Scumbler

Practically all men cross their legs, fold their arms, maybe expect me to rip at their flies.

After all, I am an artist. Men live such dumb lives anyway, continually defending their precious inviolability, their phony territory. Mostly they’re afraid somebody might just find out nobody’s home. They live in film sets like on Universal Studio lots, fancy façades, nothing behind, a front for the tourists.

Generally, people seem to be getting more and more invisible, slipping around inside their stories. Even some women are turning slightly translucent; I can see through them against certain kinds of light. Or maybe I’m going people-blind; there’s hardly anybody around for me anymore. Could be I only need new glasses: thick, rose-colored; multi-focal, with catalytic platinum frames.

HOW TO AVOID A VOID? FIRST THERE WAS

THE VOID, THEN THE WORD, THEN THE WORLD.

IT JUST CURLED BACK ON ITSELF!

Everything’s ready now. The box and a 25F canvas in front of me; palette set with earth colors, turp, varnish. The mirror’s on my left. I paint best over my left shoulder, probably because I’m right-handed.

THESE FIRST STROKES AGAINST WHITE:

LIGHT FIGHTING; A SEDUCTION TO WHAT’S GOING

TO BE. AN OVERWHELMING OF WHAT WAS.

In the mirror, I’m holding the brush in my left hand. I try to see myself as a left-handed painter, switch-painter, leadoff painter. No. That’s not me; ambidextrous I’m not. I never punch singles to the opposite field. I’m always swinging for fences and mostly striking out. Mirrors lie too. Lies reflecting lies into something we can almost believe. That is, if you’re a believer. We’re running out of believers: I believe.

I try scrunching back on my haunches and staring. I’m a Russian sitting down before leaving on a trip; say a few prayers. Got to let this happen to me, get into the magic passive-active mood.

I’m ready. I lean forward. I let go, fall into my private craziness, the insanity that keeps me sane.

When I paint anybody, even me, I go a tiny bit berserk. I want something that can never be, probably isn’t meant to be. My easel’s set so I can see the model or the canvas, not both at once. Everything close; no secrets; we’re involved in a birthing, for better or worse.

But this time the model’s the mirror, me. And I’m wanting the impossible, to get close to myself. It’s hard! I’m always twice the distance between my eye and the mirror. I know I’m there on the surface, but I seem to be in the distance. I lean close, closer, trying to see me, to crawl inside myself without touching.

In a mirror, eyes are static; they don’t move. The mind blanks it out, a minor hysterical blindness. It gives self-portraits a stare, that and the painful concentration.

HOW HARD CAN ONE LOOK? DOES LOOKING

MAKE US BLIND TO SEEING?

When I paint anybody else, we’re jammed close: model, me, easel; a triangle, knees touching, wrapped into each other around my paint box. We need to get close or it’s only looking. And just looking is like counting, or measuring or describing – or, worse yet, estimating.

There can be no sitting still. We’re not catching a moment; we’re trying to paint a lifetime, two lifetimes, all lifetimes, past, future, present. This isn’t a Polaroid instant camera click-whirrr-wait. We’re human beings making mistakes; jumping around in our loose, confining skins trying to make mistakes real, make them ours. Somehow, life must be caught in the paint, poured, forced, squeezed, seduced, transmuted into it; hard, hard, like labor-hard. Hard labor, over forty years of it now, and nothing’s really been born, only a series of miscarriages, abortions, anomalies.

IN DIVERTED LINES THOUGHTS DISGUISE

AND OPEN LANDED MINDS ARE PLOWED

BY CROWS. SOWN, EATEN, SEEDED GRAIN.

I’m drawing, trying to let it happen, at the same time doing it; establishing figure-ground relationships without thinking too much, not designing or composing. Part of what I am is how much space I take up, how and where, and I don’t know what the difference is anymore. It gets harder to sustain the illusion of importance in uniqueness, individuality.

It’s much easier having another human being close to me, talking, yawning, smoking, nose-picking, staring at space, smiling, frowning, lifting eyebrows, twitching, sniffing, belching, more or less hiding farts, sneaking peeks at me; or the painting. These things slip through me into the painting, give it life, life not mine. It isn’t true creation but it’s the best somebody with outside plumbing can manage.

It’s a kind of osmosis; people filter into me. I never look and paint at the same time; I paint in a dream, absorbing my models, being absorbed by them. They become the blood, cells, chemicals, electricity in my brain. They pass around in there, mix with me, my plus and minus ions, my personal hydrocarbon chains, chemical memory banks. There’s a wild churning; then it comes back down the nerves, along my arms into my fingertips and out through the brush. Out it pours, color and light being moved around by my brain, my body, my psyche, under my eyes; blurred by the model, somebody, not me, and feeding back, turning me on, symbiotic, back and forth; a bit cannibalistic, with Roman pagan feelings thrown in.

BECOME ME. COME WITH ME.

WE COME TOGETHER AND THEN

WE ARE APART; A PART OF EACH,

NEVER TO GO AGAIN.

Each portrait must be a new person. It’s a new being growing from the mixing of another human with me. It’s a temporary marriage consummated, and the portrait is our child, a birth, a rebirth, second mutual coming.

Compared to really having a baby, it’s like one of those old-time ‘radio re-creations’ of baseball games before television days. The announcer would thump his pencil against the mike to simulate a hit, turn up some canned crowd noise, do an excited description of slides, tags, putouts. But it’s better than nothing. I try to live with it; without this slim hope I’m dead.

SLOW-FOOTED, HEAVY-WINGED, LATE TO

STING, AUTUMN HARVEST BEE GATHERING

FOR THE WINTER COMB AND THE SUN PASSES

LOW ACROSS THE FADING SKY.

I paint very traditionally; grind my own paints, size the linen a special way so there’s a flexibility to help with the dance of my brush. For me, working on canvas board or wood is like dancing in ski boots.

I do a thin, double priming to attain just the right absorbent quality. I paint my underpainting with a personal medium, a combination of Lucite, varnish and linseed oil, then work with impasto wet-in-wet technique, followed by glazing and scumbling. I lean on all the usual tricks, plus some few I’ve invented myself.

OUT OF DARKENED SKIES, A BEAM CUTS

LIKE GLASS, DEFINING CLOUDS. I

CLOSE MY EYES: BETTER THE KNOWN

CONFINES OF AN EVEN DARKNESS.

In our days, it’s hard to find schools teaching these things. Nobody seems to care enough. Everything’s only instant gratification, a veneer of the immediate visible result, without concern for permanence or even what passes for permanence. Sometimes I seriously think we might be living in a dark age of painting.

The little I did learn as a painter I got by looking, reading or copying. Every morning for five years I went to the Louvre and climbed all over, inside, the good ones. I ate, drank Rubens, Titain, Rembrandt, Chardin, Velásquez. Goya, until they were a part of me, I was part of them. I’m closer to some of those long-dead people than I am to most of my today friends. These painters are very visible. Each was somehow desperate to be and struggling to become. They were part of their time but walked through it. They put themselves out into the future with everything they had. In them you find pain and joy blended into strength – real strength, not just muscle stuff. They tried to live in times not yet there.

I’m still drawing. I’ve got to draw through to the painting. Drawing is turning space into volume, not just making lines. There’s actually no such thing as a line. Good drawing for a painter is showing where the paint must go and what it should do. It’s easy to get caught in drawing for itself, then have nothing left to paint; romancing until there’s no room, no space, no place for making love, an isolated unpainted unpaintable corner.

DESCRIBING MAKES SLASHES, MINOR

SCRATCHES IN STEEL WALLS OF OUR

SEPARATENESS, WE ONLY MAKE THE

IMPOSSIBLE MORE SO.

Somebody watching me work can go mad. It’s like watching a tailor working carefully, with good material and fancy stitches, sewing up a coat with one arm longer than the other or with no neckhole.

The point is, there’s no sense in imitating life, or representing it; it must be invented, imagined. This does not necessarily mean abstract or nonobjective objects or theatrical distortions or strained efforts at intellectual composition either. Those are the easy ways, avoidance systems. One needs to show life the way one sees it personally, the way it is felt.

So, in the end, my own particular paintings come out a bit crooked in ten different directions. OK, so that’s the way I am. I struggle to show my personal reality, the only one I know. I try to paint it carefully with full attention and much love.

GETTING LOST IN THE SPACES BETWEEN,

A GENTLE LEANING TOWARD EACH OTHER.

When I’m actually painting somebody, they see me staring, poking at the canvas with my brush, leaning in, backing off; I’m trying not to jump up and down. Once in a while I remember to smile. I want them to stay with me, not run away or disappear. Most people think I’m painting them. Actually, I’m painting the taste, the smell, the space they’re taking up. I’m trying to paint them all the way from fetus to corpse, and all in one moment, all in one place.

