The Confluence

The Confluence, acrylic on canvas, 1992, 60x38 inches.
From the collection of Ron Notto and Darrell Andre

I last saw this painting a year ago this month, and sat under it in une chaise ancienne d'aise.

I was fever strapped, head wrapped, holding a shaky pen that reminded me too much of old Tio Augie: Renoir in 1917.

Yes, I was the old woman at the end of the hall.

The painting is not so dark as I recall, nor quite as bright, but it no longer matters that what started as morning became evening in the summer month it was painted. It is all done by light from within the paint; you two saw that and you two told me, but I think the light from your spots in the ceiling gives it the brilliance: the light comes from within your walls.

At first the canvas was a cliffy ravine, chaparral, a spotty hillside of a thousand strokes, gray and green thumb print daubs, familiar country, something to look at with little illusion; formatted landscape, not portrait.

Then it was The Secret Garden under this river scene. There are wild cats in that painting; it is more bas-relief than pentimento. I made a few mistakes that year, there are lots of trailing vines and flowers, the wall, then the city, the bay and the horizon, still landscape; my life that year, all painted over.

Turned around it became this portrait of a shared landscape, a piece of our own earth, something more than me, and it hung above the color stations at Architects and Heroes with 30 other smaller paintings made just before Michael and the Pompeian calendar finally freed the slaves in my heart of all perspective and all of us walked with Elise across Alta Plaza to the party.

He’d watched each swipe of my brush, he sat there with the dog and I loved him transfixed while I danced…

That damned Claude Lorraine! Fuck him, fuck Turner, fuck the very morning, fuck all.

What a beautiful mystery along the river, ten thousand swipes of the nine inch brush.

I don’t want dinner to end. I want you to watch me paint this forever.