These are, of course, speculations fueled by the rich suggestion of Leon Rooke’s naming, of his own god-playing in the world that he and Tony Calzetta have created. To be sure, there are readable clues as to the kind of guy god is and my advice would be not to cross him. In the opening story, which Calzetta has realized in the form of a pop up book sculpture, he comes across as a extortionist, subtly reminding us that tithing twice as much as expected just might help us avoid walking into open graves. He’s also quite prepared to leave the status quo as it is, rendering those who are without still without. This god is heavily into cost reduction and profit maximization, no matter the price. He acts like a capricious finance minister, and dreams like a gangster.

God brackets the book; if he’s a somnambulant enforcer in the beginning, near the end he’s a letch, the hoary old leader of a group of confused disciples, chasing after a young girl and insinuating that he might withhold immortality if his physical needs are not administered to. He is also a prankster: when he can’t turn tricks with an innocent, he will play tricks on his unsuspecting creation. We are his flies and he is a wanton adult boy who has refused to grow up. He most certainly uses us for his sport.
I’m pleased to say that Leon Rooke and Tony Calzetta do too, in the most delightfully intelligent way. Their collaboration was made with heaven and hell equally in mind; it is full of madnesses and deceptions, serendipities and generosities; it smells of sulphur and vanilla. (Did I mention that it exudes the brightness of Mondrian’s palette?) It is riddled with foibles and rampant with felix culpas. It is worth saying, over and over again, that their having worked together was a most fortunate fall into the world of the livre d’artiste.

I think of Rooke and Calzetta as the Brother Grim and the Brother Grin. In their drawn and written incarnations, these fabulous fictions put on the degree of perversity and exuberance necessary to their telling. They are full of knowing innocence and an elusive jouissance. They occupy the terrain of the fairy tale, the allegory and the folk tale, all literary forms of deceptive simplicity.

The collaboration was a tidy one; Calzetta’s drawings were, at his own admission, “preparatory sketches,” notes to himself that simply delineated ideas for larger paintings – a shape might suggest a rock or a tree, a few undulating lines could be water, mountains, or the tracing of an uncertain sky.
For his part, the drawings would usually say something to Rooke from the outset. “There was the immediate suggestion and then I seemed to have found a rhythm that made it very easy to create the story around the drawings, to extend them and make forays into the hinterlands.”

Oftentimes, that hinterland exploration engaged a single image that Rooke would put to unusual purposes. A floating striped shape becomes the hand of god in the title story; in the next story a pair of pillars reminds him of bank architecture, wherein an overblown and cynical bank president addresses his minions; a shape with four points hovers above a prickly landscape and is transformed into the “four-tittied bitch of a Scots girl” who is “gallopeding on a grey pony around and around the castle walls.” In this story, Ms. Smith attempts to explain to her husband why she has spent the night in the nightgown of another man. The explanation has something to do with being “among our olives,” her admirably economical euphemism for the consumption of prodigious numbers of gin martinis.

This narrative is a perfect example of the improbable connections Rooke makes once his story starts rolling; you hear in Ms. Smith a character who could congenially inhabit a comic version of a Robert Browning dramatic monologue; the Scots girl is an ethnic variation on Lady Godiva; and Rooke discovers the wonderful word “gallopeding,” which initially he thought he had invented, in the letters of Virginia Woolf. It is a word he employs to his heart’s content. To borrow a phrase from another writer who gave language a run for its money, there are more things here than are dreamt of in most philosophies. “It’s the way language works,” Rooke says, “it suggests a story in the odd tumble of words.”

Let me offer a more complete example of how he springboards into narrative from the simple drawings that Calzetta has made available. At the outset, it is important to realize that Tony’s style of drawing is not in any way unknowing; the simplicity of his line and shape occupy a tradition that includes the quirky edginess of late Philip Guston, the nervous vibrations of Keith Haring, and the overall casualness of the cartoon. In the drawing for The Scroll of Civilization (I am providing only the abbreviated title), Calzetta sets a tube-like shape across a shaft that rises up from the water. It could be a thimble; it could be a finger; it could be just a form. This is a world governed by Could-be. So the central object is a piece of architecture; it is a sculptural object; it is an instrument of maritime navigation.

What Rooke does is layer meanings onto the horizontal shape: in his telling it is the scroll of civilization, transformed initially into a rusted periscope and then into a metonymic ship, the periscope of which allows us to see land and to discover a safe navigation. What the scroll carries is itself, the inscribed representation of civilization, which is transported to the uninhabited isle. This is the story of The Tempest and the myth of Atlantis rolled into one small discursive fragment, and it all develops out of a single, uncomplicated drawing.

