Biso #19
battered
but still
there
end of
Oct.
2014
collage/
paint
urban vistas
Graffiti-strewn walls serve, in the urban scape, as ravines
and caverns did for the earliest artists who painted on rock. My
"Glyffiti" figures, merging with the ground of tags, posters and
scrawls, charge the scene with ancient echoes.
50,000 years ago dancers wearing horns emerged to sing and
shake before the rearing mountains and clouds. Dance over, they receded, like
the other animals, into the thorn. Today our urban vistas endlessly refract the
insistent cliché of advertising. Only in graffiti is there spontaneous
eruption. Graffiti, often obnoxious and insulting, is outside the grid. Some
are of it is as huge and complex as landscape panorama — gigantic sweeps of
energy in their tapestry of piled up scripts.
As I paint into these matted graffiti covered walls my
animal outlines, I feel kinship with neolithic artists who drew on un-tame raw
surfaces — an echo of the deep past. As with the earliest art this work of mine is intrinsically ephemeral.
my painting Xhibition
In the streets of Lower Manhattan I am concentrating until spring on Bisomen. Large outline paintings, the graffiti and torn posters becomes the interior of each figure. Transient, many paintings disappear quickly, but continually replaced by new. I am proceeding with this work as a painting Xhibition. My gallery: Prince to Chambers, Greenwich to Orchard.
My experience of making this work is very intense. I slap on
my paint as quickly as possible, watching my own back. I do not see what I do
until I step away and then I see it as a stranger. Every stroke has to be
decisive, fast and rough.
A clean wall does not want graffiti. Sprayed-on signs and
signatures are provocation and protest. But empty buildings and construction
sites attract scrawls irresistibly. It has always been so, since humans began
drawing on rocks and cave walls. A contemporary wall of
massed markings shows a range of invention and become a lush textured field.
Here, my merging in of a glyphic animal intensifies the
whole.
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