The graphite glints like the edge of a blade and these two fridge doors cut the hell out of three of my five fingers as I removed the formed plastic back (with the egg cups) yesterday…. blood never looks as red as it does on white enamel. Carried the slab down across the canal yesterday (cutting my thumb early in the journey and gathering a clot of gooey blood in the steel corners) only to find my metrocard expired and so I went home again (Christ meets Sisyphus).
I’m fairly depressed lately, with the strange stupidity that comes with that and the anti-social hermitt leanings. I woke to Katrina horrors and passed a chef with a long knife chopping and thought of mellons and the pumpkin head perciever that goes up and goes down and swimming at Jones beach on Saturday and Spalding Gray again and the fridge door I was carrying. The picture had to have knives in it after all the gore of yesterday and the drowning man and the mellon and seeing that Chef. It’s strange to try and free associate this way with drawings like I was doing in the manic spring with photos. It’s slower and sort of haunting.
The humid gloom gathered in the studio. It occurred to me to take the poet’s advice and recollect intense emotion in tranquility (or mania in despair) and drew these utterly bizarre things…. at least to me. “What would a happy thing look like anyway?”
Results made me laugh and cry in strange ocillations. Was actually whistling by the time I got home, but also suffering intense audio hallucinations of my cell phone ring tone. In fact, all day I thought I heard it chiming quietly in the background. “Was that my phone?” No, but still I hear the Tinnitus-like bibidee bibidee bibidee boo over and over again and then talked myself out of answering it, when the phone actually rang. Really annoying and bizarre. The ringing only went away when I listened to Coltrane and that’s when I drew the manic mellon head. The pencil makes a great percussive sound on the hollow steel door, so it’s like you can play along with the band. I used comet cleanser to carve out the highlights. On the blog it’s probably hard to get a sense of scale, so take a break and go get something from the fridge. Look at the lovely sheen graphite gets on white enameled steel:
These cartoon-like eyes are not typical of my work, but in a contrarian mood, it seemd wise to do the opposite of what I’d normally do.
