Lion

Lion | Mixed Media on Canvas and Burlap | 120 x 110 in. | 2023

On the surface, Lion shows, if you can find it, a howling coyote, a central mountain lion-human hybrid figure, and parts of a couple other figures in the top right area of the piece, which are leftover vestiges of drawings of my three-year-old daughter who, at the time of the drawings, was busy rolling around on a museum bench. The picture is absurd and makes no sense. This is also the first painting that responds to the newest and the last of the Nihil tenets, Non-Preference, which is still unpublished. 

Because of the Tenet of Non-Preference, the layers in this painting correspond to each other  only in the the order in which the drawings they’re based on were made. The first layer was from a quick sketch I made in Chama, near the Colorado border, of a valley I came upon filled with fifty or more deer, a site I’d never encountered. I had spent the day sneaking through a rancher’s land to go deeper into an unprotected wilderness. The encounter gave me a feeling of deep reverence. The next layer was a depiction of the villain in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when he rips the heart out of the man he is to sacrifice, and the heart then catches fire while he holds it up in front of his secret death cult. I made this drawing, and the subsequent layer, because, while in Chama, I had come across a drive-in theater I had thought abandoned. In reality, it’s a functional drive-in theater and the food truck cook invited me to come back that evening to watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and drink a lot of cheap wine with them, which I did.  I had forgotten how great a film it is. The next layer was of a drawing my daughter made at the Albuquerque Museum we visited a couple days later, also on the Nihil route. She told me it was part lion, human, and carrot. It was not actually her best work, which she knew, but let me use it anyway.  I tried to reproduce it faithfully, not that it matters because, of course, it was only to be covered again like the layers beneath it.  The next layer I made from one of my own drawings in the museum, which depicted Mila on the bench, but drawn frantically because she wouldn’t lie still. The final layer depicted, in the foreground, is a sculpture of a howling coyote called “Howl” by Luis Jimenez, and behind it, a kind of expressionist figurative painting called “Portrait” by Fritz Scholder. What remains in the final piece, really, are my two drawings of my daughter and the coyote and painting. 

All of that said, when you work with that many layers, a lot of strange shit happens. First, you get a lot of wild colors and shapes leading nowhere in particular. Second, faces and body parts get weird. So it was a real surprise when the leftover of the face of the figure from the Fritz Scholder painting looked a bit lion-esque, even though it doesn’t at all in his painting.  Upon seeing that, of course, I tried to draw it out more, and I think it turned out nicely. What I liked about this accident was, in a strange way, it reflected my daughter’s earlier intention to make a drawing of a man who was part lion and carrot. For me, it must be pointed out, it’s not like an African lion, but a Mountain Lion such as the kind roaming these parts.

Lion (Detail)

The mountain lion, for me, is the epitome of the paradox of love and fear. Until we moved here, I don’t think I feared anything concrete. All my fears have been mostly abstract. “What if my l life is a complete waste,” “what if my wife leaves me,” that kind of thing. What I love about being afraid of mountain lions is that at least it’s real. When I go into the mountains, I occasionally find tracks.  That really freaks me out. I carry bear spray and a big knife but I’m afraid to own a gun and would probably only shoot my own foot off before the mountain lion ate my face anyway.  I suppose it’s unconventional to go out into the wilderness for meditation carrying amateur weaponry.  You might ask me about bears, and indeed I did encounter one black bear up there once, but, rational or not, I’m not afraid of bears. Bears are ladies and gentlemen compared to the mountain lion.

And though I’m truly and sincerely scared shitless of mountain lions, I love them. It’s a strange and gorgeous animal. Its head is sort of too small for its body, and its paws and claws are much too large. It has a long, fat tail. It’s sneaky as fuck. Its eyes are sensuous and elegant, as in, if I’m honest, sexually attractive.

I have dreams about the mountain lion. One night recently, one was eating my head. Sometimes, there will be a very dangerous human who shows up in the dream, and though he appears human I know him to be the mountain lion in disguise. He can’t fool me.

Lion (Detail)

Mountain lion energy in dreams is awful. Nothing but murdery vengeance shit.   

However, if you’re into dreams like I am, you’ll note that all that murdery mountain lion energy comes from the dreamer himself. This is to say, in some sense, that the mountain lion is a part of me that wants to kill something within myself to get free. The mountain lion I fear most is myself, I suppose you could say. I mean, that’s not really true; I fear the fucking lion in the forest more, but it’s kind of true.

Somewhere there’s a point to this story.  I think it’s this: I’ve been having a lot of scary murder dreams of which the mountain lion plays an outlandish role, and it’s awfully strange and unexpected that it should turn up in a painting where the only lion imagery was in the buried drawings of my daughter’s.  My only hope is that I made all that murder energy fun in the painting. You see, I think the dream lion is trying to kill me in the ego sense, so I might reinvent myself in some way, and it has to be murdery because I’ve been ignoring it for too long, to let the old identity die, to recognize that the stories and narratives I’ve over-identified with for too long have to be murdered, so that everything else can just come out in the paintings. 

But should I go missing in the mountains and they find my bloody corpse, or what’s left of it, and you’re wondering what to do with my paintings, let’s agree to say this was the one that was prophetic.  And truly, if that happens, everyone is allowed to laugh.