LANDFILL OMEGA

All my life I`ve had my hands on bits and pieces of funny trifles,...miniscule thing-a-ma-giggies or scraps of ephemera that I sometimes have considered as art-but what I really mean-is rather simple products of everyday life-odds and ends that are usually only scrutinized by garbologists (you may want to hum "Fresh Garbage" by Spirit here). With "Landfill Omega" I decided to get my ya-yas out and create a collage with a wide variety of media. In this one I used oil paints, acrylic paints, photographs, xeroxes, molding paste, interior flat wall paint, movie ticket stubs, and film negatives. I thought of the concept while I was taking a shower one morn, and thus I fancied it would be a Neo-Platonic expression of perfection, GOOD ideals that exist dormantly in the Solar Plexis. The ideals that I chose were: PEACE, HARMONY, NON-VIOLENCE, BENEVOLENCE, IMAGINE, & SOLAR-LOVE. I had been reading about the Egyptian Pharoah Akhenaten and his non-traditional worship of the sun. This appealed to me, and I decided to create a cosmos with a Sun God in the center, and all of the other perfections radiating outward, and flinging their spendour throughout my personal synthetic universe. I was also thinking of the Beatles` song "Here Comes the Sun King"...yea that was cascading through my mind!

This shot above is simply the center of the work. I painted a small Greek God for the central portrait. The large acrylic rays project out from the center, beaming the ideals down on ye sinful mortals in an effort to cleanse y`all of fatal flaws, such as: WAR, VIOLENCE, HATRED, JEALOUSY ETC...Not a bad idea in a more perfect world! There are flourishes of house paint done in a Jackson Pollack technique of random droplets of paint or color flecks flung about whimsically. Just below LOVE is a photo of a work by Violet (I lost track of her a few years back), who paints within the Futuristic School, by my way of thinking, where globs of paint hold pulsating energy, or spiritually charged ions of energy, that radiate forth into the atmosphere, and electrify you just like a battery charger will revivify a cheap cell phone. To the top is a photo of some masks that I shot at the cactus nursery, The Living desert, that I go to frequently out by Lake Travis. I can gain more creativity in a couple of hours, when I go there, than I can obtain in a lifetime at my microscopic downtown condo! And by the way, the bars are piled with paint, in order to emphasize the intensity of the solar rays that project the ideals. On the right is a negative film strip. The colors are bright, intense, even psychedelic-but this was purposely done to draw your attention to the ideals, which have been buried `neath some cobwebs of propaganda by the Current Regime (see The Children of Men again to get the right feel of my message here).

Above is more the top of the painting. It has the two movie ticket stubs of Slither and The DaVinci Code, so it was about a year ago that I was working on this baby. There are two Mona Lisa images to the top and also two Quadrafoils. I got this idea when I read an interesting NY Times piece in the Science Times section that is published on Tuesdays. John Noble Wilford had written a piece about the Mayans and Quadrafoils had been discussed as a symbol that represented the Mayan Cosmos; anyway, I figured that if it was good enough for the Mayans, then it was fine for Bovee! For the title of landfill it is pretty obvious, as that is where we as a society dump everything that we do not want. This is also what I did, and stuck all the disposable junk, that was hangin` `bout my pad, on the canvas to create a piece of catch-all art, or maybe scrap-yard-art might apply. I suppose this is Freudian in a way, with beaucoup fallic symbols tossed in, but this is the good subconscious, the white witch of the mind. For omega it is a: subatomic particle in the baryon family having a mass 3,276 times that of the electron, a negative electric charge, ...a yea...that is what I meant...or maybe it is a reference to a fraternity house such as in Animal House.

This is the bottom section above, and it has two more Quadrafoils, two more Mona Lisa`s, a photo of my work L, a snap of me, and two images of Andre The Giant. I included him because he is in a lot of street art around here and he seems to represent something important, but I don`t know exactly what that is? I saw him once in Dallas at the Sportatorium, and he leaves a permanent imprint on your brain, as if you have seen Goliath hisself from the Olde Testament!

III

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

To sage or poet these responses given-

Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavor,

Frail spells-whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,

From all we hear and all we see,

Doubt, chance and mutability.

Thy light alone-like mist o`er mountain driven,

Or music by the night-wind sent

Through strings of some still instrument,

Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life`s unquiet dream.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY