Great Mother

Great Mother, Installed in Abandon School in San Antonio New Mexico

At an abandoned drive-in theater on the Nihil route near Socorro, I discovered a mother  red-tail hawk in her nest on the reverse side of the enormous screen. I was able to climb a hill opposite to get up high enough to take some photos and make some drawings.  She didn't take kindly to paparazzi.  After a couple minutes, she launched out of her nest shrieking with rage. She circled me for several minutes, shrieking again and again.  I could feel her raw power under my own skin.

Great Mother (Detail)

Referencing the drawings I made, each layer in the painting depicts the same hawk from a different sketch. The overall effect was strange in the course of its various erasures and distortions; it seemed to flatten. In my view, to represent an animal or a feature of the natural world in a flattened, less naturalistic manner is to render them more as archetypes than as real-world representations of themselves. In fact, I’m not sure anyone looking at this image would be sure what sort of bird they’re looking at, only that it does appear to be some sort of raptor.

The canvas was made in the same ratio as the abandoned screen where she hides her nest. It also fits in the frame which once contained a chalkboard in the classroom where I installed it. It’s the first Nihil piece I’ve made in which the abandoned space I placed it in will cause me to revise and add to the piece.

My plan is to make a frame identical in size and color to the one in the classroom. I’ll then make a long, narrow canvas for the top section of it. One will notice that a poster of the Pledge of Allegiance hangs next to it. I’m thinking to add and subtract each line from the pledge along the width of the top narrow canvas. I imagine it might skirt the edges of legibility, perhaps become totally illegible. I’m wondering if it might appear as text appears in dreams, the way letters transform into unfamiliar symbols and shift in space as the dreamer tries to read them. In some sense, to try to read the pledge this way would be to read it as an ancient or alien language, as something we’ve never seen.

Great Mother (Detail)

There is also a simple suggestion of the usual American-style bald eagle, which I see as parallel to the painting as the pledge might be to the future text painting. And perhaps like the painted text, the Great Mother seems somehow more archaic, less comprehensible.  She also seems less rationalized, more capricious. She is not the eagle as nationalistic, patriarchal symbol, but rather simply wild, amoral, preliterate and pre-literal. Next to the eagle, she subsumes it, engulfs it. She might even be the eagle’s shadow, its repressed contents unleashed and let out into the open, exploding into the foreground.

Perhaps this is my first patriotic painting, a profusion of my love for the eternal wild side of America, far too often obscured by overt political messaging, didactic cultural signifiers, narcissistic individualism, naive and shallow ideals, tribalism, and  groupthink. Its usual pornographic polish. Its full-spectrum fundamentalisms competing for cultural dominance.

I happened to read a poem that moved me as I made this piece, which I think pretty well sums it up. We just have to swap the tiger for the raptor. It’s an excerpt from Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

I would rediscover the secret of great communications and

combustions. I would say storm. I would say river.

I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree.

I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews.

I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of

the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children

into clots into vestiges of temples into precious stones

remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand

me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.

Great Mother | Mixed Media on Canvas | 41.5 x 95 in. | 2023