Dogs can't eat chocolate

Recently, I was sent a lovely email by one of my collectors.  He and his wife live in California, but over the years they've purchased four of my pieces.  We've never met.  His email was just to tell me how much he admired my work, and how much he and his family enjoyed living with it.  I was very touched.

At the end of the email he asked if we might like a gift of his art.  By which he meant chocolate.  I said, yes, we would most definitely like.  Then I proceeded to get the bug that's going around - G got it first - and rather forgot about the possibility of chocolates winging their way to our doorstep.  A few days ago this arrived:

Six pounds of gorgeously packaged Woodhouse chocolates.  My collector and his family are Woodhouse Chocolate.  A family business in St. Helena, Napa County.  In my email to thank them for their rather magnificent generosity, I mentioned that G and I were still getting over being sick, and that we would commence tasting once we'd gotten to the point where we felt we could do the gift justice.  Last night was the night.

***

José

Every March 1st - or leap day, if there is one; it really should be leap day - G and I celebrate "José Day", the day on which, in 2008, our very aged little Chihuahua passed away.  Since we have Nicholas now - Chihuahua redux? - he's included in the evening's entertainments, which include a dog-related film and treats, for us and for Nicholas.  Last night we got started too late to watch a whole movie.  (It's always rather a scramble to find something apt, anyway; our collection of dog-related films is quite meagre.  And when you're mourning the loss/celebrating the life of a dog, just how comforting is "Umberto D."?)  So we decided to watch a few episodes of "I love Lucy", instead. 

As part of our Christmas gifts to each other this past year, we bought a huge, garishly packaged complete set of "I Love Lucy" and, when we don't have time to watch a movie, we'll often watch an episode or two.  Or three or four.  This first time through, we've been watching them in the order they aired.  Last night, as I put the next disc in, the one that was the beginning of the second season, I thought, you know, we're going to have some of that chocolate tonight, what if...?  And as fate would have it - it usually does, you know - the first episode on the disc was the one where Lucy and Ethel go to work in the candy factory.  Perfect.

***

By the way, our chocolates were amazing.  Subtle and complex and sure to play major havoc with my diet.  Nicholas got his treats as well.  A miniscule amount of good cheese, a miniscule amount of roast chicken.  Nicholas did not get any chocolate.

Right and wrong

So, it's like this:

I ride the streetcar home from work on Mondays and Thursdays, both ways on Saturdays.  I never sit on the streetcar.  I have a very much preferred place to stand, where I can lean against the wall, be out of everyone's way, and not have to hold on to anything.  I'd rather not touch anything in that sort of public setting.

I was coming home today, leaning into my discrete corner.  We came to a stop and an older woman with a walker activated the ramp and got on.  I often see this same woman on the streetcar, always the same rather ratty hooded sweatshirt, baseball cap worn over the hood, sweatpants, puffy white athletic shoes.  She usually gets off at the same stop I do.  She's a round little thing, very chatty, with a chirpy voice.  She's often sitting with a similarly shaped and walker-ed friend.

Even though there are very clearly posted instructions to reserve seating for disabled passengers, no one got up or offered her a seat.  Sitting nearest her was a woman, probably in her twenties, dressed in what I'd call the Northwest Princess look: shiny, metallic parka; jeans; brightly polished clog-ish things on her feet; a little knit cap that looked like it might have been fabricated by the indigenous peoples of some "Third World" country.  Everything was perfectly pristine, studiously casual, and obviously expensive.  She had a hard, cold look on her face.  I watched her manicured fingers flick along her cellphone, and then she'd put her head back and close her eyes for a few seconds, as though she was very, very tired.  An older man - sixty-five-ish? - with gray hair and a cap with an airline insignia on it was sitting next to her.  They didn't speak to each other at all, so I didn't know if they were together.

I stared at the seated woman, made eye contact, then looked over to the woman with the walker, but the young woman didn't follow my gaze.  I stared at her again, but she didn't look back.  I stared at her.

