No. 215. The Great Books Course.
He had begun to grow unaccountably tired of painting--and of sculpting too. He had never imagined he could feel this way.
All he wanted to do now was to read.
And the books he wanted to read were the tough, strong, sinewy books of the past. He wanted ideas, music, enlightenment, wisdom, experience.
Not entertainment
He was reading books he'd always meant to read but had never before gotten around to: books by Tolstoy, by Boris Pasternak, Isaac Babel, George Eliot, George Meredith, Robert Browning, Shelley, Coleridge, John Donne. He was in a somnolent ecstasy. Every sentence he read felt like a kind of healing. Any phrase, for example, from Browning's epic poem, The Ring and The Book (1868), left him cleansed and invigorated. This one is about jewelry: "Virgin as oval tawny pendent tear / at beehive-edge when ripened combs o'erflow...." "Beehive-edge"?
No, 214. The Kiss.
It took him three weeks to carve this alabaster sculpture of a clothespin.
He realized only later, as he sat regarding the piece in his studio, that he had made a sort of industrial (or, more accurately, pre-industrial) version of Brancusi's famous sculpture, The Kiss, from 1913.
But whereas Brancusi's stony lovers were bound together in their endless embrace by an inner drive of desire, the two sections of his new embrace were spring-loaded. Desire had been reduced to pressure. "A sculpture for our time," he thought ruefully.
No. 213. Nocturne.
Now that Colin and Clifford were making their rudderless way to Lunenburg, he felt lonely in a rather unexpected way. He began to feel the need to revisit his painterly past, almost as if he were seeking some reassurance that he's actually had one.
This afternoon he was revisiting. a painting from 2012 called Nocturne. He liked it better now than he remembered liking it at the time. He liked the dark, restless harbour with its solitary, departing sailboat. He liked the tremulous spotlight--if that's what it was--that seemed so insistent and, at the same time, so lacking in resolve. It was a harbour he missed greatly--without ever having been there.
No. 212. Oz.
It was a week now and his old art-school friends, Clifford and Colin, were still there. They were supposed to have launched themselves, by now, on some epic automobile journey they had planned to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.
"Why Lunenburg?. he asked them.
"It was all Clifford's idea," Colin told him.
"I was watching a DVD of Captains Courageous," said Clifford. "With Spencer Tracy and Lionel Barrymore and Freddie Bartholemew, and I couldn't get those fishing schooners and those long, deep swells and those puffing sails out of my mind."
"It's not like that now," he told them. "That film was made in 1937, and it was shot in the Grand Banks, off Newfoundland--not Nova Scotia.”
"Still, " said Clifford, "We might get a glimpse of the Bluenose. She docks in Lunenburg."
"From the look of things here in the studio," added Colin, "you seem to be feeling the need for adventure too. Longing for some sort of escape."
"You think so?"
"Well, what's that big green painting you're working o right now? What's that bud-like thing in the middle?"
"That's The Emerald City," he told them. "The painting is called Oz."
Colin and Clifford looked at each other,. "Maybe you'd better come with us to Lunenburg," said Clifford, pouring himself more coffee.
"It'd do you good," added Colin.
No. 211. The Crab
His old on-the-road friends, Clifford and Colin, had decided to drop by for a quick coffee and a chat--only to find their friend gone.
We'll wait for him," said Clifford. "Okay?"
"Fine with me," answered Colin.
The studio was unlocked, as always, so they let themselves in.
What they found surprised them. On the wall hung the biggest painting they'd ever known their old art-school buddy to make. It was raw, aggressive and apparently, judging by the plume of oil-fragrance in the studio, still wet.
"Recent, I guess," said Clifford.
"I'd say so, "agreed Colin.
"It has a title scrawled on it. He's called it The Crab," said Clifford. What do you make of it?"
"Maybe he's angry," ventured Colin.
"Or hungry," said Clifford...
No. 210. Storm and Meadow
It seemed to him that lately he spent almost as much time re-exploring his earlier work as he did making new stuff. Was this a part of aging, he wondered? The fact is he poured over early works with such rapt attention--and often with immoderate enjoyment--that he felt it might seem merely narcissistic, until it came to him that his interest in these de-archived works was now altogether new, primary, and even urgent. It was as if they weren't even his!
The piece he was examining today had been made--according to the scrawl across the bottom--on January 28, 2013. It was titled "Storm and Meadow in Contention," He loved this idea.
No, 209. Easter Bunny
"What on earth....?" exclaimed Abigail upon entering his studio.
He made no reply.
"Most people just buy chocolate rabbits," she giggled. But he just kept on working.
"Why so big?"
"I like rabbits," he said. "And not just at Easter." "What do you like best about them?"
"They're continually wary, " he told her. "And vulnerable."
"This one doesn't seem too vulnerable," said Abigail, staring hard at his twelve-foot plaster mega-bunny. "Why does it have to be so gigantic?"
"It enlarges me," he explained, "as I enlarge it," .
