beauty and torment | CLOUD NOIR GALLERY

Beauty & Torment

By Patrick McCarthy

I try to collect art books, but only if they cost a few dollars. They’re usually too expensive.

Right now my coffee table is stacked high with them. Sometimes they’re as much as an actual work of art.

But the weakest part of a thick, glossy, colorful art book is the writing. I tend to skip over the text. Or read it later. Or not at all.

As a working painter, I started out in a figurative style, proceeded towards abstraction, and then went into pure text art. Just a few words on a blank canvas.

Others have been doing something similar for at least one hundred years. But there’s room for a small niche.

I began with a single word, and moved from there. An isolated word doesn’t seem to be enough, no matter how evocative or powerful it may be.

It’s too impersonal.

I didn’t invent the word.

But a phrase can be different. And a fully expressed idea is even more so. It can become a line of poetry. An epigram. A slogan. Maybe eventually a proverb.

she

was

high

society

low

Hollywood

dive

One Saturday morning my daughter and I hit some garage sales in Los Angeles. It was a typically sunny, mild day, and we bought some things from a few locations.

On Fountain Street in West Hollywood I looked over a small pile of books, and picked up a paperback from the 1960’s. The pages were brown, and the glue on the spine was barely holding. It was a detective novel. Pulp fiction. These were being collected, especially if they had lurid covers.

“When Dorinda Dances” was the title of this one. The cover art was nothing special, but the blurbs on the back were amusing. One read: she was high society in a low Miami dive.

I bought it for a quarter, and continued to think about it. The contrast was interesting. It painted a picture. High society versus a low dive. It was somewhat redundant. Was there such a thing as a dive that wasn’t low? But still, I liked the way it sounded.

A woman in a cocktail dress, with a strand of pearls around her neck, high heels, a fur covering her shoulders, sitting in a seedy tavern, sipping a martini. Or maybe just knocking back shots of bourbon.

It was almost a short story.

Even a feature film.

Miami. We used to live in Florida, and know Miami. But we were now on the West Coast.

A painting of those words could be changed to Hollywood.

She was high society in a low Hollywood dive.

On the following Monday I painted my first text piece on a medium sized canvas with a yellow background and red words. And sold it the following day to a furniture store on LaBrea.

That was nearly twenty years ago. I’ve made and sold that piece many times since then. Not thousands. But maybe a hundred. In various sizes, and many color combinations.

loved

her

most

when

she

loved

him

least.

After my first text piece proved more successful than I would have thought, it took a while before making another.

I’ve had a lifelong interest in brief philosophical statements starting with the darkly obscure sayings of the pre-Socratics, like Heraclitus.

But the best thing about very old writing is their fragmented nature. Bits of ideas. Conceptual shards. Unfinished. Apocryphal. Corrupted. Questionable attribution.

But as admirable as these historically important thinkers are I don’t have a talent for compressed, gemlike remarks. Or if I could come up with one it seemed too close to another’s ideas.

If I have a talent it is to be a visual artist of a certain kind.

What was uniquely my own? What sort of things could I make that would leave a very minor but noticeable gap if it was left undone?

I stopped quoting. The goal was to be quoted.

Let other brainier, less creative, types spend their lives interpreting each other. For an artist this practice is a trap, a way of dooming oneself to second-rate status. A sophisticated attempt at avoiding yourself.

An intellectual illuminates the thoughts of others. An artist illuminates his own thoughts.

Distill your own experience, and try to give simple form to your strongest feelings.

My most adhesive theme was the nature of human love. From the earliest I wanted to understand love.

My romantic feelings are strongest when the particular woman I’m attracted to is oblivious towards me.

This troubling situation could even be at the root of our fascination with celebrity. Who is less likely to return our love than a famous beauty?

But a woman doesn’t have to be famous to be intensely desired. Every town has its village queen, its official beauty. I’ve fallen under the spell of this situation several times, at several locations.

Clarified and boiled down to its essence it can be expressed in this way: he loved her most when she loved him least.

Distance lends charm. Not too much distance, however. There needs to be a sporting chance.

I’ve never been overwhelmed by a woman without actually setting eyes on her.

I may admire pin-ups, film stars, celebrated beauties, but I can’t bring myself to physical desire them. They remain two-dimensional. Like dreams, or ghosts.

Ideal burning desire can’t be enkindled in this way. And it hasn’t been down through the ages. It’s hard to fall stupendously, desperately, in love with a painting, a photograph, or a film.

But genuine dimensional seeing is enough. It’s all it takes in order to develop a massive, even a lifelong crush. The illustrious Dante only saw his Beatrice twice. The last time, when she walked by on a street in Florence. It was all it took.

She might have never noticed the poet’s extraordinary passion. Nor did it matter to him. In fact it only intensified his ardor.

Women, in particular, see this particular piece and ruefully shake their heads. So true. So weird, but so true.

“What’s wrong with you guys?”

I wish I knew, but there are some reasons.

Why do people climb mountains? Or travel to remote, inaccessible regions? The mastery of great distances will always find a challenger.

But that's not the only cause of this very intense unrequited desire. It may go back to the insufficient love from a parent.

Or even further. Back to our animal origins.

rich

artist

dead

artist

Without a lengthy search through my haphazard files and photographs it would be impossible to say when I made the first version of these pieces.

I have stacks of silk screens on shelves in my studio, like rows of books. Around 250, many of which are cleaned and remade several times. The screen itself often rips, or becomes unglued to the stretcher.

Sometimes I make a text screen, print it, and no one buys it. I then reclaim it, and use it for a new image or written passage. It saves money this way.

A painting that I’m fond of hangs on the back room of my studio, to the right of where I’m now sitting. It’s done on a discarded steel shelf that I found in an alley. It reads: rich artist dead artist.

It’s not romantic, or lyrical. It’s one of my reasoned conclusions about the world of art and artists. Not everyone would agree with the statement, but it could be defended pretty well.

It’s a familiar story. An artist starting off is generally broke, but somehow he manages to create his best work. The public takes notice and his days of struggling are over. Eventually, almost automatically, he becomes rich.

This is how the popular story goes.

In his time of poverty and obscurity an artist often says to anyone who’ll listen that he’d like to become rich and famous because then he’d be able to do his best work.

A fond delusion.

What actually happens? His art production tapers off. Each song, book, poem, or painting, is slightly less moving than the previous one. But this doesn’t matter much to his bottom line.

He turns into a public figure. A monument. And owns several properties, and reaps rewards and medals and articles are written about him in magazines and respected journals. Someone writes his biography.

He’s rich, but creatively, artistically, imaginatively, he’s a shell of his former self. He’s dead.

Or if you like, artists can become rich but only after they are literally dead. Van Gogh must be scratching his head as he gazes down at the art auctions that have taken place over the last hundred years.

Whether an artist is a wunderkind or a late-bloomer, his genius never flourishes under a pile of money. He ceases to be an artist and instead becomes something else.

Wealth drives a dagger into the heart of his genius. But he can live on, honored, satisfied, tremendously active and busy, wildly productive, or pleasantly at rest.

This observation is at once a warning and a consolation.

If an artist has a goal of becoming a multi-millionaire he must keep in mind that it comes with a lethal price tag.

But if he has that dream, and in spite of all his best efforts, he fails in his quest, he can at least take comfort in the fact that creatively speaking he still breathes. He still has a beating heart and a working soul.

He can half-heartedly thank the gods for not granting him his infantile wishes. Artists are used to rough times. The sweetly mellow ones can be the most fatal.

Artists can safely afford to be filthy rich after they die. That’s how it’s always played out. The world can be unstinting in an artist’s posthumous glory.

The world doesn’t do an artist a favor when it prematurely honors him. Unless it intends to destroy him.

But the attempts to make an artist wealthy before he’s in the grave is primarily due to others who want to cash in on his fame. Artists are rich because they make others also rich. It’s all a big scheme.

She was used to being admired. She didn’t

frown or smile much. Her face would

have to last. If you were one of lucky

ones allowed to touch her smooth skin.

It was cool to the touch. She was

The only poetry worth reading is about either love or injustice. Actually, the only art worth making, or treasuring.

Of the two injustice is a temporary evolutionary problem, but love is eternal.

Long poetry has passed out of relevance. Nor will it ever come back. The shorter the better is the rule for poetry today. The masters are the early Chinese and Japanese. The West is catching up.

These written paintings could be considered as a kind of poetic prose. This viewpoint pushed the pieces in certain direction.

But a fairly lengthy text piece wasn’t as successful. There is the problem with people pausing long enough to read the entire statement. The world is growing more impatient, as far as reading goes. So many things vie for our attention.

Reading is best done from a seated position, not standing in a gallery peering at art hung on a wall.

The most successful text pieces aren’t exactly read. That is, they aren’t a sequential process of marching along from left to right over space. They are grasped in an overall rapid glance, with a minimum of elapsed time.

A train of thought can be a problem. Or a passage from a larger piece of writing. It was successful to an extent, but another style could be better.

The more words, the less perfect. Only a classic aphorism, or an anonymous proverb, contained the ideal amount of words. You could neither add or subtract a single letter.

Maximum impact from minimum number of words.

Much in little. Multum in parvo. The ancients were unsurpassed in this area.

As soon as a passage was printed anyone with a sharp eye could immediately spot imperfections. No matter how carefully I analyzed it today, by tomorrow I could see how it could be expressed more artistically, more economically.

Some people have a gift for compressing the coal of prose into the diamonds of poetry. It’s not natural to me. It’s probably an underlying reason why I even write this book. I like expansion, and talking about something from every possible angle, even straying into tediousness and garrulity.

I perhaps didn’t take enough trouble with the passage. I was too easily satisfied, and eager to pin down my thoughts into a final form. I quickly printed it, sold it a few times, and was embarrassed to realize that there were several redundancies, and poorly expressed ideas that troubled me.

I don’t believe repetitions help in prose. Maybe in certain poems or tunes it’s acceptable, but not in prose.

Why did I repeat the word skin? Just an oversight, and being in a hurry. But it was an error just the same. Smooth and silky skin is a bit of a cliché, even though sometimes using a cliché can be the right thing to do. I’m not afraid of clichés. They have their place.

In this piece I fall into my romanticism. Or how I show my romantic influence.

One afternoon a young woman walked into my gallery and after reading the above piece, said “that reminds me of Pip.”

“Pip? You mean from Great Expectations?”

“Yes, I just finished it.”

So I write like Dickens? Or think and live and dream like a Victorian? That didn’t sound good.

But she may have had a point. I recall writing an essay in college on idealized, unhappy love in Great Expectations. How Pip had this disappointed love for Estella. It must have affected me more than I realized. Literature can do that to a person.

The text piece then started functioning as a way of understanding my past. A kind of self-analysis common to many contemporary painters, but using words instead of lines and shapes.

Yet, words are also lines and shapes.

"I won’t be able to see you

anymore,” she said, and

suddenly began to sob. Her

beautiful slim body shook all

over. I guess she had some

feelings for me after all.

I had the key to a certain kind of dynamic between a man and a woman. But I also suspected that this vital tension could also exist between a man and another man, as well as between two women.

In order to make my thoughts available to everyone in every possible situation I sometimes tried to organize pieces free of gender, and sexual orientation.

Love transcends so many conventional situations. But I noticed that it was not as effective if I suppressed every feminine pronoun. I’m deeply attracted to women. I don’t understand them any better than I understand myself. In fact, they grow more mysterious by the hour.

I wasn’t interested in solving mysteries, just portraying them. I’d make a very bad detective.

And speaking of detective, several of my pieces have been influenced by voiceovers from film noir. I tend to identify with a betrayed, ironic, somewhat cynical, somewhat world-weary male lead.

This is a voiceover style piece.