And then....  Low blood sugar?  Some faulty switch related to my PTSD?  Or maybe just some inherent oversensitivity, some lack of ability to process and not be overwhelmed by all the awful things in the world, things that we all hear about and see constantly these days?  There's so much wrong.  And I want to make it better.  And I can't.  And it makes me so mad.  I don't know what any of that might have added up to in that moment.  Whatever it was, I didn't see it coming.  I didn't know I was about to make an ass of myself.

"Hey, why doesn't someone get up so this woman can sit down!"

As everyone turned and stared at me, the woman with the walker said, "I don't need to sit down".  Which put an immediate dent in my crusade, of course.  Actually, I'd probably scared her.

I turned to the young woman who was sitting closest to her.  "Why don't you get up so she can sit down?"

"She said she didn't need to sit down", she said flatly, coldly, her legs crossed, her arms folded.

"You should have offered her the seat.  Those are the rules.  You're supposed to get up when someone needs a seat."

There's a moment of blank, at this point.  It was all so quick.  I can't remember if anything more was said by either of us.  And then I reached out to pull off her hat.

***

When G and I went to see Tosca a few weeks ago, we had two very silly young women sitting behind us, whispering to each other, playing with one of their phones, constantly giggling.  Before Act III began, we were able to move and get away from them.  But during the intermissions I'd told G how I'd fantasized about dealing with them.  The first fantasy was to snatch the cellphone, jog over to the Men's room, and toss it in the garbage.  The second was to snatch off the shoe of the closer one - she was wearing a short dress, but for some reason she had her legs crossed like a guy, ankle to knee; it would be easy to reach that shoe - and jog over to the Men's room and lob it into a toilet.  The beauty of either of these schemes would be that my point would be dramatically made, and that they'd be kept very busy with search and rescue and, therefore, far away from us.  Some scruples and the realization that those sorts of wacky-movie moments almost never go as planned was more than enough to keep either scenario from getting beyond the fantasy stage.  That and the thought of what would certainly be G's horrified reaction.

***

And those things almost never go as planned.  See, I thought I'd just grab that cute little hat off her head and toss it out the doors of the streetcar - we were stopped at a streetcar stop, the doors were open - and she'd have to go after it.  I'd already played this out in my head; I'd been fantasizing again, like at the opera.  So maybe I was "cocked and loaded" and when, in the already alarming tension of the moment, I somehow managed to lose the distinction between fantasy and reality, it was just my next move.  Like, at that point, I couldn't stop the next domino.  So I reached out toward the top of her head.

"Don't touch me", she said flatly, putting her hands up but otherwise barely moving.  Waved off, I came in again, reaching for the hat.  The same defensive but strangely calm and economical movement from her.  The man next to her half rose in his seat.

"You better stop it.  That's my daughter," he said, then sat down.

"Oh, great job you did with her.  Is that how you taught her?  To think about other people?  You must be really proud.  You both ought to be ashamed...."  Etcetera.

The streetcar had left the stop.  I said to I don't know who, "I wasn't going to attack her, I was just going to throw her hat out the door so she'd have to get up."  Like somehow that made sense, would somehow rally everyone to my cause.  Like everyone would go, "Oh, yeah, what a clever idea - bravo!"  I wasn't really able to focus - mentally or visually - but I think I was sort of being ignored at this point.  Which, in retrospect, is probably preferable to other possible reactions; I'm glad no one took me for a more serious threat and intervened.  Someone had taken my place in the corner, so I just stood there in front of the father and daughter, the adrenalin starting to drain away, mortification flooding in.

They sat, looking straight ahead, not talking to each other.  It was like nothing strange had happened at all, like this situation was normal for them somehow.  But people react differently to shock, I know.  Maybe they were just afraid, and it was fear that made them seem so expressionless, so unaffected.  But I can see now that my self-righteousness, my assumptions and judgements about them, my lack of compassion for them - their lives, their humanity - pretty much precluded any understanding of their actions or reactions.

I made one last reflexive, "you ought to be ashamed," and moved over to the other side of the streetcar, my knees rattling in my pant legs.  I stood near the woman with the walker, who had turned completely around to face the window, looking out.  

I gave her a light pat on the arm.  "I'm sorry, I really didn't mean to make such a scene.  I see you on here all the time.  I know you always sit down."

