Merc
Biso #19

battered 
but still 
there
end of 
Oct.
2014

collage/
paint
Merc
Biso


7.14  Soho

added over
torn posters

same 
location
as 6.14
Merc
Biso

7.14  Soho

outline
added over
torn posters

same 
location
as 6.14
Merc
Biso

antlered
outline 
painted 
over torn 
posters

Soho
6.14

Biso  

over
torn
posters


Tribeca 
7.14


Biso

painted
over 
graffiti
and
torn
posters

Tribec

3.14
Bisoman

slightly
reworked
March 10

negative
drawing:
black paint
outlines the
torn posters
Bisoman

black paint
outlines the
torn
posters


Tribeca
Feb 8.14
Bisoman

white
gesso
over 
torn
poster

Tribeca
9.13
Bisoman

black
gesso
over 
graffiti

E. Village
10.13
Bisoman

white
gesso
over 
graffiti

Broadway
2.14

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.

Our notions of who and what we are within the streams of creation is very restricted.  The effort to expand our sense of time and place in deep history enlarges the spirit.  Like taking a long deep breath.



Bisoman

black
gesso
over 
graffiti

Broome
St.
2.2014
Bisoman

Broome
St.

2.14
Bisoman

white
gesso
over 
graffiti

Broome 
St.
2.2014
Bisoman

black
gesso
over 
graffiti

wording
wall

Soho
2.2014
Bisoman

white
gesso
over 
construction
wall

Soho
2.2014
Bisomen   Duane alley  2.14
Bisoman

black
gesso
over 
graffiti

Spring/
Broadway
2.14
Bisoman

black
gesso
over
graffiti

Tribeca
2.14

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.