My
wife has no patience for abstract expressionism. I laugh when we tour together
through museums and we enter a wing of pieces by abstract expressionist artists
like Gorky, Pollock, or Rothko. She looks back at me and with a rolling of her
eyes, perhaps with a sigh, she scurries on to the next room, knowing all along
that this act of hers always brings me to the point of awkward museum laughter.
She loves art and going to museums. She’s just not as excited about abstract
art as I am. Example, we wandered through the Museum of Modern Art in New York
City, and I lingered longer in front of a painting by Mark Rothko, Magenta, Black, Green on Orange, after
my wife dashed into the adjoining hall, searching for her favorite impressionist
paintings. At over seven feet tall, the Rothko, which is comprised only of
large thick irregular rectangles of color against an orange background, both
challenges and overloads the senses. Its power is in seeing it in person; my
art history textbooks could do a Rothko no justice. There is not any real form
in his works. The viewer is bombarded with the emotions color can create. Joy,
ecstasy, doom. He was only interested in capturing life and the passion of
humanity and if you just focused on color relationships, then you missed the
point. When I attempt to explain this to my wife she responds, “There is no
point.” I love her.
I
heard an art critic once explain the key to analyzing any kind of art is to
look for the “3 H’s” – Head, Heart and
Hand. Any great piece of work will exhibit all three. Head signifies the
innovative idea; the new way the artist approaches and translates their world
into art. Heart expresses the passion, emotion and feeling that a piece can
conceive. Hand indicates the technical craft of the artist. My wife, always
looking to challenge me, points to a starkly minimalist painting hanging nearby,
Suprematist Composition: White on White
by Kazmir Malevich. The painting comprised only of a white square, seemingly
floating against a white background. And that’s it. “What’s this one all about?
No Head! No Heart! No Hand!” She had a point.
In
high school I was in an AP Studio Art class with a close group of artist
friends. I liked to think that I was capable of exhibiting the 3 H’s in my
artwork back then. However, the problem was I never had the 3 H’s going at the
same time. Sometimes I had a great idea, but could not get my Hand to cooperate
with my Head. Or, an emotional muse would overtake me, but my Head and my Hand
were not on speaking terms with my Heart that day. Artist’s Block. On most
days, the art teacher, Ms. Pool, would let the us work on any piece of art we
wanted, the end goal being to create a portfolio that we would submit at the
end of the year to be judged in order to earn college credit. Ms. Pool would
always supply us with the materials we needed, and the space to work, but she
was often short on direct guidance. If our Head was not cooperating, it could
be a long, painful, class period.
One such day
stands out to me. My friends were all probably working on something magnificent,
while I sat staring at an over-sized sheet of white paper with the sinking
feeling that I had absolutely nothing artistic to offer to anybody. The
Supremes sang, “You can’t hurry love, you just have to wait.” I substitute art for love. Making art does not always fit into a high school class
period and if we produced nothing, Ms. Pool would get on our case. In
desperation I grabbed several green oil pastels, ranging in tone from bright
yellow-green to dark forest green and proceeded to cover the entire sheet of
paper in these hues. At first, I had no clue what I was doing or where I was
going. I just wanted to blanket the paper in color so I would have at least done
something that period. But the more color I put on the page, the more immersed
I felt in the process. I began at the top with the bright green gradating to
the bottom with the darkest green. My hand swept across the page in long strokes,
with such pressure that the oil pastels would break and dissipate in my hand.
When the pastels were gone, I used my fingers to smudge and smear the greens
together. The more the hues blended, the greener my fingers became, the more
the piece made sense to me. The green was not a color; it was a sentiment. It
was life. It was newness. It was the rebirth of my inspiration. It was a field
of energy. From dark to light. One of my friends at the table with me said it
looked like a Rothko to her. I made a mental note to search for this “Rothko-guy” in my encyclopedia when I
got home from school. Another friend asked what I was going to call the piece. Perfect From Now On, I replied, the name
taken from an album that was just released that week in 1997 by a band we loved
named Built to Spill. It was perfect.
In the opening track of the album, the singer proclaims, “I’m going to be
perfect from now on, I’m going to be perfect, starting now!” His declaration
was my declaration. My art would now be ideal. I would let color be my
stimulus. My guide. And in the color, I would understand and describe emotion. I
now had a new direction navigated for my class portfolio.
The bell rang and the
period ended. We cleaned up, left class and entered the letdown of reality, the
rest of the world apart from art. You know… high school. The next day I bounded
into art class, ready to grab a bigger sheet of paper, and a new monochromatic
color scheme in oil pastels. Ms. Pool had set up in the front of the room a
still life of fruit, baskets, and abandoned glassware for the class to study,
copy and paint. I couldn’t be bothered by a still life anymore. Oranges?
