The walls throughout my home serve as storage space. But it's also a curatorial honor exhibiting to my pajamaed family members, and this honor goes mainly to paintings I like to think of as misunderstood. Probably I've just never been asked to explain them. They're easy to overlook or, in the gentle opinion of my old man, not his favorite.
I sit upstairs before a painting of a woman and her dog. I have painted this before: owners walking their pets. I think about what I once read twenty years ago from Gurdjieff and how our consciousness can be compared to our position in a horse-drawn cart. Who's really doing the driving?
So what to make of a three-legged dog with its tongue hanging out? And an owner's gaze stolen by what's shiny. Furthermore, the direction of their path, right to left, moving backward, a regression, disintegrates into what I hope will only be playful.
Or these which I painted ten years ago out of the back of my subaru wagon. It seems I was interested in disintegration then as well. Just part of our bedroom. Welcome and goodbye.
This is a depiction of the then Rainey Street section of Austin (decorating the bedroom walls of a friend here in town). A delicate and ghostly crane shaft belies the aggressive boom of development over the next decade on this very rectangle of fecund earth.
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