Consider this:

Consider this, dear reader. Consider the notion that what attracted me to painting mammograms was what I called their false abstraction. Their factual relationship to a given breast undone by their seeming visual disconnect. This being the rationale behind changing this...



to this...



Which hurt, because there's something about the first one that got lost in the second. Anyway, then, somewhere along the line, the whole white tape business raised it's head. Which I liked, even though it's fraught with problems.

And then all I could think about was jellyfish.



I mean, who wouldn't? So then I thought, hmmm.

If you paint abstractly, even for a little bit, you come to realize that the biggest cop-out in the world is rotating the painting. The reasons are too complex to enumerate here, other than to say that there's supposed to be an idea, a structure, behind abstract painting, and that as part of that idea you should know where the top and bottom of the goddam things are. By and large.

I say by and large because everything I just said isn't necessarily true. But still, there's an implied cluelessness to the idea that you've finished painting an abstract painting and you find out that you like it better lying on its side than you do upright. If that's even the right word.

I mean, do you think Mark Rothko ever thought of laying this bad boy over on it's side?



All that said, these paintings aren't abstractions. They're mammograms. Or half-moons seen through powerful telescopes. Or jellyfish. All of which makes me think that perhaps the best way to view "Ophelia's Left Breast (Swart, K: right breast. 5/11/09)" [the new, improved title of what heretofore has been called a number of things] is like this:



Interesting. I like the tape better this way. Maybe I should call it "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (Swart, K: rt. breast. 9/11/09)" in honor of my favorite Met ever.