H. The Bear

Yesterday I completed my first serious artwork since the Stroke, 15 months ago, an ink and watercolor painting on paper, entitled “The Bear.” My dear JG had generously donated the modest funds with which we purchased the art supplies to get started. My brush collection is still in storage. After the Stroke I had instructed Lauren to give away my paints to friends in the Astoria [OR] art community (Bill and Annie), who had been immensely supportive prior to and during our move to NorCal under duress. I had ordered a set of Beampaints, and Sunday, after Lachlan’s AAU hoops minicamp, we shopped at Dick Blick in Berkeley, picking out a couple of fine watercolor brushes — one for washes, one for detail — india ink and a 2-for-1 pair of Canson 9” x 12” 140# cold press wc pads. I waited to begin painting until the following morning, allowing the creative juices to simmer overnight. I was absolutely thrilled to paint again, which came as a bit of a surprise, given that post-stroke, I was certain my life as studio painter had finished. In fact, I embraced the idea without reservation, from an art historical perspective rooted in the examination of artists’ lives, a Western tradition at least half a millennium old [shoutout to Giorgio Vasari, RIP], and one cultivated in Asia centuries before [s/o, The Mustard Seed Garden Tree]. I felt blessed to have survived the Stroke, even in my impaired condition, since it would, I reasoned, afford me the opportunity to reflect humbly on my artist life and perhaps take measures to ensure its perpetuation, as legacy. I found comfort and solace in how prolific I had been over a roughly 40-year span, not just as a plastic artist, but as a tech and media creative, as theorist/thinker, as an arts advocate and educator. Looking back, I found much to be proud about, even after acknowledging all the imperfections exposed along the way, in myself, the work, my relationships, the Way itself. On the whole, after a phase of intense retrospection, while still hovering near Death’s door, I decided to be satisfactorily retired as a practicing artist, and to dedicate my remaining time to participating in and enjoying my son’s exploits, my wife’s company and that of a few close relatives and friends, to the extent possible.

Yet, here we are! The gently persistent encouragement of folks I trust and admire, e.g., artists Joe Adams and David Pushkin, allies John Price and Diane Avice du Buisson, et al., eventually softened my stubborn resolve. The hunger to create overcame my attachment to the level of technical mastery I’d attained. Material concerns swept aside conceptual in- or prohibitions. Finally, my love of making art was stronger than its denial, which encompasses all manner of negation to which my mind/spirit is susceptible. Once more, art for me equals survival in matters of matter and beyond it, in the visual experience and its extrasensory opposite. Art is manifestation of a thing that didn’t exist before, and art reveals the welcoming nature of creation, towards the New. The artist is the vehicle for this mysterious event, which actually is anthro-fundamental, humano-normative. I could go on, but my poor words will never match the transcendent sensation, the intense vibration coursing through the paint, the painting, my flesh and blood, the viewer’s encounter with the art, its image, the story and all the stories that art evokes by being itself, in and of itself. Yes, I still gush, like a teenager in love’s thrall. Isn’t it wonderful?!

After a lifetime devoted to art, I am unclear: does art create the artist (and Man), or vice versa; are both true at once or over time? In art, I doubt the efficacy of binary subject and object to represent human reality, and in that doubt one becomes comfortable in not knowing, or rather knowing differently. Is it exaggeration to suggest that art reminds us how to be humans, if humans painted the cave walls of Chauvet? Conversely, art provokes the most inhumane impulses, expressions of ignorant disregard for beauty, adoration and the embodied sublime, a fact verified by countless acts of violent articide: in the news today, we have pictographs “as old as the pyramids,” adorning the Texan stone faces that Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Wall” would obliterate. Or consider the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan the Taliban shot to pieces with cannon and missile in 2001? Or what about all the art willfully, violently destroyed out of hatred, or ruined by neglect, by relentless and rapacious Time, and Nature Herself. I finished the latest film adaptation of Ulysses right before commencing work on The Bear. The sacking of Troy resonated, especially the beheading of the Athena statue (and her human counterpart), which exposes the complexity of art, in binding History and Event, with body, mind/spirit in emotion, tying together our inclinations for cruelty and kindness, chaos and grace. It is wrong to liken art-making to madness (although it may be its closest asymmetrical relation)? They are truly antithetical. One is the homeopathic remedy for the other. Which is why Freudian analysis and its many derivatives are the Enemy of Art. To proclaim that Freud killed Pollack is not hyperbole. Which raises the question of what to make of Lucien Freud’s painting.

[Notes on the painting process] I started with a layer of overlapping washes. I had never used Beampaints before. The palette in my application of it is evocative of the hues of bruising, with which I’m trenchantly familiar. I began to use the small brush, touching the paint to the paper, daubing gingerly, lightly, minus the confidence of my right hand’s dexterity. John Lurie pops up in my mind’s eye, along with appreciation of and sympathy for his watercolors. I am unable to construct a formal armature at first, but I resist frustration, the despair, the whispers that the task is stupid and pointless, or worse, mediocre. I try to work at the kitchen table in the wheelchair, but after only a half hour, the pain in my right hip and left shoulder becomes debilitating, and I relocate to the bed. Lauren assists me in arranging everything. For the next five hours I am transported without going anywhere. Once the base layer is laid down, I periodically turn the pad, as I apply long strokes. Eventually, the procedure yields an irregular lattice of color. I will eschew recounting an exhaustive list of thoughts, memories, associations, etc., that percolated into my consciousness while I struggled with my sinister unlearned digits and pestering arthritis. In the background played French films: The Artist and the Model; La Belle Noiseuse; and Renoir. I notice an emergent dimensional form in the painting, which I initially resist. It is the disembodied, primitive, stylized head of a bear, which has powerful associations for me. I was once stalked by bear in New Mexico, which culminated in a dramatic confrontation and was followed by what I can only describe as a visionary experience, which I’ve chronicled elsewhere (in the White Buffalo text). For the next, last, phase of The Bear, I introduced the ink, making the latticework more complex and dimensional. At the end, when there nothing left to add, I signed it fitfully, clumsily, PJM, in the lower right corner, as if la cabeza del oso negro were about to gobble me up.

Painting is the greatest of the great teachers by whom my life’s been blessed. No summary of yesterday’s lesson could be adequate to convey the profundity of it, which I feel dumb typing on this laptop, even though it’s true, mercilessly so. Because art like this is a keenly solitary enterprise, which must not be offhandedly conflated with abject loneliness and isolation. What an odd contradiction! Because, while one is painting, memories awaken, folding and unfolding in convolution that interweaves past, present and future. These immaterialities are not evident in the art, but inhabit it, like ghosts trapped eternally in a house, even after the finite constuct is reduced to dust. Only love remains, which Benjamin incorrectly designated as aura. Art is love and its absence, its loss, which anyhow is not possible. Art never abandoned me. I only have to do/make it (latin, hacer), and once more am re-/un-/discovered. If I were to compose a verse on the subject, it would be a meditation on the amorous residue that we sense when we gaze at the moon. All that endures after the collapse of a fabled lunar kingdom, which flourished a million million years ago.

PLATES

Death Becomes Me (1998)
Bar Codes, Rituals + Subliminal Tapes (2004)
Heartless (2001)
Inside><Outside (2000)
Jackson (1997)
Overflow Show (2005)
Studio Dreams (1996)
Venus (1998)
Zia Diner (1994)
Chestnut Square (2002)