No.193. Janus. He never could bring himself to party on New Year's Eve. He much preferred to consign himself to his studio and paint right through the Auld Lang Syne night until the dawn. This New Year's picture formed itself into a massive self-portrait--or rather a double self-portrait. The trouble was the "new" portrait seemed just as fierce and dissolute as the "old" one. So much for the benediction of New Year's Resolve. Are we really doomed to repeat ourselves? And never to struggle out of prediction?
No. 192. This is Not a Christmas Tree.
He rather wanted a tree--mostly because it reminded him of the warm Christmases of his past, when his children had been young and there had been a turkey the size of the family dog (he was a vegetarian now) and steaming plum pudding with hard sauce (no reason to make it just for himself). But he wasn't about to buy a tree that had been cruelly cut down specifically for this compulsory two-week period of mandatory frivolity. Nor could be bring himself to purchase a fake tree--made of god knows what horrifying space-age material--and then put it away in a box, like a body in the morgue, until next year.
What he finally did was to cut himself a tree from a big piece of packing-case cardboard. His original intention had been to paint it lavishly with convincing ornaments and tinsel--an impulse that, however, predictably failed him during a moment of crumpling lassitude.
All he could manage, in the end, was to haul his cardboard tree up onto the wall in a tip-down position and leave it dangling there. This was not some para-anthropological attempt to negate Christmas the way certain demonic cults mount crucifixes upside down during their anti-rituals. This was more a palpable gesture of Christmas despair, of holiday depletion. Hanging listlessly down into space, his cardboard tree hung there like a jagged tear. In the end, he couldn't bear to look at it.
No. 191. Colin and Clifford Discuss His Work.
He seldom welcomed visitors to his studio, but he always made an exception for the the rare appearance there of two old mendicant, rudely philosophical cronies named Colin and Clifford. He'd met them in art school--so many decades ago!-- and saw them maybe once every five years. The funny thing about them (he actually found it endearing) was that, after he'd made them comfortable and got them coffee, they'd settle down, not to chat with him, but to look at his new work--and talk about it as if he weren't there.
"There's a lot of yearning here," said Colin.
"Searchlights and hot air balloons," noted Clifford. "Upwardness."
"Yes," said Clifford.
"You don't think our boy is waxing transcendental in his dotage, do you?" smiled Colin.
"It wouldn't be like him," said Clifford.
"Still, there's all this striving..."
"And buoyancy" added Clifford.
"Light-headedness," said Colin, with a smirk.
"It's untethered," Clifford decided.
"It is that," agreed Colin.
"Would you two like more coffee?" he asked them.
"We'll get it," grinned Clifford. "Don't get up."
No. 188. Jerome in His Study. He had begun collecting spaces--representations (either in paintings, photographs or in writing) of those places that made him feel secure, focused, expansive and content. He was continually enriched in this long meditation by his decades of reading and rereading Gaston Bachelard--his The Poetics of Space (1964) in particular.
He was always cognizant, in his searches, of the difficulty, for example, of what Bachelard refers to as making the inside of a space concrete and keeping the outside vast. In his architectural daydreaming, he longed, for example, for a cell-like space which was nevertheless not a confinement. He sought a place that nourished what poet Paul Eluard once called "the solemn geographies of human limits."
One of the spaces he loved--a fictive one--was the Saint's library in the painting St. Jerome in His Study by Antonello da Messina (1430-1479). An enclosure within an enclosure, Jerome's study is depicted here not so much as a room as a stage. Jerome has company in his orisons: a partridge, a peacock, a cat and of course, way over at the right, almost lost in shadow, his iconic lion--the one from whose paw, Jerome once thoughtfully removed a thorn.
No. 185. Gigantic Berlioz. He needed a break from tilling the visual fields and felt that a limited sojourn in music might be restorative. To that end, he decided he would try to learn the music of the French arch-romantic composer, Hector Berlioz (1803-1869). The pursuit swiftly turned from a dalliance into something close to an obsession. He hadn't known much of Berlioz's music--just the Roman Carnival Overture and the infamous and inescapable Symphonie Fantastique--but he now intended to learn it all, even the composer's almost indigestible opera, Les Troyens (The Trojans)--which was eight acts long in its original incarnation..
No. 183. Ideas. Well, the fact is, he had too many of them. They silted themselves into shoals of indigestible possibility. They coagulated into a bristling reef of notes-to-himself, a reef upon which he was more likely to run aground than to sail into some exotic port of achievement. His ideas were making him old. They came to him now as taunts rather than escape hatches or--as they used to be--intimations of mastery..
