Fulfillment Center may be the capstone for “My Neighborhood.” Fittingly, its motif is next door: a mid-stage in a process which began about 2010 when our neighbors, the Bufords, a family of jazz musicians, were swindled out of the land where, when the painter moved to Seattle in 1989, their cottage occupied a capacious yard graced by rose bushes, the sort of property that brings drooling developers sniffing around for the right moment.
This painting, from 2015, evaded posting until it emerged as part of a recent project to add frames to all the extant work.
As a part of this process, the painter took one more look at the efforts of six years ago and repainted the leafless tree growing out of the elegantly decorated truck.
“Sisyphus Screwed” (2019, 42” x 45”) is the painter’s annual holiday greeting. Some of you will receive a paper copy via USPS. There, some rather tortured prose on its reverse attempts to fit the work into seasonal traditions within a current political atmosphere where peace and brotherly love are not prospering. Perhaps, viewed here, the struggle between the tall evergreen and the intrusion of man made machines speaks for itself?
It all started some years ago with the red couch, a case of incipient disorder, an inside turned outside, in a town (it turned out) poised for the present descent of real estate agents and de/construction enterprises. Sketches were made, photographs taken in all kinds of weather, a stretcher frame built and blank canvas pulled over it. An initial layer of paint was applied. The result was run past friends. Enthusiasm was lacking. “Order on Marion Street” went to the bottom of the unfinished pile until April this year. The good news is that with this latest effort the painter’s collection of work that needs work has diminished by one more item. Call it a study in symmetries and their disruption or absence, and consider the closing lines of Wallace Stevens’ A Connoisseur of Chaos:
Limited as it is to just two tall buildings, the great beyond of downtown Seattle apparent through the gate central to “Transport” is a superannuated image. Indeed, this canvas picked up its first layer of paint sometime before that area sprouted its present crop of skyscrapers.
In the metaphysical streets, the profoundest forms
Go with the walker subtly walking there.
These he destroys with wafts of wakening,
Free from their majesty and yet in need
Of majesty . . .
Wallace Stevens, Ordinary Evening, xi
An expert spinner of Tales, the painter’s brother has been known to step over a few fictional lines. Eyes are rolled; coughs stifled. “Well,” he’ll say, “at least part of it’s true anyway.” His sister here on Seattle’s 16th Ave. has certainly stretched a few verities in this painting with its hyperbolic Hydra of a backhoe and its transport of the iconic Jimi Hendrix statue from Broadway to her own Seattle street. She hopes this performance will not affect her standing in the Webmaster’s list of “realist painters!”
This canvas lingered about the studio unfinished for eight years. Evidence for its outdated reality can be seen in the brick house (memorialized earlier in “Red Couch,” 2013) on the NW corner of East Marion Street and 14th Ave. now a fictional dwelling. A second clue, a date (April 2011) scribbled on the back of the photographic model for the innocent consumer of the “fruit of that forbidden tree,” supports this history. Meanwhile, the painter noticed only yesterday that the house on the southwest corner of that intersection is now boarded up, apparently awaiting its “development.”
This painting “appeared” to the painter a year ago as she walked along Seattle’s Marion Street in the direction of 18th Ave., where the Immaculate Conception Church stood behind a screen created by the branches of an embracing cherry tree. The image brought to mind Camille Pissarro’s painting Les Toits Rouges, which can be seen in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. It is a painting made near Pontoise, France; a group of houses with brightly tiled roofs behind what the d’Orsay curator calls “densely intrusive vegetation.” Your local painter wanted to see if she could bring home some of the liveliness of Pissarro’s work. At the same time, she found herself intrigued by the Cezanne-like geometry of the neighborhood scene with its intricate web of diagonals and verticals.
October 2018: Nothing stands now on the empty space at 14th Ave and Spring Street in the Central District. One hundred and nine years prior to February 2017, that corner was occupied by the impressive brick, steepled building which became the Progressive Missionary Baptist Church after the United Presbyterians left in 1952. These changes reflect the many demographic shifts which have characterized the CD from its beginnings (Jewish) to Asian (until World War II uprooted its Japanese population) to its isolated condition (African American), the result of red-lined areas south of Madison Street as well as the intrusion of Interstate 5, to its present gentrifying condition in what has become a hot real estate market for Microsoft and Amazon employees (until what next? in the shifting sands of late stage capitalism . . .). "Demolition Man” documents a chapter in this evolution. Soon the inevitable high-priced condominiums will rise.
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