I had resolved to leave the Alaska of my birth, walking into a mist
of all the possibilities to be expressed in painting and through the
mind's lens of painting and the hands and mind of the painter and the
terrible infinity of the canvas. I was not good, until I was better; I
had to become better. And I saw this possibility in a painting from
life of a woman whose gentle power was so compelling that I wiped out
and repainted her image 60 or 70 times before the futility of it pushed
me to toss it in the dumpster.
Long gone, left in anguish on
that pile of garbage was the three by four foot illustration of her
luminous skin, her violet top, a wry smile, her maddeningly perfect
nose, all of this sunk among hundreds of distracting bad guesses of
proportion, color and light; that is the painting where I learned to
paint. I remember her sitting on that ugly beige sofa- a couple of hours
here and there. I remember my awe of her growing as I worked - my real
introduction to painting's ever-heightening of your awareness of the
whole perceivable world. I remember the futility of infusing the bright
colored mud with life, some echo of her being, resonant in living power
before me, and in memory; but was compelled to do so, to not just
passively see but to feel all of the resonances of that moment. I was
trying to illustrate, to empathize, to celebrate and impress at all
once. The painting was doomed.
One drive for making art is
hardly mysterious. She was beautiful inside and out. Her eyes flicked
with limitless curiosity, and her internal life unspoken flashed across
her countenance like a puff on the ripples of a ocean cove. And when she
spoke it was with quick wit, music and almost inexcusable wisdom.
Years earlier I might have tried a wheelie on a green Schwinn- I assure
you I would have crashed into the nearest ditch. But the motive force
is one thing; it's cheap, small-faced and unspeakably dull to reduce
human life to motive force. I fell for her of course. But bread is a lot
more than grain, water, salt and hunger.
It is interesting that
I cannot remember exactly where I painted it. 25 years have passed.
Maybe the studio downtown. I went through 4 studios in Anchorage that
year as landlords pushed me out when bigger money came calling.
A
few days out from the road away, I found this song; passing by late one
evening, I was out, she left me a cassette with this song.
It
is, by all rights, as sappy as as an old white spruce in late spring.
But it hits. Even Tupac loved this song, so much that his girlfriend
played it as he lay dying so that it would be the last sound he ever
heard.
The Art World doesn't seem to talk about Van Gogh much,
as famous as he is. I think we need to talk about him a lot more. Not
the pop culture version, not the over-elevation and branding of his
personal story, not the ludicrous string of half-scientific
"explanations" for his artwork.
I am convinced that Van Gogh's
best work is a kinetic product of him at his most perceptive, most open
to the truth, most magnificently and terrifyingly sane.
I think
of Cypress Trees. Simple trees, but each mark is infused with a wholly
unguarded connectivity, to the earth, the light, the living air, his
hand and eyes, the paint, all that is. Van Gogh was religious. The
painting and the act of making it is indistinguishable from the most
active and unguarded faith; I am irreligious, but at my best moments, I
glance something like it; any artist could.
While painting, I've
touched tenuously this connectivity between a person and the whole of
the perceivable world that comes through and is expressed by the act of
painting. That happened in little flashes in my garbage painting and I
saw, I think, more than I could manage- certainly more than I had the
skill to put in the work then.
We need to talk about what is to
be a human being, and how we build and recognize that, and grow it, and
why this is ever denied to anyone. And why this simple song is so close
to a truth of art.
Long since, I am grateful for the gift of that cassette.