<rambling>
For some reason I never fully thought about how important eggs are for a lot of the work I’ve made. I mean, my paint is made from eggs, obviously, but when I fist started making my tempera paintings of animals, one of my central aims was to make paintings that were very much like eggs. Physically, there’s a bit of a resemblance: they’re rounded and white and whatnot, but structurally they’re quite similar as well. The gesso I use, a mixture of marble dust and rabbit-skin glue, isn’t meant to go on flexible supports like canvas: it’s too brittle, and is prone to cracking, and those paintings are on upholstered canvases. When I decided to make them, I was keenly aware of how vulnerable and fragile they were going to be, that was kind of the point. Not coincidentally, perhaps (though I’m not even sure I knew this at the time), eggshell and marble dust, chemically speaking, are the exact same thing. The egg line of thought is more interesting, I think, in the case of the birds, though. For those, gessoing the stuffed animals was a quite intentional kind of death allegory, but, in light of the eggshell reference, it was more of a “reverse birth” process, a return to the egg. Painting the faces back on end up being a rupture in the death/gestation metaphor (memory, re-presentation), and that brings us neatly into the territory of “compulsively reënacting abjection trauma,” Freud’s fort/da game, and all of that business. How tidy! It extends nicely to the exploration of representational schemes (basic simulacrum humbuggery) which is where I see my focus heading.
Oh dear. This is going to get me on a “surface” tangent, and then I’m going to have to think about the fetish object, and that’s going to take me back to my old blackface paintings, which I didn’t think I was going to have to think about, and that’s going to mean I’m going to have to take another crack at Homi Bhabha. And that, gentle reader (assuming you’re still with me), is not something I was planning to do or, indeed, was looking forward to doing. One thing after another. Although, it does make it abundantly clear that, at the heart of the matter, my core process is with covering one thing (skin, stuffed animals, or canvas, so far) with another thing (makeup, gesso, paint). Which means that there’s actually what would seem a highly improbable link between my older work and my the newer pieces (it’s actually nice to see some kind of continuity, no matter how tenuous). Also, it means I really am a painter, after all. Crap.
</rambling>
