The banality
Reading artist’s statements, to me, is a complete waste of time. If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all because, well, there’s no way to really explain the compulsion to create. I’ve never read a statement that made me feel closer to an artist or where the artist’s words bridge the gap between the visual and the visceral.
An artist can describe the inspiration of a trip where landscapes foreign to his home were painted. Or, how the technique of painting captures the invisible force of chance. How pure color expresses emotion. The cheek of a cherub, the smell of rubber inside a gas mask.
Whatever.
The work stands on it own or it doesn’t.
The torture
The one exception of analysis, discussion and explanation takes place between artists — not artists and patrons, just artists. It’s a gooey taffy stretched between two spirits occupying the same planet. Make no mistake, there is more than one planet on this planet and the one I occupy has few inhabitants. So, when I cross paths with a Bedouin, I stop to chat about the desert and the jungle.
The discussion always about art. And not about art. A telepathy exists similar to that felt by addicts and codependents. As the cliche goes, I don’t know much about art, but I know it when I feel it.
That unrelenting compulsion existing just under the veneer and fingernails, if my counterpart has fingernails, is unmistakable between the two who chew. That need to reach into an almost black swarm of flies, trying to catch just one, is an experience that is, at once, explicit and implicit. Undeserved lust and love.
MOMA
Last Friday, I visited the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. My compulsion to view art is exceeded only by my need to create it — and strong was the compulsion young Skywalker. In particular, I love the Abstract Expressionists and Neo-Expressionists.
Willem de Kooning is my favorite.
During my visit, I was struck, while slowly roaming the galleries, by the number of people having their pictures taken while standing next to the most well known 19th and 20th century paintings — van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Rousseau, Degas. Asians indeed, gathered around Starry Night, like they were riding the subway in Tokyo. Positive pedestrian weirdness it is, this phenomenon — especially since the best painting on the fourth floor of the museum was ignored: de Kooning’s Woman 1 (1950–1952).
Forced pit stop on the Monster Mile of Art
I struggle to walk due to a disability and, as a result, need to sit down often. As luck would have it, a space was open on a bench less than 10 feet from the de Kooning. While seated, in addition to the painting, I was able to watch people sneak by the painting like it was a neighbor’s dog eating another neighbor’s trash, in a neighborhood where neighbor’s expect neighbors to pick up trash eaten by a neighbor’s dog as soon as they see the dog eating the neighbor’s trash, even if the neighbor is dressed in their Sunday best.
You know what I mean.
To be fair, the slight I felt for de Kooning was probably mostly in my head. It’s true, patron’s passed by with little notice, all the while turning their heads toward the Jackson Pollock on the other side of the room, but their indifference was not cruel. It’s just that people watch television and read magazines.
Banal.
I‘d love to be remembered as a minor artist
My art is mine alone. I create it for me and I’m quick to tell anyone who has a negative comment that they don’t have to look at it. And, while I’d love to have a show in a New York gallery, I won’t compromise my art to do so. I’d rather die in oblivion.
Among the most common unsolicited comments about my drawings is the question about why some of the figures I draw grit their teeth. Truth is, I don’t know and the question had never spontaneously occurred to me. Who cares?
But, enough people had asked me that I began to ask myself the same question— to know avail. Now, I didn’t try hard to find the answer, but the fact that I tried to understand at all ensconced me in a cloud of shame at having ever listened to the question. I admit, however, that the more lyrical parts of my drawings draw a stark contrast to the gash and gnash of jacked-up teeth.
Resting my foot
I’ve been enamored of de Kooning’s Woman series since I discovered a black linen-covered book dedicated to the entire series, in the back of my college library in 1980. In the ensuing 39 years, I’ve seen most of the samples that are available in public collections — and they never disappoint.
Despite having seen the painting hanging in MOMA several times in real life, Friday was no exception. That said, for the first time in 39 years, I spent a full fifteen minutes staring into the eyes of a woman whom I’d long lusted after but never studied with the love she deserves.
She was gritting her teeth.
Jacked-up love.
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