No. 182. The Artist's Brain. He had told Abigail--his next-door landscape painter--that he had painted a self-portrait. She was anxious to see it, and hurried into his studio directly upon finishing up a particularly bothersome spruce tree in her current painting. What she found perplexed her. There, propped on his easel, was a very large and, she thought, very dissolute painting, mostly in hot pinks, violets and fleshy oranges, a seething mass of heaving, breathing colour upon which, she found to her dismay, he had scribbled a title: The Artist's Brain. It didn't look like a brain to her. It looked more like the striving chrysalis of some huge moth or butterfly about to be born. She was glad he wasn't there. She didn't want to discuss it with him.
No.181. Alchemy. It was the largest painting he'd made in the three weeks since his cornea transplant recovery, and he was pleased at the runaway energy it seemed to possess. He liked the tempest that swirled around the brimming reagent and seemed to encourage the volatile, chemically transformative stuff he had imagined to be inside it. His visitor, a rather stolid and diffident painter named Lucy Cobb, hated the picture. "It's too patriarchal," she told him, turning contemptuously away from the rampant picture. " Too testicular." He couldn't think of an adequate rejoinder.
No.180. A Swinger of Birches.
Abigail, his next-door landscape-painter, had brought him a cup of camomile tea and a shortbread biscuit, and was (he noted wryly) predictably perplexed, if not downright dismayed, by the mural-sized wall of birch bark that covered most of one wall of his studio. "Why would you do this?" she asked him. He tried to come up with" a reason that would satisfy her. "I wanted to feel smaller than a tree," he explained. I wanted to feel engulfed by one. I feel the birch tree is a sort of ladder, a transit, to somewhere else." Abigail looked puzzled. "Do you remember Robert Frost's great poem, Birches?" he asked her. He knew she didn't so he recited some for her:
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
"But why would you go and plunder so much birch bark?"
"I didn't" he replied. "The whole thing is made of paper and cardboard."
No.179. Sanctuary
Ever since his left eye had declined into cloudiness and had been repaired, his gratitude for a clarified vision had burgeoned way beyond his lifelong romance with painting and had now reverted--or was it progressed?--to a realm of desire that dwelt in nature's minute, transformative moments. He was all at once experiencing a new hunger for trees, for hours spent by the shore, for animals of every stripe, for the vaulting birds, cloud forms. Grasses and weeds. He found the bushes of goldenrod burning beside the roads he drove on to be miraculous, manifestations of a floral El Dorado.
He was an artist and he had turned his back on nature for most of his life. Now it was insistently there again--as it had been when he was a child--seductive, promising, hectic and soothing at the same time--Andre Breton's convulsive beauty, without the artifice.
A couple of days ago, he had purchased at a garage sale a book called A Sanctuary Planted. It is by someone named Walter J.C. Murray, and had been published in London in 1954 by The Country Book Club (for "subscribers" only; you couldn't buy the book at the time). It's an account of the author's decision that, despite the Battle of Britain raging overhead ("War ploughs the heart and harrows the mind"), to secure a piece of land and plant a vast, complex, all-encompassing garden there. "I would plant a woodland," he writes, "where where every living thing would find sanctuary. I would encourage birds to come and live near me with trees and shrubs and mown paths, with food and water, and never the sound of a gun. And he does. That's what his enchanting book is about.
He entered the book as of it were an abode. What longings it engendered in him!
No.178. I Only Have Eyes for You. His afflicted left eye had cost him a month of his life (which wasn't getting any longer). It was a double-decker operation: first a muffling cataract had to be slid away and then a nice fresh new cornea--which of course had belonged to somebody else--was gently insinuated into his eye--where it refused to stay
Have summarily detached itself, this outlaw cornea had to be reattached. There were litres of improving drops: anti-infection drops, anti-rejection drops (who couldn't use some of them?), an eye-patch, and admonitions against stooping, lifting etc. Couldn't read. Couldn't (of course) drive. It was a sluggish, moribund six weeks.
In the course of which he squinted haplessly at a lot of eye charts. How hopeless their inscrutable texts! How maddening, the way they faded away, line by line, into into some wistful, unattainable distance!
No. 177. The Goods Wagon. It was fearfully hot, and it had occurred to Abigail, his next-door landscape painter, that he might enjoy a glass of iced tea. He was out when she dropped by. When she entered his studio, she was surprised to find that he had apparently returned to railroading in his art. The only object in the studio was a large carved goods wagon, painted green (he had once told her that in England, freight cars were called "goods wagons"). "Oh dear," thought Abigail, "he's planning his escape again."
