The genuine thrill escapes the lexicon. These images have lives in other paintings, and they make stories of parts of stories, over and over again, for fixed moments of time. She may be overpowered by the forces she unleashes, feel helpless and hide, but then the painting dissolves and becomes another painting-a cosmology, a legend, a key. Memory and recollection operate all the senses, and language. A body chooses to speak through another body.
Painting is a living language.
The whole body of work has this kind of recombinative structure. In the final analysis the meaning of nothing is that fixed. . . But my spark, my entry point on this, the sand inside the cultured pearl, was playing with an image of intense sexual pleasure. JH - The octopus is her lover. JA - What we see is the pleasure of the lover, if the octopus is the lover.