To my brothers and sisters, real and imagined - i love you · thank you. To my parents ______fill in the blank, for myself and any other child who wasn’t quite sure where the point of correction, coercion or condemnation lie. There is a enough suffering on the planet that can be directly attributed to shitty parenting skills that i am not alone in my reservations about “honoring thy mother and thy father.” I took that shit seriously and in an effort to placate a mother who once through onyx bookends through her bedroom window after she had kicked my father to any curb outside of the home i’d grown up in, while screaming at me, a not quite 15-year old snot-faced kid what a difficult birth i had been; only to find pop suckling the breasts of his 20-year junior Mormon Princess who made clear her door was to be knocked on, not walked through, i concede confusion.
The owner’s husband has arrived and demonstrates fairly clearly the differing male/female roles of the country where i now reside. He will not do anything until he has conferred with her, or is that a blindspot from my “chauvinist” upbringing. I find it charming that they have a close working relationship where he honors her leadership and where he is not threatened by deferring to her. What i am not seeing is his “return” for such an arrangement. The women in the United States who have demanded such a configuration - seemed to think that subservience was part of the bargain. I am not getting that in the limited view i have as yet in the far more “gender neutral” country i now reside. My fond hope is that there will be a woman i meet here who has tolerance enough to look beyond my poor training and help me to help her.
Mixed in with that innocent fantasy is a vibrant relationship to Jack Nicholson’s depiction of an author given everything he wanted only to find _______fill in the blank. I have no excuse, if art was my passion i’d resort to what Matisse did and draw with long sticks in my convalescence · or the haters have won and entirely undermined my confidence in my own creative capacity and rendered me as one more “deer in the headlights.” i d k, what i know is there was a time when i could surf the subways without handrails and draw viable portraits of personages near and far on a lurching train in the flickering light - ignoring those who’d like to know but lacked my own mother’s lack of boundaries and would not peek where she had no compunction about interrupting any creative process just to _____fill in the blank.
I was once a guard at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, CA - and one of the axioms of that duty was that people seem incapable of looking at beautiful objects no matter how ancient or fragile without wanting to touch them somehow for some reason · and the guard’s duty was to see it coming and intervene in the “nicest possible way.” It seems to be a postulate to the axiom or vice-versa that the public must move around to the back of an artist and witness the process. Any longer my once rock-solid confidence to draw anything anywhere at anytime is now reduced to faint scratches of graphite indicating ideas that just remain outside the concrete. I don’t even know when that happened, one minute i’m drawing handlebars of motorbikes in Bali, and the next i’m spending weeks trying to fathom the girth of one of the largest trees on the planet. Please s’plain that to me.
Nor is it any longer of any importance to me that anyone see what i can, or understand how long and how much effort it took to reach that point - anymore i would be content to hear the voice of an 18 month-old telling some negligent fool to pick up the trash s/he just threw to the ground. I know - more pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, but at least it would be an indication that rather than waiting for the rapture, the rebuke of a small child would encourage me more than the re-animation of Mozart the Kurzwell the monster has set his sights, hopes and future of our species using the dubious Artificial Intelligence (AI) the corporations have bet the farm on - your farm, my farm the whole fucking planet’s farm. So in the end, the best i can hope for and what i wish for more and more is the gentle touch of a loving woman looking into my fading sight and asking me to paint what i see.
jts 26/07/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
∞
No comments:
Post a Comment