Hobos. Diet Ppsi. Calaway Park.

I just finished watching Emperor Of The North Pole. A bit like a Sunday afternoon film for kids, but with Ernest Borgnine hitting hobos in the head with hammers.
It has Lee Marvin in it.
Along with diet cola and greasy pizza, Lee Marvin is comforting to me. Weekends spent at my Dad's house as an adolescent eating, drinking, and watching Lee prance around berating someone to do something like kill Nazis or....kill Nazis.
My inbox contained an email about Gowan. Now, I had to second guess my memory, but I think I saw Gowan at Calaway Park when i was a kid, or my sister and cousin did and I stole their memory.
But the Volkswagen Beetle with the stickers all over the windscreen and the periscope out the top, that's mine and no else's.

Some more details about a curated solo show of mine in Montreal in October should be forthcoming soon.

The Adoration of Sickness

"You are wrong that it was long ago I gave up thinking anything could be worked out on the surface. I have found it out, like everybody else, the hard way and only in the last years as a result of I think two things, sickness and success. One of them alone wouldn't have done it for me but the combination was guaranteed. I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies. Success is almost as isolating and nothing points out vanity as well. But the surface hereabouts has always been flat. I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both"

-Flannery O'Connor, 1956

The Letters Of Flannery O'Connor

On a recommendation from a friend I picked up a copy of "The Habit Of Being". Al selection of Flannery O'Connors letters from 1948-1964.
Feeling as if I have backed into my own Catholicism, this book is becoming something like sacred. As I described to Alex St. Onge the other night, it is not that I am seeking to return to Catholicism, more that I am finding that while I tried in many ways to empty my heart, it remained full and that hurt....all along I was Catholic with my eyes lowered to the horizon, but knew the horizon for what it was only because I knew what was above.
This all goes over like a lead balloon at parties. A fitting quote from the book mentioned above:

"I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. (She wrote that book, A Charmed Life) She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn't opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequecy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned to the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said that when she was a child and received the Host she thought of it as the Holy Ghost. He being the "most portable" person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if it is a symbol, to hell with it." That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of my existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable."

It is that final sentence. Qualified by "outside of a story" that sets my head on fire.

Thanks to Flannery O'Connor: A Redemption Song

In the narrative of creation the painter lives with each painting multiple lives of varying lengths. Each painting, with its life lived has a narrative of creation whose length is determined by the time it takes to find redemption. Or the end is following a completely separate track, redemption is decided upon the end.

The relief of the end of the painting is the bliss of redemption. No longer suffering the delights and terrors of unsustainable marks and impermanent compositions, constant promise and threat of irrelevancy of a very real and well-documented present. Pathologize the marks you mythologized yesterday. Happy and silent, ignore the triumphant false end of yesterday.

But was I relieved every time? Was I redeemed? Shit, I can’t remember. Do it again. Maybe the next painting will simply never end.

The end, the redemption leaves me two questions:

1. Does the redemptive end of the painting result from every mark made, the complete creation narrative of the painting?

2. Does the redemptive end of the painting result only from those marks intended to procure redemption upon the end?