The Compartments of Visionary ... , 2/74 | Revised Compartments, 6/06 | Comparison

“Compartments” was the first five foot by five-foot painting I did, and for a Painting II class at Rice in February 1974. The professor praised it as an “intelligent painting,“ but his comment caused an art crisis. For the rest of the semester I rebelled against that critique, producing canvases that either mediocrely imitated “Compartments” or else were such deliberately awkward messes that had the teacher shaking his head at my “accidents.” No painting including “Compartments” came off as well as January 1974’s “Nancy,” which I did on my own, and I didn’t shake off the confusing “teachings” of this semester until I'd painted a few canvases after graduation later that year. I’ve maintained a reluctance to indulge in classes, professors, and teacher/student critiques since that time.

I never did understand why “Compartments” was “intelligent.” It had a certain vigor and balance, and did own the entire 25 square foot surface--which I suppose was the point of it all for me--but the green and orange shapes dominating it were thin and muddy. Looking at the unrolled canvas in June 2006 I couldn’t help but wince at the lack of passion in those colors, or the fact that the same six colors never varied in shade throughout the painting. Orange was always the same orange, straight out of the jar and drastically thinned with matte medium.

During my Rice years I saw a 5’ x 5’ painting as the goal, the proof that I had mastered painting. I recall my first art professor in 1970 showing the class one of his five by fives, and I thought: “So this is what a professional artist does!”--at a time when I couldn’t even control a 3’ x 3’ canvas. Later I had some successes with 4’ x 4’ paintings, and then, after the breakthrough of the 4.5’ x 4.5’ “Nancy,” I felt I was at ready for a 5’ x 5’, and looked forward to this painting class as a means of further developing my painting. But instead came the art crisis.

“Compartments” came off its stretcher in August 1974 and was stored rolled until November 1976, when I stretched the canvas to use its other side for “Caboose,” a calm/dynamic arrangement of shapes that somehow answered “Compartments.” “Caboose/Compartments” was again pulled off its stretcher and stored rolled in August 1985, then “Caboose” was “rediscovered” and restretched AGAIN, in July 1991. Then in March 2002 once again both were pulled off and stored rolled.

(So now that 2/74 “Compartments” was restretched as the front canvas for the first time since August 1974, then revised June 2006, ”Caboose” is now the obverse of the new “Revised Compartments.”)

Balance became the key to revising 2/74 “on its terms.” The goal was to adhere to the spirit and the overall form of the 1974 painting. The new painting would be a “second draft” of the first one, with even major changes permitted as long as the essence of Draft 1 was preserved. I wanted a conscious connection between February 1974 and June 2006. I began with the same use of six basic colors, although I changed the shades. Then I added shapes, expanded some of the blue and yellow color areas, and added different shades of green, orange, and red to get a more complicated but more balanced painting.

I’d envisioned something far different for a revision: hot yellow desert background, extremely thick sandy texture, all glimpsed through arches, gateways…a great deal of open space to fall through. A sense of infinity. Somehow there is a hint of this for me, “in a different blocky language,” in the upper right corner of the final painting.

I did reconnect with the February 74’s “action painting” style and its urge to fill the entire surface with dense shapes, lines, and blocks, but during the execution I felt it was painful to be so restricted. The initial orange shade I tried was a ghastly hospital restroom pastel, and the permanent green light of the original was changed to a light cool thalo green intended to conjure infinite background distance--and didn’t work that way at all! So I was depressed that I hadn’t come close to my original “revision vision.” And yet: that thwarted idea forms a vision for a NEW painting…

By the time I figured out that the painting was just going to get even more dense and complicated than the original, that a new balance was the goal and that I needed to introduce new shapes and colors and throw in a lot more black to define and dominate, I settled down and accepted the result. The painting got to the point of being exactly what it was, and so it was time to stop. A couple coats of gloss medium seemed to pull the complexity back together a bit.

I built a stretcher specifically for the measurements of “Compartments,“ 60 3/16” by 61 15/16”. The canvas is slightly loose on the stretcher due to the difficulty of stretching a canvas already painted on both sides.

The numbers…when I realized I wanted to revise “Compartments,” which I had numbered as painting #64, I’d just finished painting #262, a 24” diameter circle. So I deliberately went ahead with another 24” diameter circle, so that it would be painting #263, and thus the revision of #64 would be #264. Numerologists, figure that one out.

Some original brushstrokes of February 1974 are visible (black behind the thin red, top center).

Revising a thirty-two year-old painting is quite an odd undertaking. One day it hit me that it just had to be done. I unrolled the canvas and studied it, briefly agonized about condemning the decent “Caboose” as the obverse, measured the 2/74 painting, built the stretcher, and twelve days later it was completed.

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06/25/06