Some events strike a person with the force of truth. Not a universal truth, but an individual, artistic truth. I recall the time when that incident took place. I was sitting on the couch next to the woman who burst into tears.

I was leaving town. Again. This time for good. She was married. Again. There was no longer any point in my sticking around. I had used up my opportunities in that town. I was heading to Los Angeles. Again.

Twenty years later the same woman was talking to me long distance over the phone. She was looking at my web site.

“Who was that?” she asked, after reading the words. She’s aware that the pieces are about several different women.

“It was you.” How odd.

“Oh!” she laughed nervously.

The same incidents have very different meanings to the same characters involved. She’d already long forgotten about that moment. There were probably other emotional moments with other lovers and husbands and boyfriends. Maybe she wanted to forget it as quickly as it occurred. A brief summer cloudburst followed by days of sunshine.

I think the power of that piece comes across even twenty five years later. Partings are common, and sometimes they’re gut-wrenching.

Men are often so bewildered by women that they don’t know what to say. What to feel. What to think.

That my leaving town could in any strong way affect this woman was a great surprise to me back then. And it still is today.

Sometimes, though, the most solid proof of things can’t bring about our acceptance. We remain unpersuaded of what our senses tell us loud and clear.

A women’s tears are like a flash flood overturning everything in its path.

I find it hard to believe that I’m loved, or even missed. But women have occasionally tried to disabuse me of this notion. They’ve done what they could to convince me that I count.

But I still have my serious doubts.

___________

You could see that she was used to being admired.

She only smiled when it was necessary

No frowning either. Her smooth skin would

Have to last. Cool to the touch

If you were one of the lucky ones who

Got to feel her silky flesh. It was

Another of my earlier pieces again takes on a voiceover quality, like that of a somewhat hard-boiled, sardonic, older man. He’s talking about a beautiful woman, one who is coolly remote, withholding, and very self-possessed.

I really don’t know what exactly I was referring to when I wrote this. I had a woman in mind, but it seems more like a dream, an artistic fantasy. Or maybe it was an imaginary ideal woman, a severe goddess who unconsciously, through no fault of her own, torments would-be lovers, merely by the bewitching power of her intoxicating beauty.

I have this poetic tendency to transform the ordinary into the eternally sublime. This quixotic approach has its traditions. Even far back in history with the poems of Catullus or Martial.

It also reveals the narrator as someone who has been bewitched by The White Goddess, a literary myth that reappears over the centuries. I read The White Goddess by Robert Graves when I was a young man, and it has influenced me in my outlook.

A romantic poet especially tormented by The White Goddess is Keats, in his famous poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci. This plight has held the greatest fascination for me for at least fifty years. There is something real about this myth for only for a select group of lyrical types.

But it’s a short step from the sublime to the ridiculous. And hard to get back from there to the sublime.

I try to avoid hyperbole. This means uninterrupted monitoring. If I make a text piece that triggers laughter that is fine. Even if it’s not my intention.

But the sublime, while it may be close in proximity to the ridiculous, is separated by a high, strong wall. They must not stray into one another.

When a person is hotly desired it’s hard to imagine that everyone doesn’t feel the same way about that person. Hence, the permanently on guard state of a lover. The object of his admiration is everywhere prevailed upon He lives in permanent apprehension.

All eyes are turned to her. It’s as if he faces rivals wherever he goes. If the beloved is out of sight that just adds to his jealousy. His imagination runs riot.

No one is beautiful without understanding it to be so. It begins at the earliest age and continues for many years. She is told by everyone that she is special. She reads it in their eyes, their smiles, and the sound of their voices.

So she naturally develops an appropriate style to go with it. She doesn’t raise her voice, hurry, or make any sudden gestures. She’s like a stately ship gliding into harbor.

But at the back of her mind she dimly senses that this privileged status has a limit. So she makes plans to conserve this treasure.

A comical person is helped in his ability to make others laugh if he is funny looking. That is, if his features are angular and corrugated, approximating a gargoyle. A rubber face is ideal for the purpose. Lots of movement and distortion add to our amusement.

But a beautiful person is just the opposite. Even excessive laughter is not to be indulged in. Anything that breaks up the smooth, mask-like perfection is to be avoided.

Even though there is a delight in disorder, a seductive negligent manner, this is to be kept for very private, rare moments. The public must never gain entrance to this secret display of naturalistic abandonment.

The hidden side increases curiosity, until it reaches frenzy.

In this piece the narrator describes that kind of official beauty, a self-possessed, carefully managed, remote beauty. The kind often compared to a cold marble statue placed on a pedestal.

Even if the same person is described in several text pieces she’ll be shown in all of her phases, from every vantage point.

_________

Yeah, it’s easy to be with her,

What man wouldn’t like to watch

As she brushes her hair,

breathe her perfume, listening

to her laughter . . .

This piece has undergone several edits. It exists in a few different forms, like many others, in particular the early writing, which simply rushed out of me.

As my emotions cooled I saw little problems with the arrangement. Sometimes they were brought to my attention by collectors.

I sold the first one to a young man who gave it to his girl friend. She liked it well enough, but spotted the use of the past tense. I originally wrote “Yeah, it was easy being with her,”.

She didn’t like the word “was”. I pointed to thefacet that their relationship was something that ended. The narrator sounds like he’s telling someone about one of his old lovers. Which in fact I was doing, seeing how I was more or less over this woman. If that’s possible.

I then made a second version where I replaced “was” with “is.”

There are extreme passions that do not have an ending. Even death can’t destroy them.

What is more, these unique passions do not have a beginning. They go back to the furthest reaches of memory. In the womb, shortly after birth, childhood, youth. Maybe back to the dawn of humanity. Or even earlier.

This passion is anchored so firmly that it’s hard to conceive of oneself not feeling it.

Where I am, she is. The two are inseparable.

This undying, unborn, unending, unbeginning passion transcends time. It was always this way, and will always be this way.

Such a passion has religious, even spiritual, as well as mental and physical roots.

It could be called white magic, but that doesn’t exhaust its meaning.

The girl friend of the man who bought it was right, to an extent. Actually, she was a famous model.

But her anxiety was uncalled for. Whether the person who reigns in our body and soul is described in past tense, future tense, or present tense, she remains inextricably intertwined with our being.

If, in a conversation, I say “she was” it’s only a figure of speech, a way of communicating on a practical level. In reality it is forever “she is.”

Where I am . . . she is.

What I am . . . it’s because she is.

_________

If I could love you less

I’d love you more.

This piece is something of a paradox. A conundrum. But not everyone sees it that way.

A cursory reading is also possible. A young woman said to me that she saw it as a way to love a man as much as possible. She may have read it as “if I find myself not loving as much as I could then I will love you even more.”

I wouldn’t say that is a wrong interpretation, just a different one. There isn’t any such thing as a wrong reading of my art.

Each canvas is like an ink blot. It can mean anything you want it to mean. That’s the nature of art.

As we talked I pointed out another interpretation and I could see that the woman was struggling to re-orient her understanding of the saying.

This can be difficult. When one perception has lodged in our consciousness it begins to take root almost at once. First impressions are strong, but not necessarily the best, or the truest.

I explained what the piece meant to me as I created it. Once again, the original source was an experience with an actual woman. It was this woman, but it also harkened back to my past with other women in other places.

When I am overpowered with desire, admiration, tenderness, and anxiety for the immediate future, I can’t say that I am fully in love. Not as in love as I imagine I could be.

My entranced state, my excitement, gets in the way. My head spins. I can’t find the right words. My body doesn’t obey my commands. I’m simply thrown into confusion.

I’m too overwhelmed with love. It’s disgraceful, and not appropriate. It’s as if all the lion’s share of passion is on my side, leaving little or nothing for the object of my emotion.

This awkwardness, this bumbling quality, makes me blush. I don’t like what’s taking over my whole nature.

Therefore, if I could love the beloved person a little less it would right the listing ship and keep it from sinking.

But even if I was able to recover my natural self it’s very possible that I would end up even more deeply captivated. I’d now be able to love from a steady, stabilized position. This love because it would flow from my truer self would increase. I would then love the person more than ever.

Which would toss me right back to my first state. I would return to my old insecurity. The greater love would enkindle equally more intense passion and I’d be just as uncertain, and filled with trembling dread.

As I explained this to the young woman, a rather famous actress, I could tell that she wasn’t getting it. It makes sense. She was used to inspiring passion, but not really ready to feel it in her flesh and blood and soul. It’s something up the road for her.

But it was something that I’ve already endured. If that’s the right description.

____

wandering in circles

through the

jungle of desire

This piece has, like nearly every other one, an interesting story of development.

The creative process has been examined by scientists, psychologists, and philosophers for a long time, but it still remains unclear.

I made it and placed it on the wall of my gallery. One day a fairly average looking middle aged man walked in and stood in front of it and slowly read the words out loud. He then gave the rest of the place a cursory glance and left.

I wasn’t sure of the tone he took when he read it. Whether it was skeptical, comic, or perhaps he was even memorizing it. I felt he may have been mocking it, but sarcasm can be the first stage to eventual acceptance. He was overweight, poorly clothed, a deeply normal appearing American male of the species.

But wasn’t it entirely possible that this person at one time or another wandered lost through the jungle of his desires? Doesn’t that happen to everyone? We all have desires, and we all are controlled by them long before we manage to master them. If we ever do.

Where did this concept originate in my own life? Once, when I was nine, I became lost in the Canadian wilderness. My younger brother and I ran off to play and didn’t pay attention to the path that led back to our parents who were having lunch. We were on a vacation, and it almost led to a disaster.

So I have a memory of what it’s like to be lost in the woods. Close enough to a jungle. At that time my desire was simply to have fun, to run and jump over logs. Later on my desires were of a different kind.

I read a testimony of two prisoners in a concentration camp escaping, and after a week, due to a lack of compass, ended up right back at the very place of horrors that they originally fled from. Without a reliable guide we tend to travel in a circle.

I had a similar experience once while driving in Paris. After a half hour fighting traffic as we tried to leave the city we were stunned to see that we were right back at our hotel. My wife and I looked at each other and were speechless. How could this happen?

Anxiously desperate desires do not advance our lives. They only give the illusion of forward progress.

We keep repeating our unsuccessful patterns, spinning around like a leaf in a back eddy.

All this is done in a vague mist where the signposts are written in a foreign language, and the landscape is without a sense of the cardinal points of direction.

Desire takes place on many levels, but I am more intrigued by sexual desire. The problems involved with this powerful urge can be very catastrophic. It definitely recreates the feeling of a child lost and at the mercy of wild beasts and frigid nights spent alone and terrified.

---------------------

the power of her beauty

turned all of my plans

into ashes. I was willing

to let everything collapse

just for a long drink

at the fountain of her

soft, full lips. And I nearly

went mad from thirst

until that day arrived.

Love isn’t exclusively a delightful sunny walk in the park. Love can be a ravenous, pouncing tiger.

People can protest. They can say that isn’t love. They have their own definition of love. It’s everything they believe it to be, and it has its limits.

Outside of these strict limits it’s called something else. Lust, craving, obsession, irrationality, delusion, madness, even hatred.

But love is a very elastic, comprehensive state. You can have sacred love, or profane love. Or a hundred things in between.

Whatever it is, it’s generally agreed that love has power. It can erect entire civilizations, or destroy whole nations.

I wanted to portray love’s effectiveness through this piece. It is most irresistible when it employs its most devastating quality: beauty.

If anyone doubts the power of physical attraction just turn on the news of the day and try to look beneath the headlines. Why do people argue, fight, injure, murder? Love is behind it all. They’re feeble while in its deadly grip. They can destroy everything in an cataclysmic instant that they’ve worked so hard to build.

Its power is real, but not easy to express without resorting to exaggeration.

