In the year since Artspace’s Open Studios 2020 (see my contribution here), I’ve continued my work on the Tarot panels and on the series called “renderings.” My work on this year's website can be found here (when the Artspace link goes live October 15).
First up, one of the latter. This painting, which I worked on in May and October 2020, is based on a photograph I took of my wife Mary and our newborn daughter in Philadelphia in summer 1981. Apart from its considerable personal meaning for me, as an image and as a souvenir of a particular time and place, I’ve always felt the image had a great potency. The protective abandon of the maternal figure, the way the child in sleep is still in the posture of nursing, but also looks as if she’s trying to “take in” the mother. The mother’s T-shirt and cutoffs certainly conjure fond memories for me, but are also great fun to paint, set against all the pillows and sheets, as are the flesh tones. It’s probably the first painting I’ve done where painting for the sake of painting is involved. I hope there will be more.
In this series there are three other works in progress that are too in flux for me to want to post their images. All three are intended as gifts anyway so I don’t mind keeping them under wraps for now.
And now, onto the Tarot panels.
Last year, I had finished the first 3 panels of the “Ethos” section. Now I can present them together with the last two to comprise what should be a quincunx of paintings, like this:
Individually, here they are:
“Ethos 1: O The Fool” (April-May, 2020): The image of The Fool is of a man stepping off a cliff because he’s not paying attention.
“Ethos 3: I The Magus” (June-September, 2020): On a stage which might also be a church, the Magus kneels on one knee, lifts a microphone and an illuminating finger.
“Ethos 4: XV The Devil” (August-October, 2020): A collage of images for “the great deceiver,” including a pomegranate (as the fruit of temptation), a goat, a baboon, a serpent, a snarling face and images borrowed from William Blake.
“Ethos 5: IX The Hermit” (October-November, 2020): A single figure, derived from an Egyptian statue of a scribe, in an empty room, prepares to write his visions.
The latter painting was mostly painted last November. No matter how much I might like to be a hermit and withdraw from the world to paint and write and read and so forth, November, you may recall, was a particularly fraught time with the contested election and a host of unsettling events that culminated in the assault on the Capitol before the inauguration in January. It’s a fact anyway that I didn’t do much painting, if at all, after Thanksgiving weekend until the inauguration. That month I got started on Eros, the second segment in the Tarot series. And here are the first three. Again, these are meant to be seen as a group of five with VI The Lovers in the center, XVII The Star above, and III The Empress to the left of center; XIV Temperance, the panel below, is mostly completed but not yet signed or numbered, and VIII Strength, the righthand panel, was begun in August but hasn’t had much progress due to work on those three other “rendering” paintings.
“Eros 1: VI The Lovers” (January-March, 2021): Derived from an image for alchemical transformation, two winged figures, male and female, couple in a pond beneath a tree, a lyre nearby; the composition alludes to Chagall’s “Daphnis and Chloe.”
“Eros 2: XVII The Star” (March-June, 2021): A nude woman pours water from a vase into a pool in which she stands while gazing at the viewer, elements of her features and figure borrowed from friends, Dürer’s Eve, and a Waterhouse nymph.
“Eros 3: III The Empress” (April-July, 2021): A woman on a throne in nature, her figure and clothes derived from a statue of Parvati, the wife of Shiva and a Hindu goddess of fertility.
We're allowed nine images on the site, so that’s it for me, this year. Maybe around Christmas I’ll get those other three “Renderings” up. I’ve got quite a number of those planned, and should also be starting the panel for “X The Wheel of Fortune” which is the first “outcome” card—one at the halfway point, the other at the end. Thus I’m almost at the halfway point in the panels, but at least two to four months away.
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