THE GOOD MOUTH SMILES
TRENCH CONFESSIONS IV, 1998
Arteries of her granite will were dried and drained the day Dahlia Danton entered my class at the Abruzzo Art Institute in the summer of ’84. For her it was a junior year abroad. For me it was a few months in Sulmona, doing research on Ovid and teaching a course in egg tempera.
I punished her with work and wit and made her treat her talent with greater leniency. I told her to look up my good friend David Schoffman upon her return to Los Angeles and to continue her apprenticeship under someone even nastier than myself.
I did not tell her to fall in love. That she did on her own.
The Danton retrospective, currently up at the Kunstmuseum in Stassen, shows a shameless debt to Schoffman’s 1979 Battered Books paintings, a debt made more obvious by the title of the work featured above.
Love prompts David to turn a blind eye toward the lack of anxiety Dahlia finds in his influence. Or has he been weakened by her censure?
I punished her with work and wit and made her treat her talent with greater leniency. I told her to look up my good friend David Schoffman upon her return to Los Angeles and to continue her apprenticeship under someone even nastier than myself.
I did not tell her to fall in love. That she did on her own.
The Danton retrospective, currently up at the Kunstmuseum in Stassen, shows a shameless debt to Schoffman’s 1979 Battered Books paintings, a debt made more obvious by the title of the work featured above.
Love prompts David to turn a blind eye toward the lack of anxiety Dahlia finds in his influence. Or has he been weakened by her censure?
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