They see me paint one ear too high or too red. The painting looks like Eisenhower or Uncle Jim in 1962, and they get nervous, restless. Sometimes they giggle, or laugh!

God in heaven, this is a serious business: it’s a painting; I’m digging inside both of us and trying to put it in one place. We’re damned close to communication, a serious effort to glue things together.

By the end of a painting I’m sweating down to my shoes, toes are squishing around in sweat pools. Did Rembrandt paint Hendrikje Stoffels the way she looked? Hell, in five different paintings she looks like five different people. She probably was, and he loved all of her. It’s the all of things that’s beautiful; a painter’s got to paint past the flickers, somehow. Or at least convince himself and a few other people that he has.

BLEND A HUSHED WHISPER, A SKITTERING

IN ONE CORNER; THE TASTE OF SMELL.

I stand; go to the toilet. I sit down again and stare into the mirror some more. Haven’t actually been looking at myself enough lately; been looking at a memory. I know I’m a vain bastard but I never really look close except when I paint me. It’s as if I’m only checking my watch, checking to see how long it is till something, not looking to see what time it actually is; how much time I’ve spent, how much I might have left.

I look at the old ‘visage’. It’s aging faster. There’s more sag in the eye sockets and dark purple-blue smudges, more veins breaking out in the cheeks. I look like a fatal terminal all right. It’s about time. God it’s hard to know when to give up and let yourself start dying.

There’s practically no hair on top and the beard’s almost pure white. I rub some yellow ochre and black into the beard; gives about the right color. That looks better. A beard hides most of the ordinary muscle sag; terrific advantage. I wonder why women don’t have beards. Probably men needed them to absorb hard punches; men’ve been living the physical dominance stupidity a long time, women have maybe learned to take those socks and keep on with it. No hairy hidings.

One thing, if women did grow beards, they sure as hell wouldn’t shave them off. They’d make something beautiful of them, the way they have with tits.

I’M TRUE, SO ARE YOU AND SO WE

LIE. BECAUSE, TO TELL THE

TRUTH, WE BOTH LIE. YOU AND I.

I get to work on the underpainting; transparents. I’m working fast with a big brush. It’s terrific doing self-portraits; only posing when I’m looking, nothing wasted. I’m into it.

He twists his head, stares out the corners of his eyes: suspicious-looking bastard; gazes out as if he doesn’t want to look anymore; getting harder all the time. Put that in there, Scum, get that. If you’re not honest here, you’re nothing. But remember, always distrust professed honesty. It’s the ultimate con job.

I’m laying me in down to the waist; maybe I’ll do the hands, put the brush in my right hand. I tone ground with burnt sienna, use a cloth for wiping in the main forms; work up shading and volume.

FIRST IN EARTH, THEN AERATED. WE’RE

CARELESSLY CREATED TO FIGHT THROUGH

TIME AND SPACE TO OUR PROPER PLACE,

TO DIRT.

It’s time to thicken the medium; build up my darks. I start brushing in cool colors, beginning movements from the light side; pushing colors in under where the impasto’s going to be.

Look at those stupid eyes; they’re staring back with such intensity, as if it matters. Get that, too, Scum! Work that in! Boar’s whiskers, you really love yourself you broken-down fart; what else, who else. All painters love themselves or they wouldn’t do it; writers too, probably; I think old Camus even said it once.

I start mucking in the background; moving out there some of what’s happening inside. Now grab that kink around the nose and make it show again up here in the right corner. I’m happy, juggling two, three dimensions simultaneously. It’s enough to make one want to stay alive. It’s all lies, one bigger than the other. OK, make the hard one truer; paint it louder.

I squeeze gobs of opaque paint on the palette: titanium white, all the cadmiums. STOP! Careful with those cadmiums, Scum; use burnt umber, more raw sienna, yellow ochre, our kind of colors, cheap colors. I’m the earth-color man; Scum of the earth. Let’s not forget!

CAN WE EVER BE FORGIVEN

THE MOMENTS OF OUR BLISS:

THE TINY CRACKS IN LIFE

THAT AREN’T JUST LIKE THIS?

Now we’re backing in. Picking out the highest points with light. Fan the white bleeding away into rolls of color and darkness across the forehead and into the penumbra. Make it live! I’m alive now, breathing through my brushes; color like blood, light like oxygen.

We need to keep my brush in close; laying it in carefully, deeply, with strong tenderness. Yellow next to orange and then together. Make it stand up. Light! Light it!

