Friday, March 1, 2013

1st and 6th


This is what I have been working on the last couple days: a view of the corner at 1st Street and 6th Avenue in Brooklyn, 18x24 in oil.

Here's Macfarlane on reading surfaces:  "For [Mark] Twain the river was a capricious text, which punished literalists and allegorists alike for the fixities of their interpretations.  Horace Bixby, the veteran steamboat captain who apprenticed Twain, taught him the need to read surface for depth: how small perturbations might infer large submerged truths: the 'long slanting line' that suggested a reef which would 'knock the boat's brains out'."

Of course, I interpret this like reading the surface of vision and the working surface of paper or canvas. Both contain depth with hidden truths.

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