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The following previews some recent or current exhibits.
I made these small pictures after a brief hiatus from painting. The series title refers to the fact that I painted them in the basement of our Brooklyn brownstone apartment. With these paintings, I wanted to get back to simply seeing things.
The Watershed Project immediately followed the Handrail Project, continuing my use of an architectural paradigm for exploring aesthetic ideas.
Where the Handrail Project provided a broad theoretical framework for considering both the relationship between the senses of sight and touch and the influence of the sense of touch on the arts throughout history, the Watershed Project explored a few key aspects of the tactile aesthetic: shallow space, serial form, subtle variation, and the irrational.
The Watershed Project was realized only with drawings like those included here. (I made no paintings at the time.) And it may have culminated with — at least in my mind — a separate project, the Relief House. Many years later, I came to realize that the Relief House was an attempt to burn the Watershed down.
The Relief House now is a never-ending prose; it will never be complete just as the fire can never be extinguished. The full exhibit tells how it begins.
Along with several haibun, these haiga accompany the New York Haiku, which is a collection of poems about New York City.
This work conveys the seasonal (kigo) characteristics of traditional haiku, as a seasonal period in one’s life. For the New York Haiku, that period was the six years I lived in New York City.
The following is a selection of the poems from the New York Haiku.
...
said the skyscraper,
"I spy for dead empires"
to the cloud, passing
painting a closet
full of Bob and Charlotte's clothes
Appalachian Spring
King Kong, you’ve spoken
about empires, beauties
and ziggurat form
walking west on Wall
into the light of morning
the street said DIG JOB
beautiful people
fully appreciating
Mayakovsky’s scowl
...