Goddamn Scum! Now drift back with the highs fading away. Gently scumble. Scumble, you scum; pearl away, fade back but still keep it close; help those sharp edges move together. Birth the lie into life; squeeze in that missing ‘f’. Only a word, but first was the word. No, first and last is the void.

I smell myself: part oil, part sweat, all horseshit. Here I am, laughing at me laughing at myself and crying at the laughing. I wasted valuable years trying to be a serious Dostoevski type, a latter-day van Gogh. Then I buttered myself deep with Middle European suffering, Sturm und Drang; after that, I experimented with nineteenth-century melodrama. Now I’m cried out, dried out. All I ask is something to make some reason – now, before it’s too late. How dumb can you get?

LISTLESS LISTENING, CRYING, SCREAMING,

ALL WATER ON WATER. AN ENDLESS FLOWING.

ANOTHER PROOF OF OUR NOT KNOWING?

I lean in tighter. Get the stinginess, the meanness, the fear, Scum. It’s in the lips; frothed with hair but it’s there; you know, you live with it.

Over sixty years with this same face, this same body. I’ve watched it grow bigger, harder, softer, sadder, hairier. Now I even grow tufts like foxtails inside my ears. I’m falling, failing from the effects of gravity, cell deterioration, laughter, weeping and plain boredom. Watch the cracks deepen, the flesh putty out, slowly turning into aged meat. Put that all in, Scum; make it visible. Death’s stalking just around one of these hours. Maybe yesterday.

I finish off the blue jacket; decide to leave out the hands, after all. Darkness is pushing me down, pinning me. I can’t believe it; here I’ve been painting over four hours; actually painting some of the time, blubbering, yammering the rest. The family will be home soon.

I lean back and look. It’s not a bad painting; still too much self-pity. I’m like one of those donors jammed into the bottom corner of a medieval painting. Only I’m all alone in the center of this canvas, begging to nobody, everybody; praying for everybody, nobody. Definitely obscene, in the deepest sense, unbearable, not to be seen.

I clean up; pack away the box. I need new pig’s bristles; the ivory black’s almost gone again, too. I use too much black in my painting. I can’t catch myself doing it, but the paint’s going somewhere; I’m not eating it. I’d better watch that.

EATING BLACK: CONCENTRATED SEARCH FOR COLOR,

OR, PERHAPS, THE LACK OF LIGHT IN WHICH TO

BURY THE NIGHT. BUT NIGHT IS ONLY A LACKEY;

COLD AS NO HEAT, SLOW MOLECULES. I FACE

BACK TO BLACK, NO ONE, NOWHERE.

3

Slum Landlord

I work outside today, Saint Valentine’s Day. It’s cold but I’ll take any sunshine I can get. I feel all cramped up painting inside, as if I’m cut off from life. I’m happiest out in streets, fighting crowds, cursing cars, yakking with people; it all gets into the work.

My painting’s got to be part of life, not just about it anyway. I’m OK inside for a while, sharpening up my personal carving knives, digging into myself, getting close, but then I’ve got to break out and muck around. In some strange way, I have the feeling I’m most alive when I’m painting, as if the other time is a kind of waiting. I don’t know what I’m waiting for but that’s the way it feels.

I’m working down on the Rue Princesse in the Latin Quarter. I’ve just started on a woodworker’s shop, menuiserie-ébéniste. The owner of the place comes out. We get into some standard everyday talk about ‘lost-artisanship-craftsmanship, world-going-to-hell’, all that tired jabbering. He asks me to put his name on his sign; it’s weathered off. I think he wants me to climb up over his door and do some actual, honest-to-God painting up there, but he means in the painting; that’s fine with me.

The painting’s going to be mostly browns and some dark blue-grays, with a light bulb hanging inside, lighting raw wood and sawdust; yellow-ochre hollow spaces. I’m doing the place almost face on, slight angle left. There’s a big old carved doorway on the left I want to finagle in somehow.

The door’s closed when I do the drawing. Halfway through my underpainting, the concierge comes out, jams this door open.

She’s an old gal, new face painted on. New face has nothing to do with her real face; hair cut gamine, bright red. She looks terrific, like a clown. There’s still a good body there too; moves easily, holds herself straight; thin freckled legs. Nobody with freckles is ever old. She’s maybe seventy and packing some fifty pounds of libido; comes on and chums me with ‘Oh-la-la’ old-fashioned-girl-style press; hands all over me. I love it.

