God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man--the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Go
Down, Moses
Down, Moses
Working on a new painting
Been thinking about this painting for a while now. Faulkner's "Go Down Moses" and all it contains will always be one of those milestones of influence that made me the way I am. The image of the massive Bear and the big Cur Airedale going at it to the death wasn't what I wanted to portray. I often thought about Faulkner, getting old and approaching his last day, wandering if he thought of himself as the boy Issac? wandered if he had actually experienced those "Big Woods" of his words or were they of his dreams? Wandered if he had ever been there, would he want to go back? Would he want see all his old friends, the boy Issac, Sam Fathers the General and the rest? It put me in a melancholy state and I imagined him and the Old Bear and the half breed Airedale "Lion" together at the end all frail, tired, played out, the man who had lived the tale in his mind and thankfully written it down. I saw the Bear leading the way, helping his creator find the way back down that dark trail into the "Big Woods" with the old dog Lion looking back as if to say, "No, you can't come with us this time."
Here it is at the beginning
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