| About my work, 1955-57 Harrison Street and about the Blood Flower. (continued). |
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I also made drawings about the life of those small, old and dirty rooms at the top of the house, particularly the rags (in my case they were only paint rags) which I imagined once to have been thrown on the floors Although I was working mostly in oil on canvas or panels, I sometimes still worked on drawings of the city. They almost never came out; they were scrambled, muddy, thick, awkward, totally unsatisfying to me. Once in a while I did find something… like this drawing of rags left on the floor of the dirty pink bedroom sick with the smell of stale lust on the top floor of Harrison Street. *
First in the list, talent. What is it? You know, it’s a knack, an inborn ability that’s different from the competence (skill) you learn from years of practice. Some people have talent and some don’t. The ones who don’t long ago ganged up on the ones who do and convinced them and all the experts that not only does talent not matter, but also that it does not exist—and if there is such a thing as talent it is merely a manual dexterity that leads to superficiality. And, yes, perhaps talent can lead to superficiality because that inborn skill of talent is the ability without thinking and from childhood on to be able mimic easily and well what the whole world wants and sees as “good.” The question for the artist always is, do you want what the whole world wants? Is your talent (if there is such a thing) an obstacle to your speaking crosswise to the cosmos? to your being the person with whom the whole world is out of step? And anyway, when did it become a positive value to be out of step? And if being out of step has become a value, why is it a value to be clumsy while being out of step? When did clumsiness become the mark of sincerity? And when did sincerity become the quality overriding all other qualities? Wasn’t Hitler sincere? And does not the way these lines of thought come out in such non-sequiturs suggest that not only in the end but also in the beginning, they don’t connect to anything real? But we all know there is talent because we all recognize it when we see it. And it seemed to me in the 1950’s that everyone agreed that I did not have much talent—just ask the Abstract Expressionists and Bay Area Figuratives (the top artists of the time)—and my messy drawings proved it. Now what about skill and training? Or should it be training and skill? Don’t you get trained in order to become skillful? What training did I have in drawing? Drawing as we were taught at Berkeley was with charcoal in order to learn the basics of space drawing (but not linear perspective), differentiation of forms by texture and light and dark (but not “modeling” with values), organization of the composition by light/dark pattern, and the creation of visual interest by tension between volume axes and the format and the picture box space within it. We were trained to control space. What was in the space? Who cared? But if training is the development of skill, and the skill for which I was trained was the control of space with the medium of charcoal, how could I ever get any skill—except self-taught—in the use of ink and watercolor with pen and brush in the depiction of an old sex rag thrown on the floor? So, trying to use media my teachers had never used much less mastered (my only examples were the drawings of Francesco Guardi in a book I had bought when we were in Maxwell, and the drawings in the Eugene Berman book I had used for my ill-fated Medusa mural during my MA year at Berkeley) I came out “Scrambled, muddy, thick, awkward…” The space was scrambled (not a Cezanne still life rendered in charcoal)… the medium was muddy and thick—either begun with too little ink and then finished with too much, or too much ink all the time and the variations of the watercolor washes buried in black… the pen line did not grip the wash areas, or the washes buried the pen line… and as for awkward, when the world looks to representational art for the skillful rendition of recognizable objects in three dimensional space—looks to recognize what it is it is looking at… with everything else going to pieces and my complete lack of training for the necessary skills, what else could I get but “Scrambled, muddy, thick, awkward…” Well, having made a mess of the medium and form of the drawings, “then think about the content of the work—the source and method and goal of the artist who made them”. Source and goal… I picked up the phrase from M. Esther Harding’s 1940’s (?) Psychic Energy, Its Source and Goal. And I think every work of art has a source that is psychic—and sure there are social, political, etc., etc. sources (whatever the fad of the decade is), but at the deepest original root of the work is the person of the artist, only that. A society does not make a painting, a person does, and that painting has its source in that person’s experience… even that person’s talent, training and skill. But most of all the source is in that person’s desires for life and how that person has found in life to fulfill—or to live with happily or unhappily, in pleasure or pain—those desires. And so the source of my drawings of the rag thrown down on the floor of the dirty pink studio on the top floor of our Harrison Street house was my projection of all my own darkest dirtiest sexual desires onto the people who had lived in these top floor rooms before us, and from my use of an old rag to mop up stains on the floor, projecting onto that rag all the wasted semen of a thousand imaginary sadistic couplings on hot summer afternoons in finger stained dirty pink rooms… couplings born of empty lives for whom sex was an addiction—a cheap ecstasy—like I remembered Schopenhauer said somewhere of any desire, that its satisfaction leads only to more desire. Satiation is only wanting to do it again. And the goal? Catharsis. I would not have used that term then. The goal then was merely to make something redolent of old stale sensuality and lust. If I could get that look into the smears and lines on the paper I used to represent that filthy rag on the floor, then the paper and the filth I had spread on it would give the smell, the heat and the sound—the old dying echo of sex gone dead—the paper called a drawing would be as real of its thing as the icon is of a Virgin who cries real tears. Yes, if I could get all that guilt and despair over my own desires onto that paper called a drawing, then I would have a catharsis from those guilts and despairs—would have puked them up as art. How would this have helped society? Hell if I knew or cared. How would this have advanced the avant garde and my hero place in it? Again, hell if I knew or cared. What I needed was to puke. And I had not the talent, nor the training nor the skill to draw a picture of a dirty rag on the floor so people would know what it was, much less care what it meant.
