First, I am not a painter—an artist—I am a human being.  A tangle of body and mind larger than I know.  A man of lusts and loves, fears and hopes, a man who felt he had to make his art to know himself and show his art to prove himself, a man who had to build and serve a community of artists so his world would not die.  A man who was and is a lustful youth, a husband and father, an old man looking back over a wide landscape—yes, now all three ages at once.  I am not an artist (what ever that is) but a me.  And, as a me, I made and still make paintings and sometimes books and portfolios of prints that show and express my feelings and thoughts to myself and the world.

These are a few of the works I have made to do that.

And, before I tell what these works may say, I must tell about my education because that is some of the source of the work I have made and how I have made it.

My education…
I entered Berkeley in the fall of 1945, intending to major in Decorative Art (I had been told “artists never make a living”).  To do so, I had to take the first year architectural history and design, and the first year art studio courses in addition to the first year interior design courses (mostly how to make repeat patterns, etc.).  By the fall of 1946, I had decided to major not in Decorative Art but in Art—in those days, that meant I had decided to be a painter.

• In the Art Department….
  Erle Loran taught me “form” which I did not understand until years later.
  Ray Boynton taught me the Chinese brush with which I made my first breakthrough into the unconscious (but I did no know what that was nor what do to with it).
  Margaret O’Hagan taught me the power of raw color and the strength of art.
  John Haley taught me to mute color (but I seldom have).
  Henry Schaeffer Zimmern taught me to “see the whole thing,” as big as an ocean if that’s how big it is.
  Glenn Wessels taught me the Cubist analysis of form and that there are not one but many aesthetics—go looking across the world and its history for whatever has meaning for you to make the synthesis of yourself.
  James McCray taught me that sometimes friendship is the only teaching that matters.

 

• From exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum (now SFMOMA)
  during my undergraduate years…
  Franz Marc taught me the color of the spirit in his Mountain Landscape.
  Jackson Pollock taught me the heat of passion… “working out of the unconscious.”
  Arshile Gorky taught me thick and then thicker paint.
  Adolph Gottlieb taught me about signs and symbols.

 

• From books and courses outside the Art Department I learned of…
  Expressionism in Art and of Men Who Have Walked with God from Sheldon Cheney.
  I learned of The Spiritual in Art from Kandinsky
  I learned “Surrealism is automatism” from a conversation overheard in an art gallery.  (Surrealism was an unmentionable sin in the Berkeley Art Department.)
  I learned of Chinese art from a gift book from the Burlington House exhibition in 1937.
  I learned of Chinese poetry and philosophy and of Buddhism and of the far oasis of Dun Huang from my professors at Berkeley.
  I learned of the Venice of Canaletto and Guardi, and of the grids of Watteau and Hubert Robert from books I bought to feed myself when I taught in the Sacramento Valley.
  I learned of the Aesthetes and Symbolists from a late 19^th early 20^th Century series of books called The Bibelot.
  I learned of Rachmaninoff and Mahler and Schoenberg from listening in record stores and buying their records.
  I learned of Alchemy, symbolism and the self from Jung.

I also took a few courses in San Francisco at The California School of Fine Arts during the last semester of my Senior year at Berkeley (spring 1949) and in the following summer and fall.  It was that spring David Park taught me the complex in the simple, and that unless your art is first of all for you, why bother?  In the summer, Mark Rothko taught me to seek the unknown; and in the fall Clyfford Still taught me “This art has power for life or death.  Be responsible.”

 

And now, the paintings…

The man with the enormous genitals battling a snake,
early spring 1947, and lost/destroyed shortly after.
Sumi on newsprint, approx 18 x 24 in.
The first painting that I remember that made me really feel that something powerful had happened (and frightened, too… like my first orgasm—maybe I broke something) does not exist anymore.  I lost or destroyed the painting right after I made it, but I have never lost the memory of the making nor forgotten what it taught me.

The original work came about in the following way.  One fateful noon in late winter/early spring of 1947, I had lunch with three or four very intellectual graduate students who chattered on in a manner that drove me crazy with inadequacy, while all through their talk I heard Katchaturian's Saber Dance pounding throbbing in my head (that year it seemed all of the time on every juke box in Berkeley).  Finally, I left the table—I never saw any of those people again—went to the Art Department basement and began to paint with the Chinese brush, the sumi and the newsprint of my Professor Boynton's class the spring before.

I blobbed around the way Professor Boynton had taught us to make textures (and I had previously seen some Chinese calligraphy) and there came unbidden beneath my brush in the calligraphic tangle I had made, the image of a man with enormous genitals battling a giant snake.  Along with the image came that ecstatic uprush we now call primary process and a whole new mode of artistic making and experience that I had never felt before.  As I remember the imagery now (the painting was lost not long after it was made), I know Freud would laugh.  Looking at it with my eyes then, it was as great a breakthrough for me as the scream was for Edvard Munch—a painting I then had not heard about (our Art Department art history denied everyone except Giotto and Modern Art from Cezanne to Picasso)—or when a couple years later Jackson Pollock painted his One.

Remembering that painting of mine now, it confirms what I've come to believe has always been the purpose of my art: to show the tasks of my life at the times when I must undertake their work.  And it was the conflict of my overriding and polymorphous sexuality—as my girl friend had said to me, “ You’ll do it with men, women and dogs” (and even her)—it was the conflict of my roaring sexuality with my sense of life, death and human commitment, the conflict between sex and love—was then my task. 

 

The California Hills,
Summer 1947 and lost/destroyed a few months later.
Watercolor on paper, approx 18 x 12 in.
I had been wandering the California hills all that summer of 1947, smelled tar weed on my clothes, had my hands pierced by thistles, my face burned by sun, looked far off to bright skies and shining horizons, rolled in dry summer grass, and tried a couple of times to fuck the earth.  One night at home in my room, I finally got back to where I was when I painted the man with the enormous genitals battling the snake—but this time it was my whole eros flooding in the hills and skies of California.  A painting came that night, only a small watercolor—my room was hardly nine by twelve feet square—but it embodied my entire summer-long sexual union with the golden grass and dark oaks and clefts in the hills of California.

I pinned the painting to the wall of my room, looked at it for a few days, then put it away and soon lost it.  I was not sure what to think of it.  The painting was not derived ("abstracted") as I had been taught to do from forms in nature; it was instead only smears of paint made in a moment of ecstatic recollection of oneness with nature herself.  Such a work as I had made that night was completely unthinkable for all right thinking people at Berkeley where the most advanced way of working was Picasso's flat-pattern cubism.

I now think that summer 1947 painting was an adumbration of what in New York a few years later Harold Rosenberg would call Action Painting and Thomas Hess would call Abstract Expressionism.  The arena of my action that night was the painting on which I was working; and so I guess I had wandered into Action Painting.  The abstraction that resulted from my actions was certainly the expression of my sexual involvement with the landscape of Central California—so, that little lost watercolor must have been Abstract Expressionist.  But I was a sophomore living in Oakland, my teachers were epigones of the School of Paris, and New York was stealing Modern Art from Paris to become for a time the center of the art world.  None of this means that I was original.  It means that common critical/analytical ways of thinking about art are false.  There is no "originating center" for this or that movement, a movement which is then "mainstream" and from which all other artistic activities are trickling ditches.  Everything that can happen is happening in many places at once, wherever the souls of the artists need it enough.  It is only writers who have not heard of it and so do not write about it and so we do not read about it and so we think it does not exist.  But it does, in every soul which cries out.