I sent images of work by the PaFa master of figure drawing and anatomy, Al Gury, to my late uncle.
But they are ugly! he complained.

A conversation I wish we could have had, but he was beyond such exchages by then.

You look in the mirror when you’re old, and you realize two things

That you are not what you look like.

And you never were.

I think about this.. about the tradition of portraiture.
Representative art.
Is it a tradition devoted to reifying an illusion? Or does the artist… help us see beyond
what we see,
even while we are seeing it?

The ideal…when applied to physical reality
is always a lie.

Fucking Greeks messed up our minds.

For years I resisted figurative work. I told myself, I wasn’t ready. Maybe… when I had the skills of a quartrocento artist, rendering the human body.
But it wasn’t that. All that time, I was preparing… learning how to paint, the way I needed to paint. Discovering my own sense of structure, of surface. So much in art is like that–I think, for any of the arts. We set a goal, and put off where we want to go while we prepare, than at some revelation, find that we were preparing all along for a different goal–one that turns out to be closer to the one we’d been avoiding all along.
This is why art is so important! We need to learn how to move into our future, without knowing where it will lead, without nailing it down,–fixed and embalmed. How to learn through our trials and then discover what it was all for.
This is what we have to learn–that no technology, mapped out schema can save us, if we aren’t listening… and ready to embrace what newly emerges before us.
Science and art have this much in common.
We may be going in the right direction… and all the while, think it was something else… and then…

Like Jean Valentine’s poem.

Trust Me Who did I write last night? leaning over this yellow pad, here, inside, making blue chicken tracks:   two sets of blue footprints, tracking out on a yellow ground, child’s colors.Who am I? who want so much to move like a fish through water, through life…                         Fish like to be underwater.Fish move through fish! Who are you?And Trust Me said, There’s another way to go, we’ll go by the river which is frozen under the snow;my shining, your shining life draws close, draws closer, God fills us as a woman fills a pitcher.