What You Tried To Say to Me

I had resolved to leave the Alaska of my birth, walking into a mist of all the possibilities to be expressed in painting and through the mind's lens of painting and the hands and mind of the painter and the terrible infinity of the canvas. I was not good, until I was better; I had to become better. And I saw this possibility in a painting from life of a woman whose gentle power was so compelling that I wiped out and repainted her image 60 or 70 times before the futility of it pushed me to toss it in the dumpster.

Long gone, left in anguish on that pile of garbage was the three by four foot illustration of her luminous skin, her violet top, a wry smile, her maddeningly perfect nose, all of this sunk among hundreds of distracting bad guesses of proportion, color and light; that is the painting where I learned to paint. I remember her sitting on that ugly beige sofa- a couple of hours here and there. I remember my awe of her growing as I worked - my real introduction to painting's ever-heightening of your awareness of the whole perceivable world. I remember the futility of infusing the bright colored mud with life, some echo of her being, resonant in living power before me, and in memory; but was compelled to do so, to not just passively see but to feel all of the resonances of that moment. I was trying to illustrate, to empathize, to celebrate and impress at all once. The painting was doomed.

One drive for making art is hardly mysterious. She was beautiful inside and out. Her eyes flicked with limitless curiosity, and her internal life unspoken flashed across her countenance like a puff on the ripples of a ocean cove. And when she spoke it was with quick wit, music and almost inexcusable wisdom.

Years earlier I might have tried a wheelie on a green Schwinn- I assure you I would have crashed into the nearest ditch. But the motive force is one thing; it's cheap, small-faced and unspeakably dull to reduce human life to motive force. I fell for her of course. But bread is a lot more than grain, water, salt and hunger.

It is interesting that I cannot remember exactly where I painted it. 25 years have passed. Maybe the studio downtown. I went through 4 studios in Anchorage that year as landlords pushed me out when bigger money came calling.

A few days out from the road away, I found this song; passing by late one evening, I was out, she left me a cassette with this song.

It is, by all rights, as sappy as as an old white spruce in late spring. But it hits. Even Tupac loved this song, so much that his girlfriend played it as he lay dying so that it would be the last sound he ever heard.

The Art World doesn't seem to talk about Van Gogh much, as famous as he is. I think we need to talk about him a lot more. Not the pop culture version, not the over-elevation and branding of his personal story, not the ludicrous string of half-scientific "explanations" for his artwork.
I am convinced that Van Gogh's best work is a kinetic product of him at his most perceptive, most open to the truth, most magnificently and terrifyingly sane.

I think of Cypress Trees. Simple trees, but each mark is infused with a wholly unguarded connectivity, to the earth, the light, the living air, his hand and eyes, the paint, all that is. Van Gogh was religious. The painting and the act of making it is indistinguishable from the most active and unguarded faith; I am irreligious, but at my best moments, I glance something like it; any artist could.

While painting, I've touched tenuously this connectivity between a person and the whole of the perceivable world that comes through and is expressed by the act of painting. That happened in little flashes in my garbage painting and I saw, I think, more than I could manage- certainly more than I had the skill to put in the work then.

We need to talk about what is to be a human being, and how we build and recognize that, and grow it, and why this is ever denied to anyone. And why this simple song is so close to a truth of art.
Long since, I am grateful for the gift of that cassette.