A Tale Of The Right Brain Leaping



I Am A Hittite In Love With A Horse, 14" X 18", 1980, inquire here for print.



Marini Homage, 5" X 8", 1990, inquire here for print.



Nothing meant anything as I sat, depressed, before a brand new pile of graph paper--huge 3'x 3' sheets--ready to draw up a storm, but with absolutely nothing in my head.  I was on the absolute bottom--no inspiration whatsoever.  Flipped on the radio, and this guy was giving a talk on Frank O'Hara.  I had been scribbling for about a year, in black ink, dying to bust out and introduce something representational back into my art.   The conditions were right for the perfect storm.  And he began to read this poem: 

Grace
to be born and live as variously as possible.

The conception of the masque barely suggests the sordid identifications.

I am a Hittite in love with a horse.

I don't know what blood's in me

I feel like an African prince

I am a girl walking downstairs in a red pleated dress with heels

I am a champion taking a fall

I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole

I am the light mist in which a face appears and it is another face of blonde

I am a baboon eating a banana

I am a dictator looking at his wife

I am a doctor eating a child and the child's mother smiling

I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain

I am a child smelling his father's underwear

I am an Indian sleeping on a scalp and my pony is stamping in the birches,
and I've just caught sight of the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.
What land is this, so free?

Frank O'Hara

After the first couple lines, I lept for a pencil and wrote down each of these 'I am' images, and went through that stack of paper in rapid scribble mode watching the images emerge.  Even made up some of my own.  Still am.  My Hittite piece is one of three equestrians that came from those graph paper sessions.  At last images were back in my work. 

The Horse and Rider by Marino Marini caught my eye at the Hirshhorn about ten years later. One look and and the same kind of energetic peotic leap happened.  Stood there smiling drawing this, transcending the miseries of the world. 

Wm