No. 176: Onward and Upward
His complaints about the exhausted, detumescent feelings visited upon him by his big white painting on cardboard were mollified somewhat by a cheerful message from an antiques dealer he knew. "Why don't you just turn the painting upside down," suggested his waggish dealer friend. "That will perk things up!"
So he did.
And now the painting seemed as strong, as vigorous, as full of aspiration as he had originally wanted it to be. He decided to invite Abigail, his next-door landscape painter, to come and see it. "Well," said the always judicious Abigail, "that's more like it!"
"More like what?" he asked her.
Abigail blushed slightly.
"More like you," she told him.
No. 175. Detumescence. He was very tired. He decided to go back to painting again. He wanted to make something clean and clear, so he painted a white, two-element configuration (in house paint) on a huge sheet of corrugated cardboard--his favourite support for painting. It was only when he was almost finished that he realized his picture looked a bit detumescent. In fact it seemed as weary as he was.
No.174. Crown Victoria.
H e felt he had worked hard enough and long enough to finally buy himself the car he had wanted since he was fifteen years old: a 1955 Ford Fairlane Crown Victoria--the one with the green plexiglass roof arcing over the driver's seat. As a kid, he used to haunt the new car showrooms and sometimes felt emboldened enough to climb behind the wheel of these brand new cars and sit there in fantasy-filled splendour. Sitting in a 55 Crown Victoria was as voluptuous as frolicking in a jade-green swimming pool with Esther Williams.
The Crown Victoria was all light inside. The green of the half-roof bathed you in soft emerald joy. The wraparound windshield--which had been introduced that year, in 1955--left you floating about in industrial dazzle. Even the big half-wheel speedometer was bathed, in the daytime, in natural light, the back part of the housing having been replaced by another curved plastic panel--so the sun streamed warmly and wantonly into the instrument panel. It was mechano-ecstasy.
Ni. 173. The Night Watch. His despising of flimsy time and its meager passing had now refocussed on a loathing for timepieces in general--especially wristwatches. To that end--and he was aware of how perverse this was--he had begun collecting the most horrible, ugly wristwatches he could find. He cherished their awfulness. He ordered this one online from China. It had cost one dollar--with free shipping.
No. 172. I Am the Dwarf of Myself. These days, when he painted, he felt the presence beside him of another being. But it was no doppelganger, no mere double he felt there. It was, rather--and more disturbingly--an obnoxious, dwarfish version of himself, a creature like him in every way but pathetically small and, as he saw it, annoyingly ineffectual. He remembered a phrase from Nietzsche (he thought it was from Nietzsche) : "I am the dwarf of myself." This dispiriting little creature was assuredly far from Nietzsche's vigorous, terrifying Ubermensch; this little fellow was pure Undermensch! Annoyed at failing to find the dwarf-of-myself mention in Nietzsche, he came across something else instead. It was from Thus Spake Zarathustra: "Stop dwarf !" I said. "It is I or you! But I am the stronger of us two--you do not know my abysmal thought, that you could not bear."
No. 171: Floater. Perhaps emboldened by her ambitious neighbour's titanic wrestlings with impossible sculptural projects, Abigail, the landscape painter whose studio was right next door, decided to try her own hand at sculpture--and was mighty pleased with the result She was so pleased, in fact, that she called her friend, a potter named Docile Limoge, to come over for a look. Docile was predictably impressed. He's very big, isn't he!" she whispered to Abigail--as if the figure were somehow sentient enough to overhear her. "He is," said Abigail, "but he's also very light. He's carved from balsa wood. It's almost as if he 's not there." "He seems there enough to me," whispered Docile, trying not to stare at the impassive figure--who was wearing bathing trunks and appeared to be bobbing on water in a red floatation device--even though Abigail had merely suspended him from the studio ceiling with transparent fishing line. "I think he turned out pretty well," Abigail told her friend. "I think so too," agreed Docile. "Are you going to make another one?" Abigail told her she was. "Maybe you should make him nude next time," said Docile wistfully.
No. 170. Icebreaker. It had grown very hot in the past few days and and as a result, he felt compelled to turn on the air-conditioner in his studio. Dismayed at how cold it got and how quickly (he hated air conditioning), he then ordered the delivery of an enormous block of ice and--his hands freezing all the while--proceeded to carve a hefty ice sculpture--a battleship. He found it ruefully amusing that despite the cold (he could sometimes see his breath), the damned ship began to melt anyhow, its edges inexorably softening and its stalwart contours rounding and beginning to drip. After an hour of this humiliation--for so he saw it--he decided to make what he could of the situation, breaking off a shard of the starboard bow and plopping it into a tall gin and tonic--which he then carried outside into the sunlight.
