While I was out in the backwoods on an errand in the Spring of 2005, I fell to chatting with a man I ran into there. I think he initially asked for directions, but somehow we came around to talking about damselflies. I hadn’t known until we spoke that damselflies are land based while their watery cousins, the ones that fly over the ponds, are dragonflies. At that point I had in my studio a more or less gyn-morphological figure made mostly of breasts, feet and hands. I was working on three or four such pictures, all red, all reduced to extremities and breasts, all divided horizontally depicting an underworld under foot. This particular figure is looking dolefully at a hovering fairy. When I got home I painted in a woman’s figure, upside down in the underworld peering at a damselfly.

The picture, called Damselfly, is like the magic realism from Latin literature, veering madly from daily-ness, wraping up the narrative in hysterical metaphors.

Florentino, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches

I was reading a lot of Spanish literature around the time of this show, a lot of Garcia Marquez, master of magical realism. The Aureliano in this series of paintings is the General from Hundred Years of Solitude. Aureliano tries to kill himself using a circle of iodine as a target, drawn on his chest by his doctor, but the poor fellow couldn’t find his heart even when it was drawn on him and the bullet goes right through his chest leaving him alive and badly wounded. Florentino is the protagonist of Love in the Time of Cholera another fellow with problems around the heart. He seduces a schoolgirl as an older gent of about 70 and then abandons her after resuming his relationship with the love of his youth. The girl, who has fallen for Florentino lock stock and barrel, kills herself when she finds she's been thrown over. The picture called The Thread is also about love and death. It is a retelling of a passage in Hundred Years of Solitude in which the first Jose Arcadio is shot-or shoots himself- and a thread of blood trails off out of his house down the street through the town into his mothers house (making its way around the rug, like a little boy who is aware that his boots are muddy) and into the kitchen where his mother seeing it knows immediately that her son is dead.

Later that spring after the damselfly conversation, we went out southern California, Dr Seuss land and a visual feast. Three of the Damselfly pictures come out of that trip; the picture called San Diego, a tribute to Dr Seuss and maybe the only true landscape in oil I’ve done in 10 years, Venice Beach, and The Suitor. As we were taking in the sites at Venice Beach, I saw a very young woman getting ready to go rollerblading down the beach. She was wearing a very tight pink matching outfit with very short shorts. I think her rollerblades were pink too. She was blond and had a very Vegas showgirl figure. I got that the get-up was the all-important thing and the rollerblades were just a way to cover ground, I also wondered what she would actually think of the male specimens who would be watching her that day with interest. While in San Diego we saw Los Retratos an exhibit of Spanish painting from Velázquez to Riviera. There were lots of portraits of woman in heavy clothes. In my picture called The Suitor I painted my version of a woman in heavy clothes, deliberately reminiscent of the princesses that little girls draw, including myself, at a young age. Personally, I think the Suitor ought to bring his beloved a pair of scissors, rather than that ridiculous ornament.

Damselfly the painting may yet not be finished as I write this, there is still something peculiar about the inner shoulder of the figure that I’d like to fix, if I can figure out how. It seems odd to think in terms of correct anatomy considering the nature of the painting, but metaphor works best when well crafted, sculpted so close to reality that questions wander away with out being asked.

Wellfleet, 2005

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The Damselfly Paintings