelled. What IS that green? Iridescence, or the onset of a sort of mental gangrene?

26 January 2000: Even in its advanced decadence, the Orange Chair is convinced that it will go to heaven. It is the bliss of orange, soothing itself. It is the complacency of a chair, the settled confidence of a utilitarian object. What would happen if two orange chairs bumped into each other? On collision, would they merge? They might trade elements, exciting each other to change.

This afternoon I finished P260, and as usually happens by the end of a painting, the entire picture resolved itself rather nicely, contorting back into something like the original idea.

Paleozoic Series