as a pre-med student with a small scholarship from the national urban league—

  you loved biology, botany, zoology, chemistry & math,

  all these subjects you visualized later in your paintings—

  & though you loved accomplishments of dr. george washington carver,

  “felt something was transferred” to you being around his legacy,

  tuskegee didn’t have an art program, so you transferred to southern university

  in baton rouge, louisiana, where you first encountered art history

  then you got involved in 1960’s protests (you had already met

  dr. martin luther king in the montgomery, alabama protests),

  marched on the louisiana state government office building in baton rouge,

  the experience you encountered there changed you, you rode a greyhound

  north to new york city, jack whitten, & you passed a test to enter cooper union

  art School, the only black student in your class in 1960

  & being from the deep south, spoke an oral hog-maw chitlin dripping black

  alabama language dropping grease, none of your white classmates knew what

  you were saying when you opened your mouth, ’cept your white figure

  drawing professor, robert gwathmey—he was from rural virginia—

  who understood your down-home southern black dialect,

  “relished the rare presence of having a black art student” in his class,

  his affirmation saved you from complete isolation at the school, then

  everything changed for you again when you met visionary black print maker,

  bob blackburn, teaching there too, he introduced you to romare bearden,

  who called jacob lawrence, who took you up to harlem, hooked you up

  with another great african-american painter, norman lewis—

  all three of these very different visual innovators were very influential

  on your budding visual work, though in very different ways,

  bearden & lawrence gave you freedom to move away from narrative to collage,

  lewis helped you move from painting figures of black people to what

  they were feeling through abstraction—when you weren’t in school or working,

  you found your way to the cedar bar, met bill de kooning, franz kline, philip guston,

  barnett newman, mark rothko, ad reinhardt, all prominent white painters

  then you began hanging out with black painters bob thompson, emilio cruz,

  joe overstreet, william white, bill rivers, bill hutson, met poets leroi jones

  (amiri baraka), jack kerouac, allen ginsberg, ishmael reed, david henderson,

  calvin hernton, musicians archie shepp, cecil taylor, john coltrane, marion brown,

  albert ayler, eric dolphy, now you started hanging at the five spot—your all-time

  favorite jazz club—on the bowery, where you met thelonious monk, miles davis,

  kenny dorham, ornette coleman, jackie mclean, on monday nights you would

  go up to birdland on broadway, listen to art blakey and the jazz messengers,

  hearing all these great musicians convinced you to put away your long time

  dream of playing jazz saxophone, it was replaced by manipulating

  materials, making paintings, now this became your life’s calling,

  your dream of making music through the medium of sound in colors,

  became the solos you would have played on your saxophone

  when you had your first show in 1968 at the allan stone gallery,

  your paintings were influenced by the surrealism of arshile gorky,

  de kooning’s control over your abstract expressionist gestures,

  you realized after that first show your work had to shake off de kooning,

  move another way to express your own changing vision of how

  to make paintings, you built a 12 foot by 20 foot drawing board

  on your studio floor, got rid of paint brushes, made a tool, you called

  the developer, wrote on your wall “the image is photographic,

  therefore, I must photograph my thoughts” and you did so by laying down

  onto your studio floor “slabs of acrylic paint whose thickness” could be measured

  “without emphasizing the psychological underpinnings of painting,”

  you were interested in art going beyond the idea of self mirage designed

  by nature, prevents—in your mind—artists from penetrating secrets,

  “is why” you are still drawn to science to circumvent self, discover the root of being

  in a creative solo, a visual metaphor leading to “illustrational fantasies,” & you

  are still there in this moment, pursuing visual dreams made manifest

  in paintings you make, underpinned by music, metaphors

  of stunning visual poetry—an art beyond narcissism

  1: 1963 TO 1974

  it has never been enough for you to just dream art, jack,

  you had to see it in paint evolving, changing,

  because time is a permanent state of obliterating everything

  thought fixed yesterday, because seconds are constantly ticking,

  moving ideas through space, as in your paintings,

  jack, nothing stays the same,

  as when, in 1963,

  200,000 freedom marchers descended on washington d.c.,

  as riots erupted in birmingham, alabama—close to bessemer, jack—

  white policemen busted heads of countless people there,

  arrested martin luther king jr.

