McAlmon brashly turned out a review without bothering to finish the book, and informed Joyce he was planning to throw Ulysses out the window.  Joyce responded mildly, 'Don't throw Ulysses out of the window as you threaten.  Pyrrhus was killed in Argos like that.  Also Socrates might be passing in the street.................Write again when recovered from Bloomitis.'

~Richard Ellmann

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Into the Penumbra of the Garden
Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 30x24"
{painting alongside Ulysses by James Joyce}

 On May 17, 2021, just as hopes for some re-opening from the pandemic were increasing,   I received the following email:
"I am a professor of English at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX.  In November I have a book coming out with Bloomsbury Press entitled Hope, Form and the Future in the Work of James Joyce.​  I am interested in the possibility of reproducing one of your artworks as a cover image."

The author, David P. Rando and I worked for a few weeks .  We collaborated on the existing image and were assisted by James Reichmuth and Vince Bohner to have this occur.  The original was a painting from a quote in Ulysses.

My most exciting moment of that work time  was when he wrote  an email saying "I can see the light from Molly's window."
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"I have not read a work of literature for several years.  My head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up 'most everywhere'.  The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen, that and the nature of the legend chosen would be enough to upset anyone's mental balance.  I want to finish the book and try to settle on my entangled material affairs-----after that I want a good long rest in which to forget Ulysses completely."

James Joyce
~Richard Ellmann
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Milly's Dream
~Ulysses
James Joyce
"An unspoken remembered conversation with a horse whose name had been Joseph...."
.....a wee painting!
dimensions: 21x24"
sold

{see below}
-Title: "A spear by which a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten........"
~Ulysses
James Joyce

-Acrylic and collage on canvas
-Dimensions: on the small side, for me {I have to go; look it up} O.K. dimensions 24x30"

-dedicated to my sister, Deborah, and completed on the Feast day of St. George as it turns out!!!??
-{# 6 of Ulysses paintings}

Our exhibition at Pacific grove Art Center opens September 2, 2016; Echoes of Play and Peace.  Paul will be showing his acrylic on canvas works of night landscapes in the Sierra Nevada and Big Sur.  I will have about 20 works of Irish literature including the James Joyce paintings of the past 7 months!*  Please join us at the reception for a glass of wine and Amy's wonderful  Celtic harp music. 7-9:00pm.

Molly Bloom
~Ulysses
Acrylic and collage on canvas

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"At first he thought of constructing the chapter out of a series of lectures written by Molly Bloom, but he soon saw that it must be a female monologue to balance Stephen's male monologue earlier in the book.  to make sure that he could handle her childhood and adolescence on Gibralter, Joyce read all he could find about the island.  The result was that when he met a man from Gibralter later, he was so well informed that the man refused to believe Joyce had never set foot there."

James Joyce
~ Richard Ellmann

Bloom talking to Garryowen the dog in the pub
collage and acrylic
44x48"
 

Stephen's answer to his students when he gave them a riddle: "A fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush."

dimensions: 36x36"

acrylic and collage on canvas
privately owned Berkeley, CA

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Beneath Winking Stars a Fox
acrylic on canvas
dimensions: 30x40"

sold
Carmel, CA

"She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes.  She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been.  A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped."

~ Ulysses
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Painting alongside of images from James Joyce has been a very different ride.  It has expanded my horizons!  Less pastoral and rural...more surrealism, cubism! Walls become transparent and planes shift..... Heavy collage!  More interiors, more human folk, more pushing of the boundaries.  One large painting {the dog and Leopold Bloom in the pub, i.e.} is not on stretcher bars at all!  The canvas hangs like a large tapestry or a gigantic piece of paper on clips.  I really like it.  Whoever eventually owns it may frame it of course, which would be incredible too...even matted, with a white border around it, like a giant print!  That will be up to them.  But as is it looks very primitive, very strong and undomesticated!!!  I think Joyce would love it, and that is saying a lot.  He didn't care much about painting in general.  He mostly cared about things made by James Joyce.

*the Woman Delivering Milk

acrylic on canvas
dimensions: 40x30"
My first painting from Ulysses by James Joyce. 



                                                                                                                                                      

"Old and secret she entered from a morning world, maybe a  messenger......"

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