Painting

Standing in front of the canvas with brush in hand, I begin to smear the most brilliant turquoise pigment across the surface, when suddenly I stop. I smell something. It isn’t the fumes of paint or turpentine, detergent or damp. It is smoothing different. A scent so cloy that it takes my breath away. “It’s a Dum Dum pop” I tell myself. “I smell Dum Dum’s,” cream soda flavored to be exact.

The act of painting has a powerful physical effect on me. It can summon up moments from my childhood long buried, or throw me back into a conversation I had my grandfather, long dead. I can hear symphonies like I am sitting in the first row behind the orchestra pit, or taste the flavor of beef, something I haven’t eaten in twenty years. It can summon up the smell of fresh honey or clover, rekindle lost passions and fears, and even create phantom pains from wounds that have heal years past.

I don’t think of myself as having synesthesia, where my mind confuses the act of painting with some other sensation. Rather painting has for me a kind of total recall effect. One in which the sum total events of my life can come flooding back to me in an instant, even as I am totally engrossed in the act of making art. As the great artist and teacher Hans Hoffman once said “A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.”

I have heard of artists, Cezanne or Gauguin, and especially of Bonnard whose works rely on the spontaneity of memory and perception, paintings that allows us to participate in a single enveloping moment culled from the artists experience. I think about these artists as I work. An art centered on epiphanic moments that find a structure in extraordinary colors lain on meditatively like layers of afterthoughts parsed out over the surface of the canvas. The colors themselves are organized in thin lines that could just as easily represent the colors of the moment in recall as they could embody an intensity of feeling or a duration of time.

I am often told that my paintings are brightly colored, beautiful and the like, but when I look at these works I mostly feel sad. The viewer has no access to the immediacy of my experiences with these works, experiences that are profoundly personal. I wonder; how important is it that someone else shares in these experiences? Is it enough that my experience rendered in paint has become something aesthetically pleasurable to another?

Work proceeds slowly, laboriously, as memories and sensations both recent and long past wash over me. Sometimes I recreate the snippets of color that are most vivid, fuchsia and royal blue, mustard-yellow impasto and flame red. Other times these colors become a complex code of symbols that represent feelings, sensation and emotion. Again Hans Hoffman “My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.”

small world

I stood looking at the Rauschenberg in absolute wonder. “This piece is amazing,” I thought to myself. I could tell the girl standing right next to me was thinking the same thing. She looked at me and we both smiled. I turned and walked over to the guard. “Can I take a picture?” I said dangling my camera phone between my thumb and forefinger.

“Sure” said the guard, “go ahead.” I walked back over, flipped the phone open and pressed the camera button. The crack of the sound effect built into the phone filled the gallery.

“I didn’t know we could do that!” exclaimed the girl.
“Apparently we can,” I said, nodding towards the guard.
“My girlfriend will be so excited” she said, pointing to another girl across the room. “She’s really inspired by Rauschenberg.”
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Texas” she said.
“Small world. I am too.”
The second girl joined us and took over the conversation. “I am an artist.” She said matter-of-factly.
“I am too. In fact I am here doing my research for my MFA Thesis.”
“What school do you go to?” I told her and you could see her eyes widen. “No kidding. My aunt teaches there!”
“What department?”
“Art.”
I looked at her for a minute. “Is your aunt Barbara?”
“Oh my gosh! Yes!”
“I know your aunt very well. She’s on the graduate faculty. I speak with her all the time.”

We exchanged names, and I gave her my business card. “I can’t wait to tell aunt Barbara about this.”
Suddenly I felt very uncomfortable. “Look, it’s been great meeting you.” We shook hands and I dashed into the next gallery. It was full of Pop art from the mid 60’s. I hate pop art and moved on to the next room, and then the next. I saw an Antonio Tapies that was stunning, and then I saw two more.

I lingered a bit then turned the corner into the next hall, and would have kept going but stopped short. The room was full of no less than 10 Mark Rothko’s. I love Mark Rothko. Pretentious, arrogant, and full of radiant color, they were stunning. There would be no dashing through this gallery. The moment had to be savored.

I looked at the dates on the first cards. They were all dated in the late 1950’s. Superb examples of his color field work in its prime. Here were examples of the artists work when his was at the height of his power. Huge canvases painted with simple rectangles of color that seemed to glow and rise off the surface of the picture plane. There is a kind of transcendental experience one has when staring at Rothko for a substantial period of time. It cannot be rushed. The color begins to engulf you, even as the floating geometric shapes usher you into another realm without time or form. It is a place of pure feeling.

Slowly I moved from canvas to canvas drinking them up like bee nectar. I flowed them around the room, unconscious of my surroundings. There was no time for idle chitchat or discovered lost connections here. Here was a monument to genius, and standing in front of these canvases I felt for a moment what it must have been like to have that driving passion to create these colossal canvases.

