Wednesday, October 22, 2008

EB[s 25th Birthday. Cambridge 2008


retinal memory and seeing Reubens again
we had a fun time touring the highlights of the harvard three lots of little gilded bronze buddha's to delight these eyes klimt and the saturated canvas jaspar johns 'dutch wife' did not excite me as much as it did in the savarin can days of discovery redacted to david: it didn't excite me. the surface reminded me of a group jerk off in carefully measured spews. this morning i crack myself up. dutch wife, glory hole, body pillow, spew...hehehehehe i got it right yesterday i could not remember, kept telling, redacting the painting, it's a, what do you call it? it tells a story...? a literar? no, narrative, YES! and thank you eb for filling in the blank and this morning i tell myself i need more intellectual stimulation meatier conversations living lightly on the surface and only diving down deep in paint time and yesterday i showed eb the reubens, three panels. he is my favorite a better draughtsman than michelangelo have you ever seen the displaced sizes and drives of some of those figures on the sistine's ceiling? and yesterday i said: the paint is so thin my memory of thirty years is of juicier surfaces it is the thin layers which allow a painting on linen to survive for centuries cezanne was thin van gogh surface not as fat as remembered and his canvas of acid green now under glass. could not smell the man i smelled at23 when my eyes were bright and i thought i danced with those guys an afternoon lament to eb my surfaces are just crusty and dense and why because i keep changing my mind oh there were the florentines, the venetians, and the siennese panels side-by-side i could tell the different schools the coloration and how many layers of egg tempera, many many, and here painted upon the leaf by a lesser painter than botticelli re-telling the humours of spring

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