I have been thinking of these portraits as erosions.

I have been thinking of these as a graph through your mind where the things most often rubbed against come through darker.

-Like a grinding plate wearing down grooves of faces and actions -Visiting the same spaces over and over again,
and every time something added or shifted or worn away.

Why is a memory sometimes sharp?
Is the plural of a memory an ache?
Is a portrait of movement transparent?

A trick of the eye, a wink of the eye, a flick of the tongue, a smoke smell, a long smell of air.

Who are we holding in our minds as most dear?
Not an individual-
A stack!
An animation!
A shifting skeleton whose anatomy arises from the average artifact,
whose bones are built from banisters and window frames.

The structures we look through everyday become the bodies of our beloved.
What is associated becomes intrinsic.

Isn't that how we learn?
The things that settle when we sleep-
-things loudest grow taller.

Isn't that how myths are born?
The myth of the other person in your mind-
suddenly so closely related to your self-

-A distant relative of your first memory.

-An angel to early man.



* THESE PAINTINGS ARE 6 FEET BY 4.5 FEET IN SIZE *