Green Wine

It all began with a sketch. I was home alone, I think, listening to music, listlessly, with a huge sketchbook in front of me. I had to create something. I copied down a picture I had taken (with intent) that weekend. A green bathroom in a temporary apartment. Temporary? Why? Oh, that. Yeah. You see, it's because I got there at 4 A.M., I left at 7, and the owner wasn't even there. Just the temporary owner. The dog-sitter. My friend. Such a transitory period leaves its impressions. Especially when the whole place is leafy, green, with crazy art, and frogs hidden in every nook and cranny. So, thinking about that, and feeling like Albinoni's adagio in G Minor, I set myself to work. 

I hadn't taken the time to draw in a while. The sketch in my big sketchbook was satisfying. I liked its chaos. I liked its lines, its harsh angles, and the off-putting tongued face. I wanted to make it dense, theatrical. So obviously unreal and layered that you start wondering what kind of chaos put it there and why. It's a mask. Its theatricality is a mask, just like indoor spaces are a mask. How we put a mask on the spaces around us. Behind the mask is where all the impressions the space makes on you crawl around. 

Then I set about translating graphite into paint. I drew more, mapping out each layer of the painting by logic of size and order of appearance. In my smaller sketchbook this time. 

It's not that I want to deconstruct the space. It's not. But maybe that's what's happening either way, since art has a way of taking a concept and running away with it, defying the limits the creator attempts to impose, and implying a great deal more than was intended. I translated the first bathroom picture onto canvas now. Then three more. Then, for luck, a final door. The faces too, overlapping, like they're some kind of ploy on the duplicity of personality.

Now I define. I thicken. I sharpen. I deepen. I want it to feel like you could fall into these spaces and nothing is holding you to reality.