Nor is everyone a prey to its ferocity. Some may escape its fangs and claws. At least for the time being. Even if they manage to get through this life on earth, they can’t be certain that another existence awaits them. And this vulnerability to the power of beauty will eventually be tested.

Everyone imagines he’d do better than the tragic figures he witnesses in the world, in history, in literature, in art, in life.

Everyone dreams that he is stronger than the strongest passion. But no one can conquer love. You simply haven’t had the good or bad luck to meet this species of love.

Those that have experienced it will know that my words are true, and those that haven’t yet been in its power will be left with doubts. Only doubts. Not pure denial.

This piece seems like a passage from a romantic novel, it veers into the unspeakable. It can’t go much further without seeming insincere.

Can unsatisfied desire drive a person mad? Almost. Maybe. Under certain conditions, I would say yes. Definitely.

Soft, full lips. When the beloved’s lips are engorged and reddened with blood, when they are aroused, available and ready to be kissed, almost begging to be kissed, that’s when the smashing power of love nearly attains its highest pitch of absolute frenzy.

When the beloved is everything, then everything beside her is nothing. Reputation, money, fame, health, virtue, family: they all sink to nothingness.

Maddening uncertainty is one of the worst torments a would-be lover can endure. This is no guarantee that everything will end happily.

When we climb out too far on a frail limb, when we realize we have no safety net, when we refuse to employ any sort of pressure --- that can be very anguishing.

How can we be assured that we are loved in return?

We can’t.

And on top of that we are compelled to admit that such love is less than noble. We are looking for reciprocity. We hope to gain something for something. We hope to gain everything for everything.

It’s a foolish, desperate gamble, and ruin stares us in the face.

____________

One time, with one lover.

Even though we have sex with a person on more than one occasion certain episodes stand out. They take on a surreal quality, as if we can’t believe it really happened.

Art has a way of both pinning the event down for all time, and simultaneously relieving ourselves of the burden of fixated memory.

When I finally organize my thoughts into a pattern and place them on prepared canvas, I am freeing myself of a consuming idea while at the same time confessing to its power.

I become for the centuries that kind of man. This is what counted. This is how I lived. This what my dreams were made of.

I tried make a painting that also doubled as a scene in space. That is, a kind of concrete poetry.

The man and woman on bed in the upper part of the canvas, and the woman’s clothing on the floor at the bottom.

It’s easy to visualize a tempestuous encounter. The fancy clothes are not tidily arranged on hangers. The strand of pearls isn’t neatly placed in a jewelry box. It is anything but domesticated.

It takes place in a hotel room. Wild abandonment. As good as it was imagined. Maybe even better.

Such a moment doesn’t occur that much over a lifetime. Not precisely in that way. There are often variations, but one incident will epitomize them all.

Without the elegant clothes on the floor around the bed it would merely seem like home. Like a married couple sound asleep, or engaged in routine copulation.

I wondered how to place the word man and the word woman. Side by side, the woman uppermost, or the man on top?

I decided to place the woman a little higher than the man for two reasons. Women are morally and spiritually more elevated than man.

And, secondly, during sex the women I’ve known, and this particular woman, are able to derive greater pleasure from the non-missionary standard.

I see you

I hear you

I breathe you

I touch you

I taste you

I love you

This piece was made a few years ago. At first I surprised myself with its relative boldness.

I like raw art. As is it made by others. But this isn’t how I go about it.

Art deals with the brutality of existence and makes it more bearable. It softens the impact. It cushions the violent blow. It makes us able to live another day.

I made the piece, sold it once, and stopped printing it for a few years.

An intelligent friend then told me that it was one of the pieces that he really liked. This man grew up in a home with great art. He was very worldly, and something of a connoisseur.

Perhaps he had a point.

After all, it was totally mine. I made it up. I gave birth to it. There was no other way it would have come into being except through my own creativity.

It had structure. It had momentum. It made a point. It had a striking conclusion.

It even had a good title. The Five Senses.

A title that revealed something about the lines without being unnecessarily obvious and superfluous.

I began to believe that I actually created a poem. A true, original poem.

Was I in fact a poet? It wasn’t impossible. I sensed something unusual in my blood, from long ago.

Not as early as my gift for drawing. That came first. I drew portraits that caused a stir when I was six or seven, but no poems at that age.

Only much later, at the age of twenty-one, did I venture my first genuine poem. A love poem to the woman who would become my wife. It was basically derived from poems I read and admired. With a few hesitant lines of my own. It wasn’t that great.

Later on, I taught poetry at a college level for two years. But mostly I painted and sculpted. And wrote prose.

To finally bring these separate but closely allied areas together into a single work of art was a minor revelation to me. I was no longer a young man. The greatest poets always started off very strong, very lyrical, and sometimes even died young.

An old poet is not a very admired thing. He seems defeated, seriously weakened, somewhat uninspired, and frankly out of gas. His best work is behind him. Why doesn’t he shut up?

But here it was. A short poem about the reality of love based on the solid evidence of the senses.

When our eyes, ears, nose, hands, and mouth are each fully gratified, then love blossoms.

That is my thesis. That is my truth.

There is a natural overcoming of distance in order for love to be born. It begins with vision. I must see the potential beloved.

We can see a beloved for a long time before we even hear the sound of her voice. We might feel apprehensive about hearing her speak. Speech can wreck the whole enterprise. A voice like a crow can destroy the illusion.

The most underrated sense when it comes to love is the sense of smell. In English this sense is already laboring under a severe prejudice. The word smell has taken on a negative tone.

It’s the only sense that hits a wrong note when simply stated: I smell. Every other sense brims with positivity: I see, I hear, I touch, I taste.

Smell needs to be qualified. I smell good. Or I smell bad. I simply avoid the word. Instead of saying “I smell you” I write “I breathe you.” This does the trick very effectively.

It also indicates a growing intimacy, a gradual closing in on the beloved. She is now near enough for the lover to experience her fragrance.

At this point the first touch can occur. A simple handshake is filled with ample information. An embrace offers even more.

To literally taste another human is the final stage of intimate physical communion. The blunt line “I taste you” speaks volumes. Yet when analyzed it is almost commonplace. We all taste each other when our lips touch. So familiar, yet so strange.

The act of kissing can be a thundering revelation.

Our sense of taste is critical, and the final test. If someone tastes bad, it would be very difficult to fall in love with such a person. But when they are delicious, and every other sense is satisfied, then love is not only possible, but likely.

Not only must all of my senses experience pleasure, but this pleasure needs to be fully shared.

At that point, and only at that point, will mutually passionate love be assured.

________

poet of

bittersweet delirium

I began to view myself as the special kind of poet. In medieval times poets sang their verses. In the Roman period they recited them at banquets, as a form of entertainment. Chinese poets drew their words on silk scrolls. Today’s poets generally take to the classroom.

But there’s room in this crowd for a poet who prints his words on canvas.

The medium itself alters the nature of poetry. A poem concealed inside the covers of a book is one thing, but a poem out in the open, hanging on the wall will be something else.

Form and content are inseparable.

This was for a long time incomprehensible to me. I believed that form was one thing, and content something else. I distinguished between the two, just as the general populace does today, without even thinking.

But when I began to carefully craft my text pieces I finally understood that that content fuses with the form and the form is identified with the content. Tearing them apart changes everything, and sabotages their purpose.

A page in a book is designed to be read by a single person during a private moment, even if the reader is in public. A text piece on canvas is more available to a group. It can be read by a number of people simultaneously, like an advertisement or a sign. It has a communal quality, like a propaganda poster.

But also it remains personal and private.

As such its message will be transformed from the intimate to the shared.

My first attempts at text art were too long and involved. I said too much. I placed a demand on the reader that could be just as easily ignored.

I had a new goal. I wasn’t content with being read, I wanted to be memorized.

But in order to be memorized certain conditions must be met.

When the writer can’t even quote his own few lines properly then maybe the lines are too long. I stumbled over several of my original canvases. How can I expect others to get it right?

I was forced to simplify and clarify. Also, a third rule: capture the music of words. Their harmony, their rhythm, their euphony.

There are immortal lines of poetry that sink in so deeply they remain for a lifetime. Not entire poems, just single lines, or parts of a line. That is enough.

I’ve always felt that one of the obstacles to the widespread love of poetry is the fact that most poems are too long.

Whatever is too long in life is living on borrowed time. In the future it will become shortened, or will cease to exist. Many things today would be greatly improved by being severely edited and compressed.

A painting can be taken in at a glance. Or it may take longer for our eyes to pass over its surface and receive its full meaning.

But a written painting will necessarily be a slow painting. It requires a certain amount of time to understand it. People today, and no doubt in the future, are disinclined to spend their time on questionable activities. They hate to think. It’s hard and painful.

They must be coaxed, cajoled, lured into making a choice of stopping in their tracks and reading the piece from beginning to end. A painting in a gallery is not like a billboard on the street. It’s much smaller and in a private store where someone must choose to enter.

Even if it’s in the front window of a gallery not everyone will pause long enough to read it.

When the form changes, so does the content.

When a painting becomes a photograph and is placed in the pages of a book, something radically different takes place.

Photographs of anything can be either worse or better than the object being photographed. Everyone has had the experience of being dismayed upon seeing the living person compared with the image we formerly had in our mind, due to a cleverly manipulated photograph.

Also, it is common for someone to feel chagrined at seeing his favorite painting for the first time hanging in a museum. He’ll be perplexed that it differs so markedly from the reproductions he’s familiar with. It might be much smaller, flatter, and the colors duller in real life.

________________

OMNIA

VINCIT

AMOR

It's Latin for love conquers all. Latin sentence structure is written differently than English, and word order is not so strictly observed. All are conquered by love would be a translation. I think that's the way the priests taught us in school.

For a while I made several pieces using Latin, but amor vincit omnia remains my favorite.

Of course I didn't invent it, but I might have been the first to create a painting with nothing more than this line of ancient poetry. I made the phrase my own, to a certain extent. It comes from the Eclogues by the Roman poet Virgil.

There are also variations. Such as beauty conquers all. Pulchritudo vincit omnia. Pulchritudo, however, is no improvement on amor, visually speaking. I never was tempted to paint that concept.

Also, labor vincit omnia. That is, hard work conquers everything. Again, I never have used that one.

Not everyone universally agrees with the notion that love sweeps all in its path. It's basically a pagan attitude as much as it is a Christian belief, Virgil being born a few decades before Christ.

Does love eventually, inescapably, conquer everyone, and everything? This is a very utopian ideal, not necessarily squared up with the facts of life. In reality, it's a hopeful observation. Or maybe not. It could be a fearful idea if it means that a rival is pursuing the person of your dreams.

This text piece points the way to a more personal vision where I allow the ancient poet to guide me into the anxious area of self-expression. If others have revealed what's in their hearts and minds, why shouldn't I do the same?

Love conquers all is the only piece I've made that is a straight copy of the original. Amor vincit omnia is exactly the way it was written two thousand years ago. And the sentiments are just as meaningful today as they were back then. It cannot be improved upon. It is as close to timeless greatness as it gets.

But it's not mine. It's a quotation, and a famous one at that. So when people look at the canvas they will not think of the artist, but at least as much at the foreign words, knowing the painter didn't invent them.

It would even make it worse if I used quotation marks and then wrote "Virgil" underneath. Most would not know how to take it. They no longer study Latin like they used to. Virgil sounds like the first name of an old man from the Deep South. The whole idea would flop.

___________________________

all

his

steps

only

led

her

door

"Where is 12,500 miles from here?" I asked my friend, a seasoned traveler, and geography expert.

"Somewhere in the Pacific ocean."

"Well, that's no good."

"Why do you ask?"

"I'd like to move as far away as possible from this place. Since the circumference of earth 25,000 I guess that would be the maximum before I'd actually be moving closer. Is that right?"

