2007
I think that each painting I make is a tribute and an homage
to every handmade object, from a well crafted piece of wood-fired pottery to a
child’s primitive wax figure, to the wondrous Yoruba masks, to small knitted
lambs, to each kid on the street playing his guitar, to the handmade rugs from
Turkey and Afghanistan, and to each author I have read, pouring out their
version of truth, whose works have given me so much, and whose words will pass,
buried under the changes of language and customs.
All of these homemade objects are gone almost as soon as
they are completed. I think about the
dadaist paintings, the funny shaped pipes, the urinals, the newspaper prints,
the very typefaces …I know what these objects were meant to convey in their
commonness and everyday use. …but they
have all disappeared and now they seem quaint objects of great rarity, put
together as a handmade painting of beauty that talks to me in its strange
foreign voice, lost forever, as is everything and everyone, every moment we can
remember…
I remember Hunter Mulford, an extraordinary writer and
artist, sitting in his great mass of a body, asleep in his chair as he almost
always was, suddenly awake and telling the most chilling tale, finishing, and
falling asleep again before we could make a comment, like some giant mouse at
the mad tea party. And the walls of that
kitchen were covered from floor to ceiling in mad scrolls and pictures of
non-existent creatures. He wrote fifteen
novels, none of which were ever published, painted uncounted numbers of
pictures. And now he is gone, gone
forever.
I was surprised at that time by his modesty, his sort of
refusal to acknowledge what he had created, as if it had just shown up on his
doorstep and he had adopted it. Later
on, I almost came to see that as a theme in all self expression. Some sort of argument with the inner self I
think.
But every new item created is a needed image for our lives,
without which we live almost without memory.
It is in this refuge of the handmade, the individual, that I find my
aspiration and my inspiration. Because each product of the creative human
spirit can take us to that inner place, to that world where we can reflect on
the permutations and mysteries which flow with us through this life.