The Scroll of Civilization, Son of Scroll, Daughter of Son of Scroll (Photo by Gabrielle de Montmollin)

The story itself is a fable, an elaborate narrative of society’s indifference to the artist. The Scroll of Civilization is full of fine conceits and pleasing literary contours. The name of the painter is Exubrio; his wife (herself a sculptor whose art is reviled and who is reduced to cleaning toilet bowls) is called Denuncia Francesca Illuminati Luminesa. Her naming is a splendid redundancy; self-consciously overripe, commensurate with the story she inhabits. She is drugged to prevent her from attacking her stubborn husband who has decided to throw his life’s work into the sea. The story has a courtly frame with a decidedly contemporary twist and an economical sense of the colloquial. (Their daughter, the lovely Cherise, has been punching her dearest friends “in the chops” as an angry response to her parent’s lack of recognition). In the midst of this hand-wringing and domestic melodrama, we get the elegant line as the sleeping potion embraces the potentially murderous Denuncia. The potion “compelled her pulse at that moment to slow, her head to nod, her breath to leap as a gazelle summoned to lazy dream.” Rooke channels Andrew Marvel and faintly complains on the little death of his own fawn-like creature.

Calzetta came to appreciate that it would be difficult to do illustrations for Rooke’s writing. “I thought it would work better the opposite way because I knew he liked my work and that he would have fun with it.” When he read the stories Rooke had written in response to his drawings (they were “quite strange”) he realized the initial collaboration he’d had in mind wasn’t going to do justice to the text. As Rooke had done in the writing, Calzetta began sampling his own repertoire of influences. He looked to a Whitney Museum catalogue of Red Grooms’s work from the seventies; he lifted the pure colour scheme that Jim Dine had used in designing the Catalogue Raisonné for his photographic work (the four volume set published by Steidl in 2003 was called The Photographs, So Far); he scrutinized pop-up books. The project began to generate its own sense of complexity. “It definitely had a mind of its own,” he recalls. “At one point I couldn’t get a handle on it, it just kept changing. It was like being in a car and not being able to steer it.”

Calzetta stayed in the driver’s seat and now the vehicle hums along. He also changed roles inside the process, moving from driver to engineer and mechanic. He began to re-work his original drawings in response to Rooke’s extrapolated readings. The title drawing is a revealing example of the reciprocal dialogue that has operated from word to image and not only from image to word. (There was an equivalent dialogue moving from image to image in the conversation between Calzetta and master printer Dieter Grund from Presswerk who translated Tony’s drawings into the etchings and woodcuts that are so resolutely tipped into the folios). In the word-to-image exchange between writer and painter, Calzetta took the original pencil sketch for How God Talks in His Sleep and transformed it into a book sculpture which includes components from a number of the drawings and which locates the title drawing in the centre of the pop up space. The sculpture’s brilliant collage and origami form changes the simple graphite values of the sketch into a rich interplay of primary colours. At the top of the re-worked drawing is the yellow-handed arm of god, sporting a black and white striped pattern that Picasso could have worn on a Mediterranean beach, or that a convict could be wearing in jail. Given the character of the god we have encountered in the stories, the safest bet is on the latter. And if Picasso gets removed from the visual space, then Matisse finds his rightful spot in the radiant colours and lyrical shapes that Calzetta has orchestrated in this miniature cut-out world.

The Ravening Beasts at Fairy Godfather House (Photo by Gabrielle de Montmollin)

The collaboration between painter and writer comes together most forcefully in their shared theatricality. Rooke finds in Calzetta’s work a predisposition towards the dramatic, and a defining structure that often takes the form of a proscenium stage. This tendency perfectly suits Rooke’s own sense of theatre and the way he develops his characters. They write themselves into existence and they interact in accordance with the kind of character they are. They are most apparent in The Ravening Beasts at Fairy Godfather House, a drawing in which a trio of sail-topped pillars (or dunce-like pillars – you can take your pick) seem to be doing a standup routine inside a space flanked by stage curtains. Calzetta draws the stage and Rooke gathers together the ensemble company to perform there. His cast is a clutch of the slandered and the exonerated, the latter group including buxom peasant girls and black musicians who have sold their souls, women who have kissed frogs, soufflé chefs, “those who polish our steeples in the dead of winter,” and “my lover who warmly says goodnight to me every morning.” They’re like figures from a reverse elimination dance and their play ends when the ravenous beasts venture into the nocturnal landscape, spurred on by the hissing of oleander bushes, the panting of mongrels and the sight of “bleached skulls hanging from boughs bent by all that came before our society was formed.”