I can't recall what he said, but I think my figures are correct. Considering that I'm living on the earth. Of course I could go upwards and infinity lies in that direction. But I couldn't live in outer space. So I was calculating the distance a human being would have to go to get away from Florida, where I lived at that time.

Why was I so interested in getting as far away as possible? Many reasons, one of which was a particular woman. But there were others as well. My art wasn't selling. I had burnt out on a semi-tropical abstract style. I needed a change.

I picked up and returned to the West Coast. To Los Angeles, which was not even a third as far as I'd have to go to be out of the gravity pull of this woman. It worked for a while. About ten years, and then she reappeared.

It isn't actual miles that are needed to completely separate from another person. It's something that comes from inside. Inner distance is much larger than the diameter of the world.

Or much smaller. A thousand miles can be no more than a few inches to a person obsessively in love. Space shrinks to nothingness. It'd take an electron microscope to find a crevice between a pair of true lovers.

The more one struggles to get away the closer one comes to a return. An arc is unconsciously created. A curvature of space. I go back to her arms, her lips, her eyes. These delectable snares do their work.

When every step leads back to the beloved it takes on the quality of doom. The iron laws of fate. Or, a more beautiful future known as destiny.

No one can escape destiny. Every choice only strengthens the bonds.

"It reminds me of him," the older woman said, looking at this piece. There was sadness in her soft voice.

"So he always came back to you?"

"Yes, until the day he died."

"Oh, sorry to hear it."

"I'm not talking about my husband, but my dog."

__________

she

was

the

worst

but

felt

the

best

I favor contrast, in painting and also in writing. There’s no greater contrast than black and white.

Art is a way of organizing contrasts. Of draining things of their impurities until they are exactly what they are. Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, true and false.

This piece demonstrates the baffling tension between the rational and the emotional. How could something so bad feel so good? Or, more to the point, someone so bad feel so good?

Moralists have struggled with this problem down through the ages.

One solution, a person only seems bad, and the goodness she’s capable of bestowing is proof of that.

Another way of looking at it. The good feelings are, when examined closely, not really that good after all.

I had this experience around the time I was forty. It came as a shock, and I’ve wondered about it ever since.

Was the keen pleasure I took in this woman a sign that I should continue along this path, with her at my side? I chose not to, but was it the right decision? Our lives turned out very differently, but that’s not so unusual.

The opposite situation would be someone who is the best but feels like the worst. Such examples are found in literature and films.

But I should explain, when I write the word “feel” I’m not speaking figuratively. A person can feel in a definite, characteristic way. This woman literally felt as good as she was bad. Which made no sense to me.

Yet I can’t say that I’ve never heard of such a situation. It was simply new to me, but not new to the world.

I have several theories as to why this was so. I was getting older, but the women were staying the same age. I was living a slightly reckless, bohemian life, trying to become a painter. I had split up with my wife, and we divided some money between us.

So I found myself in a superior position, at least compared to a young, confused woman just starting out.

Previously the women who accepted me as a lover were ready to do so at any time I wanted. But this one was different. I had the feeling of being used, which was new to me.

She held me at arm’s length and let me know in the starkest terms that we would only make love when she wanted to, and that she would let me know when she was ready.

How curious. What did it mean? For one thing, it intensified my desire. Secondly, I was forced to be patient, and wait until the time was ripe. I began to sense the limits of my attractiveness to a woman.

I felt like a chump, but paradoxically the young woman suddenly became even more beautiful to me. By withholding her love she skillfully manipulated my desire. She gained in value.

Startling contrasts now colored my world. On one side there was an older man, with a few bucks in his pocket, and on the other was a penniless pretty young woman who in exchange for a roof over her head and somewhat bogus modeling sessions was willing to sleep with him. Now and then. Whenever something in her moved her in that direction.

I was unable to view myself in a flattering light. Nor could I see it from her angle. I had become a sap overnight. Simply by choosing beauty over convenience, respectability, and mutual sincere affection.

By placing beauty so dramatically high in my priorities I became ugly in my own eyes.

Was it worth it? Was the actual sensation of having sex with this woman, as exquisite as it was, advancing my quest in life? Or was my asymmetric affinity ruining everything, and setting me back further from my deepest and truest goal?

I decided it was. The best feeling in the world was outweighed by my shame. I had fallen into a serious trap. I extricated myself as well as I could, and carried on.

This so-to-speak bad, beautiful woman, when I saw her years later, had metamorphosed into a better, but so-so, older woman. It was a conventional development. Her out-of-control living however came with a frightening price.

Everything can be rationally explained. Even the most bizarre surrealistic poetry. Even if it’s generated by a machine.

A human being is an animal that interprets itself.

____________

Black – White

Contrast rules my style. And, as I have stated, black and white are the most contrasting colors. But contrasts are never absolute. They connect at a certain point.

All is contained in all. Everything connects to everything. There are many ways to show this. Scientists use one way, philosophers and theologians use another. And artists will demonstrate a third way.

This piece reveals the gradual relationship between extremes. It’s perhaps my most didactic creation. It could be a poster in schools.

On the one hand it demonstrates the unity of opposites, such as between “black” humans and “white” humans. It could help to quell the vicious flames of racism.

So-called black people and so-called white people are at heart identical. All belong to the human race and black, white, brown, yellow, red and everything in between these extremes is part of a single family.

But this biological interpretation is only part of the meaning of the piece.

For a painter black and white have a very different significance. An artist learns that painting is really a matter of placing one color against another color. Reduced to simplest terms it is black on white and white on black.

When a painter understands this fundamental truth about painting and he goes about it systematically his work will come to life. This is one of few secrets of painting which stretch back at least as far as 50,000 years.

The earliest cave painters realized this as do the better contemporary painters.

Discovering and then respecting the eternal rules of painting lead to a major leap in a painter’s future work.

I tried to see if I could change a letter at a time and go from black to white, or white to black. I wanted to do it in the fewest possible steps. It’s possible that someone else may be able to accomplish this better than me. But so far no one has tried, as far as I know.

A puzzle like this leads to other similar ones. I made two more pieces, and could easily have made many more. I stopped with three. I was able to change lead into gold in a few steps. Thus in some way realizing the dreams of the medieval alchemists:

lead

head

held

geld

gold

I never bothered to make this piece, but I did make one or two of this next one.

Live

Lave

Save

Sane

Sand

Send

Seed

Deed

Dead

All of these words are normal everyday English words except lave, which means to wash. The black to white also uses an unfamiliar word “shire” which is possibly less so due to The Hobbit. It is perfectly acceptable usage, however.

Art and games share a common ancestor. In fact, it may be very difficult to clearly separate the two. Some of the oldest known human artifacts are small stones that have lines etched into the surface. What could they be?

Are they early clocks, money, lists, counters, words, or abstract depictions? No one can say for sure.

Painting is not merely a physical display of motor skills. Or a representational mirror of life. It also is a subtle game. A mental thing. A cosa mentale.

The mental side of painting adds another level that prevents an easy explanation of art. It makes us return for a more thorough look, and is a source of continuing pleasure.

_________

no one

has ever

wanted anything

more than

I want you

Love is universal. It extends to everyone feelings about everyone. Man and woman, man and man, woman and woman. It’s generally an arbitrary exercise to call one thing love, but not another.

I’ve always loved this or that woman. And in my art I’ve tried to express this love.

Love is the nature, essence, and action of the soul. If you have a soul, you love. You are in love. Right now.

But I also would like to be as universal as possible. I then have to consider the wording of the texts. Sometimes I write in first person, sometimes I write as a man, sometimes I take a gender neutral point of view.

When gays come to my gallery I would like to have something that they can relate to. Several times people have asked me if I could change “he” to “she”, or “she” to “he.” I always say I could, but it would take a new screen, and the person would have to pay for it.

This piece was made as a result of several remarks about the tone of my other pieces.

“Your father seems like a bitter man,” a customer said to my daughter. She knows that I’m not at all that way.

“What have we here? A lot of woman-bashing,” a young girl said, after a quick glance at the art.

I explained that I adore women, and she should read them all carefully.

All art is at bottom an ink-blot test. You see it through the filter of your own character.

It means whatever you imagine it to mean. It’s just a more intentional, better designed, Rorschach test.

“What’s with the straight persona?” another man said.

I have a heterosexual orientation, but to call it a “persona” doesn’t seem that accurate. Or maybe it is. I don’t want to get defensive about it.

Who knows what a person is? We only are what we have been, and up until the moment. I don’t like to draw firm boundaries around my essence.

My definition of persona is a social mask, a way of concealing ourselves in order to fit into the world. All I can say is that I love and desire women. But I understand how other people can be very different from me.

I sold the above piece to a man who gave it to his boy friend. And, then, to a woman who gave it to her girl friend. I was glad that they were able to do so, even though when I created it I was only thinking of a woman who I desired.

Another gay man pointed out that some of the pieces couldn’t really be changed from straight to gay. You couldn’t change he loved her most when she loved him least, to he loved him most when he loved him least. It wouldn’t make sense.

Even to write he was high society in a low Hollywood dive isn’t nearly as effective. It needs to be a woman in order to give it a more dramatic quality. A more tragic picture.

This piece also points out that supreme human desire is always for another human. It’s states unequivocally that I want you. Not that I want billions of dollars, or to rule the world, or to be the most famous person in history.

None of those things can match my supreme desire to be with the one I desire most. I want you more than I want anyone or anything. Period. The end.

Everything except you is a means to you.

Not only do I sincerely and intensely want you, but such desire is beyond all comparison. It’s absolute. Others have wanted, and will want, someone but they can never match the ultimate totality of my desire for you.

But there’s another way of reading this piece. And not just this piece but quite a few other ones that I’ve created.

Love for another, especially fiery, unparalleled love, has often been the theme of mystics when they describe their feelings about God.

Many of these pieces could be interpreted on a spiritual or religious level.

Is the beloved a symbol for a divine being, or is a divine being a symbol for an earthly beloved?

______

they

love

you

too

much

not

enough

Did you ever wonder why it's so difficult to find a perfect love? Call it true love. Or even divine love. Because it has something unearthly about it. But also it is the most earthly of earthly things.

Everyone is looking for that ideally balanced situation. But this dynamic, subtly configured balance is the rarest of things.

A young person throws himself into nearly anything that comes along, not even hoping for the best. Not even considering how it may turn out ten years down the line. Not understanding that some places are easy to enter but hard to exit.

A person with some experience will notice a curious pattern forming. Either he is too passionate about someone, or someone is too passionate about him.

And these persons are never the same person. Not only that, a sequence begins to appear. One thing is succeeded by another thing, another very different thing. Opposites follow each other like night and day.

He may have discovered himself in one painful situation and makes plans not to repeat that mistake. And he doesn't, at least not immediately. He felt smothered by the burning love of one woman, and so he now chooses a much cooler type. This will be better, he says to himself, congratulating himself on his cleverness at escaping a miserable period.

But much sooner than he could ever have expected a new problem arises. It's true, he now loves the new beloved intensely, whole-heartedly, unconditionally (in his mind), but, most perturbing, he now finds himself not so zealously loved in return.

He dimly realizes that he merely took on the behavior of his former lover, who swamped him with her overbearing devotion, her single-minded affection for him.

He didn't want to feel dead, numb, devoid of tenderness.

So he allowed himself to feel new, thrilling emotions, but he quickly observes that these magical feelings are not mutual.

He was loved too much, but this plight caused him to seek out someone who it turns out doesn't love him enough.

Which is better? Is one at bottom not much different than the other? Or can we point to a clear improvement in his life?

His overflowing situation makes him feel more alive, but the inability to be passionately loved in return will cause him as much sadness as his formerly bored status. It turns out to be a close call, whether his change made him any better off than before.

