| I
seem to always want to paint
either my kitchen table, or the view out my window of Pinnacle
Hill. Pinnacle Hill has been encroaching upon, interfacing with,
and persistently stepping up its allurements to me as an interior
artist. I'm taking it one step at a time. I only want to paint
it through the windows and ceilings of my house, with all its
seas and deserts and nebulae, and its population of cowboys
and saints, horses, maybe soldiers, sharks and flying dogs also.
I
am allowing my paintings also to "borrow," shall we
say, from the images of other artists. For example: the one
of the Sea of Galilee Lapping the Shore of PS 35, shamelessly
appropriates from Delacroix. But Lawrence Lazarus' Battered
Blue Cube is in there, also, in quadruplicate. School 35 is
a low brick building with seemingly no appeal, yet with 4 or
5, (I really haven't counted them) blue doors, Battered Blue
Cubes! They were painted beige for awhile, a while back, and
my heart sank. I was wracking my brain for a way to convince
myself that my memory of their blueness would serve me just
as well, as an artist who knew something and could brook all
obstacles in her path, when they got painted blue again! like
a miracle, in answer to a prayer I didn't dare send up!
The
one of the Fight for the Waterhole at PS 35 borrows (HA!) from,
as you can guess, from Remington. But, again, the doors of school
35 are DEFINITELY Lawrence Lazarus' Battered Blue Cube. He probably
wouldn't have seen the point of there being 4 or 5 of them,
but that's how it is.
My
latest painting, Pope Cake, is the Pope and my mother at the
kitchen table, with a Thiebald wedding cake on the table, and
the table holding its own, if I do say so myself! It's really
a picture of my mother's arms, I think. They express her earthy
fretfulness, without giving up a bit of her translucent leaving
this earth quality.
Janet
Williams |
