I Would Not Speak of the Mountain (Vesuvius)

I Would Not Speak of the Mountain (Vesuvius), Installed in Abandon School in San Antonio New Mexico

This piece was made on two 80 x 80 in. canvases to fit in an area in a classroom where there was once a blackboard in the abandoned San Antonio Elementary School. San Antonio is the town closest to the Trinity Site where the first atomic bomb was tested.

I Would Not Speak of the Mountain (Vesuvius), Detail

Although its red color appears planned with respect to the amount of red featured in the classroom itself, it truly wasn’t. In Nihil, coincidence and synchronicity occur with such frequency, I’m not sure what it means. The red color is mainly to do with sections of red burlap comprising a certain proportion of the painting’s patchwork surface, a type of surface common in the work.

There are a number of layers beneath, and therefore, a number of images we never see. In this case, the earlier layers come from drawings I made of the landscape along the Nihil route, including locations around the Trinity Site.  The top layer, which, in this case, remains more intact than in some other paintings, shows a composite of two layers/drawings of our own Sandia Mountains and of my wife and daughter snuggling in the sun, all of which occurred on the Nihil route.

I Would Not Speak of the Mountain (Vesuvius), Detail

Though I try to resist projecting meaning onto imagery where possible, I nevertheless experience intense emotion connected with this piece, and can’t help but ask into it. It’s subtitle “Vesuvius” came to me at some point late in the process, when my mind drifted to images of Pompeii, of family members holding each other in the wake of the volcano’s destruction, buried under ash. I thought of the way in which history/memory is preserved there, its tragic images of the past visually present.

As I reach middle age, I experience time differently.  Often I will notice my daughter in a way in which I can already experience her as memory.  Don’t forget this moment, I’ll tell myself.  She’ll only be three for an instant, then gone.  I do this, to some extent, because I feel my own capacities, my old identities, even my very ability to remember things,  diminish by the year.  Missing and repressed memory is a central feature in my life stemming from my own childhood. In some sense, when I try to preserve memories of her or of other things important to me, it’s as if I’m trying to preserve the world itself, at least one which makes any sense to me, to keep it—or her—from vanishing, as everything inevitably does. In reality, of course, it’s more likely to be me who will one day vanish from her life and from the world, which itself will continue exactly as before.

I Would Not Speak of the Mountain (Vesuvius), Detail

Thoughts like these are unpopular to discuss in public I think because we tend to resist the natural way of things; we want to conquer death. But when these sorts of thoughts become conscious in the work, they become present in the touch, and therefore in how the painting responds to touch. The touch and the response is an opening and invitation to experience beauty in a way which would otherwise be impossible. “Death is the mother of Beauty,” Wallace Stevens famously wrote in his poem “Sunday Morning.”

It’s not original to me to notice that the brevity of life, to a large extent, is what makes beauty real. To connect this general feeling to the specific thought of Vesuvius and Pompeii at first seems too general to give it meaning, but it might help viewers to know that millions of acres of New Mexico wilderness have been lost in the past couple years to wildfires, especially during the spring and summer of 2022. Just as I can observe my daughter as a present memory, so I sometimes perceive our own surrounding wilderness that way.  Just as I could observe the Jemez Mountains burning from my front yard last year, I would would look to the nearby Sandias from my backyard and wonder, when?

I have a friendship with the Sandias, which is just as real as any of those with my closest friends, and, in some ways, perhaps more so. I look at them now as I write this from my back patio and know the forest will burn in the coming years while we still live here.

Abandon School in San Antonio New Mexico

It’s partly the affinity I have for the temporariness of things, a brokenhearted sense of awe, a deep curiosity about all processes of time, and a wildly desperate need for beauty, that I want to make paintings to be seen in abandoned spaces before the context and subject changes to the market and politics of the art world.

It’s now been three years since I started down the path that has become Nihil. What began sincerely and spontaneously out of yearning and loneliness, to install work in abandoned churches, schools, and post offices dotting the New Mexico countryside during the height of Covid, has become now as much performance as quest. Yet to measure the section of a room, the diagonal opening of a doorway, to notice the way light plays through boarded-up windows or along a wall perforated with bullet holes, gives me a sense of purpose and freedom I struggle to find in the newer, shinier contemporary world. To my sense of things, the abandoned spaces I install them in are the spaces from which they’ve also emerged. In that way, these spaces, which, for me, take on an aspect of the sacred, are carried into the contemporary world, like my own Archaic Brother.  I look at them, and they look back.  I’m still in that abandoned space, knowing, powerfully and powerlessly, that every silence outlives the world that first spoke it.

I Would Not Speak of the Mountain (Vesuvius) | Mixed Media on Canvas and Burlap | 80 x 160 in. | 2023