The following introduces the images I’m sharing in this year’s City-Wide Open Studios in New Haven, CT (here’s a link to the site at Artspace).
1. “Now & Then: Self Portrait with Photos” (January 1983, and August/September 2020; 24" x 30")
I'm feeling more Proustian than usual, thanks to this inter-temporal slam. Back in the winter of 1983, I was 23 and worked in security at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and spent a lot of time hanging out with current and former students there, as well as a number of Philadelphia poets and artists. I painted a self-portrait that featured, on the right-hand side, my image in the bathroom mirror (the boards through the plaster showed renovation work that was halted when we moved in), and, on the left, a painting in black and white based on a photo of me in March, 1982, around the time of my daughter’s first birthday. In between were pasted three reproductions of a photo of me at 20 (my first winter in Philly) which I painted upon. The lower left showed a sunrise on the ocean when we stayed in Ocean City, MD, in June of 1981, and the upper left showed a view of Bar Harbor, ME, from Cadillac Mountain, from a visit in October the same year. The idea was to preserve me at that moment (the start of the end of the Philly era, as it turned out), set beside some images from the recent past that informed that period.
In 2020, the Kehler-Liddell Gallery in Westville put out a call for artists to contribute to a show called “I Am”: “How do you see yourself? How do others see you? What makes you, you? From selfies to personal branding to the complexities of identity politics, our carefully crafted personas are routinely broadcast to the world via the internet. The modern world revels in the revelation of a semblance of self, allowing us to conceal as much as we reveal. In this age of unprecedented exposure, how can an artist offer some fresh statement of self?” (Here’s a link to Brian Slattery’s coverage of the exhibit for the New Haven Independent.) I didn’t submit anything but the question made me think of my youthful self-portrait, which I wouldn’t have submitted as is because I was never quite satisfied with it. That got me thinking about painting-in a new, contemporary, twenty-first-century face.
Initially I thought I might use a very good photograph my wife Mary took of me for a class she was taking around 2017. But that already was a little dated. I turned 60 in 2019 and it made sense that the picture should be from the new decade in my life—the 60s!—and from the new decade we’ve begun—the Twenties! Shortly after my sixty-first birthday in August, with “Covid hair” in evidence, I took a selfie with my Surface and that’s what the new face on the left is based on. Further work was done on the “me” of 1983 as well, and the ocean (which was the part most fun to paint and which looks forward to a series of seascapes I hope to get started on soon).
While working on the painting, I played cassette tapes I still have from 1983 as well as an iTunes playlist featuring only LPs from 1980-83 that I owned at the time. Who says you can’t go home again?
In response to the K-L Gallery query: The activity of painting recalls someone I have been at various times in my life, and am trying to be again. For it’s not simply an action—painting—it’s an assertion of identity. One becomes the maker of this particular thing, and of another, and another . . . But there is no resting within that identity because it’s predicated on activity, an activity that changes with each new attempt. The task of painting what one sees becomes at once a reflection upon how perception changes day to day. There’s no enduring gaze, there are only the discrete moments of looking. Even a static image changes. And that fact, which used to defeat me and make me despair of ever “getting it right,” now keeps me in the game, given over to the effort to paint the way I see at the moment. And—here music contributes in subtle ways—the way I feel from moment to moment, or song to song. Part of the process of trial and error means relearning how to paint, or of learning how I paint now. “I Am” both painter and painted, and, in the painting, both 23 and 61.
2. “Baby Mommy” (September-December, 2019; 14" x 18")
The return to painting after a twenty-year lay-off started a
year ago with this painting. The photograph shows my mother—who died in 2011 at
age 82—at three or four, and so dates from around 1932. She is dressed for her
portrait in a white, billowy dress adorned with embroidery across the shoulders
and neckline, with puffy short sleeves and a cape, discernible off to her left
side. Dress shoes—one is visible as she sits with one leg beneath her, the
other foot is out of the frame. She leans forward slightly, eyes gazing at
something, or simply intent upon not blinking. The face is a bit tense but
also—I sense—greatly impressed at the fuss it must have taken to appear so
perfect. Her hair is carefully combed, and she wears a bracelet on her right
arm and a pendant around her neck. There she sits, Elaine May Taylor, third child
and third daughter of Mr. and Mrs. James Patrick Taylor of Wilmington,
Delaware, at her best. Understood even then, I suspect, as an icon of the
ephemeral beauty of childhood.