I ask if she’ll stand in the doorway so I can paint her into my picture. She runs her fingers through the red straw hair; bony, bent fingers. She leans in the doorway, arm cocked against the wall. She’s wearing a blue-flowered dress. I paint it orange, need an orange accent. I gussy the dress up and make her about forty. Wish I could do that for myself, for everybody. No, there’s a time for each of us.

EACH TO A TIME A TIME FOR EACH—

WE WADE THROUGH OUR LIVES, THROUGH

MINUTES, HOURS, DAYS, MONTHS, YEARS

TILL WE GASP FOR AIR, DROWN IN TEARS.

She can’t believe it when I’m finished; a thing like this takes me maybe five minutes. One thing, I really can paint: good, fast, powerful. I might just not have enough aesthetic, or maybe too much – somewhere in there. I can spin around, fall down and begin painting anything in front of me, wouldn’t shift my eyes. I love it all, can paint everything; no damned discrimination. There are fifty paintings within a hundred yards of anywhere I’m standing. I know it. I could spend the rest of my life painting self-portraits, or stone walls: I might just do that.

Take my milk pots. I’ve painted sixteen milk-pot paintings already this winter. Who the hell wants paintings of milk pots? Thank the Good Lord our weather’s getting better; get me away from those pots. I’m beginning to smell sour milk on my nostril hairs all the time. It’s like when I was painting fish and they kept rotting on me. I get to be manic about these things, find myself falling into them, out of control. It’s unreasonable.

THE ONLY FINDING OF SELF

IS LOSING IT SOMEHOW.

This old gal’s looking at my painting and crying. Her face is beginning to run off into the street, makes me want to take my brush and touch her up. I’m also afraid she’s going to ask the price. I’ve sold more paintings for less than canvas cost because people want them and have no idea what’s involved. Rich people should pay me five thousand dollars apiece for paintings; make up for the ones I sold at ten. Only trouble is rich people don’t usually like my paintings, remind them of a whole bunch of things they want to forget. This gal slips a five-franc coin into the paint box; makes me feel like a real turd.

LACK OF TRUST

SPIRITUAL RUST.

An American’s been standing behind me. He’s watching the whole show, smiling, very catlike, very dignified. He’s young but there’s much dignity there. His clothes are old: worn cuffs, bed-pressed pants, very neat; carries an umbrella on a sunny day.

The concierge goes away. I start painting seriously again, trying to forget those five francs.

‘That was really nice, man.’

I knew he was American all the way, even with the umbrella and all the dignity. He has swimmy blue blinking eyes; contact lenses. He tells me he likes my painting; stands in the sunshine watching me paint; not much talk.

I’m up on the sidewalk leaning against the Hôtel Princesse; painting’s coming along fine; beautiful shadows falling across the wall. I’m painting a GAZ box now; lovely things those GAZ boxes, especially in early, almost spring morning, clear light.

The American comes up beside my paint box, wants to get something with the five francs. What do I care? Five francs; if he wants them, OK. I nod, smile, trying not to break the magic; I’m deep in the middle of things; I’m lost, floating in light and air, thinking and dreaming at the same time. But I might have to wipe out the old gal after all, too sharp and the top right feels blank. I’ll work on it; try to save her. The American’s disappeared with the francs.

Then he goes past with flowers, yellow daisies; slinks into the concierge’s doorway; comes back without flowers, very catlike. He’s a cat all right – big one, has all the marks. I like cats, usually; dangerous, but something. Wolves and dogs like me can usually make it with cats. We’re different but we respect each other.

I SLINK THROUGH MY PRIVATE FOREST,

SNIFFING TRACES, SEARCHING PLACES

TO HIDE MY KNOWINGS, LUSTING FEAR.

Next, the concierge comes gliding out with the flowers in a vase. She perches them on the back of my box, next to the turpentine. She’s probably some kind of small cat, too; clean little feet, sure sign. Here I am, surrounded by cats, trying to paint. Holy God!

A FEINT AT DEATH:

LAST BREATH. I PAINT.

The American invites us both for coffee. What the hell; I hate losing light but it’s OK; this is what my painting’s about, being close with people. We go into a small café next to the hotel.

The bartender here used to be a bullfighter. Every tiny Spaniard I’ve ever met in Paris is an ex-bullfighter the way all big Americans are ex-football players or boxers. No, that’s not true anymore. Today they’re all black-belt judo or karate or kung fu experts. Times change, stories change, but men’s stupid lies about themselves don’t change much.