"Oh, I didn't need to sit down."  She didn't look at me.  Probably still afraid.

"OK, but she was supposed to ask...." 

The young woman and her father got off soon after.  No parting words, still no signs from them that anything odd or disturbing had happened.  I looked around the streetcar, seeing if anyone was looking at me, wondering what they would be thinking.  Was I just some crazy, scary guy?  Someone who'd made a fool out of himself in public?  You don't look at people like that.  No one was looking at me.  I stared out the window.

As we got close to our stop, the woman with the walker pushed the button to cue the ramp, moved her walker closer to the door.  Still without looking at me, she told me to, "Have a nice day."  I told her I was getting off, too.  The streetcar stopped and we waited together for the ramp to extend.  She got off, then I got off.  And when I passed her on the sidewalk, I apologized again.

"I'm really sorry for blowing up like that."

"That's alright. Have a good day"

"It's just that people are so unkind these days...."

"Oh, I know, dear."

*** 

When I got to the apartment, first thing I did, after putting down my things, before I woke up the dog to take him out, I walked into the bathroom.  I didn't know why.  I stood in front of the mirror, looking at myself.  Looking closer, trying not to look away.  Trying to see something in my eyes.  I took my glasses off and put them back on, trying to see myself.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There's right and there's wrong.  I think somewhere there's probably a true definition of a real, humane right.  But most of us have a very subjective understanding of what that word means.  And most of the wrong done in the world comes from those who believe they are doing right.  That kind of "right" has blinded humanity, has brought havoc and suffering all through history.

I had a perfectly fine day.  I was in a good mood.  Everything was normal.  And then I totally lost it.  In my zeal to implement "the right thing", I became something that I couldn't recognize, couldn't - at least in that moment - control.  So when I got home and felt this need to look at myself in the mirror, maybe I was trying to reassure myself, trying to make sure I knew who I was.  Because in that moment on the streetcar, in the frantically aggressive certainty of the rightness of my belief, I completely lost myself.  And it was very frightening.  As I write this, it still is.

One finger at a time

There's something about putting on and, especially, taking off a glove.  I don't know what it is, exactly, that I find so transporting about this very ordinary action.  But when I'm wearing gloves - especially nicer ones, thin leather ones - and I enter a building, walking and taking off one glove first, pulling at the finger ends, loosening, then sliding the glove off and clasping it in the other still-gloved hand, I feel like I'm on stage or, more so, in a movie.  Every single time I do this little movement, no matter where I am or how otherwise shabbily I'm dressed, I feel quite elegant, glamorous even.  I always feel delightfully cinematic.

***

 

Burning patterns and burnt language

This past Saturday, I co-emceed at a literary event.  Gigi and several other fantastic writers - some real heavy-hitters among them - read at the second of an ongoing, quarterly series, Burnt Tongue.  "Burnt" refers to writer and teacher Tom Spanbauer's workshop challenge to "burn" language, deconstructing/reconstructing language in the service of defining character, as a way to discover literary "voice".*  A central figure in Portland literary life - most of the writers who read are, or have been, students of his - Tom read last, a beautiful/awful passage from his current novel.

And everyone's work was really wonderful - funny, smart, touching, challenging - and the audience was rapt and appreciative.  But being as incredibly self-absorbed as I am - I'm an artist; I'm supposed to be that way, right? - I still found time to be overly critical of my emceeing performance.  Because it wasn't what I had imagined it would be; I certainly got the job done, but I wasn't the brimming font of charm I'd hoped to be.  That, combined with the dislocating effects of only-on-Facebook friendships - and more than half the crowd were FB friends of mine - got me snuggled up against old, negative behavioral patterns, the kinds of social (non)interaction I thought I'd gotten past, grown out of.  And then, finding myself down that rabbit hole, turning and wondering, "hey, I remember this unpleasant locale; how the hell did I wind up here again?"  Sunday - on Facebook, bien sûr - I mused a bit on my experience of the previous night.