Perhaps being not loved enough is an improvement on being loved too much in the sense that it brought about a change, and a little change is always revitalizing. But whether it really qualifies as a small change is the question. It might have been a radical, devastating change where far too much was sacrificed in such a doubtful undertaking.

A neutral judge may not see it as a very wise move. Like pissing in one's pants to keep warm. Shortly afterward one is colder than ever. A clear disaster.

But active love is more vivifying than to be passively loved.

However, perfect love is wonderfully balanced. You don't love too much, nor are you loved too much. Neither do you love too little, and are loved too little. It's just right, miraculously poised, and freely circulating between two equals.

This art piece is written from the point of view of a mystified person who is unable to find a proper balance between self and others.

Either there’s too much selfishness, or too much selflessness. An ideal equilibrium has never been experienced.

It represents a typical dilemma of an idealistic romantic. You could say it is the soul-self searching for its perfect complement.

Does that other exist, or must it be invented?

_____

I don't

make

little

drawings

All the pieces up to this page are nearly always my own thoughts and words, but I also sometimes choose words from someone else, such as a friend during a conversation.

Now and then their words stick in my mind. They take on a text art quality. I begin to formulate a new silkscreen. I go into Photoshop, find an appropriate font, and type it

out. Sometimes it takes days, weeks, and even years. I let them sit in a folder on my hard drive. I let them mature, like a bottle of wine in a dank cellar.

Only a few make it. The rest are deleted. But others almost get to the finish line. I take it one step further, and print them out on a blank transparency.

I then place the transparency on a white surface and meditate on it for a few days. Again, it can stretch into months. Not always, though. Some feel good right from the start and I rush them over to the printing company, where my transparency is burned into a screen.

I may print it immediately. I usually do. But sometimes I postpone the actual printing. I have screens that have never been used. By the time they're ready I've already lost interest in the text. It does nothing for me. Or probably anyone else, too.

But I might even print the piece, paint on it, varnish it, and just keep it off to the side in my studio. It leaves me cold. I don't want to sell it. I don't want to bring it to the gallery. It was a dud. I was excited, but now I'm disgusted. I eventually paint over it, and destroy the screen. Such things are maybe inevitable. At least they are in my life. I can't always knock one out of the park. I strike out.

Maybe this is the reason why I avail myself of the words of my friends, lovers, family members. I can hear something special from time to time. If I don't appropriate their words they'll be lost in the wind. Maybe this is part of being sociable. They give me material. Grist for my mill. A man can't expect to do it all on his own.

So, my friend once told me a story. He grew up in Europe and also America. His father was very successful, and collected important modern art. He once was on a train from Paris to Nice, where they lived. On the train was Picasso, who was also returning to his home on the Riviera. It must have been sometime right after the war.

My friend's father sat and talked with the great artist for several hours, until one of them reached their stop. Before separating, and taking advantage of this rare meeting, he humbly asked if the great artist, perhaps, had a little drawing for him. He would be happy to buy it. Picasso said to the man, rather icily I suppose, "Monsieur, I don't make little drawings."

I don't make little drawings. Of course not. Even a paper napkin covered with a pencil sketch by The Master would never be a little drawing.

Around that time I stopped making little drawings. Not that I ever made many of them. I don't fill sketchbooks.

Frankly, I don't like drawing. It's probably a bad sign, but I may as well admit it.

After twenty years had passed I decided to make a text piece that simply quoted a supreme artist, in a throwaway comment. Maybe that's not even an original story. Maybe it was dug out of a book. It's very possible, but I can't locate it. So, I made my own version, and it's there for as long as the canvas lasts.

I think of it as one of the reasons why art exists. In order to keep a few things from sliding into all-devouring oblivion.

When I make a text piece that captures the words of others should I place it between quotation marks? I’ve thought about it, but decided otherwise.

I’m not strictly bound by the rules of grammar, or any other rules of writing. Painting is freedom. The artist is free to do as he likes.

Also, words on a blank canvas have their own laws. Who is speaking? The painter, or someone else? This question should be asked by the viewer, and it adds to the overall esthetic impact. Quotation marks limit the range of interpretations, reducing the multi-layered richness of the experience.

It’s one more example of my found speech art.

Of all my pieces this one benefits the most from having a page or two written about it.

__________________

her beauty

was much

greater

than the

pain

it caused.

A tall, blond young woman walked into my gallery and checked out the paintings.

She paused in front of one of the text pieces, and asked the price of the above piece.

I told her.

“Great. I’m going to buy it.”

“So many people have commented on that one. They liked it, but I guess they were put off by one of the words,” I said.

“Pain? Not me. I’m buying it because of that word. Beauty and pain go together. See,” she held out her arms. On one wrist she had a tattoo of the word torture, on the other the word beauty.

“Oh. You’re looking at the piece from another perspective. I wrote about the pain that a particular woman’s beauty caused me.”

“Was she beautiful?”

“Yes. But now I realize that beauty can be just as painful to the one who possesses it, as the one who tries to possess it.”

“Beauty and torture. I know all about it.”

“I can see that. I suppose I would use the word torment instead of torture. Tormented beauty. Or maybe a title of a book or a song: Beauty & Torment.”

The young woman was a model and an actress and she opened my eyes to the other side of the coin. My own distress had blinded me to the pain of the beautiful beloved, the woman who was the actual external source of my deep distress.

It’s as if the existence of beauty is always accompanied with an aura of pain. It tends to surround beauty with a crown of invisible thorns.

We feel our own pain the strongest, and overlook the pain of others. Nor does our own pain necessarily make us any more compassionate. It takes a complicated series of insights in order to successfully empathize with others.

What does this text piece really mean? What am I trying to say?

Powerful, haunting beauty will awaken a constellation of emotions, one of which is a vivid, searing kind of anguish.

Rejection, jealousy, defeat, shame, desperation, loneliness: beauty can produce them all at once in a vulnerable, attuned person.

But the blond model also suffered from the scourge of beauty. How many would-be lovers did she have to disappoint? What about the hostility of envious people? Or the crude and dangerous threats she daily faced?

Beauty can be a very deadly gift. It opens doors, but to what kind of a room? The power of attraction is promiscuously widespread. It affects one and all, the good and the bad.

But there was another response to this painting which further demonstrated the multiple meanings available in works of art.

A man was moved by it. He told his friend later, who in turn passed on the information to me.

When the man studied the piece he thought about his daughter who had recently died.

The memory of her beauty triumphed over the pain of her father’s loss.

____________

one by one

the rose petals

fall until only

the thorns remain

and before long

they too will

pass away

Of all the flowers the rose has the most artistic significance for me. Historically it’s associated with mysticism and is a symbol for a number of truths. But I was only partly satisfied with this observation.

It seemed too complicated, and it had a derivative feeling to it. Poets, singers, and thinkers have pointed out the connection of the rose and its thorns. But even so it tended to function as a fitting image of my view of life.

The beauty of true love is not without its painful sorrow. Nor does the moment of its blossoming fullness happily continue indefinitely.

A bitter denouement follows heightened glory, as time removes one attribute after another. Like falling rose petals.

Perfection is fleeting. Supreme love has its moment, and then changes into something else.

Perfection that changes is less than itself. As people fall out of love the opposite process begins to unfold.

The very thing that we loved now turns into something that causes us chagrin. What was magnificently desirable by degrees becomes something we want to avoid.

The thorns of painful realizations now take center stage. The end of affection is the beginning of distaste.

It’s a sad fact of life that a love which dies doesn’t simply fill us with mild, neutral emotions. It metamorphoses into something very negative and irritating. We even berate ourselves for our generosity and our tenderness.

In place of the steady build-up of growing perfections we now have the step by step appearance of imperfections. One by one we tick off the small changes for the worse.

What were we thinking? How can we have been so foolish? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why were we so deluded into imagining it could last? Didn’t we realize that all things change? Didn’t we see thousands of examples day in and day out?

Did we believe we were above change? Living as an immortal radiant being outside of the movement of time?

Dark pangs of regret, of disgust, of misery, now beset us. Where has the ecstasy gone?

Eventually we begin to see the blossoming flower and its naked hazardous stem as an ensemble. You can’t have one without the other. They belong together. It’s only right and just.

This final insight occurs as the thorns begin to lose their sharp points, as they begin to soften and rot, and eventually turn to dust.

So joy is succeeded by sorrow and is in turn succeeded by peace of mind. Everything flows, everything vanishes, the good and the bad alike.

My assistant asked it she could make a painting using this text. I said yes and she printed a rose and also the following words:

one by one

the petals

pass away

I think it’s an improvement on my original statement. Or maybe it’s too laconic. She left out the image of the thorns, and maybe it’s just as well. Seeing how it’s implied.

I then printed an edited version.

one by one

the rose petals

fall

and pass away

I think the image of falling to the ground is necessary. The falling petals give it a solemn tragic quality.

Falling is akin to failing. Gravity claims its part. As humans age our teeth fall out. Our hair falls out. Our skin falls away from its bones. Our body falls from its erect stature.

Falling is our fate.

Everyone falls.

But is that the end of the story?

The petals and the thorns fall and change into dust, but what happens to the dust?

Dust changes into atoms, and then?

_____________

the many

long

passionate

kisses

were

soon

over

It’s the nature of extreme states to seem like they are permanent. This is what gives them such power. They impress us strongly for more than one reason.

When I am happy, really bursting with joy, I am persuaded, against all evidence to the contrary, that this exultation is permanent. I somehow imagine that I have finally arrived at my great goal.

Happiness is always happiness squared, or even cubed. It’s not enough to be happy at that moment, I now expect this marvelous state to never leave me, or even diminish in its intensity.

This attitude is part and parcel of supreme delight.

Likewise, and on a more frightening note, the same will be true for extreme misery. That is, when you are thoroughly depressed it’s because you sincerely believe that you have been deposited at the dead end of hell on earth.

Pure, unmixed depression is always consciousness of its immutable nature. There is no escape, no remedy, and no glimmer of light.

Even death can’t free us from the belief that we are eternally doomed.

Luckily or unluckily change comes to us almost from outside. We are dragged from our naïve rigidity. We rejoin the evolving community of existence, shaking ourselves free of our temporary fantasy.

Escape from pain is a relief, but escape from bliss is very disconcerting.

When two people begin to fall in love the shiver of sweetness is exceptionally keen. But extreme pleasure is just as rare as extreme pain.

The miracle of a first kiss can’t be repeated. Each identical touch is less intoxicating than the previous one until an emotionally neutral state is finally reached.

There are only so many thrills available between two people. They can be used up at once, or drawn out over many years. Some can even persist beyond death.

This limit on our pleasure nevertheless contains a great variety of excitement before it is reached.

But whatever is done, is done. Whatever bit of flesh is touched, can never be touched again with the same delirium. It will unavoidably feel secondhand.

Why does this happen? There are obviously good reasons for such facts. If the pleasure never ceased we would cease. We’d starve to death, preferring the empty banquet of gratified desire to real nourishment.

Looking at the brighter side, at least our despair also has an end.

Even bad luck gets tired.

We couldn’t experience a life of unrelieved gloom even if we’d seek it with all our might. Intense pain makes us conk out.

We’re not built for too much, too often.

When lips that we have worshipped gradually seem no more entrancing than those of a marble statue, we’re disappointed. We’re literally disenchanted. The spell is broken, and far more quickly than we could have ever anticipated.

A human being isn’t designed to stay rooted to one spot like a tree. But even a tree is continually on the move, like all living things. If we fail to notice it, that is not the tree’s fault.

____________

I hope

we last

forever,

but que sera,

que sera

This piece tends to exemplify two of my most predominant strains of thought. On the one hand, what is human destiny? And, secondly, how is it possible for two people to stay together in love for a vast length of time?

