pioneertown.

I.

What if Alan Ladd, starring in the movie Shane, outdrew bad guys with a horsehair
paintbrush he wielded like a Colt 45?

Is that what the artist Shane Guffogg might do, if he starred in a Western?

Shane could paint bad guys out of the frame, like they

did to characters in Looney Tunes. He could rub them out
with gun-slinging brush-work, using Ivory Black.

II.

Shane the artist, playing “Shane” in the movie Shane, would knock back
a whiskey at the saloon, then paint the town Cadmium Red.

The marks he makes [the mark he’ll make] show that he’s no easy

mark, but a marksman working his Western experience into the picture.

I mean, he faces his painting like a sharpshooter on a Badlands street
wide as the girth of Old Man Matisse.

III.

Then how comic if Shane (as “Shane”) would drawl, “There’s a new sheriff in town,
Old Man,” in a John Wayne accent!

That would be some stand-off, though Old Man Matisse croaked in his own good time,

after decades of slow-mo showdown with Picasso (that asshole).

This cartoon shoot-out goes down against a pretend high-desert backdrop, probably
near Palmdale. But this backdrop is

IV.

a continuous self-vibrating region of intensities. [Hear string theory in the thought
of Deleuze and Guattari?]. But it’s also a still of a life.

The mark-making man draws a line in the sand, starting a war with figure-drawing.

Shane loads his paintbrush with liquid bullets of Burnt Sienna.

He quick-draws, using the Master’s cut-outs for target practice. Matisse slumps to
ground painted the color of Transparent Earth. Matisse sees stars

V.

in the Mars-Black sky, as he blanks out into the twilight of high noon.
Scribble, scribble; Rebel, rebel.

What a great scene! — [H]ow do we conceive the meaning of a line

that cannot be attached to anything we know, even to itself, to form a circle[?]

. . . of wagons, let’s say — but that train is the Shane-machine for emitting and receiving
gestures of non-sense language. It has already left this story.

VI.

BANG-BANG! “Every sign by itself seems dead,” Wittgenstein says, and Shane shoots
the saloon sign’s lights out.

The sign is pale-faced & hatchmarked with Golden Ochre. It’s nothing but brushstroke.

Squiggle, squiggle — Sheriff Shane

stands over an arse poetica that looks unconscious — the very picture
of the unconscious. I mean, all that’s glazed & glazed over in art history, & in Westerns.