New Mask: The Painted Man

The Painted Man (Math-theow): 
sculpture mix; denim, stormy blue, green, and transparent brown glazing, layered; leather strip.

Foreground: The Pict

Background: The Merman's Head.

Alternative titles: Not Hadrian; Deep in Thought; or The Painted Man's Grasp.

Alice Jones: "Knots of Possibility"

PAINTING

He'd go down to the basement
wearing his dark blue work shirt,
to the corner of the windowless,
cinder-block room where he had
his canvas propped, and somehow,
after years of being tangled up
in knots of possibility, after
days of talk, after wrestling 
with the angel of Not-painting,
he squeezed a wildly orange
Vermont landscape out of those
bright oily tubes, smeared it,
all its red-leafed, golden blur,
onto the rectangle of cloth
and gesso that had been waiting,
like me, for his stroking hand.

--Alice Jones

from her The Knot,
published by Alice James Books,
Cambridge, MA: 1992.

Horse Sense

Painted Pony: 
sculpture mix;
transparent brown and Robby's Red glazing.

Montaigne's "Grotesques and Monstrous Bodies"

The opening sentences from Montaigne's essay "On Friendship" strike a chord:

As I was observing the way in which a painter in my employment goes about his work, I felt tempted to imitate him.  He chooses the best spot, in the middle of each wall, as the place for a picture, which he elaborates with all his skill; and the empty space all round he fills with grotesques; which are fantastic paintings with no other charm than their variety and strangeness.  And what are these things of mine, indeed, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together from sundry limbs, with no definite shape, and with no order, sequence, or proportion except by chance.

--Michel de Montaigne, 

(translated by J.M. Cohen, Penguin Books, 1958)