Why are we attracted to certain people, and how can one person keep that attraction brightly burning for a lifetime, and possibly beyond?

So many things begin and end. What else can change be? Movement from one thing to another. In this case I ask myself about change from one lover to another. One spouse to another. One marriage to another.

“No one thinks they’re the first, but they all want to be the last,” said the very slinky woman.

She was so confident of her sexual powers. At least at this stage of her life. And these powers were considerable, and able to make a strong man tremble.

When lovers connect in a serious, deep way they don’t see themselves saying goodbye anytime soon. They convince themselves that their roving behavior has come to a conclusion. And sometimes it’s so. As far as we can know with certainty. And beyond that?

Humanity’s most persistent, fondest wish is to personally exist without end. Even the most materialistic unbeliever would be pleased to learn that he endures after death. Never mind his mocking laugh. It isn’t coming from his most unconditioned and very real part.

To be your actual self in another form, but nevertheless your flesh and blood, utterly true and unmistakable self on the other side of the grave --- that is what we all want. But are often afraid to come to terms with.

Because if it isn’t to be, would it break our hearts? Would we cease to find meaning in this life? Would it all just become an absurd game not worth playing?

No, we’re tougher than that. What will be, will be. There’s a great deal of acceptance in this Spanish proverb. Whether it’s two lovers accepting the death of their love, or it’s humanity as a whole accepting its brief personal existence.

If the wavering flame called my life flickers and dies forever, well, so be it.

If the wavering flame called our romantic adventure flickers and dies, all right, but let’s experience it as fully as we can right now.

What is the whole point of love? What is it two lovers seek gazing so profoundly into each other’s eyes?

Could it be a validation of their destiny as immortals? Could their love survive death? Is that what they’re awkwardly trying to grasp?

Aren’t we all searching for the Omega Being, the Last One? I will be her last, and she will be my last. Others were first, but now and forever we are each other’s last.

The last love is the best love, and the most lasting love.

Even though we freely entertain the possibility that something else may come between us, may separate us, we courageously and faithfully continue on together.

We’re either doomed to extinction, or destined to last.

Either darkness beyond darkness, or light beyond light.

Love and destiny are so intertwined that they’re impossible to cleanly separate. How can love be eternal if I am only temporal?

If God exists, and is the embodiment and source of love, then some part of love must be infinite.

But if all is only an illusion then the only thing that is infinite is my non-existence.

__________

how does it end?

they usually meet

someone they think

is fantastic, who hardly

ever is, and they

move on.

I go back and forth about the phenomenon of ending. Do things really end, or is this merely a convenient way of describing our lives?

Since matter is neither created nor destroyed I don’t know how things could finally and utterly end. I have a vague sense that all is always. Everything changes, but it doesn’t vanish completely.

Even in our mundane existence when people pass in and pass out of our lives they leave a trace, like a petrified footprint in prehistoric mud. This residue is what gives rise to art, or perhaps nothing more than lengthy reflection, and hours of brooding.

A kiss may only last a few seconds, but the memory of it can continue for years.

Brief pleasure may lead to long-term grief, as everyone knows.

This piece was one of the few that could be attributed to someone else. I was having a conversation with my brother about women, and the events in our lives. He more or less spoke these words, and I recognized them as a potentially interesting bit of text.

I recorded them and later on read them back to him, and we further edited and refined them to their present state. I then transformed passing speech into permanent art.

They have a kind of bittersweet, resigned air to them. It’s a fact that my younger brother and I have seen both sides of a romantic break-up. We’ve left and been left. We know what it’s like in either case.

I really don’t know what is worse. For a sensitive, ethical person not loving is as painful as not being loved. It’s very hard on such a person to be a source of another’s unhappiness.

The one who leaves is often cushioned against disappointment and heart-break by having a new lover already lined up. Even fully underway.

The one left in the lurch is usually in the more unenviable position. As the saying goes, it is better to be envied than pitied. The abandoned lover is forced to endure the pity of others, which can be very irksome. Even humiliating.

But this short text removes some of the sting from a standard break-up.

People who eagerly move on to the new relationship, barely able to control their glee, are not always lucky as they imagined they’d be.

The “fantastic” new lover turns out to be just another disappointment. Change doesn’t always equal progress. The thrill of any new relationship is notoriously brief.

Such is life, and the former beloved must once again move on. The new lover turned out to be a fiasco, but there’s always more fish in the ocean. It takes more than a single crushing blow to once and for all kill the dream.

I’ve made and sold this piece a number of times, much to my surprise. I then sent my co-creator a few dollars of the sale money.

He deserves it, but after all, I was the one who plucked his fugitive words out of thin air and made them into something substantial.

Everything can become art for a perceptive soul. I can hear truth over and above idle words flying through space.

Another of my friends owns a version of this piece and actually considers it his “philosophy.”

He points to the small canvas hanging on his wall and tells people that his whole life can be summed up in these few words.

I now consider this piece as an example of my found speech art. Found speech is similar to found object art, except that it uses overheard conversation instead of street detritus and devalued junk as its material.

Another category is found text art which is often a photograph of signs paradoxically juxtaposed with an unlikely situation. These startling compositions can be ironic, grotesque, or even tragic.

Found text is different than found speech because the text is already formed into an object in the world, such as an advertisement or a billboard. Or even a section of published dialogue.

Freely captured bits of speech, either heard or overheard, require another sense. That of hearing as opposed to sight.

But whether heard or seen it needs the sensitive receptivity of a creative mind to transform these fugitive perceptions into enduring art.

________________

love

odd

number

I’ve always been driven by puzzling urges. There’s nothing left to do except try my best to get them out in the open, and placed in a concrete form.

In order to do that I’ve have to war against other parts of my nature. I prefer taking things apart and inspecting them in pieces. This process is my analytical side. It’s most natural to me.

But to wrap my arms around separate areas and bring them closer together is harder, and alien to my disengaged style. Yet, this is the whole point of lifelong investigations. This is the purpose of a silent, contemplative manner.

How to fuse two things and create a spark. This is the trick. All this duality in life, and in the attempts of art to transcend it.

Europe and America. Popular culture and High culture. Philosophy and art. The sacred and the profane. East and West. Black and white. Music and speech. Clarity and ambiguity. Who can grab them in one fist?

This is the role of the poet god. To forge a new object that retains its living fire over the ages.

I know the word love is overused to the point of nausea and I’ve done what I could to avoid it as much as possible. But it’s still has its strength. It can’t be dislodged from its position high on the hill.

Why is love an odd number? And which odd number?

I framed it one way, but people see it much differently. They initially read it as a reference to the number one. That is, love is basically about the self. It’s only secondarily an even number, such as two.

Love, then, is a bicycle built for one.

One may be the oddest of odd numbers, but there are infinitely more of them.

What about three? Or a bicycle built for three.

Is love always something that happens between three people? When two lovers get together is there a ghostly third hovering nearby? Who could this third person be? A former lover, an ideal being, a potential or real child?

All of them. “When two or more are gathered in my name I will be there also.” A supernatural presence will accompany true love. So we have been told, as a kind of revelation.

These interpretations are correct, as far as they go, but they are not what I was thinking of when I invented this painting.

I am more concerned with love’s asymmetry. It’s a psychologically observed fact that love is generally in a state of dynamic imbalance. This is what gives it much of its allure, its spice, and its unfathomable charm.

Love is a dancing flame because of its perpetual off-kilter, eccentric, ebb and flow. How one side is wrestling with the other side in a vital exchange of energies.

Love is the fruitful but impossible attempt of an odd number to become an even number.

For example, try to divide seven cents equally between two people. It can’t be done. Someone will have four cents, and someone three.

This imbalance will give rise to protesting cries of unfairness. Emotionally grounded love will struggle with socially based justice.

Justice, unlike love, is an even number. Justice is designed to always be even-handed.

Love splits along the lines of lover and beloved. Or active and passive, pursuer and pursued. The desiring and the desirable.

This clearly asymmetrical division will be hidden and effectively neutralized over the years. But this is due to its growing complexity. If you ask two long married people who is the lover and who is the beloved they may be hard pressed to answer.

A see-saw action takes place. The positions can become reversed. And reversed again.

It’s comparable to dividing 79,924,693 pennies equally. The task is formidable and not worth undertaking. Call it a draw. Which is what happens over time to a pair of lovers.

All the arguments about unfairness, who wears the pants, who cracks the whip are rendered moot. Long term lovers end up seeming nearly identical as two stones tumbled in a revolving drum. Or two pieces of broken glass on the beach having been tossed about in the waves for years.

___________

He got up

and walked to

the door. “I’m leaving,”

for good.”

“You’ll be back,”

she said.

Like so many of my pieces, this one was triggered by an incident from my past.

Or, maybe two or three incidents.

Strong sensations are made even stronger when several similar ones are wound together like threads that will make a rope.

I recall as a youth giving ultimatums to my girl friends. I threatened to leave forever unless they changed their ways. It was always an empty threat. Where was I going to go?

Women just looked at me silently. What did they know that I didn’t know? Were they confident in their sexual power, their control over me?

Or maybe they didn’t care. Maybe they were busy calculating. Would it be better if I vanished for good, or would they feel it to be a loss?

A woman explained something to me. “Women don’t like to let a man go because for all that he is a source of power. She can’t get enough support in life. Every time a man separates for good from her she ends up a little weaker and poorer. That’s why they hang on tightly to their men.”

I guess it makes sense. Men can do without women easier than women can do without men, at some level. Especially when the male of the species has the money and power.

So women must use all the wits that are natural to their gender. Women charm, wheedle, cajole, entrance, intoxicate, captivate. Every woman has a bit of the sorceress in her.

Another time I recall standing outside a woman’s door and announcing that I was leaving town. Again. But this time for good.

She gazed hard at me and said nothing. “I haven’t seen the last of him.” Is that what she was thinking?

And how right she was. She still hasn’t seen the last of me.

It’s hard to separate from someone you no longer love. This is a strange fact for a man. But it is ten times harder separating from someone you still love. Heroically difficult.

I’m reminded of Ulysses tearing himself away from Calypso, or Circes, or stopping his ears against the siren’s song.

But not everyone has the clever self-control, and unstoppable, deliberate, drive of an ancient hero.

The lure of exquisite pleasure is very potent. There are women who would strip a man bare, leave him with nothing, and not think twice about it.

And there are men who are only too willing to drown in a flood of desire for a particular woman.

Artists are unusually susceptible to the pull of a goddess, of their muse. But, paradoxically, a muse will not settle for a normal, conventional life.

No poet marries his muse and buys a home in the suburbs and surrenders himself to bourgeois enticements.

A muse is far more demanding than that.

A spider must calmly watch as a wasp struggles against the imprisoning sticky web. The more he twists and turns the worse it becomes for him. He is caught, and helplessly awaits his fate.

I sold this piece to an Arab woman from Paris. I’ve often wondered what her world is like, and where my painting is today. She really came from a different culture than mine, but this painting was able to unite our distant backgrounds.

After all, the Arabs were great poets, and had a particular gift for describing the travails of romantic love. They passed this theme along to the troubadours of southern Europe, who much later influenced the blues singers of the Mississippi delta region in America.

______

If you lose your money

Please don’t lose your mind

And if you lose your honey

Please don’t mess with mine.

I’ve always kept a daily journal, and also written many manuscripts. Both of which have piled up in my house, or apartment, or studio. Unpublished, forgotten. Another useless habit.

I can’t seem to write an extended narrative. It really goes against my natural tendencies. I rebel at the thought.

To start a story and then go on for pages and pages and pages. It gives me a sickening sensation.

The thought of writing such a tediously contrived tale. Full of characters and plots and atmosphere and descriptions . . . I think I’m going to throw up.

