I could call this my first painting—the first one that flipped a switch. Maybe not the first, but it was a turn. I’d painted hundreds of paintings, but this one clued me into the nature of painting. I was a few years out of school and stuck, not knowing what to do with art. I had a lot of high-falutin ideas filling up sketchbooks, each designed to be ground-shaking. They were mostly pencil designs for would be paintings—tight, Flemish Renaissance inspired. Art about art. One was going to be an allegory of allegory (oy). I never painted any of them. I didn’t think I had enough technique to make them work, so I never tried. As time passed, my big ideas became moldy, and I dropped them, one after another.
This cycle of inspiration, paralysis, and abandonment happened repeatedly and I barely made anything for a couple years. Finally that cycle happened so completely that I didn’t know what to do next. Blank canvases stare back when it gets to that point.
Five Ton Mary was a circus elephant who killed her trainer in 1916. She was hung from a derrick as a spectacle the next day. I had a newsprint image of her hanging that I kept as an encapsulation of commercial cruelty and exploitation. The shape she made in the air was unnatural and eerie. I don’t think I ever had much intention to make a painting from it. It was just a printed image that I had in the days before the internet.
But blank canvases… I just wanted to paint something, so I picked the photo from a pile. It’s a quick scumble of transparent paint over a dry ground layer. I removed the derrick and focused on her form. I let it dissolve like the old photo. Removing the derrick changed her. The pose shifted from destruction to freedom. The colors sat in a ceramic forever, and the painting looked back at me with a kind of autonomy. Within minutes, there was nothing more to do. It was so simple. “I guess it’s done.” This was such a fresh turn from the ponderous ambitious projects I had planned and abandoned. This cut through all that. It started something fresh.