*
So that was what I was doing then, but what do I think about that now—especially since I cannot find the drawing and have only a mental image of its dingy failure to say what I had wanted it to say then. Well, the first thing I thought about the old drawing was that I had to write all this about it now while I am thinking about it, and so I should make a new drawing to put in the space above as a “filler” until I can find the original. Then I thought a good deal about why the original drawing meant so much to me, and what was the role of that symbolic object, that deadly dirty talismanic rag, for my life to come. Lying in bed one early morning, the sensual moment in the male body still drugged with sleep, I saw the drawing of the rag again and saw a rainbow arching above it. It came to me and I hoped it was true, that out of the darkness the rag represented had come for me for all the years the absolute knowledge that I must build the family, the rainbow of full life… Yes, that rag is death, but to know that is to know the drive and the promise of life, and so a dirty sex-stained rag is the soil, the nigredo, of the aurum nostrum of all the life to come. So, I decided to make a new drawing as a stand-in for the old one until I could find the old one. But, it would be not a drawing but a painting. Somehow the transubstantiation of water and bread into blood and flesh that is the necessity of art seems now best to happen for me in paint—see, the flesh is there and it’s bleeding. I had no more paper to paint (much less draw) on, so I took an old, failed painting, cut it in half (it was twice the size I wanted for the new stand-in for the old drawing) and began painting on it. The painting that I cut in half was one that had gone through many transformations already. It had begun in 1994 as the memory of my youthful—I was 19 years old—passion for Kandinsky and the Apocalypse to cleanse the world (my soul) by fire. The painting I had made about this in the early 1950's seemed OK, but the new one I tried to make in 1994 never seemed to work out. In 1995, I tried to give it a second incarnation. The paper itself had become simply a large (68 x 44 inches) piece of 140 lb. Arches cold press paper where images came and went, and so I decided to make it into an illustration for a public lecture I was to give on the role of the spiritual in painting. I put a massive rectangle of paint over the part of the original painting that was especially Apocalyptic, and dug into it the diagonals and lines of the Golden Section and the Squared Circle. How spiritual, how symbolic, and how contrived and dumb it all looked. However, I took the slides to illustrate the lecture and wrote I think the most laborious piece I have ever written. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on one’s viewpoint), the SFAI publicity department forgot to send out a press release advertising the talk. A few people heard about it by word of mouth from friends, and of those few six came to occupy a room set up for a hundred. I put the text of the talk and the slides away somewhere never to see again and put the painting on a pile to be killed as soon as possible. Another year passed and the paper with its geometric - spiritual - rational paint on it was still leaning face to the wall in my Lac Ouaureau studio. It was summer and I had to do something with it. I watched the dog lie and roll over and scratch her back squirming in the weedy grass outside the studio. I thought I can lie in that grass in the middle of a clearing in the forest, and smell it and the heat and moisture and get back to basics like the dog. So I did that and came back into the studio and covered over the spiritual diagrams with greenish stuff for the grass the dog and I had lain and rolled and smelled in, and where the circle was for the squared circle of the union of opposites, I made the circle of the dog’s food dish. From what had been two years before the image of my youthful cry for an Apocalypse to cleanse my soul of sexual guilt, and a year later had been the spiritual diagram of the salvation of the world to harmony and paradise, was now some grass to lie in and a dog dish to eat from (back to basics). But although it had felt good making the painting, it still wasn’t much. Lying in the grass was better.
I put that failure away at the bottom of things never to be looked at again, and that was that for three more years. Then came now and the need to make a stand-in for the lost drawing of the rag on the floor of the dirty pink studio on the top floor of Harrison Street. I was totally out of paper to paint on, and none could be obtained without going back to San Francisco—3000 miles away. Nothing to do but drag out old failures and paint on the backs. I took the Apocalyptic - Spiritual Geometry - Dog Dish in the Grass - Very Small Welcoming Gesture Figure painting of the last six or more years, cut it in half and painted not on the back but on the front (where all the action had always been) the painting described below. *
Yes, it’s been a long time since then, and the dirty pink room at the top of the house on Harrison Street is gone to rubble like the rest of the place—including my “There was a notion…” painting—more than forty years ago. And it’s been forty years for me to grow from a bony young guy with a hard-on to an old man who knows half a century of love… a young man who was learning and now an old man who I think knows how to show and say the darkness that was in that room and in himself—to know and say that darkness as art so that he be not condemned to live it out as fact. Someone once said of art that “…it shows us how to live.” Yes, even the darkest fictions may show us paths we need not take. * Seems like an awful lot to have gotten out of one lost drawing. But that drawing was only one work out of hundreds which as Henri Corbin said of the works of Avicenna, “…[were] all woven with the same thread, all told the same story.” Two more works from that time, put here only because I have their images (unlike an image of the lost drawing) and because they not only come from the same thread, tell the same story, but one of them even says it out loud—
Sometimes there is a question as to whether the artist’s studio, its place and its own inner shapes, affects the artist’s work. My studio was in the old house on Harrison Street. Did that house affect my work, or did I project into my studio on the top floor of that house my darkest concerns? When two mirrors face each other, which was first in that infinite regression?
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Maybe
a year went by, and I made one more attempt on that piece of paper.
Where the original Kandinsky-ish Apocalyptic area had been—it showed
through because it had been a separate piece of paper collaged onto the
large piece that was the whole painting and was now all greenish
everywhere for grass—I painted a heavy coat of deep earth red, a red iron
oxide with then a thin blackish glaze rubbed over it to make the
deepening. All this done for no reason except for one more try to get
something out of this big piece of paper I had already spent so much money
on for paint and so much time on to get anything more out of. Then I
took one of the long diagonals of the long buried Golden Section, and
instead of following it, painted a large (maybe 60 ‰ of the whole
painting) and awkward but it felt right area of the paper bluish smeary
blackish. The dog dish area still showed through indented into the
one-time Apocalypse now deep earth red area. I took a palette knife
and smeared some cadmium red light
Click the image for how this darkness in my soul became
projected
upon the streets of the rotting neighborhoods of San Francisco