No. 208: The Red Buddha
"What's this then?" asked his next-door neighbour, Abigail, during one of her brief and always undesired visits to his studio.
"It's called 'The Red Buddha', he told her "I like the other colours better than the Buddha's red," Abigail ventured. "I really like all that gold, and that vertical streak of orange."
"What's wrong with the red?"
It's sullen," said Abigail. "It's the colour of hot brick."
"That's okay," he said.
"And why is the Buddha figure up so high in the painting?" "Transcendence,"
"Oh, said Abigail brightly, you mean like updraft?"
"Uplift," he told her quietly.
No. 207. Big Bird.
There were birds again. He could hear them twittering and chirring outside his studio window. Painting one was to be part of his Spring Fever. He was petty far along with the task when McDowell trudged into the studio and stood behind him, watching. "It's a bird," he said, answering the mannequin's unspoken question. "What's that?" McDowell asked him.
No.206. Independence Day.
"What's this then?" asked next-door Abigail, more to herself than to her friend's mannequin, McDowell--who was busy--strangely enough--adjusting the details of a big dot painting he was just finishing up.
The mannequin said nothing.
"Does he know you've started to paint on your own?"
More silence. She could hear the rasp of McDowell's brush on the canvas.
"I suppose you pick things up, being in the studio all the time."
McDowell went on painting.
"I'm going to find out what he thinks of his mannequin turning artist," she told him, in a tone that lay somewhere between information and challenge.
McDowell put down his brush and walked stiffly out of the studio.
No.205. Birdwatcher.
Suddenly there are birds about. Yesterday he saw a robin. And a fluttering of finches. After which he went indoors and scribbled a grotty little poem into his notebook--a poem he liked well enough to make into a painting. Here is the poem:
Birdwatcher
his face is blue
like the birds
but with
two red irises
for the cardinals
he watches
No. 204: White Chrysanthemums.
Normally he found it irritating when his neighbor Abigail would slip bits of salutary and supposedly "improving" poetry under his studio door, but yesterday she had rather over-reached herself. She had given him a tiny, haiku-like poem by the Japanese poet Ryota (1718-1787), both in a translation by Kenneth Rexroth--that he didn't like much--and in a word-by-word transcription by someone named Harold Henderson. This he liked much better. Here is the whole poem:
not saying anything
guest and host
and white chrysanthemum
He liked the poem so much he decided to take the miniaturization of the poem's chrysanthemum blossom and make an enormous flower painting in its honour. The smaller the poem, he decided--rather perversely--the bigger the painting. For some reason, McDowell sulked through the entire procedure.
No. 202. Quartz.
Abigail from next door was surprised, in the course of one of her unsolicited visits to his studio, to find two gigantic hunks of quartz, glistening on his display table.
"What's the idea?" she asked him. "You didn't make the quartz. It's not art. Why this veneration?".
"It's better than I can do," he told her patiently. "It's better than anyone can do." "So what happens now?" Abigail wanted to know. "You'll probably just get depressed, won't you?"
"Probably," he replied...
No. 201. The Egg.
Perhaps it was his sculpting of the large chocolate valentine rose that had awakened in him a desire to make more single iconic, nay archetypal, objects. At any rate, he had come this week to the egg--the exquisite, impossible, morphologically perfect egg.
The challenge of the egg reminded him of the reverence still afforded the 4th century B.C. Greek painter, Apelles of Kos, whose reputation still stood, twenty-five centuries later, upon his apparent ability to draw quickly and perfectly, demanding shapes like circles and ellipses (he is also remembered for a portrait of Alexander the Great which nobody has ever seen).
Plus there was a whiff of the transcendental in all this. While not in any sense a religious man, he had found himself inexplicably and, in a way, annoyingly touched by something he had recently found in a book of youthful essays by Hungarian Marxist critic George Lukacs called Soul and Form. As an epigram heading up one of his essays, Lukacs had quoted the 14th century German mystic, Meister Eckehart. "Nature makes a man from a child, and a chicken from an egg," Eckehart had written, "God makes the man before the child and the chicken before the egg." And while this had struck him as good biology if dubious theology, it had stayed with him from his library to his studio.
"Have you ever seen a large sculpted egg before?" he asked his mannequin and studio assistant, McDowell. "Not that I can recall," replied the mannequin. "Of course," he added, "I'd never spoken, listened, or recalled anything at all before coming here!"
"We ought to make one in marble," he suddenly cried aloud. "Why not?" said McDowell. "And paint it brown," he added. "Sure," said McDowell.
No. 200. The Chocolate Rose.
Galvanized, first, by the fact that this would be the 200th view into his Tabletop Studio and, second, by the fact that it had recently been Valentine's Day, Abigail, his next-door landscape painter, had suddenly presented him with a bouquet of chocolate roses, each bloom meticulously wrapped in bright red, rose-like foil. He appreciated the gesture (though he carefully discounted whatever erotic fervor that may have been nestling at the heart of Abigail's gift), and while he didn't much care for chocolate, he did rather enjoy the fake blossom's chunky, ottoman-like shape and density. Encouraged by the amusement of his increasingly sentient mannequin--now named McDowell--he had set about carving a large version of one of Abigail's florid blooms in wood. Both he and McDowell found it charmingly absurd. He did rather worry, though, about Abigail's suddenly popping in with a cup of green tea or something. He didn't fancy her company, but he had no desire to hurt her feelings either.
