Category: Pavement Series

#359

18×23 Acrylic on canvas.

I got a camera today. From New Zealand. From my favorite niece… I shouldn’t have favorites, but I do.

Passing a Passport I.D. photo place I was thinking… I should get a photo. And a passport. Who knows?

But reality is… I will never get out of the country. Never travel. Though this was a dream of my youth. And while I feel a bit of loss in this, it’s in no way a sense of loss of knowledge, or insight… I believe in Blake’s Minute Particulars. The universe is at your feet… in a grain of sand.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been obsessed with making art from patterns I find in the pavement beneath my feet. Mostly, unless they’re very colorful… people don’t get these pieces.
That’s ok. They’re the best things I’ve done.

#359

An artist’s manifesto

4

Up from the basement studio–preparing a block for a woodcut, and began a painting that will be 20 in my Pavement series. I may do this to the end of my days. I see years of possibilities in this–and the metaphor of broken foundations is exactly where my head has been. Who knows what may grow out of the cracks–what we can build from the rubble.
All our high culture (especially “high culture”)–white Euro-American, grew in the service of kingship, empire, and from there–slavery, war, capitalist economic colonialism and expansion to the end of life on the planet. What is there to do, but renounce it–all of it. Build a new world from the ruins.

(reworked) #355 Missing pavement block, 2nd Street

#355 12x17cm

12×17 cm watercolor, ink, acrylic on paper. Pavement Series 19

Reworked this a bit. I was standing there, gazing at this… the missing block of sidewalke,  and noticed the guy selling photos near by. I explained what I was doing… how beautiful that missing pavement block, the patterns of stones and cig butts… I think he thought I was an hallucinating homeless dude. I told him, I saw this in color… like, ya know?