  president john kennedy called up 3,000 troops,

  while in the same year sonny liston knocked out floyd patterson,

  kept his world heavyweight boxing championship

  you understood time, like events, is always changing, evolving,

  nothing ever stays the same, so you created the painting, the blacks—

  after seeing the play—a work with multiple mask-like black faces

  against a white, anvil-shaped background, centered

  in a black backdrop, the image is magical, haunting, brings to mind ancient

  totems representing a cloak of evocative typography, conjures up a subversive

  agenda hidden in mystery, power, there are a series of paintings

  with strange looking amoeba-like faces floating up from below into view,

  pulsating from dark canvas, based on your memory of being told

  the tale of henry wells, a black renegade imprisoned on the second floor

  of a courthouse, in carrollton, alabama, on february 6th, 1878

  when wells’ face was seen by a white mob gathered below, come

  there to lynch him for burning down a church, when suddenly

  a thunderstorm bloomed like a huge flower in the sky, a bolt of lightning

  struck the courthouse, burned wells’s image into the window

  & after the storm passed the crazed mob broke the window, replaced it,

  but wells’s image came back the same as before,

  stayed put, even after the mob shot & killed him

  your series of paintings, jack—head IV lynching, head VII, head XI,

  hide and seek, the gray void, christ, psychic eclipse—all

  created in 1964, were symbols of process, paradox, your art reminded

  of monk’s piano notes on misterioso, the faces hovering in space, ancient as time,

  contemporary as life breathing new, mysterious in this bizarre moment

  then you left those dark images behind, found striking colors

  in ny battle ground (1967), martin luther king’s garden (1968),

  garden in bessemer II (1968), satori (1969),

  in 1970, your process, your application of paint changed once again

  a gazillion colored straight lines streaked across your canvases,

  from top to bottom—beige, gray, off green, white, black, brown—

  line the surface of untitled (1970), blurred, diffused darker in second testing

  (slab), (1972), opaque, though brighter—a contradiction? —in testing (slab) (1972),

  electric static, broken, diffuse, as in a sea of water reflecting black & blue

  echoes in space, breaking lines up in opos dipote (1973), began disappearing,

  smearing, blotted out, splotches of red, pinks, images trying to break through

  a sea of shifting colors here, rising up, nudging the surface, the influence

  coming from crete, where you spent summers now, experiencing

  the morphology of the libyan Ssea bottom (called lyvikon pelagos in crete),

  where you swam, went deep-sea diving to hunt octopus, saw mysterious shapes,

  giant merou, sharks, silver flashes of sea bottom fish gliding through

  ochre, green, dark blues, yellow, turquoise, pink colors, 100 feet down

  in salt water, where jagged rocks sharp as razors loomed,

  where octopuses hid in caves, flounder, all of these elements

  began seeping into the hues of your paintings now, jack,

  as in the cut acrylic series—the pink psyche queen (1973), lapsang (1974),

  april’s shark (1974), prime mover (1974), chinese doorway, chinese sincerity,

  all finished in the same year, colors dredged up from the sea

  process is important to you now, matters, you have become a sponge

  absorbing culture, wringing out its moisture, essence, what you can use

  to make your art, you would move forward from there

  1975 TO 1985

  now you switched the visual mapping of lines on your canvases, jack,

  moved from horizontal to vertical, crisscross paintings with occasional lines

  fracturing themselves as they sought stabilization in your evolving images,

  you were trying to capture the evolution of symbols in each painting now—

  very different from the ones preceding it—nothing formulaic for you,

  who never respected “cookie-cutter painters, who always used the same method,

  because painting for you is “creative flow as emotive response,”

  a kind of improvisation pulled from a conceptual mind, like jazz music

  riffing on an original creation in & from the moment it is forming

  then pulled from the void—womb if you will—into birth

  this process began a few years back with the faces in the window paintings,

  now you moved full speed ahead, reversing line placement in paintings

  from 1975 to 1985—gamma group II, delta group II, sphinx alley III,

  kappa I, epsilon group I, sigma II, tuf I, tuf II, persian echo III, annunciation XV,

  annunciation XIV, DNA II, holding pattern, dead reckoning I, norman lewis

  triptych I—all these paintings broke pattern from mapping your improvised images

  in the past, now you weren’t interested in progression informed by modernity,

  disagreed with the notion the avant-garde advanced time,

  thought instead hands of human clocks spun backwards, like a cosmologist

  you believed life was always out there in the world—like art—is essential,

  spiritual, in understanding ancient civilizations as maps,

  preludes to the present, analogies to work from, in your mind

  painting is not metaphorical but analogous to the physical world

  you live in every day, trying to understand it through creating art

  1986 TO 1995

  the garden in bessemer (1986) painting can be looked at from above as a map,

  a city landscape—streets, parks, blocks of square structures—

  with a rough, silver surface, glazed over layer upon layer of acrylic paint, blotches,

  appear white & gray, textures like wire fences—some broken, some not—

  jump into our eyeballs like an architectural drawing, without any bright colors,

  this garden seems unrelentingly gloomy, washed out, though compelling,

  as your painting mask of god II: for joseph campbell (1987) is also a map,

  seen from above, perhaps an homage to the spirit of campbell’s quest to excavate truth

  in mythologies, history, psychology, anthropology, archaeology, cosmology,

  in this painting you have fashioned a grid festooned with sudden bursts of colors—

