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Acacia, as a serigraph, evolved from a collage of the same name that I did at one of the happiest and most creatively exhilarating times of my life. The year was 1976 and I was living on the "wrong side of the tracks" in Arles, Southern France, in a small isolated house not far from the railroad station. This was one of the most fertile periods of my life: I used to rise at 4 a.m. every day and explore all the nooks and crannies of this wondrous Roman town with its mysterious light and quirky provencal populace. In the summer months the heat was so heavy ("il fait lourd," they-would say) that by noon it was too hot to move around much as the air would sap all one's energy. The first time I went to Arles, many years earlier, I was amazed at how many of the locals would sit in the shade every summer afternoon and seemingly stare into space. Later I found myself doing the same thing - accomplishing my paper-tearing in the wee hours of the cool morning, and finding sedative activities in the afternoon.
There was a fragile acacia in our yard at the time, which captivated my attention for all the negative spaces between its branches. Sometimes the sky was so blue you could virtually taste it. The collage was effected by literally tearing out the negative spaces while grasping red and blue papers, then affixing them slightly off-register to obtain a relief or 3 dimensional effect. I had used this device many times before, as in the lithograph, Entrance to Infinity, at Landfall Press in Chicago.
In 1979, returning to Los Angeles, I printed the serigraph, Acacia, at the tiny garage workshop-studio of Jeff Wasserman in an alley off 14th Street near Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica. Jeff, who is now regarded as one of the top silkscreen printers in the United States, has printed dozens of editions of my graphics and assisted with monotypes as well as sculpture-fabricating projects since then. It was Zora Pinney, of Zora's Gallery in Brentwood, who told me about him. Zora was one of the most dynamic catalysts in the Los Angeles art world of the late 50s and early 60s, bringing artists together from Mexico, New York and elsewhere.
Some years later, I was still obsessed with those negative spaces, and did a painting called Acacia, using the structure of the original collage as a basis for a sort of stained-glass surface, with different textures and exotic materials such as polyester, poured in the "holes" between the contoured strips. In this way, I felt I was opening up, or pushing and spreading those areas to give them a more spacious dimension in which to exist. Hence the original collage became a kind of matrix idea from which I could generate variations in different media and, to use a musical metaphor, in other keys and tonalities.