during & afterTotal Lunar Eclipse 26/8/07 for Rachel Defay-Liautard

Tuesday 26 Auguast 2007 between 4:00 am and 6:15 am there was a Total Lunar Eclipse here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin usa

I made this painting/rubBEing during the eclipse--

later in the day, at the same site, an old decrepit multi- open-roomed garage building in the alley where i have worked for years was being torn down, smashed to pieces by a huge bulldozer/crane-shovel. In very bad weather i used to go in one of the empty abandoned "rooms" and paint or make rubBEings with materials i carry in my shoulder bag and backpack. It was sad to see the garage looking like a shattered structure in Gaza.

Due to the destruction, however, I was able to remove with a free conscience the metal door to an old unused chimney flue--a great art supply/souvenir of my old "studio" which i had worked with and looked at longingly for a long time!

I also found a piece of shattered piping with at one end an ornate flower pattern. On the pipe, which was torn in half vertically, were the mysterious and incredibly, completely appropriate words "(T)OTAL ECLIPSE"!!

So I came home at the end of the day with two new art materials to work with the rest of my life, living mementos of the garage and eclipse's passing through time.

An intersecting of materials and events in time that will continue "re-producing," re-generating the garage and eclipse's scattered fragments in many many works--