Under Construction

One giant canvas panel stretched but not sized. One giant stretcher built and mostly braced. For some reason it took a long time to get the second one square. All carpentry and construction is precarious at best. If you were to see the verso of each panel you would laugh at me.

During this process I have been looking at George Catlin and Grant Wood. I just feel like I should. Catlin for his tiny towns, camps, and forts; and Wood for his woven hills and fields. It may be a passing thing, but you can really see their imaginations at work regardless of how you personally feel about Regionalism, or whatever "-ism" Catlin belongs to.

Cellini's Autobiography is providing A TON of inspiration for scenes of mischief. There is a banquet scene described that involves a cross dressing pretty-boy named Diego at Michaelangelo's place. I mean, come on! That is too perfect. Benvenuto later nearly murdered his ex-girl (Panacelia) and Luigi, whom Benvenuto had "sponsored", after warning the Luigi not to get involved with her. What a guy!

Ya Gotta Believe Me!

Okay, so this thing is getting more contained. I know, I know...I said that, like, months ago, but seriously I got this one. I am also trying to figure out how to shave time off of the painting process because as it stands I will finish these paintings by around 2012. So, my resolution is to: a) not get sick or b) take vacations for the next year. Oh! and c) no detailed underpaintings. That took something like two weeks. (I just had to try it. It worked just fine on the small ones. All told that should save me about 1 1/2 months.

I am reading Cellini's autobiography right now. 

All Hail Satin

Here is a detail image from behind the bar of the "expulsion" painting. Since the painting is so big, we are still in "coming together" mode. I know how I will proceed for the rest of the painting, but it's simply a matter of dealing with the accidents/vagaries of making a painting.

In reading list news...I finished Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino. I think I found the moral center of the paintings completely by accident through Mr. Palomar's endeavors. I started reading it because Invisible Cities had to be transfered to me by the library. Serendipity strikes!

Infancy Gospel Update

I located the M.R. James' 1924 translation to the "Book of James", or "Protevangelium". It is much more to my liking, as it has all of the "thouest" this, and "thy gifts" that. It feels more authentic. The Ronald Hock translation has such turns of phrase as, "at top speed" and, "No, not like that Mary..." That instead of "Wherfore didst thou..."

Here is the Greek text if you'd like to give it a go.

What Sort of Defilement Do You Mean, I Wonder?

As part of my research for this project I am reading The Infancy Gospel of James. An apocryphal book where the story of Joachim is told, however, the book is primarily about Mary.

I don't know that the translation I am reading is particularly great. I should read a different translation just to satisfy the skeptic in me. None the less it is tremendously interesting reading. As simply a story, one begins to pick up on these themes and references that aren't explicitly chauvinist, but pretty chauvinist when you stop to consider them. Here is one from chapter 8:

"When she turned twelve, a group of priests took coucil together , saying, 'Look, Mary has been in the temple of the Lord for twelve years." (already a continuity problem as Mary went to the temple at age 3 in this story. And sent to Joseph at 16.) It continues, "What should we do about her now, so that she does not defile the sanctuary of the Lord God?"

Deconstructionist Tremens

I am getting swept along by Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar. It's about a guy who looks a lot because he is trying to catalog the universe. This, to me, introduces all of these oppositions between Hegel/Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein/(insert phenemonologist here) .Food for thought.

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?

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.

Read-A-Long Cassidy

Here are some reading materials pertinent to the project:

The Usurer's Heart by Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje
**without whom I probably wouldn't have thought of this**

A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present by Howard Zinn
(you can read an excerpt here)

Democracy In America by Alexis de Tocqueville

There are some other Barthes essays about image, text, and myth that I am exploring, but this list is already pretentious enough.

p.s. for a Tocqueville subcategory you can check out American Vertigo by Henri Bernard-Levy, or America by Jean Baudrillard. They are nearly identical in form and subject, however Bernard-Levy "travels in the footsteps of Tocqueville".