06/18/2024
Portrait of Myself, Preparatory Study for the Large Illusionistic Ceiling Fresco
If you take a brown feather, if you line it just a tiny bit with black, if you look underneath the feather, if you look at me closely in the light, the chased, encasing air, the leaf from which the subject seems to grow, flowering in catkins, the fruit a small samara no man would have, you would never display so much emotion in a portrait, ever title this portrait of a woman: My Life as a Lark. As though it’s snowing leaves, she’s a flurry of shadow cast by green, or by clouds as she dampens the ground with her sadness, then rehearses a trill that obsesses as written. As performed, she’s part of the air behind: her eyes blend, her shrug dissolves with the color of background sprig of flowering almond blossoming in a glass, with marked breast & throat: desperate heart heat dance. Chromatic, the almond body, when you’re painting each stroke as if you’re naming it, like writing which is naming, bringing into being, we who are making our worlds in self-portraits. As the Lady of the Lark emerges out of painting, a fading effect of becoming thickness creates folds, then draws strong black lines around them—the bodies the portraits the trees—except the almonds raining—
—Dale Going in
Literature of the Black Sun. Publisher of Vestiges.