What a fabulous vision: dystopic, generative, monstrous and mutable. Leon Rooke and Tony Calzetta have made something unique inside the frame of their combined word pictures. They are at once director, actor, set designer, writer and painter. They have made the stage, and have given it form and language. As I say it, the whole enterprise sounds godly.

At the time I was financially stretched, the painting’s price beyond reach. My thwarted desire proved instructive. The absence of The Beginnings of Love made me realize living with art that spoke to me was a necessity, not a luxury. Years later, when I saw Val des Bois in a Toronto gallery, I didn’t hesitate to arrange to pay for it monthly. For almost twenty years, I’ve had the freedom to touch the clumped green crowns of trees, have had the pleasure of seeing the jazz-like way Gorman riffs a landscape, giving trees ghost trunks so that reality and dream seem one. I never tire of seeing how he plays with the idea of near and far or how he creates a great sweep of energy in a swath of mauve sky. There are times when I stay up late at night to look and look again, drawn by the wonder of the painting’s vitality, the speed of its execution, its light.

The more I live with Val des Bois and the other Gorman paintings that have joined it, the more I appreciate their unique sense of fleetness. Recent sketches like September, By the Lake, Late Summer, small works like Gatineau River and Homage to Courbet, or the large paintings, Suntree and Deep Night, make me feel I am seeing earthly and human speed conjoined, that I am privy to a vision of beauty based on the knowledge that nothing lasts, that continuity means change. Once, while reading a poem by Amy Clampitt, I glanced from the page to look at the Gormans, and saw her line on every wall – “all that we know, that we are made of, is motion.”

Richard Gorman - Late Summer

The profundity of Gorman’s motion has come to me through slow accretion. I remember first being aware of it in 1982 at an exhibition of Limerick Lake paintings at Ottawa’s Galerie Anne Doran. The large black and yellow landscapes in that exhibition seemed to have been painted from the field of vision of a runner in the woods, seeing trees peripherally and centrally. I was moved by the visceral materiality of those paintings, by their call to being sentient, qualities that were heightened in images of wrapped heads inspired by Gorman seeing his own reflection at night in a cottage window and thinking of Francis Bacon’s portraits. The works from that exhibition have long been dispersed but they remain vivid in my memory as the spectral antecedents of a drawing and six etchings that hang in the bedroom. I often start my day lying in bed looking at the etchings and the life drawing of a female nude, posed in a twisted stance, her face shown in profile, her body frontally. Energetic lines create her force field. In the etchings, the force field is a strangely revealing and obliterating blot, a dense cover for couples making love. Seeing these works daily has gradually made me think of the blot as an enveloping space for human passion while intimating the entropy of the biosphere.

Richard Gorman - Suntree, 1998

Over time, I’ve come to think of the blot and the human form as fused in the leitmotif of a solitary tree, fragmented or whole, that first appeared in the Orpheus series, fourteen paintings Gorman did after moving from Ottawa to Toronto and immersing himself in the poetry of Rilke. Suntree came from that series. Its “tree,” a yellow blot against a grey sky, echoes Goya’s Dog Buried in Sand. It has the same mysterious sense of a shared human fate that I responded to in Goya’s painting fifty years ago when I stood in front of it alone on a dark March day in the Prado and thought that the dog, its body trapped in sand, bathed in a strange light, was mutely yapping for us all. In Suntree the “tree/dog” is rejoicing, running free. It is an ideogram of landscape and, like imagistic poetry, its effect is large. Layered, reduced in terms of motif and palette, Suntree is weighted with the surprises of its organic growth. The great grey sky and yellow ground are shot through with underlays of brilliant reds, magentas, greens, blues, browns, bringing an awareness of a process Gorman once described to Ottawa artist, Blair Sharpe, as being what painting is essentially about: “letting the idea go through all the changes on one canvas instead of over four, five or six, letting the structure grow and change, not having an idea, ever, of what a painting will look like when it is finished, starting with only an inkling.”

I had only an inkling when I bought Suntree of its impact on my life. At first there was the sense of wonder and excitement at being able to see, at any time, a clear image of life’s quick race, and to respond, at leisure, to the challenge of finding the ways the mystery had been wrought, what had been done with a squeegee or a brush, how many layers were beneath its surface, the rigor of the palette. Then there came a time when life and art were indivisible, when having come from a hospital room where I’d seen the drawing of a final human breath, I saw that breath reinforced and ongoing in Suntree, saw Rilke’s line, “this having been earthly is lasting, beyond repeal.”

