TOMALES BAY

As haze obscures the sunset
there are a few ribbons of light
left on the inlet
a last light on the end of the inlet
limning the channels
of the low tide

where the arterial ways
waters wander
form memories  of meanders
in the tide's wake
and the mirrored
basins grow opaque

as the memory of meanders
grow empty
and their deltas slumber
the last silver tricklings of water
are drawn off
by the low-tide's last fishnet

and diffusing into mist, the weathered
plank buildings disappear into vapor
the harbor lights, aureoled, are covered
becoming a faint shoal of light

(1988)(drawing from 1994)

BLUE NEREID

Blue Nereid is a four  layered piece  made of  painted aluminum screening;
each layer is painted with a different but related image; each layer is shaped differently 

it is meant to cast an ambiguous  series of shadows

and to yield a different image from each angle at which it is viewed

to act  somewhat like sculpture

somewhat like painting or even  a  drawing

and then change once again on examination

I did  this  in the spring of 2012; it is about  forty inches long and forty inches wide
and   stands  off the wall at about  a  foot at its deepest, and no more than  an
inch off its edges.  I think of her--for she seems feminine to me--
 as being  the Nereid Leto in the Odyssey, who lent the wrecked Odysseus  her
 "scarf", as Robert Fitzgerald translates it, so that he could be washed ashore
  after his craft and crew were lost.. This  however,  is the sort of thing
 that must be told, as  it would take a   genuine  psychic to deduce.

NEREIDS

This Maenad, who appears on a wall of the Villa of Mysteries at Pompeii,
has long been an emblem of inspiration for me.  I have usually managed
to have a postcard of her up somewhere, no matter where I have lived.
(There was a time when I lost such a postcard, and there was an odd,
lingering uneasiness to missing her image which I did not quite rid myself of
until I found it again.)
 I associate her with a poem of Goethe's, In Tausend Formen. Here are
a few of its stanzas, which Christopher Middleton put into
English:
Take on a thousand forms, hide as you will
O most beloved, at once I know 'tis you;
Conceal yourself in magic veils, and still,
Presence in All, at once I know' tis you

The cypress thrusting artless up and young,
Beauty-in-Every-Limb, I know 'tis you
The channelled crystal wave life flows along,
All Gentling Tender One I know' tis you.

This presence is something I sense continually, and just as the Maenad
might serve as its emblem, so Goethe's poem might serve as its song.
As a process, it might be described as seeing the Nereid in the
water and the Nymph or Dryad in the wood . It is elusive,
continually changing, shape-shifting, on the margin of appearance.
Certain of paintings or constructions of mine may be described as
nothing more than devices for sensing this presence, or
as records of my sensing of it. This is less singular,
and less pathological than it might seem to those who
do not envision this way, but it is a strong feature of
Dante's poetics in the tweltth century, and of Eugenio Montale's
in the twentieth. In painting, I would hazard to
describe it as the moment when something "abstract"
flickers or to distills itself into the  "figurative". (But I
dislike this terminology, which seems irrelevant to me:
I have always inwardly doubted whether there is
really much difference between them, other than focus:
if we do not know what it is, it is "abstract"; if we can recognize
it .it is "realistic").
This is one of the most recent "Nereids", done on four layers
of aluminum screening. it was done in 2012.

DARK WING OF THE NIGHT

In the fall of 2010 , I became obsessed with FW  Murnau's film version of  Faust, which was done
 in 1926. This photograph depicts Mephistopheles--who is played by Emil Jannings--
unfolding his dark wings over Nurnberg.

. I studied this part of the film repeatedly before making  what was to prove
an over-literal copy of  the sequence--the wings sequenced nicely on the layers of
aluminum screening,, it is true,  so that they did seem to unfold-- but my Mephisto-face
looked like something from "Batman". As a result, I decided to transform the wings
into relief-pieces. of which this is the first.

