Number 26
August - October 1999
The Painter
1989
oil on canvas
36 1/2 x 40 in.
CLICK ON IMAGE FOR MORE DETAILED VIEW
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI just returned from three weeks in
Europe. One of his stops was in Florence for a book signing and poetry reading
at City Lights Italia, a book store named after the one he had co-founded
in San Francisco in 1952, but not otherwise connected with it. A man there
walked up to him, "and he handed me a thousand dollars in American money.
I said, 'Well, what's that for?' He said, 'Well, I'll give you 2000 more
if you'll do ten designs relating to Leonardo Da Vinci. It's his 500th anniversary,
and then we're going to have an exhibition. We've asked 70 artists around
the world to do this, and the exhibition will be in Milan sometime around
2000.'" Turned out the man was Francesco Conz, a collector who had been a
primary funder of the Fluxus movement in Europe. He also invited Ferlinghetti
to his home in Verona, a four story building filled with surrealist and Fluxus
art by the likes of Dali, Joseph Cornell, and André Breton.
When Ferlinghetti returned to where he was staying, he took a supplement from the Sunday edition of La Repubblica-"sort of an illustrated history of art, 48 pages, saddle stitched. There was an illustration of Monet, and one of Gauguin-it went back centuries." He chose several pages, and in French, English, or Italian wrote "'Leonardo was here'-he had influenced all these artists. And on a couple of illustrations I put, 'Leonardo was here' with a question mark. And things like that. Then I did a little bit of collage on them, and that was it. I mounted them on story boards and sent them to him and he sent me $2000 more."
One of his reasons for going to Italy was to select the final versions of glass plates that had been commissioned by a hotel in Venice and that were being produced by "the top maestro on the famous glass-making island of Murano. I was in his factory for two days. I had sent him the designs [in black and white] several months ago, and they produced some trial plates, which then I chose among. . . . I chose two colors, two of the designs. They did them in cobalt blue on very light transparent blue glass, and the other two are going to be on yellow ochre. Basically, the design was Auroboro, the snake eating its own tail, which fits onto a plate very nicely. Did several variations of that. Now they're going to produce a limited edition."
A week before he went to Italy, he attended the opening of his solo show at Dominican College in San Rafael CA. Curated by Diane Roby, it consisted of about a dozen paintings on canvas or burlap, and a similar number of drawings, lithographs, and other works on paper. The paintings ranged from about 17x13½" to 68x72", and most of them referred directly or indirectly to such personages as El Greco, Freud, Ezra Pound, Magritte, Picasso, Van Gogh, or Motherwell. The works on paper included Serpent - Bird, a seven-panel suite of drawings in sumi-e ink on Japanese paper; done in Big Sur in 1997; it shows a serpent turning into a bird. There were also about 15 books, including such things as his most recent novel, a book of his drawings of the figure, When I Look at Pictures (images and poetry), as well as a number of broadsides.