No. 169. The Dunciad Ascendency. Deeply disturbed by society's relentless and dispiriting Dumbing Down, he repaired, a month ago, to his studio--which he was beginning to regard as part oasis, part outpost and part fortress--and, for several hectic weeks, laboured on this giant painted photo-mural. The thing was ornate, overworked and teeming with desperate if extraneous incident. He had built it as an elaborate shrine to stupidity. It's main objective, pictorially speaking, was to provide a kind of altar (hopefully a pyre) upon which was positioned an elaborately wrought Dunce's Cap, the essential, if archaic, symbol of vicious vacuity, wilful ignorance, intellectual depletion and moral emptiness. What was he to do with it? Nothing, he supposed. There was nobody to show it to. Tomorrow morning, he would begin taking it apart.
#168: L'Etoile de Mer
He had been reading books about the sea: Melville's Moby Dick and Whitejacket and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea--which he now regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written. And a lot of Joseph Conrad as well. Buoyed up by this new nautical obsession, he felt he wanted to make a sea picture. In this he was heavily influenced by the films of Man Ray he'd been watching recently--in particular an exquisitely nebulous, poetically charged work called L'Etoile de Mer from 1928. For his own piece--which was to be a clear homage to Man Ray--he painted a sea-creature, rather starfish-like, but more sinister. He made it on a large sheet of glass, using only blacks whites, greys and silver. When it was finished, the thing seemed disturbingly primordial, some cold, unknowable creature from the depths of the ocean, as well as a sounding from his own unconscious. It frightened him a bit, and he found himself growing pale and delicately imprecise in the face of the creature's imperious exactitude.
No. 167. Hairpin Turn.
"What's this then?"
"It's a sculpture."
The pointed and, he thought, rather abrasive question had come from the painter next door. Her name was Abigail Swan. She tended to make abstracted landscapes that sort of folded together works by John Marin and someone like Morgan Russell. He didn't mind them too much. And besides, sometimes she brought him a freshly brewed pot of green tea.
"I thought sculpture sat in the floor."
"Not this one."
"Well, if it hangs on the the wall, then it's really a picture, isn't it?"
This was a smarter comment than he expected to hear from Abigail. He was just about to get into a long discussion about volume and implied volume and fictive volume and how volumes weren't masses, when Abigail suddenly turned away from the piece and smiled at him.
"Would you like some green tea?" she asked him.
"I'd love some."
"You know what your wall sculpture looks like," she added. "A hairpin."
"It does?"
"Well okay maybe a safety pin."
No.166. The Cut-Out. He had become extraordinarily devoted to the use of corrugated cardboard in his work. He loved its abject yet noble mien, its warm coffee-cream colour, its democratic roughness and expressive imprecision. Yesterday he decided to make a huge cardboard still life--which he had intended to paint, the way Alex Katz had painted full-scale stand-up metal cutouts of his wife and friends back in the late 1980s. Because he couldn't secure a large enough cardboard, he cut his big still life from plywood--which seemed to him to be strongly allied in its effects to cardboard anyhow. He was about to begin painting it, when he decided he really liked it better just as it was. Although it was supposed to be a vase and a plant, the big cutout looked as primitive as the Venus of Willendorf.
No.165. The Kiss. He was perplexed about the shadow that so often fell between his plan for a work and the way it would sometimes turn out. He felt he too often lost control of his projects. This sculpture, for example, was supposed to have been his homage to Brancusi's The Kiss (1916). By the time he'd finished it, however, the work looked more like a giant clothespin. Still, he thought, the high-compression clutching provided by the spring, forcing the two halves of the piece together, furnished something of an embrace-like energy. It would do.
No.164. Odalisque. Last week, musing warmly upon reclining nudes by Titian, Giorgione, Rembrandt, Ingres, Courbet, Manet, Renoir, Modigliani, Matisse, Van Dongen and Picasso, he began a Grande Odalisque of his own. His supine figure, idealizable into roseate womanhood only by a generous elasticizing of the imagination, painted in black and white on a pink divan, was indeed so primitive in appearance, it more closely resembled one of Les Demoiselles of Picasso's Avignon than anyone he'd ever seen before. The figure was monstrous: heavy, helmeted, tomb-like.
