Paintings from China and India, August-September, 2001

During the days on Harrison Street when I painted the dying Western Addition of San Francisco, I also painted pictures of far away places that I imagined would give refuge from the despair of the ruinous city in which I seemed to live. I found old travel books, and made paintings copied from their illustrations. Later, I began to make collages out of the names of streets they told of, and as time passed, moved from mostly painting pictures of things and places, to making collages out of names and colors and spaces—not only places far away in space or time, but also places very near in the depths of my heart.

In 1971 I was able for the first time to travel in fact to the far places of my until then imaginary travel… a trip across Asia as the center piece of a trip around the world that began in Rome and ended in Manila. In the years that followed I was able to go several times to China, and then again to India. For every trip, the goal was what have been sometimes called the “high places,” the temples, tombs and sacred landscapes… sometimes common tourist traps, other times places known to few but the natives.

In early August of this year, I decided to see those places again, not in fact but in my imagination now loaded with the memories of how they were when I was there… either a year or thirty years ago. I decided on a method: first a large painting evocative of my feelings of the place, and then to develop a series of small paintings on panels from the smears of paint left over on my palette knife from the large painting.
I began with the hope for recognizable subject matter—after all, these were travel pictures—but soon found that any kind of topographical imagery was impossible for me. (Once I made a series of pastels from my travels in Egypt and Central Asia. I was gratified when I saw on a poster in the SF Airport the same view of Luxor as the pastel I had made a few months before. Now thirty years later, that kind of representation seems impossible for me.)

And so I have tried to make these paintings not pictures of far strange holy places but as the dirt they have left on me of their rocks and mountains, not views of strange temples but memories of their light and sound, color, smell, touch and space… not a vacation travelogue of where I have been, but rather the indication of the fragmentary marks and indelible stains left in me from a few of the world’s high places.