Red Square — Memory

Russian word (krasnaya) – can mean either red or beautiful.

The paintings become like bodies imbued with feelings of the collective group – peasants – Russia. The form is the collective, the content, the body.

The Red Army stopped at Rovno, where my father was born.

Red Army – Babel – between two worlds. My father lived between two worlds.

Red Calvary – channel in the energy between two worlds – survival and existence.

Issac Babel – from Hannah Krall -when in the synagogue,

Everything is white and plain to the point of asceticism, everything is fleshless, bloodless, to a grotesque degree. You have to have the soul of a Jew to sense what it means. But what does the soul consist of? Can it be that ours is the century in which they perish?”– what is the intention?

The gesture of a body is not perfect.

Each painting is like a character in a novel.

David Grossman is reading from a novel on the radio, that is being broadcast on a bus that he is riding. He looks around him and no one is paying attention. He is speaking about an extra pedal on the sewing machine, so that the woman who is sewing can reach the pedal. The image is used to convey empathy. What is it like to be in another person’s body.

Can a painting be like fiction?

I kept seeing men with no legs for a few months, outside the subway where Joshua Bell was playing the violin.

It brought up feelings of power / powerlessness.

The interior of the other.

Helene Herzbrun talked to me about the idea of invention rather than just seeing reality, at the only meeting we had about my thesis paintings before she went into the hospital and died from a brain tumor. I took this to mean later on, that which cannot be seen, but experienced. I was told that when they did a scan of her brain, she was much younger than her chronological age.

My mother told me when I was growing up, that when I complained of boredom, there was no such thing, since I could use my imagination. She took me to the Rothko room at the Philips when I was 15. My mother told me to not speak, but rather take in the sensations of color. When my son was 5, I took him to the National Gallery, and lost him. I found him sitting on the floor underneath the Rothko’s looking up. It was then that I realized that was the way to see Rothko.

I had to figure out how to get the crash – the fusion – so there is no theory – just the poetics of space, color and emotion. The structure of a painting allows the process to remain open –

 Narrow Road to The Interior – Basho.

David Grossman referring to his book, Falling Out Of Time

“only in art can life and death meet”

Art can touch beyond what is real – beyond what is visible