The Great Pumpkin

A friend of mine asked me what I thought of the great pumpkin...He lives in the Netherlands, my friend, not the pumpkin currently on parade here in America...I did these ink drawings a couple weeks ago stemming from titles that came to me, things like "10 hastily reassembled heads chewing a pencil", "one hastily reassembled head with a crown of tongues"...I liked the idea of working from words laid down like a quick sketch, and seeing if the process toward realization would be the same, and if the character of the grotesque would change at all, would it be more direct, would it change, would it lose something in the telling...I am always struggling between the need of the work to speak on its own terms and how much I should interfere to tweak the results...This week I had been feeling the need to explore them in paint, but the paintings got stuck in orange and the orange completely took over...like the orange in these paintings became this bleeding gushing wound sucking in any attempt at rationalization, understanding...it's raw and ugly, and I am afraid that in order to explore this place of terror, the paintings have to fail. But the funny thing is I have been doing this kind of grotesque for years because I have seen the American experience for what it is, and this shift towards fascist expression doesn't surprise me one bit. We have been living it much longer than people like to admit, people are quick to forget the Bush years, and I don't think folks overseas should be surprised either...This isn't a nice place, not if you are poor...and who should the poor turn to if they won't organize to raise their voices? The big heads, the heads with a crown of tongues. The drawings were not well received by my friends in France, or by other people for that matter...they felt they were too forceful, and they ARE ugly and forceful, but that is the point of them...which got me thinking about the work that art is meant to do...whether it is flattery or something else...Of course we recognize beauty and love the feeling of opening up to that world...we are built for it...But there's another kind of work that art should do, like what Otto Dix did, which should draw out the ugly, bring it out to see...sometimes my work veers into that ugly place, that place of suffering and terror, but it isn't a place I'm drawn to...I just feel it bubbling in the background and I know I have to respond to it like I do anything else and ask, hey this is going on, what do you think of this?