FOR MO FOR AS LONG AS YE BOTH SHALL LIVE + D.I. 9-7-79

   That instruction is typed on the top card of a mason jar containing a hand formed "turd" of wallpaper from David Ireland's house- 500 Capp St, SF. Every once in a while it "pops" from the pressure. I just got word that D.I. had died on Monday. Of course the jar popped. 

   I met David in 1978 when he was working on 500 Capp and I was stumbling around trying to figure out how I could make getting to know a 12 year old art. We clicked immediately. He let me do a church and a whorehouse in 65 Capp. I have the "65" address numbers. His influence on my work is incalculable. Recently I told him that. In typical Ireland fashion he told me how I had influenced him. The man was gracious to a fault. 

   David Ireland went back to school when he was forty. He started doing beautiful complex prints. Then cement paintings. He caught up with art history and started to make his own. In the late 70's he was 50 and well immersed in 500 Capp St.- a house rich in history and surface. He gently revealed it all and placed himself squarely  at it's center. He lived in his sculpture.

   With 65 Capp he took a totally different approach, transforming a sad salt box into an architectural beauty, redefining the rules as he went. But always, David's gift was that as artist, as an accessible artist, lacking in pretense and revealing in his role, and place in the world. You could tell it baffled him. It was contagious. In his words- "You wanted to talk and write dirty and felt you couldn't while your parents were alive." 

I will miss him mightily.

-MO