This painting was done in Denver in 1994, but I’m having a difficult time recalling the exact details behind it. Here’s what I sort of remember: somehow I acquired a pre-stretched canvas, and it was not only pre-stratched, but also pre-gessoed (pre-primed). You can buy pre-gessoed canvas, but I’ve never done so. But somehow I acquired this canvas – it’s all a very vague recollection – I can’t quite recall how I acquired it (maybe I just found it discarded on the street? or maybe somebody gave it to me? I dunno), but this picture is what I painted on that canvas – but by the time I did so, I had removed it from the stretchers. 

I believe there was probably a painting either on the other side of it or underneath this painting. I can’t tell. I’m not quite certain. By the time I was finished with it, there definitely would have been, because all of the paintings I did in Denver in 1994, were two-sided. My guess, since nothing is really showing through, is that it was just painted on the other side, but I do know for certain is that the surface was very thick and slick – because of the pre-priming – which was different from the other canvases I was working on. 

This one was done – I’m sure – from a drawing, as were the other paintings I did in Denver, but this one is a little bit different from the others in that group of paintings. That treasure map up in the upper right hand corner is a very different sort of compositional element than I’ve usually used. I’ve never done anything quite like it – that diagrammatic – either before or since, but I really sort of like it. I wonder if the original sketch for this is in a sketchbook from that period – I’d like to see it. I like the mapping nature of it. I like the way that it all fits together. It’s really a nice composition. I’m sure that this painting was destroyed long ago because the paintings I did in Denver did not survive, which is too bad, but I’m glad I’ve at least got this photo of it.

Update: A sudden realization just came to me, which makes me conclude that the recollection above is either totally wrong, or I was right, but somewhat confused. The whole time I was writing about that pre-gessoed canvas, I had a sort of hard-to-pin-down memory of another painting lingering in the back of my mind. After I’d finished writing the above statement, it suddenly came to me – in one of those remarkable flashes of insight that our otherwise faulty brains are sometimes capable of – what that other painting was. So I looked on the website and found it. Here it is:

It’s really a pretty terrible painting, but this is definitely the one that was painted on that pre-gessoed canvas. The Treasure Hunt painting was likely painted over this, or maybe on the back, and something else from 1994 was painted over it – that’s my guess anyway, and if accurate – it was a tremendous improvement. I really do think that this is the correct recollection.

This painting from 1991, shows an evening by the fireplace with myself, my then girlfriend, and her roommate. The subject matter is pleasant enough and those were lovely evenings as I recall, but the execution of this painting makes me cringe. I’ve never been enthusiastic about the depiction of space, and here, I somehow seem to have trapped myself into allowing for it – I suppose in those days, I was still open to that sort of experimentation – especially when I was probably trying to please the subject. In hindsight – and I think even at the time – I knew this was not the direction to go. Eventually I learned to stick to keeping things true to the 2-dimensionality of the surface of the canvas. I feel much better about the results when I do so.

Further thoughts: I realize now, I had kind of forgotten – that the paintings in Denver were done on the unstretched canvases that held the painting I’d done in Venice in 1989, 1990 and 1991. Then as mentioned elsewhere – these paintings (The 1994 Denver paintings) were damaged because they’d been rolled up before they were totally dry, then had to be peeled apart, which caused a real mess – so the 1998 and 1999 – and 2000 – paintings were made on the (often torn down) scraps salvaged from those, I think. I hadn’t thought about that archeological history of the canvases for a long time. I actually think that some of the 1991 canvases, ended up being what I used for the Raising Cain paintings in 2006 – or maybe there were sill scraps from the 1990 canvases even then. I’m not certain – but I don’t remember priming anything new in 2006, so I must’ve been repurposing something. So much of this is so long ago, it’s just hard to piece it back together, you know.