Deep Night, painted four years later, is Suntree’s dark twin. An elusive painting, capable of pooling its light into a blue/black lake of oil so the leaning tree’s slender bole rising from a tenuous base becomes almost invisible, Deep Night seems to presage the kind of death Rilke foresaw, “when a happy thing falls.” How much Deep Night has entered my life became apparent when, on a flight from Paris, I sat beside a man who told me of the unforgettable experience he had had as a student making a pilgrimage to Mont St. Michel by starting several kilometers away, before it was light. It seemed to him his body was gradually apprehending the abbey’s stone mass as he approached it. Dawn brought the architecture into focus.

I immediately resolved to make the same journey with Deep Night. Rising before dawn, I sat as far from the painting as I could, and concentrated on the familiar image of a leaning tree. All I saw was a black mass, giving me the sensation that I was in deep space. A few minutes later, this shape gave way to a tornado/whirlwind shape. Surely, I thought, my eyes are playing tricks on me. Yet, the more I concentrated and the closer I moved toward the painting, the more the shape seemed to move like a cloud, shifting, changing formation. I realized I was seeing the organic growth of the painting with a clarity I had not experienced in the six years I’d lived with it. At times, I saw white, lighter streaks moving across its central mass. Finally, a semblance of the familiar recognizable shape came into focus but with an unstable equilibrium that appeared to hinge on a suggestion of a tree’s crown in full summer foliage while the tree trunk vanished. If I looked at it from an oblique angle, this crown appeared to be a face sending its breath into the wind. At that moment, I felt, as Rodin did when he visited Chartres, that Deep Night was “wise with an intense passion.” As daylight came, I saw the painting return to the familiar image of a leaning tree with a slender bole. The white that streaked it earlier had turned the colour of slate. It’s like a person you thought you knew well, I thought, only to discover you had been blind to some fundamental trait.

This sense of renewal and discovery makes living with the Gormans an ongoing journey, deepens my understanding of what Rodin regarded as the artist’s task, “the study of nature, not imitated but heeded… revealing to his fellow beings a thousand unsuspected shades of feeling, discovering to them riches in themselves.”

“If you’re a painter, you’re not alone. There’s no way to be alone. You think, and you care, and you’re with all the people who care . . . To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in . . .”

—Franz Kline to Frank O’Hara in “Franz Kline
Talking,” Evergreen Review Reader, ed. Barney Rossett
(New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1968), p. 204.

AFFIRMATIONS AND CURRENT ANXIETIES

For more than four decades, I have sought to make consciously informed paintings, drawings, and wall constructions that have been rigorous, complex, and resonant in visual and material terms. As well, it has been crucial to me to pursue directions and issues that seemed authentic to my own particular temperament, curiosities and capacities while maintaining a sense of wonder and admiration in relation to the great art of the past and present that I have encountered. Having now produced thousands of works, I have come to recognize in my sustained practices that I have had no desire to have my own art replace the accomplished art of others. Rather I have been more interested in building my own critical contributions on an intellectual and psychological foundation of historical art and pictorial knowledge and understanding. Over these many years, my studio practices have increasingly acknowledged, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, historical precedents and cultural continuities, while investigating perceptual experiences and expressive circumstances that engage the urgent present. Although aspiring to be an artist of ambition and substance has been at the core of my personal goals, my essential sense of social responsibility has, in fact, compelled me as well to participate actively in the development of necessary cultural, educational, and social infrastructures whenever useful opportunities presented themselves. Furthermore, these simultaneous efforts as an educator, administrator, and writer have been deeply informed by my intense commitment to serious art making as a profession and a life’s calling of aesthetic and ethical consequence. In doing so, I came to realize that I cared little about material success, but rather hoped to serve my diverse communities in meaningful ways. Nevertheless, I have also recognized that worthy insights in the studio demanded a particular kind of courage, focus and discipline if I was to develop a convincing body of art that truly embodied a sense of human continuity, insight, and perceptual immediacy worthy of prolonged contemplation. Painting has come to serve me as an essential metaphor for the negotiation between the individual and the collective, between the intellect and the hand, between emotion and analysis, and between the past and the present. I long ago realized that my unconscious need to make art would have to be integrated into a more comprehensive and explicit understanding of the origins, possibilities, and responsibilities of art making and its diverse histories if I was to make a serious contribution as a practitioner. I have immersed myself deeply in the great western traditions of painting that have set the highest standards of aesthetic accomplishment, and have provided, for me, the most profound paradigms for visual expression and communication.

