A trip West in Winter, 2025

So I'm off tomorrow on a trip across the country. It is prompted by a teaching stint at University of CA at Santa Barbara, which I have been lucky to have association since when I first showed my paintings there at a University Gallery in 1996.

It is not at all the best time to be doing this. In my experience something will come up though which will make the trip memorable and define some idea for my new paintings.

Already the Fires in Malibu, which will be a memorable event for time to come, is there at my destination.

As I write this in Canaan NY it is snowing. I just attended the memorial for David Shapiro and it reminds me of Davids poetry relating to this moment. 

The Snow Fell 

And so the snow fell

And covered up poetry.

And so the snow fell

And covered up cities like bags of leaves.

And so the snow fell

and covered up an architectrure.

And so the snow fell

and covered our friends.

And so the snow fell

and covered up one red orange sexual flower.

And so the snow fell

and covered the clear watertowers, the windows and the doors.

And so the snow fell

and covered up the fire and a house within.

And so the snow fell

and fell on their fallen trees.

And oh the snow fell

And covered up the photographs of snow.

Stevens wrote of the Wintry slime as he thought of the Imaginative weather of poetry which came alive in places like Gulf Islands National Seashore . I shudder as I write this as Gulf Island is still relatively empty. Pensacola seems to prefer bars and shopping malls.                  

To think 40 years ago I made these paintings. The black and white signaled destruction to some and it was there. But in the larger painting the Circles, gleaned from an essay by Emerson, talked of recurrent cycles.

The Winter is a dream of Spring. So They are hopeful in some way, especially in the scope of my whole painting oevure. I am taking leave in a most fearful time. Trumps inauguration as I reach Texas. This next Painting was nicknamed, The Viet Nam painting. It kind of cleaned the slate for a beginning to my painting life. Another cycle.

So again I can't think what my friends must be thinking. One friend lost his beautiful home in Pacific Palisades. California has always harbored disaster maybe in thinking about the Big One. It has been a part of the sublime western landscape I've loved and take off now-- to try to meet.

Obviously it is about more than Landscape to me. I'm always looking for something out there.  I found making a painting something was always trying to come to the fore, to distinguish itself, to say something. I thought, the idea,  of the painting, the figure.