Two Calls, Two Painters, Two Reasons

Philip Guston, The Line, 1978. 

1st Call

I called a friend and fellow painter whose New York gallery was greatly affected by Hurricane Sandy. He had just received over 30 images of his damaged paintings. As he narrated the scene in which the paintings were found, and described the paintings' conditions (as it was narrated to him), I imagined the paintings as dead animals. 

He told me these losses made him think about the countless summers in his studio, painting his life away.  "And when I realized it was October," he said.  

Without those paintings, what value do those summers have? 

2nd Call

I received an unexpected call from a painter who left our graduate program after a year. I remember our constant complaining about how we felt like we had to explain everything we painted. She told me about her married life and how she didn't have "a love affair" with NYC--her new place of residence. 

She also told me she went to museums and she wanted to get back to painting. She said, "One day, I told myself, I am going to Michael's and get some supplies and then I will go to Trader Joe's and buy a flower to paint a still life...but then I started to think about what it meant to do that." After a brief pause she continued, "But I don't have to explain what my paintings are about. I can just make them." 

Truth and Markmaking

a mark i've kept

i'm aware of directness as a conceit in writing, a tool, as useful as metaphor or voice. ariana reines sometimes uses all caps and that makes me feel like she's speaking straight from the hip with no editing, a message sent through her like a prophet, but i also know that she's a craftswoman of language and i'd guess that her process curls back on itself like a snake spitting. eileen myles does it with run-ons and inconsistent capitalizations like she has to get it all out before it dissolves. there is truth and style in both of these ways of writing and i'm not even suggesting that truth and style are on opposite poles. and can you ever be without style? the way i move my hand when i paint, is that style? 

i always thought of writing as work and painting as the guiding of a force, especially in later years when i paint in a fever, surrounded by mess and coffee cups and rolls of wax paper half-dipped in blue latex, trailing. as though the mess and urgency kept me closer to something, but what? i do want truth, and i do think it exists, and i do think it exists in painting. but not because it aligns with something i already know is truth, or because it has the look of truth, or because i felt truthy when i made it. markmaking is a writhing pit and i am happily lost inside it. moments of clarity rise up and i stare at a line for days, trying to see what it is revealing to me. so many things in the visual world seem like they are opening themselves up to me, hoping to be seen and understood. the best of these are the things i make myself, because in their unfamiliarity i feel a rush of love, like my little brother doing calculus. a thing that is part of me surpassing me, becoming other. 

but painting has just as much fake-directness as writing does, if not more. all those men strong-arming their way into the canon, mistaking adrenaline and privilege for truth. and it's clear that writing toes the abyss just as painting does, the inconceivable possibilities of letters, the way a poem vibrates in the mind after reading it, the long, looping lives of characters that exist beside our own. when i finished dostoyevsky's "the idiot" a few weeks ago i sobbed in the shower and i wasn't even being self-indulgent. those characters deserve my sadness. their loss is real. this is why i keep the marks i make, the ones i have no practical use for, the ones no one else will ever see or buy. they are as real and living in the world as i am. unlike dostoyevsky, i'm the only one looking at them and usually i'm the only one who knows they are worth looking at. if you are an artist, you have these marks too, and you honor them in your own way. you know there's something there, truth or whatever, you don't need to call it anything. pink beside gray or black beside black or white beside white or a picture of a banana beside a weird purple or a thin line of something, you don't know what it is, you found it there on your palette like your palette was a doorstep.

Unrequited

Norman Bluhm and Frank O'Hara, "Meet Me in the Park," 1960, gouache on paper

Sam Francis, "Blue Balls," 1960, oil on canvas

Nancy Spero, "Artaud Painting -- All Writing Is Pigshit," 1969, left-handed writing and painting on paper.  Spero's series on notoriously misogynistic writer Antonin Artaud was a "forced collaboration"; Spero experienced a psychological connection with the writer despite feeling what she described as "his disapproval."

Before Death

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Medusa, Oil on canvas mounted on wood, 1597. 60 cm × 55 cm (24 in × 22 in). Uffizi, Florence, Italy.

I am writing to you because I wish you would die.
Die with ants in your mouth.

For years undiscovered.

Even vultures don't look for you.

Your snake wraps you

like in a Caravaggio.

Since the day you told me you would die

You have been paralyzed in this moment.

Almost dead.

In power, in drunkenness, in debt, in exile, in covered pains. 

  

You scream.

Never like Munch

You hold it with you. 

So nobody knows.

In agony, in guilt, in weakness, in excuses, and through adaptation. 

I wish you could just die

Die fast and for once.

I wish you death

Because death is the pain of you alone.

Edvard Munch. The Scream. Pastel on board. 1895. © 2012 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.