Apples? A table-cloth? Paul Cezanne called, he wants his motif back. I was not
going to just paint a still life. Because life is not still. I was going to
recreate life and its majesty with a new field of color. I was going to
challenge structure and form and make something so vibrant that retinas would
sting.
Just as I was
about to streak purple to paper, Ms. Pool came over to my table. “We’re not
going to have a repeat of whatever that was yesterday, are we? Oh God, I hope
not.” I put away the purple oil pastel, and grabbed a black charcoal drawing
pencil. I sketched a still life and deserted my color fields, and never
submitted a portfolio.
When I lived alone
I sometimes had solitary painting parties on sporadic Saturday nights. I turned
off the cell phone to the outside world, bought a bottle of cheap red wine,
because I really did not know anything about wine back then, and shut myself
in. My only table covered in newspaper became the easel and I surrounded my
blank canvas with distressed brushes, and squeezed and contorted tubes of oil
paint. I grabbed a photograph out of a shoebox or an old album and it became my
spontaneous motif. The cork removed from the wine, to be poured into a white
coffee mug, because I did not have wine glasses back then, and the brush dipped
into the paint mixed on the newspaper to be spread across the canvas in manic,
rapid strokes. A CD from my collection put in the stereo, the volume turned up
just loud enough to be too loud, and when it was finished the next one up would
take its place, the music no doubt influencing the pace and movement of my
painting. A slow album urged me to use more blues, more yellows, pale green
things, and longer softer lines. A fast album coerced reds, bright oranges, and
distant purples, in jagged marks. The music also compelled me to dance alone,
save for the ghost of inspiration, taking silly breaks, to mix some new colors
and get a different perspective on the piece in motion. No matter what, I could
not stand to work on a painting for more than one night, so by the time the
wine was gone, so was my inspiration. The finished painting then had two
possible destinations: 1. If someone liked it then they could take it. 2. If no
one asked for it I hung it up on my apartment walls. Most paintings ended up on
my apartment walls.
The
scene is the bedroom, the most intimate of rooms, of a troubled artist at one
of his most troubled times. He paints his bedroom as a scene of calm and rest,
belying what was taking place outside of the room, and inside of his mind. The
mad Dutchman. Fleeing a period of alcohol sickness, Van Gogh moved to this
“Yellow House” in Arles. He was described by a young girl who sold him colored
pencils as “dirty, badly dressed, and disagreeable… very ugly, ungracious,
impolite, sick.” At Van Gogh’s request, in an attempt to create a utopian
artist commune, Paul Gauguin came to stay with him in the Yellow House. Instead
of utopia, a decomposed friendship turned into arguments and competition, and
with the quarrels, the threats of violence, the infamous razor blade appeared.
Just a few months after he painted Bedroom
at Arles, amidst all of the turmoil with Gauguin, Van Gogh sought the
solace of a prostitute named Rachel, and sliced off pieces of his left ear,
wrapped them in a towel and handed the macabre package to her. Gauguin later
found him at home, unconscious, his red head now crimson, blood saturating the
pillow. Two months later, Van Gogh would be in an asylum. Gauguin never saw his
friend again. A year later, Van Gogh died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot
wound to the chest. No gun was ever found. Only questions are left.
Like when one of
my painting sessions was interrupted by something I saw printed in the section
of an LA Weekly covering my table from the turpentine that often spilled. According
to the too brief article, Elliott Smith, a singer-songwriter, who I had been a
fan of since high school, and had seen perform live several times, was dead of
an apparent suicide on October 21, 2003. Two stab wounds, self-inflicted in the
chest. In the months following, more details about the suicide were reported.
That he and his girlfriend were arguing in their Echo Park home. She locked
herself in the bathroom to take a shower, heard a scream, opened the door and
found Smith standing, the knife lodged in his chest. He died later in the
hospital. A possible suicide note was found in the home later. It read, “I’m
sorry – love, Elliott. God forgive me.” The official autopsy left open the
possibility of homicide. Only questions are left.
Ruminating back to
my discovery that night still causes me to quaver. I cannot remember if I
actually finished a painting that night. The thought of the self-directed
violence is horrific. Alarming, tragic. His songs were always wrought with
sadness and melancholy, of allusions to abuse and addiction. Back then everyone
who cared about Elliott Smith drove out to the spot on Sunset Boulevard where
the cover of Smith’s last album Figure 8
was shot. The wall, a mural of swirling blue and red color bars, was
transformed into a memorial to Smith. Standing in front of it made me tremble,
slightly. Just like how I trembled when I saw Bedroom at Arles in person at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris when I was
19. Standing in front of the painting of the room where Van Gogh lived when he
had his major breakdown was disconcerting. That in a matter of weeks, his
mental state will have deteriorated to the point where he will mutilate
himself, before taking the last final step of self-destruction the following
year. And this was his bedroom. Pale blue bars of color stretching down to the
floor. Those paintings of his hanging on the wall. Every morning he would awake
and look up at these paintings above him, the ones he and his brother Theo, the
art dealer, could not find buyers for. They are further proof that the whole
world is concert against him in its rejection.
