desire / in the house of the bear

I always think about California. I can honestly say I think about California every single day. I was thinking about the drought, and then about the fires, and I was trying to figure out how to put the bear into that situation.  It wasn’t my initial intention, but I ended up making a version of the Californian flag. I guess the idea was both to personalize and take a wider view of that place that I spend so much time thinking about. I gorge myself on the ideal of my life when I was there, of what it would be like if I went back. The empty bottles are for the drought, but they’re also for the empty things that I put into myself, the poisons all around us, the physical ones and the psychological ones. The poppies aren’t even the right type to really take away pain and suffering, they’re like a shadow or a ghost of their cousin. There’s uncertainty and doom all around. 

Desire is making eye contact because it’s the condition, the emotion, it’s looking at you, it wants, it’s hungry, it endlessly needs. In the House of the Bear looks away, because it’s me succumbing to the condition of desire. I’m incapable or unwilling to look at you, or I just don’t give a fuck. The fires are coming, the end is at hand, there’s nothing around to fix it, the water’s all gone. All the suffering comes from want, and often a want that I can’t identify, which only makes it more frustrating. Desire is eating an empty bottle and a flower that doesn’t help me.

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latracalia

I have a very Spanish Catholic Church in my neighborhood that still does processions through the streets. One of them involved rose petals which were all over the ground one day and I knew that I wanted to work that into a painting. I started thinking about Valentine’s and the use of rose petals to signify the visitation of the Holy Spirit which led me to learn about Lupercalia which got me thinking about sacrifice and moving out of a dark place into something more hopeful, and the ways the western world has traditionally practiced that concept in organized rituals. This painting is called “Latracalia” because I’m using coyotes instead of wolves. I like coyotes for this role as they’re very successful despite people vilifying and killing them. I guess that happens with wolves too, but to a lesser extent, and they’re not quite as tenacious and successful despite it all.

So really the painting is about attempting to move from a dark place into a more hopeful one, even though it often involves ugly, violent, dark, burning, sad weirdness and cobbling together concepts and rituals from whatever broken bits are at hand. A kind of any means necessary. In other words positive change is difficult and doesn’t always pan out, but it’s still worth trying.

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