Eric Fischl's Response to the Dumb Boxes

For years, painter Eric Fischl has created images that have intrigued, moved, and upset me: Sleepwalker (a boy masturbating in an inflatable pool), Bad Boy (a young man stealing from a purse while a nude woman, legs spread, stretches out on a nearby bed), and John and Joan (a powerful portrait of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, included in his recent Mary Boone show) are good examples.  So I appreciate his allowing me  to quote from an email response to my Dumb Boxes:

"I went to your blog and like very much what I am seeing of the boxes.  There is always your touch, your sensibility and there is also an authenticity to the weight of your sentiments.  The sculptural  aspect is very sophisticated without being too much so.  They feel just right.
They are poetic.  They are slow to process, slow to sink in.
Helen of Genoa's milk-thin surface embodies the thin, undernourished blood of a victim of leukemia.
The tower homage to your brother's polio and the havoc is reeked on the family is very powerful.
I love the visual intelligence of the Fellini image though I make no immediate connection to Juliette of the Spirits.
The device of the holes in your boxes, your funerary boxes, are spirit releases, portals, and key holes.
Intimate and powerful stuff."

New Paintings Winter 2012

Concurrent with working on my dumb boxes, I worked on four large (4 ft x 6 ft) acrylic on canvas paintings.  Two were based on the dumb box inspired by my Aunt Helen's death from leukemia, back in the fifties:

As often happens, I destroyed the lesser one and saved the one I liked:

The other two employed texts, and once again, I destroyed the lesser and saved the stronger:

Collection: Martin Muller

A Quiet Girl [Dumb Box 21]

Throne for a New Ubu [Dumb Box 20]

Collection: Martin Muller

Island 02 [Dumb Box 19]

Waken [Dumb Box 18]

I see the influence of all those Burma Shave signs placed along the highways of America during my youth.  And while I respect the idea that sculpture should work from all sides, in the round, the psychological effect of a front and back can produce an aide for the way someone is to look at a piece.  Or, at least, that's the way I see it.

One-eyed Afternoon [Dumb Box 17]

Collection: Fifi White