But word of the painting had somehow got around. Yesterday, in the afternoon, he was visited by a couple of women from the neighborhood who, proclaiming themselves sometime-adherents of the Me Too Movement, accused him quite forcefully of demeaning women. He thought this absurd. If anything, he argued, the reptilian painting demeaned a great and noble part of art history. "Destroy the painting at once!" said Abigail Fortescue, who painted landscapes in a studio a few doors away. "Don't be silly," he said, guiding them gently but firmly to the door.
No.163. Anti-Narcissus. Five years ago, he had painted a very large self-portrait. This morning he got it out again--and was utterly dismayed by what he saw. The painting loomed up over him like a cloud bank, threatening, horribly belligerent and jocose, an arrogant, toxic clown, a Lord of Misrule. Was he ever like this? Surely the portrait was now a likeness of somebody else entirely?
No. 162. Blazing Cinders
Last night he reread Blaise Cendrars' great novel, Moravagine (1926), one of his favourite books--and perhaps the greatest anti-war novel ever written. Cendrars (1887-1961) was born Frederic Sauser, but he soon changed his name to Blaise Cendrars because that entirely invented name seemed to evoke the invigorating, Phoenix-like idea of "blazing cinders."
Cendrars' writing is never less than astonishingly inventive and lyrically outrageous: "--Turn your head a little," I would say to her. "There. Thank you. Now don't move, I beg you. You are lovely as a stovepipe, smooth and rounded into yourself, elbowed. Your body is like an egg on the seashore. You are concentrated as rock salt...." (Moravagine, Penguin Modern Classics, 1979, p.41).
Early this morning he began a gigantic portrait of Cendrars. Wanting it rough, as the writer would have wished, he made the picture with black house-paint, sweeping and slathering it onto the white canvas using a push-broom.
No. 160: The Polychromed House. It was as rough as a brick. He had come to abhor finish, detail, nuance and restraint. He sought the honesty of disarray, of accident, of the orphaned incident, the unheralded error, the sublime vulnerability of mishap. backlash, crust and crumble, the beauty of that comes to you "like late luggage suddenly placed in your hands" (Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton University Press, 1999, p.16), being at play in the fields of spontaneity and excess. He knew, with a certain skewed joy, that His idol, theoretical architect John Hejduk, and his spiky, hair-raising House of the Suicide (1986) lay somewhere behind this cherished abject object of his. .
No. 159. Minyak. He made himself a toy elephant--only on a gigantic scale. It made him deeply happy, in a surprising, childlike way. He called his elephant Minyak, after his favourite elephant in the movies--the big sweet beast that nearly lowers its huge front foot onto the face of a supine Gloria Graham in Cecil B. De Mille's film about the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus, The Greatest Show on Earth from 1952.
No. 156. The Floral Cardboards. His latest project had become his passion. Always in thrall to the elemental beauty of corrugated cardboard, the authoritative calm of its honeyed browns and its imperfect surfaces, he began painting big rough bowls of flowers, in raw black acrylic, on huge sheets of the stuff. He exhibited the paintings by mounting them, under glass, in ornate golden frames--usually Victorian. He loved the juxtaposition of his abject, upstart cardboards and the dignity (possibly an outraged dignity now) of the opulent, venerable frames which now held them.
No. 155. The Canadianization of Emily.
His cousin, Persephone, was visiting from Detroit. He had asked Melissa to show Persephone around until he got back.
Melissa: ...and this is his portrait of the 19th century American poet, Emily Dickinson.
Persephony: Yes, I remember he was painting writers last year....
Melissa: Well, this is another one. Do you like it?
Persephone: I like the window,
Melissa: You see how the figure of the poet is made out of sheets of printed text?
Persephony: Uh huh.
Melissa: Yellow and blue seem sort of like Emily Dickinson colours.
Persephony: Do they? I haven't read much of her. I do like that patch of blue sky above her head.
Melissa: He says that's a representation of Dickinson's thinking.
Persephony: Oh.
No. 154. Carless Driver. He found himself searching endlessly, obsessively, for constructable images of the leaderless society he deplored being a part of. This search was born of a restlessness he seemed to share with everyone he met, talked to, read or watched online. This week's offering to the oblivion he so reluctantly inhabited was a hammered sheet of aluminum, cut in the shape of a driver without a vehicle. The driver's absurd attentiveness to nothing whatsoever, his concentrated piloting of an entirely imaginary automobile, struck him as both funny and bleak.
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