*** 

First thought about last night's Burnt Tongue reading:

 
Married to a writer, I go to a lot of readings and hear a lot of great writing. But last night was something very special. And one of the incidental delights of the evening was watching Lidia Yuknavitch** across the room - she was in my direct line of sight - just beaming as she listened to the other writers read, her love for what her fellow writers do and who they are was so obvious. And I keep thinking that it was just the perfect expression of the amazing, loving camaraderie that is what Portland's writer's community is all about.

Second thought about last night's Burnt Tongue reading:

I got a good smacking from that weird FB condition. You know, that thing where you know SO much about your FB friends - their politics, their love life, their kids, their family, their job, their vacations, their health, on and on - and you have great, smart FB interactions, but in person, you don't know them AT ALL. I often find that gulf very hard to bridge, makes me paralytically shy. And when that FB friend is someone whose work I tremendously respect, or even if I just think them very cool, it gets that much harder. So, trying to break the cycle, I'm outing myself to my top three from last night: Dear Monica Drake, who is a good egg to be sure, in the future I will try to do more than just bid goodnight as you and Kass exit the building. Mr. Mingo I will attempt more than a handshake or a wave; we might speak of large vegetables and France, even. And Miss Lidia - great, lustrous, vibrating soul of a woman - I will try to make it past just telling you that I'm kinda scared of you. Oy!

Third thought about last night's Burnt Tongue reading:
 
When I was younger, whenever anyone complemented me on anything, especially on my art, I - always - felt compelled to tell them what was wrong with the thing at hand, to tell them where I had failed in whatever way. Somehow, I guess I felt my over-critical self-honesty would be a service to us both; no one should be fooled. But at some point, someone pointed out that that was actually a pretty ungracious thing to do, that it denied, even disrespected the experience of the other; it spurned the gift of their complement. And really, it was very selfish, saying that my experience was more valid than theirs. And at some point, I stopped doing that.

We all try and grow up and come to an acceptance of the muck of our experience, remold ourselves into a shape that better suits who we really are on the inside. And then, there you go. In an unplanned dive, you find yourself back in an almost forgotten, but still awfully comfortable, uncomfortable place. Which sounds - terribly - important but, really, I'm just trying to say that people were so nice to me last night about my co-emceeing stint. And because - I - didn't do quite what I imagined I'd do, I proceeded to bat away their kindness. Well, basta! Thank you, sweet people. I do appreciate it. xo 

Fourth (and final) thought about last night's Burnt Tongue reading: 

It was really all about the WRITING! (Beautiful, beautiful writing....)

***

*  Tom Spanbauer, giving a fuller explanation of the concept of "burning" language: 

[from a workshop description]  "... the first thing we will encounter is voice. How to create it. Saying it wrong, saying it spoken rather than written, saying it raw. By challenging old creative writing workshop language, we will investigate what my teacher [Gordon Lish] called Burnt Tongue. The New York Times, in its review of  The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon [Tom's best known book], called it Poisoned Lyricism. Character lies in the destruction of the sentence. How a character thinks is how she speaks..." 

[from another workshop description]  "Participants should expect a close look at their writing. Sentence by sentence. What we’re really doing is deconstructing language down to the fundamentals, in search of voice. Character lies in the destruction of the sentence. By analyzing parts of speech – adverbs, abstract nouns, received text, clichés, “proper” grammar – each student will get to scrutinize his or her language as it goes onto the page, and in that scrutiny, come up with some new and exciting ways to get rid of that creative writing sound, or that weird way one’s writing sounds formal, distant, boring, drab."

[from an interview]  "Lish’s workshop met once a week, and there were maybe 120 people in his class. Instead of being theoretical, it was all, What does this sentence sound like? How to create a voice, and to get authority of voice by “saying it wrong”—what he called “burnt tongue.” It’s a way of writing as if you were speaking, of making your prose sound raw or strange or off or wrong or weird. Basically of fucking up your syntax."

And a quote from Chuck Palahniuk, Tom's best-known student:

"The next aspect, Spanbauer calls "burnt tongue." A way of saying something, but saying it wrong, twisting it to slow down the reader. Forcing the reader to read close, maybe read twice, not just skim along a surface of abstract images, short-cut adverbs, and clichés." 

