 I felt I was having an out-of-body experience. The lady standing up was discussing me as if I were not there, telling a crowd of maybe 150 at my art exhibition that the brush strokes on my paintings suggested I had a very normal childhood. Really?
Of course I had a normal childhood.
After a few years living in a trailer park,
I grew up in subdivisions, quarter acre square lots with block pastel colored houses. No serial killers in my family. We were white bread and vanilla ice cream. The few skeletons in the closet didn't rattle, they yawned.
I remember that winter night as clear and cold. There were slivers and patches of black ice on Andrievsky Spusk. The light from L-Art Gallery burned brightly. I was about to leave the comfort and warmth of a car for the most terrifying of events, my first painting exhibition. It was called "People and Places."
My opinion of myself as an artist is perhaps the same that is generally held by others. I don't deserve to wear the cloak. My formal training came from the great, long dead masters, ornery folk like Van Gogh, Matisse and the irrepressible Schiele. I love them.
However, I confess I am the social bore of the art world. I hate modern art, unless one would like to consider expressionism modern. I think it is silly for so-called intelligent people to stare, rub their chins thoughtfully and wonder at a frame holding a solid black canvas.
I think they are pretentious. But then, they think the same of me, and, after all, pretentious is such a relative and polite term when used in writing about art and tea parties. Most of us have an element of the gene.
If I see a Kasimir Malevich without a face, I have this compulsion to want to, at the very least, draw a mustache on the character. If I see a film of a totally naked ice skater filming himself, as I recently did at an Estonian gallery visual installation, I think of the fellow merely as an exhibitionist, not an artist.
I also wondered aloud about the young children present, and also how cold this clown must be.
Feeling this way, I also don't think I am one of the unwashed wannabees, folks who find magic in Thomas Kinkade's light soaked landscapes that ooze of the sights and smells of the five and dime store. Paintings that remind you of Aunt Bertha's parlor and the covering over of a hole in the sheet rock wall.
The fact that a Jackson Pollack paint-dropped-from-a-can canvas garnered $140 million the other day makes we want to sing praises to P.T. Barnum who never said, but certainly thought, that there is a sucker born every minute.
Art, as you so often hear, however, is subjective, and art critics are more subjective than most. My friend Jody Powell said, and he was obviously not the first, that columnists are the ones who go on the field after the battle and shoot the wounded. The same may be said for art critics.
I had taken up painting at the age of 49 while living on my cabin cruiser on the Washington Channel of the Potomac River. My inspiration was simply that I liked beautiful pictures and was totally bored with my day job as a PR executive of a nondescript company.
One day I visited the National Art Gallery in D.C., and happened upon an exhibit of drawings by Egon Schiele. It was the closest I have ever come or hope to come to an epiphany, a religious experience in which I saw my God manifested in color and infinitely pure lines.
Without another thought, I jumped in my red jeep, headed across the river to Northern Virginia, and plopped a few dollars down at a hobby shop to buy paper, pencil, charcoal and pastel sticks. My first efforts were horrible.
The fellow on the next boat surmised that his children could do much better. They were preschool. I proudly showed my mother a pastel drawling of an old man and a cane. She exclaimed: "How nice, a dog smoking a pipe." I had a long way to go.
But that was then.
A few years later - about two years ago - there is this art critic praising my work and, to my knowledge, not being paid to do so. But she kept talking about the brush strokes, as if some mysterious impulse went from brain to hand to brush and it was, indeed, a cerebral experience.
For me, it was not.
As the late stock car driver Dale Earnhardt said about trading paint at 200 miles per hour, "That's just racin.' " Well, what I try to do is "just paintin'," a slightly redneck admission that will cause all sorts of colors and shapes of critics to cringe. But it gives a thrill, and that's what counts.
It's merely coloring in the lines. A brush stroke is a brush stroke is a brush stroke. You do what it takes to cover the canvas.
I wanted, but was too polite, to yell out to this very nice lady that painting to me was about light and color and substance and form and ideas.
Sure, Monet was a world class "dabber", a gentle touch of the brush to canvas in polite flicks of the wrist, one supposes by the glorious outcome. But he also had big brush flourishes. And he squeezed that big brush into corners.
Painting is often compared to conducting a symphony. It is not. It is the spine-tingling fear imposed by the sight of a blank canvas as one plans to commit paint. The inspiration, if it comes, comes from that fear.
No, it is not the conducting of a symphony. It is the writing of a symphony.
|