Unfortunately, in recent years I have become increasingly aware that the majority of those models and standards of creative achievement that first nurtured my ambitions and stimulated me to seek to be a serious painter are no longer fashionable nor of much interest to the current generation of dominant Canadian curators, critics, and artists. Sadly, a genuine desire for an understanding of and a responsive engagement with certain fundamental philosophical sources, essential varieties of visual experiences, and formal complexities of profound visual art seem largely to have given way to a level of self-satisfied superficiality, smug ignorance, and self-delusion that is deeply troubling. The urgent and often transcendent works of visual art that, in the very recent past, had attracted disinterested criticism and scholarship, and were catalysts for many ambitious artists have, apparently, lost much of their currency with many of the people who now seem to control most of the contemporary Canadian art world. The influential interventions of these equivalents of self-interested “spin doctors” and fashionable marketing strategists can be characterized by their ideologically driven advocacy, apparent lack of long term knowledge, and blindness to plastic form. Their overt desire for personal control has diminished the nature of much critical discourse, and has also deeply infiltrated the curricula both of studio and art historical studies in art colleges and universities. This is also a time when some of these same curators, cultural entrepreneurs and other self-interested interpreters brazenly appropriate the hard earned, and often slowly resolved efforts of artists of integrity, and subjectively manipulate the actual art into fictive displays and thematic spectacles, or appropriate works of art as mere specimens in a mode of simulated research or textual speculation.

For knowledgeable observers and mature artists of integrity, this is a generally disturbing time in which the visual arts, particularly painting, seems to have been trivialized by many of those same individuals whom we have traditionally expected to be principled and discerning guardians of culture.

Although my assertions may seem to be coloured by a generational nostalgia for an ideal time of widespread cultural awareness, balanced analysis, and professional standards that never really existed, I am convinced that there is ample current evidence in art periodicals, public gallery exhibition catalogues, and university course descriptions that intelligent visual art has been generally marginalized by a repressive flood of seductive, technological diversions, pointless commodities, and textual tyrannies. That said, I am also aware that a few public intellectuals, scholars, and critics of genuine learning, empathy, and insight remain committed to serious inquiry and expression while resisting the temptation to replace the truly “visual” in the visual arts with clever, linguistic confections that do little to elucidate the perceptual experience and content of works of visual art. For the sake of moving my ideas along, I must resist citing at this point the many writers, educators, and artists who have stimulated my thinking, and have inspired my practice. In my previous writings and in my teaching, I have regularly referred those to whom I owe much, and will do so again elsewhere in this article. I am certainly heartened by the few persistent, artistic peers who continue to trust the worth of the visual, and bravely investigate their deeply held interests and sense of necessity. Moreover, because I occasionally encounter recent works of accomplished art, uncommonly inventive painters, and wise analysis in unlikely places, I remain guardedly optimistic that reason and a mature desire for challenging visual experiences will eventually, again, find empathetic and generous audiences. It is with these hopes in mind that I write this text, and spend so many days in my studio anxiously seeking aesthetic results that are convincing, personally essential, and seemingly inevitable.

When I consider how I became the artist that I am today, I take great pleasure in remembering the first hand encounters with works of great art, as well as those conversations with wise and educated teachers and mentors who helped me grasp the necessities of disciplined personal commitment and the critical understanding of formal structure required of truly serious artists. Conversely, I sometimes search for those obvious signs of the corruption of the same values that have been precious to me. In my more cautious, self-effacing, even doubtful moments, I wonder if the changes that I observe are simply the results of the shifting priorities of an obviously unstable and irrevocably consumerist society, and wonder if they are simply inevitable. I worry regularly about these apparent symptoms of a pervasive cultural and ethical decadence that may have permanently undermined the genuine search for hard won pictorial insight and integrity. However, when I am able to set aside, even briefly, my own version of romantic idealism and am truly honest with myself, I must also acknowledge that the seeds of cultural and ethical decline have probably always been present in the character of the human condition. It seems to me that the territories of serious art making have possibly always been contested, certainly in living memory. On the other hand, for those of us who care about the freedom and responsibilities of being fully engaged visual artists, it is crucial that we remain vigilant as we reassert the viability of our chosen studio disciplines, and that we affirm our commitments with confidence and unembarrassed authority. I believe that as independent artists we have the responsibility to be agents of legitimate cultural specificity as we resist the leveling influences of the mass entertainment industries and global capitalism. The sum of all the visually intelligent art of the past and present reminds us of how formal elements, physical matter, technical developments, and an infinite range of subjects can be integrated into causally structured objects of contemplation and discernment. These rigorous and resonant works of art embody what it is to be human at a given time, and in a specific circumstance. It is in relation to that art of high ambition, complexity, and coherence that I measure my own practices, and have learned much about the expressive potential of pictorial form to be continually rethought in accordance with newly emerged meanings. Life experience has also persuaded me that rigorous art making can also be a crucial process of evaluation and re-interpretation of the familiar that may result in a fresh awareness and a sense of renewal.