I never took the
rejection of my paintings seriously at all. Painting was just a hobby, not my
essence of being. I feel a bit bashful when I look at the paintings that I
still have, now living deep in a closet. I feel sad when I see Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles. It’s the same feeling
I get when I listen to Elliott Smith’s songs now. In their beauty lies that
deep melancholy. It is heart-breaking to me when such artistic, creative people
capable of producing beautiful gifts to us just cannot convince themselves that
they can fit into this world.
Two months ago, my
pregnant wife and I moved over the hill to the San Fernando Valley. For the ten
years prior, we lived in apartments, five of those years together in West Los
Angeles. But similar to my wife’s belly, we both knew we had to expand. Moving
to the valley was not the ideal plan. It took the perfect house to rent to lure
us away from the Westside, where my wife had lived her entire life. Where we
could not find or afford the place that would be right for us. Maybe one with a
walk-in closet for her. A spacious kitchen for me. One with a backyard. After
existing in apartments for a decade, I had almost forgotten how glorious one
could be.
Let
me tell you about my backyard.
It is shaded by an
immense, majestic, and messy mimosa tree, whose long, sweeping branches
outstretch like the tentacles of Verne’s octopus, sheltering the grass below,
feeding hummingbirds, and releasing 600 flowers a day onto ground. To its right
rests an old wooden picnic table, blue at one point, presently faded like beach
wood. Now on the supreme teacher perk (a necessity not understood by those outside
of education), the summer vacation, I have delighted in the simple bliss of
eating breakfast and sipping coffee out at the table. Lining the south side of
the yard are many mature fruit trees, planted years ago by the owners.
Tangerines, oranges, peaches, plums, pears, apples, lemons, cherries,
grapefruit – it is an amazing thing to stroll up to a tree, grab a piece of
fruit, and like Eve in that garden, minus the whole being expelled from
paradise part, take a bite. Along the eastern edge is a built-in child’s pool.
Only two feet deep, but together with a lounge chair and a good book, it is the
perfect way to waste a few hours of a summer weekday while the rest of the
world is away working. My first attempt at a vegetable and herb garden resides
in the northern part of the yard. Its opening day roster includes heirloom
tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers, broccoli rabe, basil, parsley, and cilantro.
My wife said, and is right of course, that I planted too much too close
together. We shall see what happens.
As marvelous as
all this is, the real wonder that consumes me is my future in this backyard,
with my son who is set to make his grand entrance into this world in September.
As I am slowly drinking my morning coffee, I gaze across the yard following the
swooping paths of birds at play, the racing of squirrels fighting for the
fallen fruit, and I can see myself throwing a baseball to, or kicking a soccer
ball with, or just chasing around, this vision of who my son could be. I can't
picture what he will look like, although he does already have a name, but I do
envision this area to be the happy place of him at play, and for me to see the
wonderment of life, and its simple pleasures, through the eyes of a child
again. And in my head I am singing that Creedence Clearwater Revival song about
a fantastic circus at play around John Fogerty’s son as he watches him dance
around backyard. And all is right.
I reminisce back
to my earliest childhood backyard memories. They begin out in New York, on Long
Island. A backyard full of green and trees, family and barbecues, lightning
bugs and cicadas, the above-ground pool and the swing-set, and more room than
any kid would need to play with his Dad. Somehow, though, we used up every
square foot of that land. Me, my dad, my mom, my little brother. Then to the
next stage of childhood, when ages turn to double-digits, my family moved out
to Temecula, California. The Inland Empire, supposedly. Our house, like every
one around it, stood far too close to the next, and its backyard could not
compare to the one on Long Island. It began as dirt with a small concrete
patio, and remained that way until long after my parents divorced. Quiet.
Disregarded. Unlike the Long Island house, when it was time to move, we did not
do this together, as a family. First my dad left. Then I moved to Los Angeles.
Then my brother got his girlfriend pregnant. Later, my mom and sister finally
left, as well.
Until now, that
was the last backyard I could call, in any capacity, mine. I had left Temecula
and moved to Redondo Beach, where backyards are a luxury. But throughout my
twenties, a backyard never registered that high on my list of priorities. I
even thought at one point that I would live out my life in an apartment just
like Jerry on the show Seinfeld. Finally it set in, really much later than it
should have, that it’s not me who will be that that kid running around in this
grass chasing butterflies. I am going to be Dad now. I stand out in my
backyard, with my arms around my wife and her belly, the next world waiting in
her womb, as she enjoyed a popsicle straight from the ice cream man, and I know
that a backyard is for family.