The activity of painting involves what’s called “muscle memory”—indeed, that’s one of its great attractions, as some might feel for cooking or running or playing an instrument or any of dozens of physical activities. Which may include dancing or making love. And the latter is the act I find most akin to painting because it is a labor of love, this effort to render an image. Working from a photograph presents certain immediate frustrations—you can only see what the camera shows. And what the camera shows has been frozen in a lifelike but non-living image. To put life into it—my life—is the task, certainly. But, more importantly, the effort means putting my mother’s life into the image. Day after day I painted and watched her face change—watched as I changed her face—letting me glimpse my older brother, Tom, or Joan Walters, a cousin my age (who then died in April), or my mother’s father—recalling his resemblance to my younger brother, Jerry—or our sister Kathy, or even my daughter Kajsa, whose face I drew many times for a collage of images from photographs of her, newborn to age ten, back in the mid-90s. To find those other faces lurking in my mother’s child-face as I painted and repainted it was to see again our interrelations, while the face that emerged in the painting was not my mother as a child, or not only. The look in her eyes—in the eyes I fashioned for her—was a look I had seen, it was the stare not of the child in the photo, who would become my mother, but of my mother as I knew her. That double vision—was it only in my eyes, looking at what I had done, or was it there more tangibly? My deceased mother’s living gaze brought back to me as an object to be regarded, as a “thing” that had been, that had—in a sense—never gone away. The painting I created was not my mother as a little girl, but a little girl as my mother, a baby mommy.
3. “Not Yet Dad” (January-April, 2020; 14" x 18")
Here the idea was to do a quick study from a photograph of my father, Fred Earl Brown, 1927-1996. The picture was taken in a photo booth with my mother around the time, I believe, they became engaged in 1949. They married in August of that year and my dad turned 22 in October. I liked the way my father engaged the camera in this photo, ready to start his life with the woman at his side. He had been in the service as a Marine, but he was not yet a dad. Their first child would not be born until March 1952, when my father was 24. The fact that I was a dad before my 22nd birthday gave me a certain pleasurable feeling of priority over that young dude. The photo is black and white so I had considerable leeway in choosing colors, and the expectation that I would paint this one quickly soon faded away. I had thought, because my mother’s photo was such a fine studio affair, that it would be the more difficult to render, but the flash-bulb-lighting on my father was the kind of distortion that is foolish to render as is, in paint. So it took some time before I got a tonality and balance I could live with.
There’s the old canard of the poet Paul Valéry saying that, for amateurs, a poem is never finished, only abandoned. A comment I’ve often applied self-consciously, with an ironic smirk, to my own efforts. Valéry, a certain kind of perfectionist, wouldn’t undertake any work unless he knew what “the end” was, what it was he wanted to achieve and why. Well, we all can’t be Valéry, and many of us simply blunder along, trying things, eventually saying “I give up.” In fact, the only thing that made me stop work on this painting was the fact that I needed to move on, to begin the series that comprises the rest of the images in this inventory. And because any further work would only distort what I’d already achieved, and I didn’t want to find out where such distortion would take me. Not with this. The photograph, unprofessional as it is, has a charm I wanted to maintain and that has to do with walking a line between simply sentimental evocation—which I don’t at all disparage, at this point in my life, whatever I might’ve felt about such motivations as a younger man—and something more elusive. That “something” kept me involved because (whatever it is), it entails a search within myself for a reason to do anything so de trop, so superfluous, as making a thing. A photograph can be scanned, made into a digital facsimile, photoshopped, and shared. What can be the purpose of rendering that image as a separate object, if not the experience that occurs in the fashioning? And that’s the very thing—my skepticism says—not likely to be present to other eyes or at least not as a particular experience. The question of particularity—this particular image at this particular time—is apt to be meaningless to anyone but me. Even my siblings or my father’s grandchildren, familiar or not with this image of his youth, aren’t likely to relive their relation to him simply because I made this painting. And yet something like that is my goal: to live the hours spent making the image as a kind of homage—to my father’s past, to the beam in his eye, and to my past indebted to him and to whatever aspect of our connection still lives. While painting “Baby Mommy” I thought of my father once saying—watching me paint as a teenager still living at home—“I’m gonna have to chain you to the easel.” He meant, quite rightly, that I was very lazy about painting, even back then when I was doing Frank Frazetta copies for spending money, and I wasted a lot of time not making any effort and a lot of effort not putting in the time. So, on this one, I put in a lot of time.