OPPORTUNITIES AND EDUCATION

“The individual in search of personal expression, when confronted with the local stock of possibilities available to him upon his entrance, must select the components he will use. This gradual accommodation between temperament and formal opportunity defines the artistic biography.”

—George Kubler, The Shape of Time, (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1962) p. 65.

In the previous paragraphs, I have mentioned some of the disturbing factors that must be faced by today’s professional visual artists as they pursue their careers both in public and in the privacy of their studios. Nevertheless, given the attendant uncertainties, I expect that it has always been difficult for most sensitive individuals to find their way as serious artists, particularly those from economically modest backgrounds, as well as to sustain and to renew their creative lives over an extended period. In this regard, I would like to pause to reflect on those conditions that enabled me to follow the uncertain path to becoming an artist and to consider, in retrospect, what factors may have influenced my aesthetic choices, my evolving understanding of pictorial form, and my many career opportunities. I am hopeful that my brief account of the journey that eventually led me to direct my talents toward the challenges and joys of being a painter may be more broadly instructive. I suspect that my experiences have not been fundamentally different from those of countless other North American artists.

Through the imperfect filter of memory, I recall that during my early childhood and adolescence, more than fifty years ago, I began to test my interests and opportunities as an artist. Thanks to my early public education, I was introduced to the worlds of literature and art that provided glimpses of life’s wider possibilities. In primary school, the specialist art teacher in the big hats, Miss Tricker, swept into the classroom with bags full of materials and her expert enthusiasm that encouraged my creative potential. In grade six, there was the exotic and kind Miss Lafitte whose beauty and association with her pirate ancestor encouraged my imagination beyond the confines of the seemingly grey walls of Hill Street School and the working class neighborhood where I lived. Then, in junior high school, the inspiring Miss Mabel Jackson introduced me to the books of Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway. Moreover, I also remember fondly my first trips to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with my grandfather, who pointed out the extraordinary paintings of Thomas Eakins, including the remarkable Max Schmidt in a Single Scull. Other visits to that temple of visual culture perched high above the Schuylkill River, where Schmidt himself had rowed, provided memorable encounters with Stuart Davis’s intriguing Something on the Eight Ball, and Andrew Wyeth’s luminous Groundhog Day. At some moment during this time, I learned that Andrew Wyeth lived in nearby Chadds Ford, and that his father, N. C. Wyeth, had illustrated my cherished volume of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, Treasure Island.

Although there were no paintings on our walls at home as I grew up, my father’s copy of a 1938 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which was bound in thickly woven, green cloth, offered instructive illustrations of the great Camden, New Jersey poet’s expansive text. In addition, the reproductions of paintings in the World Book Encyclopedia and John Canaday’s reactionary survey, Mainstreams of Modern Art, a gift from my parents, provided useful versions of aspects of art history that stimulated my curiosity. Finally, my wonderfully flamboyant high school art instructor, Miss Katherine Starr, praised my developing talents and, in my senior year, arranged for me to receive a scholarship to attend a Saturday class in illustration at the Philadelphia College of Art. I began to focus my tentative creative ambitions in the visual arts while I continued to maintain a relatively un-critical attachment to the comforts and challenges of literature. On the other hand, with my immature awareness and insecurity about what a serious artist actually did, and how one earned a living, I accepted my parent’s well-intentioned counsel and applied to the nearby Kutztown State College, which was well-known regionally for its art education program, and which would enable me to earn a primary school through high school teaching credential for Pennsylvania. To my knowledge, I still had not actually met a practicing artist. I certainly didn’t understand the career implications at the time of choosing to enter a publicly funded, teacher preparation program instead of enrolling in an independent, professional art college.

