me work can go mad. It’s like watching a tailor working carefully, with good material and fancy stitches, sewing up a coat with one arm longer than the other or with no neckhole.
The point is, there’s no sense in imitating life, or representing it; it must be invented, imagined. This does not necessarily mean abstract or nonobjective objects or theatrical distortions or strained efforts at intellectual composition either. Those are the easy ways, avoidance systems. One needs to show life the way one sees it personally, the way it is felt.
So, in the end, my own particular paintings come out a bit crooked in ten different directions. OK, so that’s the way I am. I struggle to show my personal reality, the only one I know. I try to paint it carefully with full attention and much love.
GETTING LOST IN THE SPACES BETWEEN,
A GENTLE LEANING TOWARD EACH OTHER.
When I’m actually painting somebody, they see me staring, poking at the canvas with my brush, leaning in, backing off; I’m trying not to jump up and down. Once in a while I remember to smile. I want them to stay with me, not run away or disappear. Most people think I’m painting them. Actually, I’m painting the taste, the smell, the space they’re taking up. I’m trying to paint them all the way from fetus to corpse, and all in one moment, all in one place.
They see me paint one ear too high or too red. The painting looks like Eisenhower or Uncle Jim in 1962, and they get nervous, restless. Sometimes they giggle, or laugh!
God in heaven, this is a serious business: it’s a painting; I’m digging inside both of us and trying to put it in one place. We’re damned close to communication, a serious effort to glue things together.
By the end of a painting I’m sweating down to my shoes, toes are squishing around in sweat pools. Did Rembrandt paint Hendrikje Stoffels the way she looked? Hell, in five different paintings she looks like five different people. She probably was, and he loved all of her. It’s the all of things that’s beautiful; a painter’s got to paint past the flickers, somehow. Or at least convince himself and a few other people that he has.
BLEND A HUSHED WHISPER, A SKITTERING
IN ONE CORNER; THE TASTE OF SMELL.
I stand; go to the toilet. I sit down again and stare into the mirror some more. Haven’t actually been looking at myself enough lately; been looking at a memory. I know I’m a vain bastard but I never really look close except when I paint me. It’s as if I’m only checking my watch, checking to see how long it is till something, not looking to see what time it actually is; how much time I’ve spent, how much I might have left.
I look at the old ‘visage’. It’s aging faster. There’s more sag in the eye sockets and dark purple-blue smudges, more veins breaking out in the cheeks. I look like a fatal terminal all right. It’s about time. God it’s hard to know when to give up and let yourself start dying.
There’s practically no hair on top and the beard’s almost pure white. I rub some yellow ochre and black into the beard; gives about the right color. That looks better. A beard hides most of the ordinary muscle sag; terrific advantage. I wonder why women don’t have beards. Probably men needed them to absorb hard punches; men’ve been living the physical dominance stupidity a long time, women have maybe learned to take those socks and keep on with it. No hairy hidings.
One thing, if women did grow beards, they sure as hell wouldn’t shave them off. They’d make something beautiful of them, the way they have with tits.
I’M TRUE, SO ARE YOU AND SO WE
LIE. BECAUSE, TO TELL THE
TRUTH, WE BOTH LIE. YOU AND I.
I get to work on the underpainting; transparents. I’m working fast with a big brush. It’s terrific doing self-portraits; only posing when I’m looking, nothing wasted. I’m into it.
He twists his head, stares out the corners of his eyes: suspicious-looking bastard; gazes out as if he doesn’t want to look anymore; getting harder all the time. Put that in there, Scum, get that. If you’re not honest here, you’re nothing. But remember, always distrust professed honesty. It’s the ultimate con job.
I’m laying me in down to the waist; maybe I’ll do the hands, put the brush in my right hand. I tone ground with burnt sienna, use a cloth for wiping in the main forms; work up shading and volume.
FIRST IN EARTH, THEN AERATED. WE’RE
CARELESSLY CREATED TO FIGHT THROUGH
TIME AND SPACE TO OUR PROPER PLACE,
TO DIRT.
It’s time to thicken the medium; build up my darks. I start brushing in cool colors, beginning movements from the light side; pushing colors in under where the impasto’s going to be.
Look at those stupid eyes; they’re staring back with such intensity, as if it matters. Get that, too, Scum! Work that in! Boar’s whiskers, you really love yourself you broken-down fart; what else, who else. All painters love themselves or they wouldn’t do it; writers too, probably; I think old Camus even said it once.
I start mucking in the background; moving out there some of what’s happening inside. Now grab that kink around the nose and make it show again up here in the right corner. I’m happy, juggling two, three dimensions simultaneously. It’s enough to make one want to stay alive. It’s all lies, one bigger than the other. OK, make the hard one truer; paint it louder.
I squeeze gobs of opaque paint on the palette: titanium white, all the cadmiums. STOP! Careful with those cadmiums, Scum; use burnt umber, more raw sienna, yellow ochre, our kind of colors, cheap colors. I’m the earth-color man; Scum of the earth. Let’s not forget!
CAN WE EVER BE FORGIVEN
THE MOMENTS OF OUR BLISS:
THE TINY CRACKS IN LIFE
THAT AREN’T JUST LIKE THIS?
Now we’re backing in. Picking out the highest points with light. Fan the white bleeding away into rolls of color and darkness across the forehead and into the penumbra. Make it live! I’m alive now, breathing through my brushes; color like blood, light like oxygen.
We need to keep my brush in close; laying it in carefully, deeply, with strong tenderness. Yellow next to orange and then together. Make it stand up. Light! Light it!
Goddamn Scum! Now drift back with the highs fading away. Gently scumble. Scumble, you scum; pearl away, fade back but still keep it close; help those sharp edges move together. Birth the lie into life; squeeze in that missing ‘f’. Only a word, but first was the word. No, first and last is the void.
I smell myself: part oil, part sweat, all horseshit. Here I am, laughing at me laughing at myself and crying at the laughing. I wasted valuable years trying to be a serious Dostoevski type, a latter-day van Gogh. Then I buttered myself deep with Middle European suffering, Sturm und Drang; after that, I experimented with nineteenth-century melodrama. Now I’m cried out, dried out. All I ask is something to make some reason – now, before it’s too late. How dumb can you get?
LISTLESS LISTENING, CRYING, SCREAMING,
ALL WATER ON WATER. AN ENDLESS FLOWING.
ANOTHER PROOF
