This canvas was begun in 1992 as a joke on a friend. At the time he had a painfully small garage apartment, a single bedroom, a small living room and kitchen, and a tiny bath, and as you entered the door and passed through the kitchen there was a blank wall to the right that was, perhaps, intended as a dining room nook. This blank white wall was just about 7' across, and as there was no table or anything there it was very strikingly empty. I laughingly told David that I was going paint him a canvas 6' across, to fill that place perfectly, and I'm certain he answered with a smart-ass comment of some sort, which led me, that evening, to saw, assemble and stretch a 6' x 4' frame and launch out on a painting that has never gotten finished but has, strangely enough, served as a record of my progression through the library of images that I have used over the past 17 or so years. Also, keep in mind that I had never to that point attempted a canvas much over 4 square feet or so, so at 24 square feet this was a mammoth undertaking for a young artist.
The working title was derived from a computerised Monopoly game, where David's username was "Satan's Birth Canal." Don't ask me where we came up with that, we simply did. The title birthed itself when his playing piece landed on the Free Parking space, and in big letters the game displayed "Satan's Birth Canal Lands On Free Parking!" So jubilant was the declaration that it stuck firmly in my mind, and was resurected for the painting.
I have returned to this canvas more than five different and widely separated times, for different reasons. There have been times when, desperate to paint and having no blank canvas I would turn to this piece, or times when I simply KNEW I had to put some other piece of my current image library onto this Rosetta Stone as it were of my progress. The earliest images I used are represented here; the artist's mannequin so prominent at the table is one of the first images I ever painted more than once, as is the pencils stuck in the rear wall. Sequestered in pencil is the shape that existed in the third painting I ever produced. The 'slain piano' is both an hommage to Dali and an image of a huge black piano in the old arts building where I leared to paint, a thing that always sort of haunted me. It is around this time that I was also beginning to be drawn to the idea of a walled space enclosing and 'presenting' the images within the walls, as if the painting were a stage play or a frozen tableau.
The torn masks were painted, I believe, on my second return to the canvas. They were also library images of mine, from the earlier days of my work. Often I rendered them either impaled to vertical surfaces or 'hung' on pegs or pins on vertical planes, and left to melt or sag. Here I took the image one step further along and pulled them until they tore apart.
Difficult to see in the pencil cartoon is the mantis leg appearing in the doorway behind the mannequin. This is part of the original cartoon I used when designing the canvas, and is one of my first images to be collected and reused. That exact image appeared once before in a very early canvas of mine.
The dark blue shells appeared on the canvas the third time I returned to this canvas, around 1994, when I was painting Deconstructed Wasps and was closely examining the bio-mechanical aspects of insects, particularly those with exoskeletons, and trying to ascertain the incredibly creepy and somewhat surreal 'manufactured' aspects of most insects.
The crescent figure with soft organics, centered by the three dancing nudes was added somewhere around 1997 or thereabout, during a very emotionally unsettled time. The original image was produced on a canvas at that time and given to an old flame.
There are many other autobiographical images here which as a whole cover the entire span of my painting career.
DETAIL 1 This detail shows a return to the painting around the time I was working with painting origami figures into the canvases. There are at least seven of my paintings extant, perhaps more, which have used this technique, including "Tyger Redux," which portrayed an origami tiger in green grass, "With Patience And A Great Deal Of Saliva The Elephant Impregnated The Mosquito," which was a three-canvas painting, incorporating an origami elephant much like the one pictured in the detail, and at least two others not shown here whose titles I cannot remember but which featured origami foxes, one painting of which was on a monumental scale (6' x 4' as I recall.)
DETAIL 2 This detail shows "The Sky God," an image I repeated in a separate canvas, earlier than this return to The Autoerotic Breakfast. I was at my friend's very small apartment late one evening, and as I recall we were listening to Mike Oldfield's album "Tubular Bells" in the near dark. There was a single candle standing on the floor, and just behind it was a stone cross monument. The air stirring from the speakers would move the air just enough to cause the candle flame to flicker and move in small increments, and the shadow of the cross cast from this small flame was spread massively across the back wall and ceiling of the apartment, and would jitter and flick across the white wall, giving every indication of a blocky man with outstretched arms, extorting or cajoling us to some unknown behaviour. He is recreated here on I believe my second return to this canvas.
