EATEN BY GOATS
 

In 1972 at the Yale Summer School, which was held on a 19th century estate in northwestern Connecticut, I came across a small herd of lawn chairs (the classic aluminum tubing and synthetic webbing type native to suburbia) in the formal rose garden. They seemed so out of place (as did I) that I decided to make a series of photographs, watercolors and oil paintings of them. The first paintings were large, on 5’ x 7’ canvases arranged into 21’ wide, panoramic triptychs. The landscape space was painted in a pseudo-impressionist style with overlaid patches of paint mixed with cold wax encaustic that created a pronounced surface, and the lawn chairs were painted flatly, as if they had been pressed into the landscape space. After I had completed the first two triptychs, Philip Guston visited to give a slide talk on his work. (This was a couple of years after he had “abandoned” his celebrated abstract expressionist style and began to paint crude, cartoonish images of common objects and Klansmen carrying nail-spiked boards. This work had received scathing reviews, and his long-time gallery dropped him. He was still clearly licking his wounds from that experience.) After his talk Guston toured the crowded painting studio, and seeing my disassembled triptychs he asked me to take one of them outside so that he could get a better look at it. I hauled the panels downstairs to the courtyard and leaned them against a stone wall, while he went to fetch his wife, Musa. When they returned the two of them stood in front of it and laughed for what seemed like ten minutes. I had intended some humor in the paintings, but I was bit surprised by how funny they found it, and was too shy to ask why. (I mentioned this later to one of my teachers and he said that, coming from Guston, I should consider it high praise.) For years I thought it might have been my romantic (or perhaps corny) coupling of Monet and Hockney that amused them. Or that they might have seen my pseudo-impressionist surfaces as similar to his abstract impressionist (as it was often dubbed) earlier work and the pop art lawn chairs to his current, cartoonish, vernacular imagery. I now think it was probably the odd composition that set off their laughing fit. One lawn chair entered the painting in the right panel, a second lawn chair straddled the right and center panels, and most of the center and right panels was an empty expanse of the lawn.

I returned to Seattle at the end of the summer and a friend and I rented a large studio in the Bay Building on First Avenue downtown. Over the next eight months I painted twelve or thirteen more lawn chair paintings. In some, the panels were oriented vertically to form 7’ x 15’ triptychs, and others were smaller, single canvas paintings. I crated and shipped two of the triptychs to Yale with my graduate school application, and some of the paintings were shown in exhibits around Seattle. Before I headed off to graduate school I hauled the paintings up to my parent’s farm and stored them in the barn, in a corner of the defunct milking parlor.

Years went by. The farm was rented to distant relatives, then sold to cousins who decided a few years later to resell. It was finally time to retrieve the paintings. When we entered the barn I was astonished to find the paintings gone. I immediately thought that they had been stolen. Then I noticed a few small pieces of stretcher bar wood with shreds of painted canvas clinging to them, and I recalled hearing that the distant relatives had kept small animals in the barn. I realized the paintings were probably used to make pens for them, and they had been gored and eaten by goats. I figured this probably would have amused Guston even more.