As a traversed each canvas my mind was rocked with magentas and violets, ochre’s and reds. Till at last I came to the last painting and was completely overwhelmed. This painting was different, something altogether new. A large black filed atop a cooler grey. The artist fingerprints were clearly visible in the lower register, but the black was formless, unbroken, a perfect void. I looked at the card on the wall. 1970. Rothko killed himself in February of 1970. Was this the last painting he ever made?
I stared into the black for a moment. “He’s confronting his mortality.” I thought. I could feel the darkness tugging on something primordial. It was drawing me ever deeper in. “This is so depressing” I thought. “No wonder he killed himself. I would have too if I painted this.”

I looked at the playful gestures in the gray paint. “Was it enough to create this? Or would it never be enough?” I felt a kind of closeness with this man who died a mere month after I had been born; a kind of intimacy that wells up out of human understanding. I looked over my shoulder. The girls had just entered the gallery. You could see them rocking on their heels. I knew what they were feeling too. I had just been there. I decided to walk over and share my discovery with them. “Just once more, and quickly” I thought “And then I am getting out of here.”

reflecting on my time on Face book

I think I hate facebook. Not that I am going to stop using it right away, I am too compulsive for that, but I think that facebook may be a huge waste of time and, what is worse, my be enabling character flaws that need acceptance and validation.

Years ago, I remember it clearly, my high school debate coach told the class how much he loved college. Most of us scoffed at him. How could college be better than high school? At the time high school seemed like the greatest place on earth. I had never felt closer to any group of friends, never had the same sense of purpose that I had shared with so many, the disdain for authority, the yearning to explore my sexuality and the driven desire to purposefully feel boredom for everything life had to offer. My god, it was beautiful.

I went to a small liberal arts college. My freshman class was slightly more than one hundred students. My graduating class four years later was barely seventy. I knew virtually every one of them by name, and certainly all of them by sight. We all took the same classes, we dinned at the same time, we threw extravagant parties on the weekends and cloistered together in the evening to read Joyce and Plato, the Bible and Kant. We cried together, slept together, laughed together, and by the end of four years I wanted to see few, if any of these people ever again, not through any fault of theirs, but because I am a solitary person whose boundaries and been sorely tested by the system.

Face book is a funny place. The most interesting thing about it, I think, is that I can look at the friends I have there and can draw demographic lines around those periods in my life when I made the most friends: high school, college, and now in the present, as we have recently joined a church and become members of the community.

The oddest thing, I think, is how Face book seems to accentuate the nature (or perhaps the origins) of these friendships. When I was in college, I spent most of my time locked away in my dorm room reading the thousands of pages of homework I had been assigned each week. In reality, when I did see my fellow classmates, it was in class, or while standing in line at the dining hall, in the coffee shop, or walking back to my dorm room. I saw these people and they saw me. We would mutter salutations, exchange a few pleasantries about our lives, occasionally make insights, and then we would disappear into our studies.

Truth be told that while I did not miss these people at first. I grew to remember them nostalgically, and with incredible fondness. The lives we shared were incredibly close and the opportunity for friendships like those I forged in high school will never come again. When I joined Face book and began to discover so many of the old familiar names and faces, I was incredibly excited to discover them again, twenty years later, in cyberspace.

Only here is the thing. I see them now on Face book, a line in their status update, a glimpse at their lives as they answer the questionnaires in memes and on applications, I see them in the dining hall and on the way back to the dorm room. They are present in my life, but in an odd quirk of fate, that presence is strangely similar to the one we shared so many years ago. The nostalgia fades, and I am left wondering how much time do I give to these people? How close am I to them? How honest am I about the nature of these relationships. What is a friend?

Now that the friendships are back, the past seems to glimmer a little less brightly. I am no longer separated from these individuals by time and space. The nostalgia is gone and I find myself wondering, am I better for it?

Postscript:
Lying in bed last night I was telling J. about what I had written. I think I was afraid that I was going to offend someone by telling him or her that I thought of many of my face book friends as mere acquaintances.

“Why do you still use Face book then?”
“I don’t know, because I am compulsive, I can’t stop.”
She thought about this for a minute “What do you get out of it?”
“I don’t know,” I said again. “I suppose I enjoy the little connections I make, posting a humorous status message and then seeing how people will respond”
“Yeah” she said noncommittally.

I fell asleep still thinking about it. In the morning, I slumbered into the living room. The laptop was still open, I tapped the enter key and brought it back to life. The draft of the post was still there. “Oh yeah’ I thought “That.” My impulse was to delete the whole thing. Better gone than to insult every one I ever knew.

I thought about nostalgia. Was I glorifying it? Was nostalgia really all that? Or was it instead a way of prettying up memories of the past to make them more digestible? The truth about College was that I was really too busy to form many deep or lasting friendships, but that the friendships I had formed were real and lasting. Also, there is something to shared experience that bonds people together. There weren’t many other people that understood my college experience like those people that had been there with me. They understood the nuances, the music the fashion, the… well you get the idea.

The more I think about it this morning the more I am beginning to think that Face book, while probably still a huge waste of time, isn’t as bad as I first thought. If anything it has given me a second chance to connect with no less than three different groups of people that I really missed, and many of whom, because of our circumstances in the past, missed opportunities to become close friends. I think about the people I have reencountered just in the last year and am amazed at how quickly these friendships have blossomed.

I think again about my conversation with J. last night.

“Why do you keep doing it?”

Friendship, and the possibility of even greater friendship.