I began this painting early Winter 2010, and did not finish it till a few weeks ago.
What was missing? the background.
The new digs (ours as
long as Providence allows it) has these red-coloured walls. When I picked up the painting again, a
fter having moved it clear from Atlanta, I looked at it, looked at the walls, and saw the rust-red was the missing ingredient. Somehow I had to wait a year & 1/2 to see the needed background manifest.
A symbolic still life, all describing the same process - I had a particular muse, if you will, for that entire period of my life. To describe it in a modest, succinct way, the Muse waxed eloquent re. the Good Things in Life - how intoxicating and seductive they be - and sought to beguile and impress. Yet - how quickly they fade and die, no? How silently all the systems and infrastructures of a home, a town, a society fall asunder while its drunken boozed-up glazed-eyed residents turn towards the next amusement... The concept that most encapsulated my imagination at this time (and I had been plotting this painting for a long time, since May 2008, actually) was that of the Vanitas Still life. The poetic passage from grape to wine to vinegar, the noble life cycle of the grape The Vinegar bottle I've had since about that time - the wine bottle (and, in an inexplicable twist of fate, the grapes) came from our Good Friend Larry Taylor - sort of weirdly perfect, considering the thematic, for all who know the slightly hedonistic over-the-top larger-than-life personality.
The true still life was a smaller, more air-tight version that has ended up at the house of one Stuart Thomson, aesthete and excellent backgammon player - and, of course, a Very Great Friend in addition to Art Patron Extraordinaire. After finishing that version, the grapes, Thanksgiving dinner, and scores of petty tragedies and minor triumphs provided the oomph for the completion of that still life's more psychedelic cousin.
I believe I like this version better - it tries less hard, and is more honest. Plus, I had a whopping "if I only knew back then what I know now" moment informing the whole process that made the new reality more real, if not more agreeable.
The Vanitas still life theme wherein grapes turn to wine turn to vinegar continue, with the added baggage/residue of a Thanksgiving dinner (turkey bones), a half-smoked cigarette, a half-smoked cigar perched on top of an extinguished candle -proably extinguished in desperate pursuit of some magical conjuring or other, by the light of a last-quarter moon, a half-smoked cigar and a wine long since soured), a half-finished painting by Good Friend Colleen Hackett, a portrait of my grandparents (Alicia Moder and Arturo Araya Peters - see p. 9) and (though I didn't know it at the time) the background colour of the walls in the New North Carolina abode.
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