Painting
If you could ask Gerry, know that he would deny everything you read: even that he was a painter.
He didn’t dwell on aesthetics and he never took his art too seriously. He took on a brush at seventeen and used it for seventy years straight. He just painted.
He painted whatever he wanted and liked, wherever he saw beauty, which is what he looked for in life. He painted naked bodies and cunts and dicks and bees and blossoming flowers over the hanging dress of a lover.
He painted nature and the rooms he lived in, if they were beautiful enough. He painted the locations he visited, still moments to remember a story shared with friends and family. He painted to tell his story, to document his journeys, to portray what he found inspiring and what came up from within, sometimes through sudden and out-of-the-blue media and format changes. He went from erotica and Indian miniatures to Op art and then back to nature morte. Why? Because he could.
Do not ask his paintings to be an honest account of his life. Do not look in his paintings for hidden meaning and truthful revelation. He painted illness and old age, but there is no death and no loss. He shared with us in his paintings the beauty he kept looking for, the only thing that really mattered. Sometimes he let go and let some pity and some pain come through. Momentarily though, he was as self controlled as the lines and the dots in his paintings.
Sometimes he would suddenly let a splash of colour take over the canvas. But those paintings he didn’t like and he threw them away.
If you could ask Gerry he would probably deny all of this or maybe just shrug his shoulders. At the end of the day, he didn’t give a fuck about what you and I can make out of his paintings.
They are gorgeous, take them at face value.
