Freudian

In honor of Freud's birthday, here is a painting of Freud and Jung kissing.

Freud appears 13 times in my book. When he saw his mother naked. When he got his famous couch. When he started collecting totems. His attempt to stop smoking. A list of who he got birthday cards from when he turned 80. An altogether interesting life.

Valentine

I did Valentines for my near & dear last week, as I always do.

This is the one I did for my very dearest, Faith.

Bagatelle Story-frame 7

...and finally the culmination of what we'd been hoping for.
What had been hinted at, which is what prophets do in a vague sort of way...
Merry Christmas.

Bagatelle Story-frame 6

...which becomes something surreal. This is what is called the transformation scene in the world of pantomime...

Bagatelle Story-frame 5

...a tree becomes a fountain surrounded by figures...

Bagatelle Story-frame 4

...A man becomes a beast, a vase becomes a tree...

Bagatelle Story-frame 3

...a curved line becomes a world, a puppet theatre, a bearded face becomes a boot and a boot becomes a peninsula in the Mediterranean.

Bagatelle Story-frame 2

It's interesting how the shapes grow out of the painted line, almost like flowers growing out of the stem growing out of the ground, and how similar in silhouette a figure is to a flower or a leaf or a gondola to a continent.

Bagatelle Story-frame 1

I like to paint these small silhouetted stories during December, which is a time of stories. I've been doing a few this week. These are from a few years ago and comprise a story, a kind of ballet, no dialogue, just shadows. This is frame one.

A New Bagatelle

I began doing these silhouetted images several years ago, inspired by the cut-paper art of Hans Christian Andersen (the fairy tale guy). I did one for our family Christmas card that year. I did several small narrative series for the New Yorker. I kept revising and perfecting them and inventing new ones for my art directors there. They were never used. But the form continues to intrigue me. I think they'd make a wonderful endpaper or book cover. Or scarf or area rug or wallpaper or dress fabric. This one was painted for my wife's birthday. I have no idea what it means or what the vignettes are about. A story seems to emerge as I paint, and it's always better unrehearsed, like a Rorschach seen in the patterns of the foliage outside a window.

Bagatelle no. 25

What do these mean? What do they suggest to you? And where was my head at when I began Bagatelle no. 1?

The first two in this series were painted for a gallery show in Florida that never came off. (The gallery folded the week I showed up for the opening.) Numbers 1 and 2 were in American Illustration a few years ago, but no design or ad work has come of it. The New Yorker asked me to do a series of these but never published them.

They are peculiar, allusive and vague. If they are "fine art" maybe I have no business doing them. Maybe they are the visual equivalent of my recent short stories, the ones that connect up but never answer the questions raised. These stories have been admired but, again, never published. If this category of work is a dead end it is at least an interesting and thoughtful one, but nobody these days pays people to think or suggest things they can't resolve neatly.