  red, orange, tans, blues, yellows, browns—inlaid into blotches—or splotches—

  of gray, black & white areas, surrounded by what could be images of houses

  your spiral: a dedication to r. bearden (1988) follows a similar structure,

  feeling, only the structure of the painting evokes for me a circular movement,

  though the colors here are more muted than in the painting for campbell

  the energy of movement here sweeps viewers’ eyes from left to right

  as if we were experiencing a vortex of compelling jazz rhythms,

  homecoming: for miles (1992), for the great trumpet player, miles davis,

  who died the year before, is very dark—like his nickname, “the prince of darkness,”

  the painting evokes a sky, speckled throughout with white lights—stars flashing

  in a circle, crisscrossed with other lights, deep in a midnight, clear sweep of sky,

  only now the viewers’ eyes look upward toward a mythical heaven—where

  miles’s soul might rest—here we are struck, by black monolith, II: homage

  to ralph ellison the invisible man (1994), for the great black novelist,

  who died the same year this painting was made, it is striking work, a massive

  black head—almost like a mountain—dotted with multicolored fragments,

  the black figure is laid into a background of small white, pink & blue tile

  squares surrounding the massive head with no discernible eyes,

  mouth, ears or nose, just an impenetrable block of black granite

  has risen there, suggesting it is immovable, a force of nature,

  rising up from some mysterious place beyond our knowing,

  carrying a mythical visual power that it would not be moved

  these monolithic painted figures, begun in the 1980’s, became

  celebrations, homages, if you will, of genius human beings

  who made remarkable contributions to american culture, art, these figures

  are totemic in their presence, ancient lineage imbued with power, tribal

  even, though these totems move beyond race, gender, cannot be pigeonholed,

  are spiritual in what they bring to the table of what they do,

  whether it be expressions of art, the tracing of mythology

  through rivers of beauty, wisdom, these totems are conduits

  through which history flows, is fashioned into languages—visual art,

  music, poetry—are reminders of the past present here today,

  connective tissue to ancestors, they are elixirs, tinctures,

  carriers of miraculous substance, they evoke in us joy—fear too—

  in their presence, we know magic is here, along with mystery,

  add the transformative element—the essence of power

  1996 TO 2006

  the black monolith III: for barbara jordan (1998) is strangely diffuse,

  is it because she was a politician from texas in washington & it’s hard

  to feel the pulse, heart of a political figure, is it an elusive matter,

  since many are all over the place, this scattershot painting with gray & black

  small square tiles—though solid black in some spots in the lower middle—

  still has power, exploding matter spreading out from the center,

  brilliant corners: for thelonious “sphere” monk (1998)

  reminds of the Jordan painting, only with more color—

  red, orange, yellow, blue & green & white & grey tile squares,

  surround an explosion of black paint spreading north to south

  from the middle, then a smaller bursting thrust from right side to left side,

  then the flying high: betty carter (1998) painting is a change up, improvising—

  like Betty always did with her sweet jazz voice, wondrously sly & wicked,

  sliding through notes & chords of any song she rendered—

  bright colors—brown, mauves, tans, off maroon, green—

  with blue lines outlining shapes of figures, with two dominant ones—

  a big bold blotch of black—resembling a human figure, maybe a fish with fins,

  or a jet plane with wings, about to take off—like Betty?—

  separated from a smaller splotch of diffusing browns shaped like a head,

  surrounded by brown & green lines forming another head, set against

  a backdrop of small white & beige tile shaped squares—in all your work

  from this time forward—improvised solos—leads to vibrations:

  for milt “bags” jackson (1999), a very different painting in its composition,

  the way it is laid out with bright circles—red, green, orange, blue, purple,

  black, a yellow one cut in half at the edge of the picture, set against

  a bed of white & beige square-shape small tiles—a signature now?—

  the painting split right down the middle by a black straight line, bordered

  all around by rectangular white-beige tiles is a departure for you, jack,

  more childlike—the circles remind of lollipops for children—

  it is stunning, beautiful, so different from black monolith IV:

  for jacob lawrence (2001), a painting that returns to a powerful

  massive image, exploding upwards from the bottom of the picture,

  white, gray & silver small square tiles, outlined in red,

  set against a back drop of small black tiles,

  is a stunning totemic figure, a compelling avatar

  leads to your 9. 11. 01 (2006) memorial painting,

  after you saw those two planes hit the twin towers, jack, heard them strike,

  plunge like swords into the bodies of those glinting silver buildings

  when light glanced off the windows, you felt the plane’s strike in your skin,

  which moved, kind of rippled, like the building, then after the first plane struck,

  you saw a burst of glass shoot out, a chandelier of glass hanging up there

  in a clear blue sky, before it dropped in a shower of razor shards in a plume,