A293 Anomalous Picnic

A293 Anomalous Picnic
24x36" oil on canvas
private collection

March 2, 2003: I drew a woman on the new large canvas, stretched out at a picnic of strange objects, A293, Anomalous Picnic. She looks bemused, as if playing a game of chess. This is a more innocent- looking picture, and much flatter than the others in the series. I had thought to do it with no shading, but I suppose that will depend on how I feel as I do it. Tonight I painted some French Ultramarine into the background, like a sky, or perhaps a river. There is supposed to be a cloth on the ground, and the dishes will be full of incongruities. Chaotic tidbits.

March 5, 2003: I have been enjoying using cadmium red in this painting, mixing glowing flesh tones using it and cadmium yellow. The womans face is full of lines, but serene; she has earned her picnic.

March 19, 2003: Upstairs in the studio, I worked on A293, little fossil cookies and a delicate cup with a design of blue and white synapses. I have been thinking of these paintings as representative of the chaos of our lives, so many patterns and choices, so much happening. But also, in spite of all that we notice, our perception of the world must be somewhat flat and graphic, as we tend to generalize and idealize everything, not looking closely or investigating, or perhaps not wanting to, frightened by the complexity of it. Any anomaly is too disturbing ...I worked on my painting a bit more, drawing amphibian fetal patterns on a large green plate. They look like carved beads.

March 25, 2003: I spend some time in the studio, and finish the first layer of shading and outlining on A293. I plan my patterns carefully, gourds bursting with motifs, the warped web of the cloth, the glowing orange of the arm of the woman. She is dining on the bits of matter that life gives her, converting it all into her own design.

April 30, 2003: I took my second cup of coffee upstairs and put Wagners Ring Cycle on the stereo. I sat down at the studio typewriter and studied yesterday's single line of poetry, catching a bit of flow. For about an hour, I typed and re-typed lines, eventually coming up with two more stanzas, inspired by my painting session last night. I spent the rest of the morning working on A293, which is beginning to shape to my original ideas. The central green plate, set up on its edge at odds with the false perspective of the checked cloth, is a trompe loeil of flat and dimensional patterns, inspired by amphibious egg development. It blooms like an Aztec calendar of biologic glyphs. Its persistent growth precludes any preoccupations with the other picnic choices; pabulum and pills, generic fossil feed. Staring into such a plate as the green one, we feel we must go on, be something else. All else is shells, inertia and weeping over teacups.

Anomaly Series