THE HOLOGRAPHIC FENCES

This is an ongoing project--ongoing until I solve it!-- which tries to take the "holographic" nature of the screen paintings outdoors. The drawings are studies for it.The idea being to make the effect of shimmering with pictograms. The use of pictograms in turn reflects my desire to do an outdoor piece using all the world's writing systems. A dream endeavor, but one must start somewhere. I did atwenty four foot piece using shadecloth, the black fibermesh used to shade greenhouses--now I have graduated to bamboo fencing and lattice, though I plan to extend this to perforated metal and/or LEDS. If I succeed I will be able to make a kind of mirage.

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HOLOGRAPHIC FENCE CHAPTER TWO

I have now done five 15 ft pieces, as well as the lattices, and a tall column made of the vinyl strutting used to keep corners sharp in stucco-ing-- there is probably a legitimate term for it. Each is no more photographable than the scrims. The last of these was finished a week ago.Primed with aluminum paint so that it glared at noon, it was done when the May air had grown heady with honeysuckle. Add to this that I was pent up after my first car wreck, which was jolting,and you will understand a little of its "feel". Every time I use a new material I must start at the beginning again, and these bamboo pieces, particularly, come from the realm of my early imagery. I long to do something about the island enclosure at Hadrian's Villa, but I must learn how to work outdoors on two surfaces in counterpoint first. Right now they are in the paradoxical position of being very large bagatelles. But one evening my nephew came over to hang and talk about Bartok, and as a jeu d'esprit we unfolded four pieces in the studio, so that we were surrounded on all sides by this imagery. It was a little as I imagine being beamed up or atomized and teleported might be, or being in a little grass shack in Tahiti done by Monet rather than Gauguin. Ah yes, and I have discovered the odd pleasures of paintings which can be bended and folded in all sorts of ways.