On a KSAN late night interview in the mid-seventies Ken Kesey presented an eloquent analogy between R. Crumb’s “Meatball” and the LSD phenomenon of the mid-sixties as a one-time and expansively influential trans-cultural event which temporarily blindsided the inevitable media co-option, exploitation and etc.

In the end, you gets no bread with that one meatball, but if you were there for it….

Fifty-some years ago, loosely looped, arrogantly stoned [as had been the case for some time then], while having my own extended meatball moment ricocheting around the Bay Area I painted a painting in a Palo Alto garage [unlike Packard, Jobs, Hewlett or Wozniak in their respective Palo Alto garages it resulted in neither vast remunerative consequence nor cultural upheaval] which recently, after a long and complicated life, came back to me.

A fifty year old painting…from a Palo Alto garage.  Given the Thumb, the Foot, the Active Libre Social Life and the KC Cold what little studio time I’ve stolen away these three weeks has been mainly devoted to Looking, looking at what’s been left here, looking and figuring out what’s worth keeping of the last of those “After RR” acrylics from 1991 and, after Adrienne passed on to me the painting[s]* bequeathed to son Bryan which had been in her care since our dear friend Lars died, thinking back to that acidic Palo Alto meatball moment.

Lars intended all the artworks he collected to go to the artists’ offspring; at the time of his untimely demise Bryan was about eleven and not exactly interested.  Now past forty and in the Army, he probably still isn’t particularly interested nor, particularly, was I until I got the things home and realized they represented a most peculiar moment in time as well as in the development of my work.

Done in October 1965 they remained with Lars when I left for the east that November as a stowaway driver in a driveaway car, survived many 60’s, 70’s and 80’s adventures until his premature passing, at which point Adrienne took charge of them.  Since their antecedents were oils such as this

they obviously constituted a pivotal moment in the Works’ Progress.  What it seemed I was looking for then [perhaps initiated during the previous summer] was a more modeled [if muddled] approximation of landscape as well as, in contrast to a black and white interim [gridded paintings, also all lost, from the Yale Art School 1964 -65] some very peculiar coloration.  After the driveaway episode I lengthily labored into the dark stoned winter of 1966 on what became “Karnak/Carnac”, the first substantial realization of the Garage Experiments and, ultimately, sole survivor of what became some increasingly troubled times.

…but, back to the Garage Painting[s], which were meant to be looked at the way they were painted; closely,

very stoned and

for a very long time. Whether the rewards were ever commensurate with the effort…well…

Thinking here “what was I thinking?” the coloration puzzled me until I remembered the paints were Politec muralists’ acrylics from Mexico with heavy doses of dayglo in the mix constituting a dope-fueled liberation from the previous winter’s monochromes for sure. The smeared depictions of landscape were obviously very rudimentary, just beginning…

Afterwards, following a lavish New Haven Thanksgiving, with numerous chemical aids, some in retrospect decidedly ill-advised [not that anyone was taking any advice], as entitlement eroded into uncertainty and arrogance became paranoia,

I finished Karnak/Carnac. The darker times, times, nonetheless, of much extravagant dreaming, took considerably more time to overcome…

never dreaming that half a century and many eventful flounderings later, I’d be contemplating

these unnamed canvases under Colorado skies, spacing out to “Plateaux of Mirrors”.

Which is not to say that the wanderings ended there, but under Colorado skies at the beginning of 2017, though other concerns ultimately distracted [see “Stove in a snowstorm,” subsequently] they made for fruitful contemplation.

And Bryan they’re here for you, whenever you’re ready.

M

*As to “what was I thinking?” I can’t currently figure out if the three are meant to constitute some sort of discontinuous triptych or three separate canvases, so whether they’re “paintings” or “a painting” remains debatable.