Perfect From Now On

            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.