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| The title of the painting is from the poem, As I Ebb'd by Whitman, "These you presented to me you fish-shaped island," |
Paumanok is the Indian name Walt Whitman the poet used to describe Long Island, NY. Paumanok is the birth place of much of his poetry. I painted for many years, in the summers on this stretch of beach. Walt very well could have composed his verses here, one hundred years earlier, near Sag Harbor, LI.
I used to cut Sunflowers from a neighboring farm and go paint them on the Bay Beach. I was doing this one summer and reading Van Gogh's letters to his brother, Theo in the evenings. I read that as Vincent painted his own Sunflowers he had been reading Walt Whitman and that the swirling oneness of everything Vincent made in Starry night was an idea he had read there in the poems of Leaves of Grass, the title of Whitman's main work.
I felt I was very much in the center of this thought also. I thought my own setting up of the still life was much like Walt's idea of reverence for the common place. I thought of the still life as a secular altar to this idea. I saw the Sunflowers as suns or symbols of life and the broken shells that we would collect on ropes on beach walks, as signs of passing. I saw them as planets revolving. Other paintings of the still life I called Suns and Planets.
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| 1990, charcoal on BFK paper, 30 x 40" |
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| Anne Plumb Gallery, 1992, NYC |
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| Anne Plumb Gallery, 1992, NYC |
In 1972 I visited the frescoes in Italy, the Giotto Chapel in Padua, being one of my favorites. They linger here in the compositions of these paintings. Back then I naively had said I wanted to make something like those Giotto's. I suppose I have in how the blue and white skies tie the paintings together with a common background and the work strives for a unifying narrative. Later I became interested in the restoration and deteriorating effects on the fresco and literally used the breaking and heightening in my work. The Painting below is an example.
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| Suns and Planets, 54 x 54", o/c, 1995 |
I shadowed this narrative with a more abstract version more like a poem of Wallace Stevens, see Postcards from a Volcano, or The Comedian with the Letter 'C' poems critical of whether this mythologizing is even possible in our contemporary world.
Large Paumanok Reeds #1 , 84" square, o/c, 2010
Large Paumanok Reeds #2, 84" square, o/c, 2010