The Tarot Panels
This is not the place to go into the history of my interest in the 22 cards called the “Major Arcana” in the Tarot deck. Suffice to say the curiosity dates from around 1980 and that I wrote a poem for each of the 22 cards between 1988 and 1992, which I gave a public reading of while in grad school at Princeton. A few efforts to publish them as a chapbook went nowhere and my interest drifted to other things. When I moved to Hamden in 2016, I hoped the extra room would give me a place to paint and one of the ideas was to do an “illustrated Arcana” in some fashion. When the COVID lockdown occurred in March, I got immersed in texts and notes to see how I’d approach that. Developing a logic I’ll maybe go into on some other post, I broke up the 22 cards into four groups of five, with two leftover, one as transition and the other as outcome. The four groups were titled—following on ideas about literary interpretation I spent some post-doc years developing—“Ethos,” “Pathos,” “Eros,” “Logos.” I considered doing a very big painting for each group with the two extras as stand-alone images. But that didn’t feel right. And I don’t really want to work so big in my spare room home studio anyway. The two paintings of my parents both happened to be 14” x 18” and that seemed a good size for the Tarot panels. Panels because canvas stretched on board to feel and look a bit more like playing cards. So it should be possible to hang all five on a wall at once, and to even rotate them through the seasons and so forth…
Initially, my plan to join the City-Wide Open Studios was to garner a wall to hang the first group of five on—“Ethos”—which should be in a quincunx with #1 in the center, #2 above, #3 to the left, #4 below, #5 to the right. My hope was to do one a month and have all five done by September. It didn’t happen and COVID meant no wall anyway. So, here are the three I consider “done” as of now. #4, “XV The Devil” is begun and #5, “IX The Hermit,” may be by the end of October? In any case, I’ll add them as they come along.
4. Tarot Panel 1: “0 The Fool” (April-May, 2020; 14" x 18")
The standard image—borrowed from the Golden Dawn Tarot pack
developed by A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith—is of an aesthete-looking guy
stepping off a cliff while brandishing a flower and carrying a knapsack. I didn’t
ponder too long over this card because I’ve drawn a couple different
adaptations of it, in different contexts, over the years. The main change was
to depart from motley for the Fool—I liked the association with the Fool in King
Lear, one of my favorite Shakespeare characters in one of my favorite
Shakespeare plays. But this time I wanted a contemporary fool, and the act of
checking his phone while stepping into the abyss struck me as irresistible. His
clothes came from a google search of hip threads of the times, while the
figure’s stance came from Rodin’s statue “John the Baptist preaching.” I needed
a naturalistic space, I felt, so the fact of his imminent plunge would be
clear. I selected the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, well-known as “the Cliffs of Insanity”
in The Princess Bride. And the Fool’s features are meant to recall those
of the young Hermann Hesse (around the time he wrote Knulp, a novella
about a free-spirit who wanders about without any ties to person or place)
whose works helped me, as a teen, get into Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, which I associate with the spirit of The Fool, in its more
philosophical inspirations. (For more synopsis, via a song playlist, go here.)
5. Tarot Panel 2: “XIX The Sun” (May-September, 2020; 14" x 18")
Unlike the Fool, which has a story of sorts, the Sun is
mostly just a symbol, or else it’s the heavenly body itself. To paint a picture
of the sun is not an easy thing to do, and what should its foreground or
background be? All along I knew—drawing again on the Waite-Smith deck—that
there would be a young nude male in the image. He should be an embodiment of
the Sun. A Sun-child. The Sun god. The search went out for cherubs and cupids
and a number were found that might suffice. In the end I came to rely, mostly,
on the figure of Cupid that stands, mini-me style, on a first-century statue of
Augustus Caesar from Prima Porta. Except that my Cupid-Sun figure would be
holding a glass up to see his own countenance. To get the look on his face was
a long bout of trial and error—at one point I had a face that was quite lyrical
and dreamy, then a self-satisfied look that reminded me of the young Marlon
Brando, and a couple others. The face that finally emerged owes something to an
image of a Renaissance putti a facebook friend happened to post. The idea is that
The Sun is personified as a nude man-child looking raptly at himself in a kind
of “sun bubble” that flourishes with sunflowers and corn, to symbolize summer
in my part of the world, while below all is desolate sunbaked wasteland,
recalling two famous poetic lines: “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” (from
Yeats’ “The Second Coming”) and “boundless and bare / The lone and level sands
stretch far away” (from Shelley’s “Ozymandias”). (For more synopsis, via a song playlist, go here.)
6. Tarot Panel 3: “I The Magus” (July-September, 2020; 14" x 18")
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