**  In case you're not familiar with the names, Lidia Yuknavitch and Monica Drake are two of the best known and respected writers who happen to live in Portland.  (They're also part of the same writing group that includes the above-quoted Chuck Palahniuk and Cheryl Strayed - rare air!)  And their respective - and also very talented - spouses are Andy Mingo, a filmmaker, and Kass Alonso, a writer.

"L'ai-je bien descendu?!"

Several years ago, not long before Gigi and I found each other, I stumbled upon an overly-efficient but, to my mind, rather elegant method of racking up credit card debt.  Bidding on Ebay for vintage postcards and cartes de visite of mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century European royalty.  (I now own a quite impressive collection - two volumes full - and, yes, the cards are paid off.  And, yes, I hardly ever even remember that I own them.)  I suppose I was lonely, bored.  The best, most fertile condition for reckless, not-very-useful-or-ever-will-be expenditure.  In my bidding and buying frenzy, I only managed to veer off-topic twice:  I have a small cabinet card from 1902 of a young Austrian military cadet; I suppose his lyrical beauty is sufficient explanation for the departure.  And the other  - the cabinet card pictured above - I have no explanation for whatsoever.

The image is of a young Cécile Sorel, the famous French actress.  She's obviously in costume for a play, but I don't know which.  Other than her name, I knew nothing of her before the purchase, and only a little more now:

Born Cécile Émilie Seurre in 1873, she made an early start in the theatre and by 1901 had been admitted to the Comédie-Française.  She had a long and successful career there; her most celebrated role was Molière's Célimène.  Internationally known, she was charming and vivacious, and held the friendship of many a "great man".  As was common with popular actresses of the day, her photograph - in costume or in the latest fashion - was in every journal or newspaper, and her lifestyle was as commented on as her acting. 

Her beautiful apartment on the Quai Voltaire was famous for its elegant, but daring décor and perfect taste; Cecil Beaton in his "The Glass of Fashion" devotes several pages to describing it, all but foaming over in nostalgic rapture:

 "...The fine boiseries were of eggshell blue and gold.  Against a magnificent Coromandel screen she placed a couple of Jacob fauteuils in lobster-scarlet velvet.  [...]  The floor, of white and pigeons'-blood marble squares, was spread with leopard skins, while the walls, of an eggshell brown, were hung with medallions of carved stone.  The dining table of marble was copied from one at Versailles and was covered with a cloth of gold tissue.  For her dinner parties huge garlands of scarlet poppies... were stretched in festoons the length of the table...."

Two of Beaton's drawings which were included in the book.

Apparently she was long engaged to wealthy American architect Whitney Warren, but in 1926, at the age of 52, she married the much younger Guillaume-Henri-Robert, comte de Ségur-Lamoignon who, an actor himself, went by the stage name of Guillame de Sax.  Not a successful union - they separated but never divorced - the chief benefit of this marriage was that she was able to spend the rest of her days happily employing the glamorous appellation, la comtesse de Ségur.

She retired from the Comédie-Française in 1933, and at the age of sixty, made nearly unrecognizable by a radical face-lift (see more below), she completely reinvented herself as an improbable star of the music hall.  At her first appearance in this new sphere, after making her long descent of the escalier Dorian at the Casino de Paris, she paused at the foot of the stairs and uttered one of the most famous phrases in all of music hall history:  "L'ai-je bien descendu?!"  ("I came down well?")

 

 

 

I'm pretty sure that the bared breast in the center image above is only a product of artistic license; Sorel was in her sixties at this point, after all.  The costume design in the sketch by Drian, above right, is shown as worn in the photograph above.

In 1937, in a role that suggested typecasting, she played an aging courtesan in Sasha Guitry's Les Perles de la couronne.  She continued working in the theatre during and through the end of WWII.  Even as her career inevitably waned, she was still to be seen everywhere - with other celebrities, in the newspapers; always très à la mode - until, it seems, she thought perhaps the time had come for one last transformation.

Being glamorous and dramatic about town.  (On the left, in 1947, with Jean Marais and Edwige Feuillère.)

