There was a time, before I threw my hands in the air and followed the muse elsewhere, when I was a pretty hardcore visual artist. Having posted nothing very interesting lately, I decided to dig out the twenty-year-old portfolio and scan some of the better efforts to share with other nonists. Why did I give up painting? It comes down to this: I couldn’t find a way to make pictures say what I wanted to say. Just look at how many of the images posted here are unfinished: and perhaps that’s a message in itself, as I will explain farther down. As artists go, I would compare myself to a duchamp: a very small output, efforts slaved over at excessive length and abandoned in boredom and indecision. Except duchamp was 100x better than yours truly…
In 1983 and 1984 I was ‘production manager’ at woods hole weekly, one of those small indie papers you get for free at the market, all attitude and no budget. the staff was tiny (never more people than you could fit in a van) so it was easy to have a job title that sounded important. as production manager i was a jack-of-all-trades around the office, but really it was paste-up work, mostly. and back then, actual wax was used for paste-up. occasionally I’d do an illustration, as for example this drawing for an article on ocean pollution (pelagic_tar, to be exact). it pains me to see all the misspellings in this article, but i think that was someone else’s department.
On another occasion I had to come up with a front-page illustration and left it to last. increasingly paranoid, alone in the middle of the night, with nobody to consult, i finally said, the hell with it, I’ll do whatever I want. the folks over at the cape codder (the big paper which did our print runs) raved about the result. go figure! paranoia was, after all, the subtext of the illustration, i suppose. front page, above the fold: woods_hole_weekly.jpg. a better look: woods_hole_weekly_detail.jpg. the illustration was black and white acrylic on paper, and the red lights are an overlay (the front page always had black and one other color, so for this issue I picked orange and got extra mileage out of that). had to leave the paper and work in a nursing home, because my then g.f. luci was pregnant with heidi (the stranglee in my turkey day post). in newspapers, you don’t earn much of a living unless you’re an utter sellout…
while I had trouble articulating what i wanted to say as a serious artist, certain images compel me. I’ve always loved space art, especially chesley bonestell, and there’s a certain hunger i feel when I see a full moon, akin to the feeling i get when i see open water; a desire to dive in, to fly without aid, to travel without difficulty, without borders. moon.jpg
some of these were technical experiments with krylon matte black spraypaint as a background. this paint is so dark and nonreflective that even pencil appears silvery on it. it’s a bit like velvet painting but classier… night_city.jpg another technical experiment, acrylic paint with firecrackers:firecracker.jpg. now this is truly asemic! the thing i like about this experiment is that it creates fine, lacy patterns that i could never do deliberately: detail: firecrackerdetail.jpg. even if it does burn holes in the paper…
a bolder bit of surrealism, and obviously i’d been looking at ‘the bride stripped bare’ when I did this one back in ‘78: jeer.jpg
these last pictures say a great deal about the artist. for one thing, i really love to do landscapes, perhaps to the point of getting in a rut. I’ve never been good at portraiture; perhaps it’s an actual discomfort with other people that prevents me from observing them as i would a leaf: leaf.jpg in any event, i love deep focus (think orson welles’ films) and so compose an image with a detailed leaf blown before trees and mountans. and why so hard to finish a picture? lack of confidence, to be sure; what else can one read into a painting of an abandoned truck on a road that dead-ends in a pond? abandoned_truck.jpg
which brings me to one of the last things i painted (circa 1985) before essentially abandoning the brush for the guitar, and probably my best painting even, or especially, unfinished: climber.jpg it’s all there, isn’t it? in the first light of dawn, in air so clear that far things are brought near, an unfinished man, climbing between jagged rocks toward an unreachable, impossible moon. it’s not about me. it is me. no wonder i had to move on.