But I’m happy that others have done it, and taken the trouble. I don’t know whether to admire them, or laugh, or cry. What a capacity for dogged efforts. For enduring so much mental exasperation. .

The way certain authors sew words together. Day after day, year after year.

But it can’t be as boring for them as it would be for me. Otherwise they’d blow their brains out. And some do.

I begin one story and it soon leads me in wholly new direction. It’s the way my brain works. I can’t stay on the same track for very long.

This present manuscript is the only way I could ever produce something like a book. If I haven’t found my medium, my style, and my voice by now I never will.

These self-enclosed commentaries on a group of word paintings make great sense to me. They can be placed in any order. They don’t have a chronological sequence, yet they can follow or precede one another with no harm to the overall story.

There is almost nothing linear about this book. It’s like a pack of cards. Each so-to-speak chapter can be reshuffled and dealt out in a new order.

These two couplets were taken from an old blues tune. I love the blues, and it seems to harmonize with my other obsessions, such as film noir, lyrical poetry of England and the Tang dynasty in China, French maxims, and stoic philosophy.

They all strike a clear note with me.

In this case I just copied the lines from memory, and added a touch of my own. I added “honey” in order to make it rhyme with money.

Merely helping myself to classic blues lyrics seems to fit right in to that tradition. Musicians would borrow and alter words spontaneously, to suit the occasion. The words and music were rarely written down in the early years, and only lately have they done so.

Musicians have remarked on my similarity to their own song-writing. It wouldn’t surprise me if I heard one of my text pieces blaring on the radio someday. I would be flattered. I find them sprinkled throughout the web, and now and then quoted and attributed to “anonymous.”

That’s just fine with me. Even though I’ve been signing my art for the last forty years I’m perfectly content to see it regarded as anonymous. To accept your anonymity is part of being an authentic creator.

Art is not made in order to add luster to an individual name. And in fact the greatest works have no one name attached to them.

I’ve borrowed several lines of music for other text pieces, but haven’t included them here. I made several “let’s get lost” paintings. Everyone knows where those lines have come from.

Originally poetry was sung. Today it’s no longer so, even though there are still poets who write their own lyrics and perform them. And they’re excellent tunes as a result.

But would they make good text paintings? Not in my opinion, no. Even if you took some of the best written songs and divorced them from their musical sounds they look odd and stripped bare. They don’t read well. Nor are they that easily memorized.

The music helps to memorize the lyrics. But a text painting is forced to stand on its own.

The words must be brief and very striking. The word order and hidden music and rhythm of the spoken tongue must do its best to allow it to sink in and remain in our consciousness.

Repetition facilitates memorization. We learn that in grade school with nursery rhymes. Songs use repetition all the time. And we can learn music lyrics with relative ease.

But poetry not set to music is a different matter. Repetition is often avoided in the greatest of lines.

“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.”

There is no repetition is this supreme line. But there is a subtle, highly distinctive musicality. The end of each word is followed by a contrasting syllable of the next word. The sharply defined sequence moves along in a fascinating, even spell-binding progression.

I understood that repetition would work against my text pieces. For example, “of love” is far worse than “for love.” Of rhymes with love. It produces an unpleasant echoing sound when spoken. More like stuttering than clear speech.

I’ve tried to avoid similar sounds in my texts and have occasionally failed to do so, more from unconscious haste than anything else.

This style of individualizing sounds is very much like the task a painter faces when placing colors on a canvas. When every color and sound is sufficiently distinguished from its neighbor then the overall result is a beautiful clarity.

Style in painting or poetry comes from knowledge of details and how best they can be arranged. The sounds of speech are such that poetry can’t be translated into prose, not to say another language. Poetry comes from a deep connection to one’s mother tongue.

It’s hard to imagine a great poet who became fluent in a second language at a later age becoming a master of that language’s inherent music. Poets write in the language heard while nursing at their mother’s breast.

But not everyone has an ear for the music of their own language.

___________

I never wanted

anything more

than I

want you.

I currently have my own gallery where my texts fill the walls. Strangers walk in from the streets of the Fairfax district in Los Angeles.

I hear many remarks, and consider them all. My daughter, who is also my business partner, also listens to the comments.

“The guy said ‘your father sounds like a bitter man,’” she said after one encounter. “I had to set him straight. You’re the least bitter man I know.”

“It is funny to notice all the different responses to the art. They all are important, even the very stupid ones. They all represent a large section of society.”

This year, as Valentine’s Day approached, I decided to make a purely positive text. It’s a fact that I generally cast a cold eye on sublimated values when it comes to romantic love. And I suppose it could be a case of punctured dreams. But I still am motivated by long cherished ideals.

Who could complain about this confession of unstinting, naked, desire?

Hasn’t everyone felt such a sincere longing at one time or another? Well, maybe not. But there’s still time.

To place attained, reciprocal love at the top of one’s wish list is possibly more rare than we commonly believe.

The response to this piece has been very affirmative.

I’ve watched as customers stand still and silently read the text to themselves. I can see their mental wheels turning round and round.

It’s possible to crave something, or better, someone, with all your heart and soul and body and spirit. This ecstatic dimension doesn’t come along every day. Nor can it be repeated. Not if it is an incomparable state.

In my case it’s noteworthy that so much of my life has been without a real hunger for anything or anyone. It just didn’t seem worth the trouble. I’ve spent many years being unmoved, even a little disinterested in nearly everything. A passionless existence.

Why, indeed, should anyone be inflamed with an inextinguishable desire for anything in this world? It’s possible to look at everything whatsoever as of little, or no, value.

Breath, food, drink, clothing, shelter, well, yes, they are necessary to a person’s continuing life but they can be had without feeling anything close to passion. They are accepted as conditions for human existence, but hardly revered. Certainly not worshipped, except by a very naïve sort.

But this relatively meaningless situation can change. And change dramatically, apocalyptically.

The transformation from neutral, half-conscious, observer to highly charged super-conscious participant is perhaps another of my fundamental themes in my work.

This unadorned text piece is like a light going off in a person’s darkened boredom.

It’s an admission. A pure realization. A way of facing your own unfulfilled, straggling nature.

It’s already become one of my more popular pieces. It helps that it’s written in the first person, and gender-free, as well as inclusive of all sexual orientation.

___________

I can’t live

without you

with only

you.

“I have a text piece for you,” said Hannah, my daughter. Actually, Hannah is my step-daughter, but we don’t care for that term

“Lay it on me, sweetheart.”

She then said those words. Hannah is a short-story writer, and lives in LA. We see each other frequently. Her biological father is a well-known, very dedicated poet. So Hannah has writing in her blood.

She likes my text art, and she did make a fine contribution to my body of work. It’s a subtle, complex thought.

It’s reminiscent of several ideas. “Can’t live with them, or without them.” You still hear that.

Also the lyrics from a U2 song. “Can’t live with . . . or without you . . .”

But Hannah’s is darker, as if it comes from a femme fatale. I’ve always liked the phrase femme fatale, and have used it in my paintings.

Hannah wrote it as if a woman was speaking about a male lover, but I changed it to first-person. She thought it was a good idea.

People pause in front of it and ponder what it is actually saying.

A little while ago a young man bought it as a gift to his lover. He was gay, and it was Valentine’s Day.

“They must have an open relationship,” someone said, a little surprised at such a gift on such a sentimental occasion.

Not being able to live with someone and remain exclusive, and sexually faithful, is a fairly common plight, and could be the theme of a novel. It may not be that rare, but it is rare to make a painting of the situation.

It has a distant ring. I could imagine this as a piece of ancient graffiti, carved on a wall in Rome. Italians have a tart, sardonic style of poetry. As Juvenal wrote “satire is wholly our own.”

This illustrates the anti-romantic strain in my text pieces. I prefer writing about love in all of its richly complicated variety.

I say it reminds me of poetry from another millennium because human nature doesn’t change that much over time.

We evolve, but slowly, and not by leaps. Just a few steps forward, then backward, and forward again, like a dance.

When it sold I paid Hannah for her creation. It does seem more like her than me. Actually it has a feminine voice, if you really look closely.

Women like to hold on to lovers, even when they tire of them. But they don’t like to be controlled by anyone who they no longer desire. So the observation reveals a hidden part of their character.

Men are noisy about their love lives, but woman are naturally as silent as a tomb. They have no desire to poke a sleeping lion.

I don’t think I’ve ever found myself in this dilemma. When I fall out of love with a woman, I only want the open skies. I want to make tracks and leave everything behind.

I suppose I could write it differently if it pertained to myself. Something like:

I can’t live with you,

or even see you anymore.

I’d like it to be

as if it never was at all.

This is harsh and cold, and I’d never say or do such a thing. It wouldn’t make a very popular canvas.

I’ve never spoken these words to a woman: I don’t love you anymore.

It would be like committing murder.

I may feel such things, but I’ve always kept them to myself, and tried hard to never let it show.

But no one can pretend to love when there is no love. It never fools anyone for long.

Love rules us all. But a narrow selfish exclusive love isn’t the best we can do. Expansive, embracing love demands a greater role in our nature.

_____________

she was

beautiful

only to

others

I’m no longer surprised when I read some famous model’s appraisal of herself. She’ll say she was an ugly duckling when she was young, and today she has knobby knees, an uneven skin, and she can’t understand why people consider her to be beautiful.

She isn’t lying. To know with certainty that you are beautiful is impossible, or exceptionally fleeting. You might see yourself that way for a moment, but it quickly passes.

But it doesn’t matter how a person sees themselves. It matters far more how the rest of the world sees you.

Beauty also requires the proper setting. A little this way, or that way, and beauty vanishes.

What exactly do we mean by beauty?

In order to answer such a question thoroughly you have to take a step beyond the everyday, beyond photographs, movies, and television. You have to attain a more timeless, universal viewpoint.

A beautiful person is someone who embodies Beauty. An archetype of Beauty. Someone who represents an ideal form. This ideal form is the supersensory pattern that all real, transitory, and fragmented entities partake in.

For example, I might not describe this woman as beautiful, but rather as Beauty Itself. To say she is beautiful is not really giving her enough credit. She focuses all the myriad, exploded facets of beauty in her one perfect form. She is Beauty.

This isn’t merely an imaginary dream. It is a mystical transfiguration and as real, or more real, than anything that exists.

Beauty in itself is a divine pattern from which all partial manifestations are temporarily derived.

Absolute beauty cannot exist as a mere object unseen by anyone. This is another interpretation of the common saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Beauty is beauty beheld. Purely objective beauty requires purely subjective envisioning in order to fully exist.

A beauty dwelling alone on a desert island, or on a depopulated planet, wouldn’t even be beauty at all. It wouldn’t make sense. Beauty in order to be beauty must be shared, perceived, and appreciated.

It actually takes two to be beautiful.

It would be tragic for a beautiful person to never become fully aware of her beauty. This is only possible if she is never truly loved by a good person.

“If people could see what’s inside me, and what I think, they wouldn’t find me beautiful.” This is a common statement from a very attractive human. But it’s only partially true.

Inner beauty is another name for goodness, which is closely allied with beauty in its timeless core, but separated here on earth.

For a beautiful person to genuinely feel beautiful it’s necessary that such a person be loved and love in return.

We feel beautiful when we love ourselves and realize that we are indeed lovable.

This text piece is the sad story of someone who, although physically beautiful, was never able to see herself through the devoted, worshipful eyes of another.

It’s impossible to be beautiful without being somewhat aware of it. It begins almost at once and with each day that passes the world reinforces this social truth about oneself.

Being beautiful is then simply the permanent awareness that others have of you.

But beauty for others is only half the picture. To completely understand the nature and meaning of beauty, its purpose for existing at all, requires self-insight.

