Sometimes paintings take several years and multiple iterations to find their final form, and sometimes they come together very quickly. The Hand That Takes is one of the latter.

If you break the painting down into its component parts, you could say there was a long gestation period. I took the photograph that appears in the middle of the painting in 1989. The hand on the left is a photocopy, enlarged over and over again from an image of a neoclassical sculpture, and dates to around the same time.

The painting itself was executed in 2005, and if memory serves, I completed it in one or two short sessions. A good friend (who is now the owner of the painting) came by my studio while it was still sitting on the easel. It was dry, but I was pondering what else might need to be done to it.

“It’s finished,” he said. “Resist the urge to go in and tweak it,” he added, knowing full well how sometimes my intended minor adjustments become major changes.

I took the canvas off the easel and agreed to set it aside. I let it sit where I could see it and moved on to another painting. A few weeks later I came to agree that he was right.

In a conversation at the Politics of Power reception, I was discussing how Crony (see below) was actually the third life of this canvas.

I can no longer recall what the first painting looked like, but Crony’s prior incarnation was a painting titled Deluge (see below). I created Deluge in 2005 during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, an elegy of sorts to the drowned city.

Deluge hung in my apartment for a while, but it was one of those paintings that quietly nagged at me. “I’m not finished yet, ” it would whisper as I would pass it in the hall.

“I know. But I don’t know how to finish you. Yet.”

Two years later I resumed working on Deluge. As it often happens, it was a rather spontaneous occurrence. I walked up to the painting and once again gave it the once over.

“I’m ready for you now.”

I had no fully conceived plan but I had a starting point in mind. I began by outlining the figure in the watery blue area at the bottom, a figure that echoed a news photo I had seen of a drowned body in the streets of New Orleans. Then I started working around the left and right edges. I liked the overlapping letters and textures, but I felt like they were distracting from the center. I began adding black to create focus.

As it often happens, I had planned to only do some minor tweaks. Somehow in the process, however, the painting changed from a vertical to its original horizontal format, and it acquired a new central element: an image of a Scooter Libby seated in the back of a limousine, post-resignation and indictment.

In some ways I suppose it seems like a long journey for the painting to have taken, from the deluge of a city to the exit of a White House crony. But these words just came to mind: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

Perhaps the journey was not so far after all.

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“The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.”

William S. Burroughs

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EDITED 03 JAN 2008: I just came across a photo of the original (or at least earlier) state of this painting. Before Crony, there was Deluge, and before Deluge, there was this:

I think about the only visible remaining element is the standing figure that appears here inside the red house. Also, as noted above, Crony returned to this horizontal orientation.

December 1, 2007

Many thanks to all (especially Chris, Keith, Brian, Marianna, Margaret, Jezra, Marcus, Patrick, Dan, Kurt and Anita) who came out on a chilly night to the Brooklyn Artists Gym for Politics of Power.

From the BAG Gallery announcement: “The artwork in the show Politics of Power at BAG Gallery is a collection of thought provoking work focusing on the mechanics of power. Can an artist at the crossroads of art, politics and truth help decipher the mechanics of power? Or does the mixture of politics and art manifest political correctness and censorship? Where is the room for risk?”

Participating artists: Bunny Burson, Mike Calway-Fagen, Reino Carlson, carlsweets, Heather Contant, Isabel Cruz, Robyn Desposito, Susan C. Dessel, Jen Dragon, Carey Garris, Kate Hamilton, Shauna Doyle Hammond, Dawn Hunter, Laura Johansen, James Juron, Michael Krynski, Diana Leidel, Uli Minoggio, Virginia Naughton, Tommy Pace, Samuel Paden, Patricia Paludanus, Geoffrey Raymond, Joanne Riina, Anjelika Rijvers, Anna Marie Rockwell, Lauren Smith, Greg Stephens, Janice Suarez, Sarah Tunnell, Max Tzinman.