fury and control

goya's paintings remind me of my first tastes of fear when i was a kid. the unnamed nothings that kept me from sleep after learning of possession and evil spirits in church. the day that i opened the book i was reading to the part about legion, and how my mom had to carry me out of the building screaming, with the open book left on the pew and the churchgoers staring after us.  they remind me of the places my imagination used to run away to after the veil was pushed back and i realized that the world was not all good, and i knew with my child's mind that i couldn't possibly understand. things were bigger then because they were all in the dark, and i had no idea their size.

oh, goya.

"goya was no more mad than shakespeare was when he wrote the mad scenes for ophelia or king lear. furious and inspired, yes, but infused with an icy control. and it's the combination of the fury and the control that announces the genius."

"i tell you, i admire him so much but he also frightens me so much sometimes, because the thing about goya is his absolute authenticity. you feel that the demons that inhabit his work come absolutely out of the center of his being. they're completely familiar to him. it's like he has breakfast with them... they are what we are, and he shows this with complete lack of any sort of embarrassment or pretense. you know when you look at the black paintings that 

there

go 

i."

-- goya: crazy like a genius