At Kutztown in the early sixties, I began to be awakened to what it might mean to pursue a life as an artist because of the encouragement of such empathetic, practicing artist-professors as Rosemarie Sloat (an expressionist painter), Bruce Carter (a humanist printmaker), Karl Karhumaa (the figurative sculptor), Nunzia Alagia (a graphic designer), and Robert Baumler (an abstract painter). Moreover, the curriculum required me to take a diverse range of art and design studio courses that ranged from drawing, painting, and printmaking to ceramics, illustration, jewelry making, costume design, and stage design. A selection of other required and elective courses in art history, art education theory, and liberal arts and sciences completed my education. Textbooks, rather than primary sources, tended to dominate the assigned literature. I developed a familiarity with certain general assumptions about pictorial composition, including notions of balance, harmony, rhythm, and variety. Unfortunately I recall no intense studio critiques of specific works, and certainly no rigorous discussion of the construction of pictorial space, or the orchestration of dynamic form. Equally important to my maturing consciousness were remarkable student friends who introduced me to the fiction and poetry of the Beats, to Dylan Thomas’s life and poetry, and to the honesty of traditional folk music. With Gino Bianco as our compelling leader, I was persuaded to work on the campus newspaper, the literary magazine, and at numerous other campus organizations while I became increasingly political and compulsively active. We challenged the campus status quo when many of us were elected to student government, and became crucial irritants to the college president’s restrictive policies. Of course, this was the period of the developing Civil Rights Movement, greater student activism, and the assassination of President Kennedy. Together, Bianco, Killeen, Santoro, and I, traveled to Washington to cover the solemn ceremonies and the funeral of President Kennedy for the college newspaper. When the article describing the tragic events was published the next week, a couple of my drawings accompanied the text.

Despite the hostile efforts of certain reactionary faculty, I graduated with a degree in art education in June 1965. Surprisingly, I received the Honor Prize for Painting, for a small painterly interior with a figure. Reminiscent of Richard Diebenkorn’s work of the time, this acrylic on cardboard was purchased for the College’s collection, and continues to hang in a hallway of the art department. Within two weeks of graduation, I received my notice to report for a physical examination, as the beginning of the process for my induction into the United States Army. The Vietnam War was underway.

Thanks to a generous scholarship, I spent much of the summer of 1965 at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine where I had the extraordinary good luck of studying with two distinguished artist-teachers, William Holst and Morton Grossman, in a physical environment of inspiring natural beauty. Holst was a very accomplished abstract painter who had been a student of Hans Hofmann, and shared his deep understanding of the relationship between visual expressiveness and plastic form. (See note #1 below.) Through Bill Holst, I began to understand Hofmann’s ideas concerning the construction of pictorial space as well as to consider more rigorously the inherent potential of each medium, painterly process, and visual elements. This pragmatic introduction to many of the tenets of modernism persuaded me to reflect more carefully on the possibilities of abstraction and non-objective painting to communicate a quality of purposeful exploration and philosophic insight. Morton Grossman was a gifted painter of gestural abstractions in watercolour and acrylic who was extremely enthusiastic about my abilities and encouraged my greater understanding of colour as an essential component in the construction of dynamic pictorial space. The additional presence that summer of numerous other artists of exceptional character and achievements among the faculty, such as the visionary educator-poet, M. C. Richards, the textile sculptor, Lenore Tawney, the ceramist, Toshiko Takaezu, among others, created an exciting and nurturing learning community in which art and life seemed to merge. Furthermore, the highly gifted, small student body came from across the continent and from other parts of the world, and pursued their work with seriousness and skill. Fran Merritt, the founding Director, wisely guided all aspects of the school with a gentle and bemused knowledge and sensitivity that seem to celebrate the individuality of each student, staff, and member of faculty. His deeply felt assertion that there was a place for everyone at Haystack permeated daily interactions. In addition, the simple framed and shingled buildings of the school itself, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, suggested the vernacular architecture of the coastal region, and integrated beautifully into the natural surroundings of the rockbound island. Haystack was a place of creative harmony and provided me a cherished opportunity for great personal growth. I felt for the first time that I might have a life as an artist. Unfortunately, this idyll was shattered when I reported for my military physical exam in Bangor, Maine. Within two months, I found myself on my way to boot camp in Missouri.

During the nearly two years of disturbing military service, between 1965 and ’67, in several locations in the United States and Germany, I managed to find opportunities to enrich my first-hand experience of historically significant art that deepened my sense of what might be possible as an artist and what choices might be required in the creation of substantial visual art. A posting near Nurnberg gave me a valuable opportunity on several occasions to visit Albrecht Durer’s home and to see actual examples of his intensely observed and invented drawings, paintings, and prints. In addition I saw a large exhibition of Paul Klee’s intimate watercolours and paintings that impressed me with their visual intelligence, expressive diversity, formal invention, and sensitivity to the character of chosen materials. Upon my first visit to the Tate Gallery in London, I encountered Mark Rothko’s darkly emotive and large-scaled paintings, and they moved me greatly. The hovering, atmospheric expanses of colour truly seemed to be the spatial embodiment of the sublime, while transcending their material facts. Originally painted as a commission for the Four Season’s Restaurant in New York City, I was convinced that Rothko had created remarkable paintings of great spirituality and mystery with purely pictorial and technical means. Also, I was very impressed by the purposefully designed gallery at the Tate where the paintings were then housed, and in which these very particular canvases could be slowly and carefully savoured. That singular experience remained unmatched for me for years, and continues as crucial evidence that non-objective painting can provide profound perceptual experiences.

