Cesar Boo 2

In 1980 I received a CETA-MAC Arts grant that allowed me to work in my studio for 9 months and receive something akin to a salary. A monthly income was paid and visits to the studio were made on a periodic basis to check on the progress of the work. This was ostensibly to create art for public places. At the end of the grant period the work would be turned over to the city and displayed in some suitable public forum. I chose to work on an artist's book using Hayle handmade paper and Sharpie felt pens. If used right the ink on the tooth of this paper could look like a crayon litho and a rich range of grays could be achieved.

After nine months and the review it was decided the finished art work - a book of some 323 pages plus a suite of 4 enamel drawings on paper were "unsuitable" for public fare and it was decided the work would remain with the artist. The problem was the nature of the imagery. I was deeply impressed with the dark German Expressionistic Gothicism of the film, "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari". I was exploring nightmare and mysticism and the point where the two converged in my life. I have since come to realize this is a highly emotional state I was entering and engaging. And emotional work, if at all dark is really quite unsettling; not suitable, this very private vision, for a civic forum.

I have since redrawn every page of this work, initially titled CEZAR BOO, at least once and most have been redrawn twice. Sometime the revisions changed the composition, mostly the revisions were refining the imagery and perfecting what I felt were strong compositions at the inception. The drawings began with thumbnails (2" x 3") sketches. These sketches were often compositionally dynamic and crude. Then they were worked up into the larger format It was at this point that they achieved the typical bilateral symmetry. I had recently read the Comte de Lautreamont, "Maldorer", and written my own epic poem of desire and fierce pride at becoming an opposite of the deity of the norm, i.e. a contrary. I identified with the amphibian - the creature that can live in two realms and so the poem was called "Song of the Frogs". In if the protagonist, separated from God, and most painfully conscious of the exclusion, finally after a series of "falls" winds up re-united with his beloved deity as a "sore on God's right thigh". And so, upon the aesthetic template of gothic expressionism I laid a story of the outcast, the overwhelmed, the stunned, the reviled. The drawn work consists of a series of cycles or "spirals" of attempts at re-integration. There are the profane "weddings", the secular "resurrections", the "sinkers", and possibly the most disturbing, the "premonitions". The work ends with images of an empty grave, a skull with a flowering gamete issuing a 'song', a pronouncement laid onto an unfinished drawing and a 'cancelled' drawing. All indicators of resolutions and movement forward - a very positive stance.

The work was shown at P.C.V.A in 1982, Portland, Oregon. In Soho, New York, 1985 at the Artist's Space. In Portland again in 1994 at Jamison Thomas Gallery. And in 1996 at Space 743 in San Francisco. Each time it evolved. The work was sold in 1997 and at that point must be considered finished. The reproductions presented are of this final state.