what I’m painting now…monday, february first 2010

You said in your letter to write about what I’m painting now. You were maybe sitting in a virtual world taking pictures of your self there at the time. You’d found a room with the ripped wallpaper and the old oriental carpet like my real time room for painting portraits and perhaps your avatar was dressed in the half wolf persona you wear sometimes. From what you send me. You said you were thinking of taking your meat time persona in there, into the virtual, a little cut and paste, a little interweave, you had to figure out the parameters. I was tickled at your using a virtual place and your entity in there as a artist/photographer’s model.  I said ”The implications are smart, there’s a nice science fiction edge to it, the mundane process of taking snaps also strips off  the mystique of the  medium… I can see it kind of ease people into talk about meat and virtual time etc.,  yap that’s entirely familiar to you and I maybe. Most of the population hears babel from an impenetrable world.

We were talking about having your shows in places in virtual worlds, shows of work from outside, and about us using ourselves as subject matter. Like Robert Lowell did in his poetry I’m thinking but I’m no Robert Lowell.  You said “Maybe it’s all a big stroke off, I guess that’s a natural part of it. I meant more that I use myself as a subject. I tried to explain this one time in film school and people just didn’t get it: It’s certainly an ego stroke, or perhaps more aptly an ego builder for me, but also if some of the things I’m doing might come off as exploitive, I’d rather be exploiting myself, if that makes sense. I figure I shouldn’t ask anyone else to do what I wouldn’t be willing to, barring inability.”

Me, I’m painting portraits of course. I tend to forget painting anything else though it isn’t even a year I said this is what I do, portraits of people,  this is the persona. I hardly think beyond the physical attraction. The addictive gloat.

This pictures maybe going well but  there’s a heavy, raw bodily sadness to making it and to lookin at it, I never felt the melancholy like. Comes with the kit, at least this time with mine. Heavy but not while I actually paint. I try not to stop. I’m full of the wolf and the last wasted moon then. I didn’t get to run. Avid for flesh, for no words, for no word processing. Vivid company here when it comes. Then the dirty cups and spoons. The surprising silence it all comes to.

I’m runnin a bath and stripping off while I’m painting the pattern on the blanket over a big leg and if I get the pattern right there’s a big leg too. Something I hanker over  like an animal set in the bourgie paradigm of parlor decoration and oil paint. Set in a lot of paradigms and shrugging off each as a poor fit. I got a letter on facebook from a young and distant cousin. He said growing up baptist in this little town he always felt like he was being watched, on display. Jaysus missing nothing with his helpers licking ice-cream and never missing a beat either, main street Friday night. This cousin’s a musician, a performer. If you can’entirely conform you can at least entertain mebbe. A lot of my family performs, though when we were kids the constant refrain every time you opened your mouths was “Don’t be bold”.