"Osprey" - 19x9" - Pen & Ink - March 25, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Goal: no taxidermy
What a weird day. A chat with a sad neighbor ("What does it all mean?") to an email from a retiring professor ("What did it mean?") and back to my fish ("What the hell am I doing?"). And of course, as things always go, everything else around was keeping theme ---- including my current book of choice! My choice at the moment is "Bluebeard" by Kurt Vonnegut. The narrator is Rabo Karabekian: an aged, rambling one-eyed veteran who is writing an autobiography of his life while sitting in a gargantuan, empty mansion. (Empty, save for the strange woman who decided to move in!) Here, he reflects on his life as an artist, comparing his accomplishments to that of Dan Gregory, who he apprenticed for earlier in his life:
What kept him [Dan Gregory] from coming anywhere near to greatness, although no more marvelous technician ever lived? I have thought about this, and any answer I give refers to me, too. I was the best technician by far among the Abstract Expressionists, but I never amounted to a hill of beans, either, and couldn't have -- and I am not talking about my fiascos with Sateen Dura-Luxe. I had painted plenty of pictures before Sateen Dura-Luxe, and quite a few afterwards, but they were no damned good.
But let's forget me for the moment, and focus on the works of Gregory. They were truthful about material things, but they lied about time. He celebrated moments, anything from a child's first meeting with a department store Santa Claus to the victory of a gladiator at the Circus Maximus, from the driving of the golden spike which completed a transcontinental railroad to a man's going on his knees to ask a woman to marry him. But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away.
Let me put it another way: Dan Gregory was a taxidermist. He stuffed and mounted and varnished and mothproofed supposedly great moments, all of which turn out to be depressing dust-catchers, like a moosehead bought at a country auction or a sailfish on the wall of a dentist's office waiting room.
Clear?
Let me put it yet another way: life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. Even a picture of a bowl of pears on a checkered tablecloth is liquid, if laid on canvas by the brush of a master. Yes, and by some miracle I was surely never able to achieve as a painter, nor was Don Gregory, but which was achieved by the best of the Abstract Expressionists, in the paintings which have greatness birth and death are always there.
Birth and death were even on that old piece of beaverboard Terry Kitchen sprayed at seeming random so long ago. I don't know how he got them in there, and neither did he.
I sigh. "Ah, me," says old Rabo Karabekian.
What kept him [Dan Gregory] from coming anywhere near to greatness, although no more marvelous technician ever lived? I have thought about this, and any answer I give refers to me, too. I was the best technician by far among the Abstract Expressionists, but I never amounted to a hill of beans, either, and couldn't have -- and I am not talking about my fiascos with Sateen Dura-Luxe. I had painted plenty of pictures before Sateen Dura-Luxe, and quite a few afterwards, but they were no damned good.
But let's forget me for the moment, and focus on the works of Gregory. They were truthful about material things, but they lied about time. He celebrated moments, anything from a child's first meeting with a department store Santa Claus to the victory of a gladiator at the Circus Maximus, from the driving of the golden spike which completed a transcontinental railroad to a man's going on his knees to ask a woman to marry him. But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away.
Let me put it another way: Dan Gregory was a taxidermist. He stuffed and mounted and varnished and mothproofed supposedly great moments, all of which turn out to be depressing dust-catchers, like a moosehead bought at a country auction or a sailfish on the wall of a dentist's office waiting room.
Clear?
Let me put it yet another way: life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. Even a picture of a bowl of pears on a checkered tablecloth is liquid, if laid on canvas by the brush of a master. Yes, and by some miracle I was surely never able to achieve as a painter, nor was Don Gregory, but which was achieved by the best of the Abstract Expressionists, in the paintings which have greatness birth and death are always there.
Birth and death were even on that old piece of beaverboard Terry Kitchen sprayed at seeming random so long ago. I don't know how he got them in there, and neither did he.
I sigh. "Ah, me," says old Rabo Karabekian.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Peregrine Falcon, Stomping Around ...
Peregrine Fledgling, Stomping Around
Pen & Ink --- 8x10 --- March 1st, 2010
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