Wiork in Progress
Work in Progress
Cheap Ass Ballpoint Pen on Paper
18x24
Work in progress. But isn’t it always. A work in progress. I could call this transference. I could call it then and now and then again. I could call it 15/51. But if I put a name to it, it would change anyway because nothing is fixed except for the fact that circles are the only existing shape. Squares only contain the ideas of circles. Auto-repeat. Return.
I create a face that is not mine and is mine. It stares back and says I am a sum and a dividend. Do the math and I will return to the same place I started. Only divided into parts. I try to put them back together, like a jigsaw puzzle of a little cottage in a field of flowers except the flowers don’t attach to the stems and the roof of the house never holds tight. There is always a gap. So I dump out the pieces and start over. Rebuild. Disassemble. Reshape.
I started this drawing because the loop was looping. I got out my pens. My art cat said “Let’s do it.” I did it until I got something out that needed to be said without words because words are traps too. I say one thing and mean another. I create an irreversible record.
Turn on the radio station and listen to the oldies and suddenly I am in bed with a fever, ten years old, and the person singing about a car crash could be my mother doing dishes in the other room. That kind of thing. The way Dick Clark never dies. The way I watched my mom carted off in an ambulance today and didn’t even bother to wave. Her back slumped into an oval folding in on itself. Collapse is inevitable.
I shore things up with pens. Write these words which really are just a series of letters dropped onto the page. Return to sender. Maybe it is time to burn those old letters. Sometimes it’s best not to remember.