Unfortunately, it’s possible to live an entire life without self-understanding.

Hence, the idea that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. That is, an old wrinkled stooped feeble person may then say “I was beautiful.” And perhaps understand what it meant.

“I was beautiful” is more widespread that “I am beautiful.” Because at that point one can observe oneself as others do, or did.

“I am beautiful” is a rare insight that requires two necessary conditions. First, others affirm that you are beautiful, and secondly, you possess a living insight into your own beauty.

These two halves of a supreme wholeness are the great truth of the existence of Beauty.

_________________

I opened

my door

my hands

my arms

and my heart

to her

In response to the reputation that all of my text pieces were too negative, I wrote several that only expressed positive ideas.

A very unbalanced attitude towards life is never that acceptable. For one thing, it’s too obvious. One becomes a name, instead of an individual. It’s never good to be able to be summed up in a single word.

“Oh, him. What a cynic.” Or any term like that. A human is a mixed bag. A contradiction. We are not smoothly harmonized singularities. We may appear that way in public, but no one falls for it.

I’ve described myself as a cold, sensitive, selfish, tender-hearted man.

All of these opposing traits can add up to a real person. And this text piece demonstrates the caring, giving side of someone’s nature.

An open person isn’t that easy to criticize. To open your house and home to another is universally approved behavior. To be welcoming, inviting, sharing. These are good traits.

To open your hands reveals a harmlessness and sharing attitude. A closed fist is threatening and miserly.

To open your arms is even a greater degree of fellow-feeling. An embracing person is hard to dislike, as long as the embrace isn’t forced on another. It must be mutual.

To have an open heart is best of all. To beat in unison with another’s heart indicates great social awareness. A selfish person

can’t accomplish this rhythmic communion.

A man who has proven to possess such openness on several levels will live an esteemed existence. At some point he’ll be able to say to a woman “all I have is yours.” This is what it takes. Total sharing, pure circulation of energies between two people.

It’s a depressing state of our time when you realize that far too many people have been unable to pronounce these simple words to another human being: all I have is yours.

It’s a selfish, immature, cold-hearted world we’ve manufactured. All of the politics, science, religion, and art haven’t made it much better.

An open-minded, open-hearted, open-handed person releases his locked-up creative energies in order to increase the fruitfulness of life.

Closed up natures perish alone and tragically. A sealed up person may as well have never been born. His enwombed existence is no better than an entombed one. It resembles a seed in the ground that never germinates. It dies rather than allowing itself to crack open and grow.

The opening up of a human will at the start resemble a loss. It will be painful. This is what is so anguishing. But this loss is only apparent. By losing one’s timid self-involvement one gains a world.

Openness must be nourished. The tendency to clam up and return to a sterile form of isolation is always a possibility.

_________

She was

So soft

And playful

All of these pieces can be traced to a personality. From the earliest to the most recent. They span almost sixty years.

One of my friends asked this question. “Do you think you feel more pleasure during sex than other people?”

I immediately answered yes, but he then let the issue die. I never knew what he felt about the answer. And was the question ultimately absurd?

But later on I told him about an early experience of mine.

“It was an afternoon in the summer and my girl friend was baby-sitting. The baby was taking a nap and we were sitting on the couch. A kitten was in the house and we played with it. I held it up to her face and she laughed. It tickled her. But I was also surreptitiously, or so I thought, brushing my hand against her small developing breasts. We were thirteen at the time. But she was more mature than me, and egged me on a little. We played with the kitten for what seemed to be hours. Time had vanished. It was perhaps the most exquisitely sensual thing that ever happened to me. And I’ve chased after that sensation for my whole life.”

My friend had his own share of adventures, but he didn’t contest my interpretation of a staggering delirium.

Later on of course I embarked on thousands of explorations of physical gratification. But whether or not they were more intense or richer than the earliest discoveries is very hard to determine.

When a cup is full it’s full. Nothing more can be added. You can search for more novel escapades and maybe you’ll attain a new kind of fullness. Or maybe you won’t.

As time passes it becomes more difficult to experience the wholly new, the jarringly unfamiliar, which also serves as a kind of natural completion to our being.

When one reaches a certain age everything is like something else.

Memory overwhelms immediacy. The most singular event still has an echo of an earlier moment, of another time and another place, with another person.

Fullness becomes increasingly unlikely. We are left with a stubborn residue of what something is not. It is not unique.

I had made a prior attempt to capture and represent this special moment in my evolution.

I held the kitten

close to her face

and she laughed

because of its

tickling fur

while my hand

strayed across

her angora

sweater

It was too long. It went against my idea that my text canvases should be easily memorized. It was needlessly complex.

Actually, it would make a better film clip. It could be looped, just a boy and a girl sitting on the couch with a frisky, purring kitten.

Even today, decades later, I find that incident unsurpassed as an example of the sweetest, most innocent, and joyous love.

I wonder where my first girl friend is today? Even if she’s alive she’d be a very old and unrecognizable woman.

On that afternoon so long ago she wanted me to go further than I dared. This established a lifelong pattern in me. At the most perfect moments I always stopped myself from even more superabundant emotions.

But maybe that’s the key. To know there is more, much more, but it’s perfect the way it is.

I have a horror of surfeit.

Happiness is the feeling that more happiness is coming.

___________

perfection

through

love

Many years ago I believe I needed a motto. Something to be carved over the doorway to my home.

The carving hasn’t happened, but I did settle on a motto: perfection through love.

It’s simple, and to the point. Of course many people wouldn’t see the advantage of such a rule to live by.

Perfection is as fugitive and indefinable as love. One person’s perfection will be another’s chaotic mess. Nor is perfection something hard and fast and changeless.

The perfect art of ancient times may strike the contemporary viewer as cold and dull. It was perfect at that time, but today it falls short, and is beside the point.

And just how it such perfection to be attained? Through practice? Through iron discipline? Through fanatic attention to detail?

Something is achieved by these methods, but it’s not the perfection I have in mind.

If a shoemaker, a chef, a potter, a horse trainer, loves his craft and spends years on it, he will approach perfection. He will manage to accomplish his work like no one else.

Perfection is inimitable. It is personal and cannot be transmitted without years of intimate sharing. A master will take on an apprentice who must undergo a very similar lifestyle if he is to eventually assume the mantle.

But there are perfections and there are even more extreme perfections.

How can a composer of symphonies hope to pass along his knowledge? Or a great scientist? Even an artist genius. All are one of a kind. The perfection they possess is born and dies with them.

Diligent study, unremitting work, may take a person a long way, but that isn’t the road to perfection.

The surest method I know of is the agency of love. A life devoted to love will enable a person to happen on insights otherwise hidden from anyone else.

Love will lay the groundwork for a perfected existence. It makes all the necessary connections and environmental conditions that enkindle the flame of perfection.

Without love dreams of perfection remain just that: mere dreams. Love consistently discovers fresh material to be used in building a world rooted in love.

When works of love exist side by side all throughout then there is no difference between heaven and earth. A person placed in such a dimension would believe he entered paradise.

To be enfolded in a love-generated time and place of perfection is the goal of the ages.

_______________

earth

heaven?

I don’t know

happiness

The more abstract, philosophical pieces aren’t nearly as popular, and anyone can see why.

But somehow they fit into the overall pattern of my comprehension of the All. It would be a lapse of judgment to exclude them.

We hate thinking. Not just thinking about thought, but any kind of thinking. We’d rather dream. And remember. And forget. None of which is real thinking.

When earth feels like heaven, and heaven feels like earth, what is happening?

When you see castles in the clouds and the moon reflected in a puddle you can’t be in a bad mood. The two worlds are merging, and healing a cosmic split.

This convergence is normal for a sensitive child, but rare in a thoughtful adult. It appears at the beginning and towards the end.

What is the most powerful truth a person can discover? That heaven is unreal? That earth is unreal? That both are real, but very different? Or that both are real and are the same?

Over many years I’ve come to grasp the unity, and the reality, of this situation.

The fusion of these two major dimensions add up to what can be called happiness.

Earth, separated from the reality of heaven, is a depressing affair. A bleak, meaningless landscape. Filled with gibbering, squawking animals. Where humans can’t make a home. Nor fit in.

Heaven, deprived of earth, is equally bizarre. A bloodless, insubstantial fairy-tale. Where fantastic monsters abound. Ghostly nonsense prevails.

But when earth embraces heaven, and heaven responds, things start to make the greatest sense.

When a sharp division between the dimensions is blurred and a flickering oneness predominates and grows it’s incomprehensibly delightful.

Incomprehensible, because there is no laid down plan to follow, no set of precise instructions as a guide. “I don’t know” becomes the highest form of “I know.”

Delirious wonder is superior to dead factual knowledge.

The periodic restoration of wonder is a proof that we are getting somewhere.

Nothing is more fatiguing and miserable than the suspicion that the future is no different than the past. What lies ahead is merely more of what lies behind. This is the most nauseating speculation possible.

A lack of rigid certainty about the most important things is the greatest gift I can offer to myself.

I don’t have any doubts about the reality of a divine world, nor do I discount the truth of my material existence. And by constantly nourishing both I’ve tended to see them flourish together and make an original composition.

It’s just this skillful, continuous blending that brings out the properties of both in the strongest manner.

These written canvases are the closest thing I’ve created that completely expresses my own vision of my individual, but wholly universal, existence.

I can’t conceive of a better way of explaining and at least partially justifying my life.

__________________

cloud cloud

cloud

sky

cow cow cow cow

grass

So much of painting is one landscape after another. I enjoy looking at hills, mountains, oceans, sky, and fields as much as the next man. And I appreciate paintings of landscapes if they’re done with a personal touch.

But I don’t like painting landscapes. It’s a perceptual problem with me. I can’t see the landscape as a wholeness, a simplified pattern that I could represent on canvas. It’s too much. Too many leaves, too many blades of grass, too many individual parts.

I tried to make a conceptual landscape. It was the only one of its type that I created. Maybe even a complex outdoor scene reduced to a few words was an experiment I didn’t want to repeat, even if it was successful.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the reverse can also be true. A few words are worth a thousand pictures. If those words are well chosen and expertly arranged.

Written language is a late arrival in human culture. Painted images stretch back many thousands of years before writing was invented.

In a way painters are like old children compared to writers. They’ve been doing their thing for so long. And they don’t even have to know how to read or write. Painters, even the most intellectual ones, are necessarily primitives.

Writers are more mentally developed. You can be a barbaric painter, but not an illiterate novelist.

A conceptual painter isn’t comfortable with these earlier stages of civilization where everything was colors and shapes. Even though writing itself is basically also just colors and shapes.

Calligraphy is the attempt at restoring the pictorial basis of writing. Trying to take writing back to its origins. When letters were images.

But there are other ways to use words artfully.

I grew up in the Midwest where there’re many miles of cows in pastures, under a broad sky.

I call this piece Memories of Iowa, even though only a few paintings have titles.

__________

Los Angeles, 2011

Beauty & Torment

By Patrick McCarthy

I try to collect art books, but only if they cost a few dollars. They’re usually too expensive.

Right now my coffee table is stacked high with them. Sometimes they’re as much as an actual work of art.

But the weakest part of a thick, glossy, colorful art book is the writing. I tend to skip over the text. Or read it later. Or not at all.

As a working painter, I started out in a figurative style, proceeded towards abstraction, and then went into pure text art. Just a few words on a blank canvas.

Others have been doing something similar for at least one hundred years. But there’s room for another small niche.

I began with a single word, and moved from there. An isolated word doesn’t seem to be enough, no matter how evocative or powerful it may be.

It’s too impersonal.

I didn’t invent the word.

But a phrase can be different. And a fully expressed idea is even more so. It can become a line of poetry. An epigram. A slogan. Maybe eventually a proverb.

_______