Fluxie Sings the Blues
Ron Bass
Fluxie is a rescue dog, a mutt. Two years ago I went to the Animal
Control Center on E.110th Street. We made eye contact and she came
home with me. Fluxie’s full name is Fluxie R. Mutt. Her purposefully
anarchic nature led me inexorably to this name for her. One afternoon,
about six months after her arrival, I was working on an acrylic
painting of “Jeff Koons Creating ‘Michael Jackson Suckling Romulus and
Remus at the Founding of Rome’” -- this is a painting that comprises
one of the gates of a large mandala I was working on at the time. The
painting was about ninety percent done. There was some detail work on
Jeff Koons left to finish, plus the lotus motif around the borders,
that’s all. The study was primarily in ochre. I had Bronzino and
Goltzius in mind while I was creating it. I had just prepared some
International Klein Blue to do the lotus pattern in but I hadn’t
applied any of it yet. Well anyway, that afternoon I took a phone call
from my dealer into the library and I must have inadvertently closed
the door on Fluxie, trapping her inside the studio. Being who she is,
she knocked over the easel and my palette. The canvas landed face up
on the floor. Fluxie landed in the International Klein Blue and
proceeded to apply it liberally to the entire canvas using her paws as
brushes. When I came back into the studio my immediate reaction was
anger that almost instantaneously turned into huge, cathartic peals of
laughter. As I was picking up the canvas the phrase “Fluxie sings the
blues” popped into my head, and I knew that with no further work to be
done we had just collaborated on a NextGen readymade.