CV
ABOUT
II.
Riding through the Yukon plateau, the swamps of the river dried through to the bone and opened up to burned-out forests. The piles of matchstick trees, blackened and silver, looked intentionally placed, composed and positioned as the remnant of an exhausted logging stand would be. A fox, emaciated and panting in the heat, ran out to the road to meet us and glistened, sweating and starving in the shadowless sun like an apparition.
We pushed on to seek a place to sleep for the night and pulled over to the bank of a tributary. The place was good, hidden between the tall brush of the gravel bar littered with caribou tracks and the black asphalt of the highway, the smallest ribbon in the wake of raw wilderness. We walked out toward the gravel to find water access. In the confused rushing of the silty river, the thinness of the fire-wrecked trees, and the density of the new willows, a bear that couldn’t hear us coming rose on its haunches, rearing to full height. Making eye contact with it in the split moments before it charged sent a wave of adrenaline into my bones that made me sense the air in a way I never have and I could taste the smoke.
I.
The shit pile is the most prolific source of all creative origin: The places where things ferment and fester are where the impulses to generate emerge, as chemical reaction of enzymatic breakdown. Look to the ground and to the manure.
Life must come first and the resulting work the broken down, dissolved, absorbed remains of that which is exalted, horrifying, unrecognizable, mutilated, and becoming a new entity containing its own life essence.
The work must exude the fumes, fluids, and brittle shrapnel of the life that came before it, which allowed your mind to stretch and warp around the image in the first place.
If you aren’t seeking out enough life to saturate the image, you will shrivel in the intellect.
Symbol is only universal to a haphazard degree. You are reflected in every single painting whether you know it or not. Figure it out later.
Shame is the greatest enemy
Honesty is the only antidote capable of the ruthless brutality needed to remedy shame
The imagination is often the only legitimate and worthy conduit to honesty because it resolves to resolute unabashedness and cannot be corralled
But, it can be quashed, and remember it and conceive of it a small and ancient organ, or a false pregnancy, inside yourself- pressing on it is like activating a gland, it is fragile and covered with a delicate skin, it requires certain and particular sustenance, it can be neglected and atrophy but since it is prehistoric and the body has evolved beyond absolute need for it, you can survive without it though you can never generate it again.
On a similar note, within rage you can decide to see for yourself and decide for yourself. Look at things that repel, scare, arouse, and revolt you.
Light is everything; on the physical surface, paint with it by obscuring, preserving, revealing, reflecting, mimicking. Then, in the conceptual surface, light can combust and destroy, reveal ruthlessly, blind to the point of concealment, deflect, produce tricks and illusions, bring revelatory spirits and visions, or wound and flood.
There are things you cannot do and cannot be; in the painting the loneliness of this becomes a beacon.
However, the meditation of complete presence and being in a real place, in a real world with feet on the ground and resisting against gravity, soil, water, wind, and heat, is the center of the illumination. Maintain firm and immediate contact and stare hard because beyond the mortality of that moment the painting can only be a window.
On the surface and in your mind be ferocious about everything, in your calculation, introspection, adoration, criticism, nitpicking, pleading, devotion, and crisis.
Rage Digest Transmutate Worship Refuse Listen Walk Bite Insist and Stare.