“Gerald Murphy (Mar 25, 1888 – Oct 17, 1964) was part of the so-called Lost Generation, a group of expatriate artists and writers who flourished between the World Wars in Paris. For Gerald and Sarah Murphy, Paris afforded distance from Gerald’s wealthy family and the opportunity for him to pursue his chosen career as a painter.”

As I have noted before on this site, sometimes a painting goes though many different phases before settling on a final form.

The picture below shows an early stage of a work. Hanging on the studio wall it acquired and shed various objects. It is taped and tied together like a temporary shelter. An assemblage of scraps, it includes a discarded silkscreen frame and a wire form, art tools used by my recent ex.

In this second state the work has taken on a more permanent appearance. Elements are screwed and glued into place. Layers of collage have taken hold. The coral branches have vanished, and the nest-like material has moved from behind the green field to the behind the metal grate.

A narrative seems to be forming. At the top of the painting to the right of the dome, a figure departs.

At the bottom of the painting a figure waits. The work acquires the title Divergence.

In the center panel, a hand hovers above a coiled spring as if feeling the vibrations. Standing below is the Page of Cups, a symbol of some sort of new beginning or renewal. Lodged into the hole in the canvas is a Resurrection Plant.

And now the painting itself diverges.

The center canvas is detached and becomes a freestanding work called The Hand That Takes. It receives a new layer of painting to tune the color.

The back canvas, previously largely hidden, becomes a separate work called Severance.

And they lived separately happily ever after…

“Hybrid forms are more obvious now … perhaps the symbol bank is near capacity and the only alternative is exploration of ideas reflecting off the surfaces of other ideas. Or perhaps this is what the creative process has always been about and now, for some reason, it has become visible in conscious application.” - Jon Hassell

Firemen lining up for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, 47th Street, New York

Seventh Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, Fall 2007

Surreptitious photo taken on Newbury Street, Boston, 2000

“The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.”

- Walter Benjamin

Protestors at the Biodevastation 2000 march in Boston, 2000

Red Hook near Fairway

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