Like so many grand ladies with a perhaps too glamorous past, in her old age she rediscovered God.  And in 1950 the comtesse de Ségur decided to retire from life and took vows of the Third Order of Saint Francis of Assisi.  Until her death, she wore the "sackcloth" habit of the order - though her habit was white and red, rather than the regulation brown, and was made up for her by leading couturiers.  She died in 1966 at the age of 93.

The year before her death, resplendent in her religious robes, reminiscing about her former glories.  Still the actress.  Et encore très animée et charmante.

***

In her memoirs, Mes cahiers bleus (My blue notebooks), famous courtesan Liane de Pougy speaks often of Sorel.  (De Pougy and Sorel had similar trajectories; both married a much younger, low-rent aristocrat, whom they later separated from but never divorced, thus keeping an attractive title - Liane became Princess Ghika in 1920 - and both spent their waning days as part of a religious order.)  Reading between the lines, de Pougy sounds a bit jealous of Sorel, and in describing the effect of the latter's cosmetic surgery she doesn't temper her frankness:

[In 1933, after seeing her photograph in a newspaper]  "Sorel has had her nose done and her face lifted so often that she has ended with a different face.  She is still pretty through it all, but one wonders who it is."

[And the next year]  "I saw Cécile close up at Armenonville in July.  [...]  She is fairly frightening, her body delicate, supple, quite fashionable, her face tortured, the eyes sunken and too wide open.  They say that she has had her eyelids lifted and that now it's impossible for her to shut them completely...."

And this was in 1934.  The technology of rejuvenation has certainly advanced since then, and its results are usually much less crude.  But in her quest for the permanent bloom of youth, for reasons both personal and professional, the comtesse de Ségur was certainly a woman ahead of her time.

The "new and improved" Cécile Sorel.  In the photograph on the right, Sorel is made ready by the writer Colette, who briefly had her own cosmetics business.

With Willy Michel, photographed in his Photomaton in 1939.  Visible here, as proof of the drastic face-lift, is the rather alarming recession of her hairline.

One foot in....

Health matters can be very confounding to an aging hypochondriac.  The doctors roll their eyes at you when you shuffle in with your long, hand-written list of all the things that presently ache or dribble or sting.  At this point in your life you're apparently supposed to be broken down and feel vaguely wretched all the time; you're not sick, dear, you're just old.  So how can you ever manage to discern if any one (or several) of those creaky or lumpy annoyances is actually something else?  Something real.  Something that will one day, quite unexpectedly to everyone but you who, of course, has been expecting this your whole damn life, cause you to drop down dead right in the street.

I do hope that, by some frantic calculation, I'll be able to resolve this bewildering question... before it's too late....

It started with Queen Olga

 Queen Olga of the Hellenes, born Grand Duchess Olga Constantinovna of Russia, first queen of the current Greek royal line, grandmother of the Duke of Edinburgh, etc., was really quite near-sighted.  I've always been charmed by the way she would often pose for official studio portraits (as opposed to merely informal family snapshots) with her trusty lorgnette; if the camera intended to focus in on her, she seemed determined to return the compliment.

The first idea I had for my current show at Froelick Gallery, here in Portland, was certainly inspired by this short-sighted personage.  I quickly started forming other ideas related to sight.  How we enhance and obscure our vision, intentionally and unintentionally.  Literally and metaphorically.  It's a bit of a gimmick, I guess - eyeglasses, mirrors, veils - but it certainly seems a pertinent metaphor for an artist.  All I do is see.  And I'm constantly adapting my sight, literally, as I make art; taking off and putting on my glasses, adjusting to the variances in natural and artificial light.  And then adapting the sighted world, respecting the laws of what we perceive as real-in-the-world, while forcing reality to fit the truth of my imagination; altering color and light, reflection and proportion - the too-small waist and the too-small shoe aren't possible, but absolutely true in the sight of my imagination.  And I think because I see these impossibilities so clearly in my imagination, they translate as somehow correct - impossible but true - in my paintings.

