I came across this a few months ago in the studio. It survived the long trip to Australia and all my culls throughout the years. It seems that I periodically throw out pictures all the time because I realise that they're never as good as I had once thought. But anyway, they won't fit in my coffin, so better that they feed the earth under the laughing Kookaburras.
I never really liked it but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to chuck it out. Now I'm really glad, of course, because I see something in it that I finally appreciate. I think it's because I was can see it now from outside of myself which I couldn't do so well previously.
I see something in it that I wasn't used to seeing. It's a carnival of various coloured objects of all shapes and sizes that I was somehow lucky enough to place upon the right parts of the canvas board. I also think I was channeling my teacher Leo Marchutz who had recently died.
I like it now because it reminds me of how much I was trying to absorb an idea about uniting relationships on the surface of a picture plane. It was always the great lesson from so many painters, but especially Cezanne, who for me at the time, was so influential. How to make a kind of spiderweb of the whole image, an architecture wherein every part, every colour, and brushstroke, all synchronise to work in unison like one long extended breath.
For fun, It's accompanied by another painting I made even earlier, maybe around 1974? I painted it from the roof of a house in Goult, also in the Luberon, and I remember it was the Autumn and I had a strep throat that was killing me. It's much larger and I spent the whole afternoon on it. This one too, I was never really crazy about because it felt like an oversized copy of a Cezanne watercolour. But hey! I was young and had not found myself yet. Today, I see them as points on a map where I had, at one point, crossed paths with both Leo and Paul who were two buoys upon which I hung onto with all my might in those days.
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