No. 199. Dummy Crit.
He was tired. He needed a vacation. The realization came to him quite forcefully when, in the course of a moment's contemplation of the calligraphic painting he was working on, he heard a voice over his shoulder suggesting some minor but important changes in the work's composition and even some ideas about improving the dynamics of his drawing. These unsolicited hints, it turned out, were emanating from his wooden anatomical mannequin. The upsetting thing was that for a mannequin, its suggestions were actually quite helpful.
No. 198. Green Bird of Happiness. He was so desperate for Spring that he decided to make himself a songbird. He thought he might carve one from wood. Or build it in tin and then paint it. In the end he did neither because, as it turned out, the bird he has envisaged already existed.
He found it in the alley beside his studio. It was very large, about three feet high, and made of metal--cunningly made, he thought. It bore a little hexagonal hole in its side that had once clearly accepted a huge key (now missing) that had probably caused it to jump about in a fluttery, bird-like manner--or maybe even sing. The bird had rusted here and there, and some of its exquisite blue-green paint had flaked off. The top of its head had been painted a soft cherry-red.
He hauled the derelict bird into his studio and heaved it up onto a wooden platform so he could study it .
The bird was superb in every way. It was of course mysterious--not the least of its mysteries being its sudden appearance in his alleyway--and yet not remote or off-putting in any way. It was a Bird Familiar. It was an adjunct bird, a bird that completed him and set his restless desires to rest. It filled his yearning heart with peace. There were times when he was certain he could hear it singing.
No. 197. Cirque d'ennui.
It is in the fifth of e.e.cummings' six nonlectures (now & him), published by Atheneum in 1965, that the poet-lecturer, quoting from his play, Him, has his spiky, autobiographical protagonist suddenly utter cummings' infamous oath, "Damn everything but the circus!" "Him" goes on to say "and here I am, patiently squeezing fourdimensional ideas into a twodimensional stage, when all of me that's anyone or anything is in the top of a circustent...."
He is used to feel that way too. He had adored circuses. He had met the circus train and watered the Ringling Bros. & Barnum & Bailey elephants when he was twelve years old. He had collected circus books and posters. He and his childhood friends had put on backyard circuses of their own. He had viewed Cecil B. DeMille's film, The Greatest Show on Earth, twenty times.
But the circus--now politically and environmentally incorrect anyhow--had lost its savour. Just as everything else had. He could no longer bring back, even for a nostalgic moment, the cheap, exhilarating tinsel and housepaint gold, the popcorn and candyfloss, the angel aerialists, the acrid music, the weary, evacuated clowns.
Was it age? Aging seemed to be eating away at everything he once loved--the way rust eats metal.
No. 196. Photo Op.
Recently, his hitherto highly private, indeed sepulchral, career as a painter had somehow begun to gather modicum of interest, and now an art magazine had dispatched a photographer to take pictures of his recent work--and, worse luck--of him as well, often posed (though he protested only as vigorously as was consistent with getting the job done) in front of his work.
"What's this one called?" asked the beleaguered photographer, fiddling with lenses and light meters.
"Tree With Seated Figure," he said. "From 2015," he added--as if it mattered. As he sat there trying to be patient, he kept thinking about the delightful interchange between Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine in the early minutes of Alfred Hitchcock's film, Rebecca. Fontaine is trying to explain to Olivier that her father, who had been a painter, painted only trees. "Only one tree actually," she adds, half-embarrassed at the recollection. "The same tree over and over?" asks the amused and incredulous Olivier. "Yes, my father felt that when you had happened upon something perfect, you should stick with it!"
No. 195. Oh Tall Tree in the Eye!
"That's a big Tree," observed his neighbour Abigail--who was never above highlighting the obvious.
"It's my answer to last week's shrinking before Armageddon," he told her.
"Why so big?"
. "It's the poet Rilke," he explained. "In the first of his Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke talks of "a tree ascended there....:"
"Where?" Abigail wanted to know.
"In the attentive, worshipful mind. Rilke described this visionary tree as Pure transcendence. Oh tall tree in the ear! "
"Or, in this case, "suggested Abigail, determined to be witty, 'a tall tree in the eye!' Rilke was a poet, after all, and not a painter."
No.194. Bird Nesting in Armageddon.
He had finished this small painting last night and then couldn't sleep at all because of the anguish it caused him. The biblical concept of Doomsday seemed all too imminent these days (how he wished it could have remained only within the annals of apocalyptic possibility), with the fat fingers of mad dictatorial man-children hovering like vultures above their red buttons. The nightmarish little painting made him feel smaller and smaller, the longer he gazed at it.
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