The show is titled, La Vue à travers.  The view through.  It's rather a small group of paintings, but the lovely people at Froelick wanted a show from me this year, and they understood that I was already booked for a full show in Seattle in June.  So when we spoke of this at the beginning of the year, they were very accommodating and agreed to a smaller than normal body of work.  There are only five painting in this exhibition, but I'm very happy with the work.  And I learned a lot, making it.

***

People ask me a lot about my process, so I thought I'd show the finished work alongside the small sketches that are my only working out of theme and composition before I actually start drawing out the image on the panel; I only work out the final design and all the details at that point.  I always jot down my ideas on 3x5 pads.  I include visual notes and sometimes ideas for titles.  With two of the paintings here, I needed to make an additional sketch - a rare event.

After I was all but finished with the painting, I decided that Le Miroir should have some sort of unglamorous plant rising up on the left side.  For compositional balance and irony.  So I sketched out something attractive and imaginary - only God can make a tree, but I fabricate plants all the time - though the little weedy item ended up slightly different in the painting itself.  And I wasn't having an easy time drawing out the hat in Le Voile, so I needed to step back and come up with a proper hat design before I could continue; it ended up being my favorite part of the painting.

I always tell people that I don't draw well, and I don't.  I've never developed any dexterity or fluidity; my sketching is crude, and I erase much more that I actually draw.  But honestly, for paintings, I only need to draw enough to set the image firmly in my imagination and then, on the panel, as a strong base upon which to paint.  I don't need any more than that.  Ça suffit!

***

La Lorgnette - acrylic on panel - 24x18 - 2012

Le Monocle - acrylic on panel - 16x12 - 2012

Le Miroir - acrylic on panel - 36x24 - 2012

Les Lunettes - acrylic on panel - 24x24 - 2012

Le Voile - acrylic on panel - 24x18 - 2012

Hands and paper

 *

Books.  And magazines, pamphlets, catalogues.  Newspapers.
And letters.  Typed letters.  Hand-written letters.  Telegrams.
Printed greeting cards in the mail.  Postcards sent.  Stacks of photographs, shuffled through.

All these have become thin images on a screen.  Chemical and phantom.
A finger's tap may call them forth.  But our touch can never meet, never know that other existence, a reality of shape and texture and ink.
Our words, our thoughts and memories are only in our eyes and minds, now.  When they used to be in our hands, as well.

*

Of bullfighting, sex, and the human animal

A friend of mine posted a photograph on Facebook yesterday of a bullfighter being horrifically gored.  He captioned it simply, "Sometimes when you stab an animal that animal will stab you back", as a statement against the institution of bullfighting.  While I understood his point, I can't imagine that he has many FB friends who are also tauromachophiles, and who might thus be converted by the sight of this incredibly gruesome image.  Many, if not most, will feel that what happened to Juan José Padilla last year was only just, considering his chosen profession, but I'm unable to view the incident in quite such a simple, straightforward manner.

For the record, I'm no fan of bullfighting.  And though I generally regret the passing of traditions that contain any element of beauty or glamour, I think that bullfighting should and must pass away.  The animal rights aspect - and for the horses used in the corrida de toros, as much as for the bulls - is clear; the whole business is indefensible.  And yet I think we - especially we Americans, so decisive and short-sighted and unsubtle in all things - don't look with any depth as to why this tradition still exists.  And why it arouses such a deep veneration and passion in those we can't otherwise argue are simply savage or uncultured.  What do they see and experience that we don't?

Though it is usually referred to as a sport or bloodsport, I'd have to agree with the alternative argument that it is an art form.  (A perverse one, yes.)  And much more than that, a ritual.  A very codified ritual of violence.  Blood ritual is not something very comprehensible or attractive to the majority of modern society, and certainly anathema to the ever-lurking Puritan ethos of Americans.  But bullfighting goes back to prehistory.  Prehistory.  And I believe there is something elemental in this bloody pageant that, from the comfort of our modern existence, we now find incomprehensible and rightly horrific.  But has the instinct that would call us to witness this sort of prehistoric theatre been bred out of the majority of us?  Are we safe enough in our soft world that our genetic material can let go all that?  Or is it yet a part of our makeup?  Will it always be?  (The constant insane violence around the planet would seem to answer yes to that query.)  As we get farther and farther away from the original workings of nature, as a technological construct is more and more our living reality, what is our connection with our historical and biological needs and instincts?  Can we maintain a balance that is healthy for us, in the physical and emotional forms we inhabit?

