photos by Martin Axon

CHRONOLOGY

Since 1980, I've made paintings of street construction work zones in NYC - Paris - London - Tokyo. Nice - Milan streets. Workers' transient studios are arenas of performance, transformation, personal theater.

I worked in The Sublime 1980 - 2000, then in Phenomenology ("fFunomena") making documents of the timing of uncontrollable events.

1981. Etchings and paintings in connected or disconnected pieces, in or out of balance, an area of two unequal sections, NOT the classical picture frame of a selected vision. Maybe the smaller section is more vivid, or not. The idea of falling. The Sublime.

NYC street construction = reminders = comfort home.
Danger cones. Tents of yellow light. Toolbox on wheels. Backlit red flags flipping in wind. Worker dancing with broom. Steam from manhole. Moveable smokestack of caution stripes.

Andy Warhol brings an entourage to happenings that I have in my Park Avenue studio under the water tower, holds private parties there, calls me during studio time working, takes me out to numerous events. He introduces me to Robert Rauschenberg, Cycily Tyson who is wife to a hero Miles Davis, Tina Turner, tells me everything about Jasper Johns my hero. He puts me in several shows and Interview Magazine, stays at my opening Ever After at East Village gallery –– & –– documented by a feature and photos in the Daily News and by Baird Jones in the East Village Eye and later books on the East Village. Keeps a photograph-painting for time capsule box.

Olivier Renaud-Clement arrives in my studio from Paris in 1982 to buy a painting and take work back for a show in Paris. He takes paintings of glowing
traffic cones and steaming stripey pipes over street construction excavations. "What eez eet about thees town? . . Everything eez always burning !"

I visit Andy and Bridget at the Power Station 4 blocks away periodically. One of the times is the day before he goes in for the gall bladder operation he is about to have, and he is extremely worried. I tell Andy stories about my mother. It seemed like a year that she could only eat jello, how pretty it looked in glass bowls in the refrigerator, and when she had her gall bladder removed, 50 little cubes came out that we kept in a jar in the linen closet. A story about her in her fairy gown when we stayed in a cardboard motel in Pennsylvania and in the morning I looked out the window and there was the huge head of a horse looking at me just outside, as if it had been quietly waiting for us. Andy said "jello isn't good for you. Don't eat it. It has too much food coloring in it."

I continue to make notes of incidents in the NYC landscape. There's a traffic light being repaired and a motorized bucket with a guy. A giant rock on a superlong flatbed truck rolling through an intersection.
15 years later, Dan Rice (studio assistant of Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, authenticator because now there are many fakes) calls them Impulse Drawings when I install them inside an interior square hut with windows on the bra factory floor, Smoothie building, New Haven CityWideOpenStudios.

1990. I'm working only in reds, asymmetric double canvas, a seed shape and a clinging-member symbol.
They are hypnotically beautiful and I get an important grant for them, notice from a good dealer.

1997. My parents are fading. I lose interest in permanent archival materials.
Artmaking is precious, too guaranteed to outlast us, too much pressure on me to say something of value.
My children are feisty little adorable flowers with curious fragile charming brains.
Life is fleeting and I want to feel it, not observe it from a detach.
The protection I felt from a mother and father vanishes.
But simultaneously, I learn to sail, snowboard, use knives and the stove in the kitchen, use acetyline torches and plasma cutter.

I start painting halo sections on the interleaving paper between the prints of an edition. I'm making movable protection areas to hang above us.
They brush the top of our hair as we step inside the halo area where it feels safe. That placement reminds me of walking into hallowed shinto
spaces in Japan and Kyoto, 1982.
The buffered paper will yellow when exposed to air. Frame = vitrine = death.
By definition, something living will wither.

1999. Mother dies January 26. Father dies 11/22/1999. Red paintings are all i have made for several years now: so imposing
controlling intimidating scary they have to be sliced up, dropped down a shute, destroyed. They seemed full of love before, the vivid red with
clinging shapes like babies attached to me, but now they are foreboding. My brain is full of migraines. My blood is anemic. I think I can save my parents at the last minute but I can't control the outcome.

2003. Drawing installation at Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Hartford, in a glass lobby above down elevators, in the Gold building next to the Carl Andre sculpture site.
Drawings are asymmetric units floating off wall surface, 13 feet and 8 feet high in massive scratchy black soot on noisy rumbling sheets of silver aluminum. They are simultaneously a magnetic hug to the ground and a vertical leap. Unsprayed they would blur and turn to dust.
During this exhibition, I learn to weld and use a plasma cutter in New Haven.

2004. I enlarge small impulse drawings onto the 7 foot assymetric canvases.
Warhol opening of Jon Gould collection, Brattleboro museum VT. Andy's inner circle Peter Wise and Chris Makos are at Robert duGrenier's pre-party. Andy's gift to Jon was a slice of Warholia unknown even to museums, including some great drawings. Peter tells me how Andy enlarged the drawings with an Artograph. Unwittingly, Mark Sanderson, Springfield Printing, my brother in-law is a corporate sponsor.

I like to blow up small painted sections into large. it's like resting your ear on the body of the guitar while you play - big sound disconnected, like the lines in space that are detached on an enlarged section of drawing.