Ancestor Figures
One consults this quicksilver analyst this parroting psychiatrist this counsellor whose Da Vincian observations, conclusions, notations are inverted on its walls.
One sees the impossible: flesh | mind | spirit & only will at hand to construct a harmony.
One reads a Rorschach world of ravages with each new day’s inscription engraved upon this wailing wall.
One sees the analyst reflect a target in his lidless omniscient stare.
When I made this sculpture in 1987 I couldn’t help myself from inscribing a little poem into its plainer side. I had chosen to give its two sides as thorough a contrast in treatments as possible; hence, one side got a brilliant burst of contemporary colour and texture, while the other got my signature, tonal/colour/textural restraint, and an original poem.
As the inscribed version of the little poem cannot be read in full from the sculpture, I’ve made the words visible by arranging them in the thumb-hole of this “palette”.
Winter Figure
Draw. Erase.
Draw. Erase.
Draw a symbol of renewal
: crocus, baseball, robin. No. Rub it out
: too romantic, too sentimental, and much too soon.
Draft instead the black-plumed preacher
in the back woods—be-sooted raven, riled fundamentalist,
that besotted Cassandra high in the black back woods,
who frets over winter’s excesses and counts/curses/condemns
every person, dog, cat that comes and goes below it
on the road to hell in a freeze-dried world.
Sketch cats agoraphobic that slink/crouch/slide
with flattened ears from barn to bush to shed
, schizoid from nightmares of being fed
to a fanged and hackled open space.
Draw euphoric people multi-hued and mechanoid.
Scatter them helter-skelter on wheels/tracks/skis,
ecstatic hearts pacing the harangue of oriental pistons.
Trace the stubble and tattered stems of Queen Anne’s Lace
where it decays and smudges the drifts of the paper white back lot slope
: charcoal remnants / trace reminders of seasons long erased.
fillière 