Which brings me to sex.

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I'm loathe to even bring up this topic, since people will make all sorts of assumptions about my own sex life and my relation to "the act".  And I'll feel compelled to make all sorts of suspicious defense for the quality and variety of said sex life.  I'll need to try and convince all and sundry that I have a very healthy regard for the delightful activity, and that I'm surprisingly hangup free, and -- well, you see where we get to with this.  But, as with most things, I can't help but pipe up when I have something to say.  And I can't help but observe that our modern society is in a complete frenzy about sex.  Still. 

We had the sixties, didn't we?  And then the Seventies.  We've even had Madonna.  (Still do, apparently.)  You'd think we'd be a little fatigued by the constant, adolescent chatter about sex.  Like it was something new.  Maybe - but only maybe - we do it better now, otherwise it's the same old terrific thing.  The difference being that, for several decades now, we've had a seemingly ever escalating obsession with it.  Or at least our obsession with talking about it, portraying it, seems to keep escalating.  It is ever present in the media, in advertising, in popular music.  And especially in film, graphic or even actual.  Its pointed inclusion seems to be a current prerequisite of most entertainment, "high" or "low"; it's often its raison d'être.

And there is a definite pressure in the arts to make work that is sexualized and graphic.  I know or am acquainted with a lot of writers, my wife among them.  A lot of them write a lot about sex.  To be clear, I have no problem with that; writing about sex is just as valid as writing about anything else.  (Much of it deals with abuse, which I put in a different category altogether, and don't take issue with here.)  But I think that within the literary community and in publishing, there's a sense that if there isn't a fair amount of sex in your work - good, bad, or ugly - and if you aren't being quite graphic, that you're backing off of something important and "deeply human", and that therefore your work is probably shallow and maybe even cowardly.  (And not terribly marketable.) 

I enjoy my share of "graphic".  Yes, I do.  But that doesn't keep me from thinking that things are quite a bit out of balance in this regard.  What is it that keeps us so continually fixated on sexuality, ours and that of others, fictive or real?  Not all of us are still working out the effects of our sexually repressive childhoods, are we?  We don't all need to reclaim our sexuality and maximize, fortify our performance and/or pleasure, do we?  Our sexual selves really don't need this much expression, do they?  Or is it...?

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I believe that the further we get from any sort of a natural existence, the more we find ourselves connected to and are often troubled by our more "animal" instincts.  Our moral conscience has advanced to a point of civilization where most would find bullfighting - blood ritual - abhorrent, but what is retained within us, unalterable?  To varying degrees we are all conscious or unconscious of our biological underpinnings and heritage.  But finding ourselves submerged in the disorienting technological soup of modern life, it becomes increasingly difficult to function with any sort of human/animal certitude; our lives are machine-made, but where does the animal still lurk?

Which brings us back to sex.  The farther we remove ourselves from nature, and the more dislocation we sense in our not-yet-adapted bodies, the more fiercely we crave a connection with the animal we find in our genetic selves, the connection that we experience through sex.  Our lives are so altered by the unnatural, our instincts so denied, that we flee to the safety of our sexual lives.  Because sex is one of the very last places left to us that allows for an unaltered, untempered connection with our purely animal selves.  I believe the unbalanced nature of our lives has led us to an unbalanced obsession with sex and sexual expression; we hunger for some vestigial connection with the elemental within us.  The animal instinct has become a refuge.

Winston Wächter booth at Art Platform - Los Angeles

Here are a few pictures from last weekend's big art fair in LA.  I was very pleased that WW took three of my paintings with them, and gave my work some "southern exposure".  They hung La Légèreté délicieuse de la grandeur and Un regard oblique, and had L'Équilibre "in the closet".  Golly, it's been simply years since "the closet" was in play...!

Thank you Stacey, Megan, and everyone at Winston Wächter for all your support of my work.