Burnout Painting

I was writing a letter to my friend, the poet Margueritte, trying to tell her how burnt out I was feeling. In the pit, abandoned by the muse. Surely I had painted everything worth painting, discovered everything worth discovering. And with the world going to hell, the planet cooking, soon to be unlivable, there wouldn't be any posterity to enjoy my work, which would probably be burnt up, washed away in a flood or blown up by a nuclear bomb anyway. So to illustrate this feeling for my friend I got up and did a drawing. (See additional images.) Well, in her reply she said she loved the "burned out" drawing, so I thought maybe I would try to paint it. Sometimes in the past, when feeling desperate I would paint an image of my despair and that would resurrect my creativity. But this time the opposite seemed to be happening. I seemed to be cremating it instead. I've said in my "Artist's Statement" (the lowest of all literary genres, to be avoided whenever possible) that I approach every painting as if it were my first, which sounds good but of course is bullshit because now I actually felt that way and it was awful! Everything I did was wrong. I thought this would surely be my last painting ("the big one, Elizabeth!") because I would never finish it, like Frenhofer's "Unknown Masterpiece. But one evening, several weeks into this nightmare, a half-hour before time for dinner, I picked up a brush and pallet with drying paint on it and, just out of guilt for not having painted that day, started painting. Half-heartedly at first, but then the thing seemed to catch fire - I was painting flames in the woods behind the burnt out dude - and all of a sudden I was in the Zone! - which is my term for that condition in which the brush is doing what it wants and I'm just along for the ride, having no idea where we're going. Of course that joy ride doesn't last, but it got me over the hump, and this is the result. But then in the middle of all this the October 2017 California fires started, wiping out whole neighborhoods and killing dozens, so that the humorous aspect of my painting now seemed disrespectful of those for whom this imaginary nightmare had become a reality. Bad timing.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:40 W x 30 H x 2 D in

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