This painting belongs to the ‘Invocational’ series. It’s mostly soft earth colors, a monochrome painting, but not quite. Therefore it’s not a very like kin to the rest of its sibling works. In the middle of the paining is a collage image, an enlargement of the small photo I have of her. She’s a young girl, around 10-11 years of age, standing on a sidewalk outside her home in Heath Springs, South Carolina. She’s at a three-quarter angle to you as the viewer, her shoulders scrunched up for she’s cradling a kitten in her arms.
There’s strong sunlight on her. The Sun in casting very strong shadows, including hers. It has always seemed to me a terribly intimate and poignant image, but at the same time one of contentedness and love. The town is small today and was smaller then, which was around 1952 or ’53. All sensibilities of he original photograph are my own, for I’ve never asked her to look at it as we’ve never really been close. So you see, it’s a mystery.
The title of the other three paintings are a variant of “Marylyn’s Metropolis.”
But, I titled this one “We Desire.” There are many reasons, all having to do with how I’ve always interpreted that photograph. That is what art does; just like a writer, you are able to make up a story, and present it to the world, as I’ve done here.
It’s also the largest of the four works. The first was 8 inches high by 4 inches wide; this variation is around 16 inches high by 14 inches wide. The other three were all some shade of red as the predominant color.
But not this one.
This one belongs to me. It's not the last, I think, on this theme. I decided a few months ago to visit Marilyn, and talk. The next one I make, without a doubt, will be a digital (possibly a digital/hybrid build) maybe even a varied edition to explore more of the story I've created since painting that first small one in 1996.
"We desire," 1998 acrylic/collage/image transfer on cradled wood panel. Each side rail is a unique but very related treatment. The eyeglasses are from a 1916 SC newspaper.
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!["You're standing on the porch of a farmhouse, just ten yards (if that) from a perceptibly approaching veil of mists while listening to Kurt Vile & Courtney Barnett [see thread] which just seem too synchronous for the slow fade of these first few days of your return home from the high deserts." ≈ A swapping of places. Welcome to the story's beginning.
I was surprised on my return from Santa Fe to see the miasma fogs had returned to this region of SC. Within ten minutes the silver grays had slipped into impenetrable, barely indigo-black of nightfall. Falling faster than the mists were approaching. And then the skittering sound, the retching of an interminably long hissing. I'd started 7 panels that day inside the raw pined walls of the farmhouse & had noticed a swift fog outside the window. I'd not expected the hissing. It remained a tenant of the mists for 2 years and 2 months although I was to come and go so often from here all too often in that time.
The home was surrounded by a 40ish stand of pine, so most likely I was standing what was likely a tobacco field in 1974—the year I graduated from high school. Two years after the last vacation our family took in August of ’72; a very short one by comparison to what my mind had just dislodged. I walked back in from the side hissing porch, picked a wine glass, poured a tawny port, grabbed my pipe & walked onto the front porch. Dark but a chill was backed by more hisses.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:klk4jxpiyu36pvauctmtcmc3/bafkreidvcnu6vwf7snhjs4vwkchkvqxrw3lzyycpoxzbdu3jfwip5cmkau)
![Maybe it's time to pull out my Raven cache...
A photo on the edge of a big crevice in Northern Arizona. Otherwise known as the Grand Canyon. A solitary raven is perched, as they so often are, on the cliff's very edge, poised for flight at a moments notice. It's on a pale buff-beige stone formation, a juniper between me & it. The 12 mile span of the Northern rim is in front of the great bird of the West. I'm fairly sure I know where I was, for there were ravens flying all around me as I was painting that day. At this moment though, I can only say it was on the western side of the South Rim.
“It was the loneliest land for a grave. A land given over to the coyote and the raven - which is but another name for desolation and utter solitude. On damp, murky nights, these scattered skeletons gave forth a soft hideous glow, like very faint spots of moonlight starring the vague desert. It was because of the phosporus in the [buffalo] bones. But no scientific explanation could keep a body from shivering when he drifted by one of those ghostly lights and knew that a skull held it.” ≈ Mark Twain, from "Roughing It"](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vcddplfkwtjscvc3sh3aphwo/bafkreiepdvteqgspeob5qnbeia5ehzov7ob7soek6wnte5y6kq4zvqnr7a)
