“ walking along that section under the old El, between Sixth St. & West Broadway… a little bald headed, white, beautiful face was in the window with little bits of crumbs- alone. She could have fallen from the window & been killed.”
When attempting to create her likeness he added layer after layer of paint but was dissatisfied with the results & slashed away all of the coats until the various attempts coalesced & he was left with the amalgam of beatific idiocy that remains.
For me it is an echo of my own painterly methods of frustration with a result that is a harbinger of instability & simple joy in the face of neglect.
Phillip Evergood
Inspired as much by the story as by Evergoods painting methods & the resonances with my own search for threads of meaning I have made my painting with a somewhat different reasoning.
I call where I paint the batcave & it makes Francis Bacons studio feel like a Trappists cell. It is the room at the front of my house where there is a perpetually shrouded bay window & outside of this window there is an overgrown dog rose bush that has often been the cause of arguments between my neighbours & myself as I allow it to grow so wild & unchecked. Initially this was a protection from the local teens who used to sit upon my wall shrieking, drinking cheap booze & discarding fried chicken wrappers as there was an old red telephone box directly in front of it that they obviously felt an obligation to be near. When the box was removed some years ago the rose had become home to two male house sparrows & their numerous mates who would fly in & out of the treacherous thorns with indecent speed. I have often been prey to those thorns when to-ing & fro-ing & I once used the branches to frame a large canvas for an exhibition & was dutifully scratched until my hands were swollen & sore & wept copiously for days. The painting was rejected from the show as being a health hazard. I was of the opinion that if anyone was stupid enough to hurt themselves on what was obviously sharp & painful then it was their own fault. When the wind blows the thorns scratch eerily against my window & I can hear the fluttering & desperate cries of the birds who call it home & I am reminded of how short & violent are the tiny lives of these creatures that we commonly perceive as so sweet & picturesque. I listen to them often & am struck by the fact that they are generally violent, territorial & aggressive. They make me question my own tenuous relationship with existence & if the roles were reversed how I would fare under their circumstances, if I too possessed a tiny, fragile body covered with minute soft feathers in a symphony of soft browns & greys that appear at first drab & those legs so thin & fine that the surging blood that swells through them ending in the perfect claws must pass one platelet at a time & the pert & inquisitive beak with a labia like crest & finally the eyes that blaze with cruel life that is all impulse that never questions itself but is vibrant & violent & ceaseless until snuffed out in a rage of down & blood by some barely interested local tom or pecked to pieces by a magpie over a morsel or frozen in perfection by the combination of starvation & colder bitter winters that obscenely strip its bones of all feather & flesh till they are hollow & the lightest whisper of a breeze plays a tune so small through that ossified marrowless flute that not even metaphors could hear it. They are ciphers for me of bubbling insanity: enigmatic & beautiful from the outside but tortuous, painful & miserable to experience first hand. Pain looks great on other people.
The vitality of the tiniest creature astounds me as I am so far away from empathy.
The calls of the sparrows mock me from just beyond the glass whilst I scratch away at paintings that are filled with the unending wish for death & pure blank black misery watched over by a painting from my childhood of tumultuous storm driven waves crashing against rocks as black as my own selfishness.
I managed to catch a tiny fragment of this for once in my version of Lily of the Sparrows & in my clumsy way distill it into a single image of tumult & misery & torment in the shadow of vibrancy; eyelash by eyelash & feather by feather. I retreat to the grave one grey hair at a time; painting by painting, tooth by tooth, second by second, breath by breath. Unusually I actually kept the picture upon completion & made a frame from the dog rose once more, much to the chagrin of my poor fingers which are swelling as I type. This does not mean that I am any more vital or placated or satisfied with the result but that there is some small & almost silently apt lyricism remaining within me to torment myself with during every drear moment in much the same way as pressing briefly at these cuts on my fingers provides some momentary relief whilst inflaming the wound.
Lily of the Sparrows2013
Earlier sketch for the portrait
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