Beautiful Title

I went tooling through the Luce Foundation Center yesterday and was overjoyed by the collection of folk/naive paintings, which as you probably know, I adore. I don't remember seeing the above image, but I found it on their website and loved the title: "And The Moon Became as Blood" It sounds as though Cormac McCarthy wrote it, but in fact Revelations did. I can see that I am going to have to steel it.

You can look at this image, among others, here.

Barthes McCarthy

Additional reading related to this project is Blood Meridian. A friend of mine, upon learning about this project said, "Oh! Like Blood Meridian!", which I thought was amazingly acute. He then said, "That is a twisted book."

You might also want to add the Barthes essay The World As Object to your Cinecitta Chapel Reading List. The writing has this "ricochet" quality, not unlike Foucault's essay Las Meninas. I think that this has symbolic resonance in both cases. Both essays are about the gaze, depicted and implied, bouncing around a painting. Since my paintings tend to have these ricocheting, geometric facets I thought these essays might be pertinent in a holistic way.

There is another interesting Foucault/Barthes moment when in the opening chapters of Camera Lucida Barthes mentions that "a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe," while referring to the infinitude of an object/presence/moment in a photograph. Clever, no?

Honorable Mention

I was mentioned over at The Lumper last week. Didn't even know it. I think you've seen this image before though.

Former Missourians Unite!

"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar kine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter."

image and text via poets.org and T.S. Eliot of course

Self Congratulations

The reception for the Penn State Show of my work, which I have effectively titled "Good And Dead" (Michael Ondatjee's words, not mine) is on Monday, March 30th if you are anywhere near Harrisburg, PA. The reception starts at 5pm and there will be a little informal discussion about the work. I should probably prepare some remarks, huh?

The show includes both the "Predella paintings" and still-life paintings. Believe me they are related, but you have to kind of be there to see it I suppose.

Big thanks to Paul Manlove (pictured) for making it happen. More flattering images of the show will soon follow.

Decoration Isn't a Dirty Word

Add this to the reading list. It is Eric Broug's Islamic Geometric Patterns. The book is more like a technical manual, and not really ethnographic/anthropological in the way that, say, Owen Jones is.

In earlier paintings I was working with these geometries, working out compositions using tangents found in carpet designs. This body of work won' t differ in that respect. In addition to being conceptually relevant in a way (I won't prattle on don't worry) the "Islamic" patterns are simply terrific design elements/compositional matrices. There is a lot of similarity between Uccello, Piero, et al. and these patterns once you crack them open. There is even a similarity in how Borromini overlapped shapes, creating these unusually moving volumes... All that stuff is tangled up in these patterns too.

WWRBD? (What Would Roland Barthes Do?

Man! Talk about narrative in action!

via: wrondistance / Roberta and Libby / and Jayson Musson