Billy Pilgrim is a character of time travel from Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
We are all Billy Pilgrim.
We are a mix of all the experiences in our life. Every time we interact with each other we are acting with that “Other”: our future, past, and current self.
“So it goes.”
“Ah ho.”
“This too shall pass.”
These are not just about sad times or about people dying, it is about every interaction and every feeling we have. We are all time travelers. You are a different person each day. You may bring baggage with you, but you might as well drop it. It will not be lost. Just a part of a different time. I am drawn to Kurt Vonnegut Jr because of his plain speech and metaphysical content. I feel a connection to him. I saw and heard him speak when I was in undergrad at Indiana University, Bloomington. He spoke of reading a physical book as a form of meditation and time travel. A few years later I was at a liquor store in Indianapolis and the checkout man looked spot on like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I asked if anyone had ever said that he looked like Vonnegut. He said, “Who says I’m not?”
I like the thought of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. moonlighting as a checkout man at a liquor store. He may have been time-traveling: researching the banal conversations of the everyday drama between individuals at an interaction point. Why not a liquor store?
The “figure” scoffs drunkenly in a simplified picture plane.
There are loud colors screaming energetically. Bits of kitsch or cartoon lines taunt my yearning to be a participant in the golden age of painting. In this post-image world some stories are told over and over. Each time they are taken out and retold they become more abstract versions of the original.
Unfolding the mundane until it is strange allows a back alley way into unknown spaces. By sneaking up on them it may be possible to gaze on the previously unknown. To see them like shadows playing on a wall or phantoms seen at oblique angles in a mirror. There may be a tabletop, room, or landscape recognisable but asking to be understood by its own rules. Gesturally applied paint sometimes creates figures and anthropomorphised elements. I paint this convoluted path so that I may stand a chance of accessing a foreign space that cannot be possessed through ownership or rationality.
Indirect observations arc toward revelation.