The Confluence

The Confluence, 1990, acrylic on canvas, 60x42 inches.

From the collection of Ron Notto and Darrell Andre.

This is the Mary’s River, where it flows into the Willamette River at Corvallis Oregon.

The painting is not so dark, nor as brilliant. It is all done by light from within the paint.

It is a painting I did not want to finish, and a painting I would were it possible, expand from the four sides of its two dimensions so that the whole world looked like the paint, the tone of the painting.

The canvas was once a cliffy ravine, a spotty hillside of a thousand strokes, gray and green and familiar country, something to look at, not much more than illusion, landscape not portrait: turn it around.

It became The Secret Garden before it hung for sale above the color and rinse station at Architects and Heroes just as the Pompeian calendar finally freed the slaves in my heart of all perspective and all of us walked with Elise across Alta Plaza.

There are wild cats in that painting, lots of trailing vines and flowers, the wall then the city and the horizon, still landscape.

That damned Claude Lorraine, fuck Turner, fuck the very morning, fuck all, what a beautiful mystery along the river, a hundred thousand swipes of a four-inch hog bristle brush, paint gone to water.

Here are two watercolors of Oregon...