I finished a new hologram painting, the first I have done in five weeks, yesterday. It was based on a spread (literally and figuratively) from a pornographic publication of the mid nineties, and I did it to cheer myself and thrill the right person. This would be someone to whom the sight of a buff male body in his late teens or very early twenties with a hard-on is not an affront. It occurred to me at the time I found the photo-spread, that the pose resembled La Source by Courbet, which is of course the most anatomically correct depiction of the female genitalia in nineteenth century painting--it belonged to Lacan for a time,who hid it behind another more conventionally avant-garde surrealist painting, if my memory serves me. Some angst-y daub by Andre Masson.
Now I am not particularly interested in shocking anyone, myself; those who would be shocked are more or less as predictable as those who would make a cause celebe. I did it for the beauty of it, and to answer a few questions of technique. The first nude I did--last year!--was of a callipygean weightlifter displaying his arse by a pool. What struck me, finishing it in two different versions, on in the spring, the second in the fall, was the prescence of tendresse absent in the photograph itself.Im not sure what emotion appears in this latest piece, but it is not in the centerfold; there is a relationship in painting, the accumulation of time if nothing else, that is different from photography. The hand sees in a certain way over time. So this is a handjob of a day and a half.
No, it is the handjob of a week and a fiasco six months ago, and a day and a half and a success just now, because I had done an earlier version which was a disaster. My brush stroke was thick and stupid, then. Now it became light, witty, keen. I over-painted then. Now I sketched in the shadows, glazed, high-lited. La! It is done. But it was still not quite right, and I dug up the earlier version to see the difference-- the difference between Alice the Goon and Apollo, really.
Then I made a curious discovery, which was that if I put the earlier fiasco behind the new painting, making eight layers of what had been four, it suddenly had an odd power and depth. The earlier version is not visible behind the four layers of the new version but it is felt and makes the new version resonate in a way that it did not before. I had a hard time--no pun intended--accepting this, against the evidence of my better judgment, and I tried arranging it differently for an hour--as five layers, six, seven, and in different sequences--but the perception stayed firm.(Some skate absurdity;I collude with it)
As for the question of technique--the model appears in two photographs in poses which differ only in the placement of the limbs, a slight nudge forward in one of his head, the with one leg up in one, with both legs on the ground in the later--in short, in two poses which are much alike and different in a hundred subtle ways. And I have thought for sometime to transpose them each to my technique, and then to combine them. Now I have accomplished the first step. And what is the emotion I find here, which seems rare in pornography? Joy. Joy like the Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rilke, who says You must change your life.