short of supplies and having met resistance from Kevin at the co-op, I had had no work planned that day, but time is precious, passing with every breath and I decided I would touch the thing I had been frightened of the most, the framed embroidery our mother hung above her dreadful bed: "IF YOU HAVE EVER SEEN A MAN DIE, REMEMBER THAT YOU, TOO, MUST GO THE SAME WAY. IN THE MORNING CONSIDER THAT YOU MAY NOT LIVE TILL EVENING, AND WHEN EVENING COMES DO NOT DARE TO PROMISE YOURSELF THE DAWN."
I did not want to touch it, no more than put my hand on a flat iron, hiss of skin, smell of flesh. I spent a good hour cleaning up the studio, scraped the lino, laid down paper and a length of unprimed cotton duck. If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die. I removed the mixers from the drills and set to clean them. There was no actual need to do this, but I slowly peeled all the accumulated paint that had made its own little planet on the X-shaped armature of blades. "YOU MAY NOT LIVE TILL EVENING" and all the painted past was layered like licorice allsorts, sedimentary rocks, green, black, gorgeous yellow, sparkling mica, fool's gold they call it in the Marsh. I did not wish to start. I scoured the blades with wire wool until they were burnished and then I screwed up my eyes and plunged the whirling shaft into the heart of Mars black, carbon black, graphite, two hundred and forty volts, one hundred rpm, phthalo green with alizarin crimson and I had started. I was in. I shook the drips off that last mix, what a very cold light-sucking black was lying there, a lovely evil thing captive in a can. At its lovely nasty little heart was alizarin crimson. I could already calculate how I would edge those shapes as yet unborn--that alizarin crimson would make a border almost as black as black, but also, on the aft of "PROMISE" like the burning edge of a leaf in a firestorm. Then I invaded ultramarine blue with a force of sweet burned umber, thus giving birth to a new black as warm as a winter blanket for a twenty-thousand-dollar horse, and then I stained my cotton duck with a very fucking diluted dioxane purple, so watered down it was a pearly grey, a secret skin you can still see behind the smudges of, say, MORN, and on that site, and in other places too where my mother's dreadful fear was bent and twisted, you can today observe the pentimento, the erasures, the smudges, the changes of mind as I pushed, sometimes like Sisyphus, at the resistant letters which now must be made to serve,, me--not the Roman chisel or the language of the poets-until "DO NOT DARE TO PROMISE" was as ugly and noble( as the milk-factory fire of 1953, ten men dead amongst the twisted
tin and smoke. On the last day, very early on a dew-bright morning, I made a series of washes, 9/10 gel, and these I lay, lighter than a river mist across the blacktop.
As for the work itself, you can see it, finally, years later, in a serious museum, and I will not treat you like some dickhead day trader in an aeroplane who wants to know "Should I know your name?"
But let me say only that I rubbed at it and buffed and scraped and sanded until it was an argument both within itself and against itself. Jesus it would put the fear of God in you, to see the skeins of secret black, it could choke you, and hick you, and put your naked toes onto the fire.
This work continued three days. And it was done. Ominously, there were no visitors. And by that time Hugh had disposed of his dog and his little eyes were deep and hidden and he was very quiet around the property, mostly hacking at the thistles. I stayed away from Bellingen, judging it wiser to avoid the crime scene completely and drive the extra thirty minutes to Coffs Harbour.
There were already difficulties--limited supplies, no phthalo green, a change of palette I would rather not have made. On the fourth day after the metacarpal came the first assailant, an idiot from Bellingen Council with long white socks, a building inspector with a clipboard in
I did not want to touch it, no more than put my hand on a flat iron, hiss of skin, smell of flesh. I spent a good hour cleaning up the studio, scraped the lino, laid down paper and a length of unprimed cotton duck. If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die. I removed the mixers from the drills and set to clean them. There was no actual need to do this, but I slowly peeled all the accumulated paint that had made its own little planet on the X-shaped armature of blades. "YOU MAY NOT LIVE TILL EVENING" and all the painted past was layered like licorice allsorts, sedimentary rocks, green, black, gorgeous yellow, sparkling mica, fool's gold they call it in the Marsh. I did not wish to start. I scoured the blades with wire wool until they were burnished and then I screwed up my eyes and plunged the whirling shaft into the heart of Mars black, carbon black, graphite, two hundred and forty volts, one hundred rpm, phthalo green with alizarin crimson and I had started. I was in. I shook the drips off that last mix, what a very cold light-sucking black was lying there, a lovely evil thing captive in a can. At its lovely nasty little heart was alizarin crimson. I could already calculate how I would edge those shapes as yet unborn--that alizarin crimson would make a border almost as black as black, but also, on the aft of "PROMISE" like the burning edge of a leaf in a firestorm. Then I invaded ultramarine blue with a force of sweet burned umber, thus giving birth to a new black as warm as a winter blanket for a twenty-thousand-dollar horse, and then I stained my cotton duck with a very fucking diluted dioxane purple, so watered down it was a pearly grey, a secret skin you can still see behind the smudges of, say, MORN, and on that site, and in other places too where my mother's dreadful fear was bent and twisted, you can today observe the pentimento, the erasures, the smudges, the changes of mind as I pushed, sometimes like Sisyphus, at the resistant letters which now must be made to serve,, me--not the Roman chisel or the language of the poets-until "DO NOT DARE TO PROMISE" was as ugly and noble( as the milk-factory fire of 1953, ten men dead amongst the twisted
tin and smoke. On the last day, very early on a dew-bright morning, I made a series of washes, 9/10 gel, and these I lay, lighter than a river mist across the blacktop.
As for the work itself, you can see it, finally, years later, in a serious museum, and I will not treat you like some dickhead day trader in an aeroplane who wants to know "Should I know your name?"
But let me say only that I rubbed at it and buffed and scraped and sanded until it was an argument both within itself and against itself. Jesus it would put the fear of God in you, to see the skeins of secret black, it could choke you, and hick you, and put your naked toes onto the fire.
This work continued three days. And it was done. Ominously, there were no visitors. And by that time Hugh had disposed of his dog and his little eyes were deep and hidden and he was very quiet around the property, mostly hacking at the thistles. I stayed away from Bellingen, judging it wiser to avoid the crime scene completely and drive the extra thirty minutes to Coffs Harbour.
There were already difficulties--limited supplies, no phthalo green, a change of palette I would rather not have made. On the fourth day after the metacarpal came the first assailant, an idiot from Bellingen Council with long white socks, a building inspector with a clipboard in
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