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.    

    

Color Bars

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.

           

      
Vincent Van Gogh hung his paintings on his bedroom walls. Van Gogh painted his bedroom in the French town of Arles three times. In the painting the bedroom walls are a pale blue. A blue drained of its vigor. The strokes seem to slide down the walls like drops of rain down a window on a lonely, rainy, Saturday spent indoors. Like tears. This painting lacks the shining yellows, beating reds, and swirling strokes of his other paintings from his time in Arles (Think The Starry Night or The Night Café). The warped wooden bedroom floor, green in the grooves, stretches out at an uncomfortable decline. It creates an uneasy slant, seeming to empty the contents of the room out at the viewer. The sparse wooden furniture is mangled in an invented perspective, evidenced in the footboard of the plain bed dwarfing the headboard behind. Hanging from the walls are five of Van Gogh’s own paintings.

           

 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.     

Lookin' Out My Back Door

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.