It is done on three layers of aluminum screening  using sign painter's 

enamel and a special metallic blue spray paint I am only able to find 

at autobody repair shops.

this is a detail of the upmost part..

the second version is shown here.

this is the moon who was once the face of Emil Jannings.

and this is the upmost part of this version.

I was pleased with these pieces but not satisfied

so I did a third version, as large as them both together.

this is a detail of the third version's lower half; unlike

its siblings, it is done on four screens and is darker

and perhaps more ominous as a consequence.

it  is also deeper,  standing  about 8 inches off the wall,

so that the moon  changes to a much greater degree

in relationship to the position of the viewer. 

DECONSTRUCTED/RECONSTRUCTED DRAWINGS (2:"Ropetricks")

In addition to chopping up those hobbled drawings of sad thought, I decided to in some
cases to weave them together. I wanted to make something  in which one was not sure

where one thing ended and another began.

DECONSTRUCTED/RECONSTRUCTED DRAWINGS(1)

I had a bad period as an artist in my early forties. It was as if my hand had gone wrong, or
I had lost the way. Looking back, it is understandable:the AIDS crisis had compelled me
to renounce whatever was easy in my own personal mysticism, and for a while I struggled
to see again. My reading changed:it was no longer anthropology, religion, poetry, but
history and science. Also I abjured what for lack of better terms might be called  "the circus'--
the dancers, and choreographers, and shamans, and Sufis, and artists, and witchdoctors,
and Tibetan Buddhists etc., which had been my milieu in Soho. I put myself
into hard labor landscaping. For a while I was a foreman at a nursery. This proved a
better means of contending with sorrow than metaphysics.I sweated it off.

Years later, I went through the drawings of the time. Not all were bad, but some limped on
hobbled feet. And so it was that I decided to chop them up, and turn them into something else.
This was accompanied by the most delicious feeling of releasing the sad thoughts of that
time and transforming them into something else. This was in 2010. I call them
my "Rope Tricks."

AMONG SHAMANS

By dawn we had reached the village 
        where the festival was to take place.
Greeted by itinerant musicians 
        playing something like klezmer music,
We were soon surrounded by shamans 
      with headdresses like juke-boxes
         made of tinsel and feathers,
feathered boas around their robes the color of sorbets,     
       all of them shaking marachas.
Lead to a small chapel from which billowed copal smoke,
      its lineaments obscured 
     by smoke, jukeboxes, feathers,
as honored guests, we were compelled by etiquette
     to sing a phonetic anthem  with ten dozen choruses.
The dialect was unknown 
     to the anthropologist who accompanied us,
      as well as to the barrio shaman--call him "Mario"--
    acting as our interpreter.
The former supposed 
       that it was some synchronous paean 
     to assorted demiurges, saints.
I wished it was "Yankee,Go Home."
Some whim or intuition
     had lead me to wear a business suit,
     trusting that it  act as a prophylactic measure
    and keep the gods at bay.
This was only partially successful.
     Repelled by my cologne,
     they did not pass
      the threshold of my conciousness,
taking possession of me 
     (as they did my junior colleagues)
instead crawling at my feet like lizards, hissing
    with forked tongues imprecations
    whose import--though in Nahuatl--
     did not escape me.
Your gods are demons, I thought,
    picking my way through the cow dung.
Strictly local, they delight
   when an afternoon knife fight
      ends in shed blood.
It pleases them that
    some wretched widow thereby
     fulfills a destiny slated
 from day one of becoming
     a mater dolorosa hocking pig parts,
that children are hitched 
      like donkeys to a spindle
    which makes the merry go round go around.
In a circle of peyote takers with a look
   of ecumenical bliss straight from California
     danced the anthropologist, his loopy grin
confirming my hatred of the ineffable.
The book he'd write later
     lead to tenure, and a second Volvo.
                                          (1990)

(the illustration is of an Asmat body mask now in the DeYoung)