Portrait of the artist in his studio.(Photo by Fran Gallagher-Shuebrook)

Another significant experience at the time involved a fortuitous discovery in the base library of a deeply informative article, “Impurity,” by Alan Kaprow in a recent issue of the then influential magazine Art News. (See note #2 below.) In this remarkable text, Kaprow, the reputed originator of the Happening and a former student of Hans Hofmann, astutely compared the contrasting intentions, pictorial means, and individual content that were evident in the paintings of Pollock, Newman, and Myron Stout. I was deeply impressed that Kaprow had so empathetically discussed the major achievements of these different artists without foregrounding his own practice in the article. Although the details of his analysis have faded from memory, his respectful interest and deep understanding of the influential achievements of the preceding generation has remained an important model for me.

Upon the completion of my military service, I returned to Haystack toward the end of the summer of 1967 to study with English designer, Peter Gee, who offered a colour workshop that deepened my sensitivity to the systematic use of colour in the construction of pictorial and evocative space. Gee also urged his students to consider the use of emerging plastic materials and Day-Glo colour as ways to invoke cultural artifice and social meaning as an alternative to more conventional references to nature and related subjects. This learning experience helped me to trust pre-meditated planning, visual judgment, and improvisation as equally valid processes in the making of coherent and meaningful art.

Following nine months as a social worker in Wilmington, Delaware, I accepted a teaching position in an inner city junior high school in Reading, Pennsylvania, and pursued a master’s degree in art education at Kutztown University. Benefiting from the guidance and encouragement of James Carroll, I began to read historical aesthetics, and contemporary art theory and criticism, with particular attention to the writings of Clement Greenburg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krause. Specifically, I explored systems theory, and paid close attention to the paintings of Hans Hofmann, Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and others. My interest in sculpture was stimulated by Cleve Grey’s book, David Smith on David Smith. (See note #3 below.) I found Smith’s writings in this volume extremely poignant, and they greatly influenced my aspirations as an artist at the time. Later, I also saw the David Smith Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. This extraordinary experience compelled me to contemplate how welded steel sculpture might simultaneously address the pictorial and the physical. I soon came to realize how Smith’s sculpture at times denied gravity, implied movement, employed colour pictorially, and acknowledged the properties of materials. My interest in David Smith led me to the study of and admiration for the abstract sculpture of Tony Smith and Tony Caro. The paintings that I produced during this period explored hard-edged, geometric structures that were formally reconciled to the rectilinear support. In a few cases, I explored modestly shaped canvases as I struggled to explore my newly acquired understanding of formal organizations, and colour as an essential structural component. Although I continued to be interested in most serious art, whether explicitly representational or non-objective, I was determined to make paintings that relied primarily on their internal visual logic, and resisted overt references to the externally observed world. I completed a series of systematic colour paintings during 1968-69 academic year. Fortuitously, I came across an announcement in a Philadelphia newspaper about a new Fellowship Program for young artists and writers at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts that had been founded recently by Robert Motherwell, Jack Tworkov, Myron Stout, Fritz Bultman, Stanley Kunitz, Alan Dugan, and others. I applied for and received that life changing Fellowship and moved with my family to Provincetown at the end of the summer of 1969.

In Provincetown, with my partner, Fran, and our son, Paul, we found ourselves in a community that had a long and rich history as a place where independent thinkers, artists, writers, and political radicals lived in an interdependent community with fishers, merchants, entertainers, and tourists. Traditional values, divergent sexual orientations, and unconventional behaviour were also evident, at times in surprising combinations. I finally found myself in a context where being an artist was not regarded with suspicion. At the Fine Arts Work Center, I had regular contact with staff members, Myron Stout, and Fritz Bultmann, both of whom had been students and friends of Hans Hofmann. (See notes #4 and #5 below.) Through informal conversations and critiques, Stout and Bultmann shared their vast knowledge of art, as well as their profound understanding of plastic form. Moreover, they welcomed me into their homes and studios, providing alternatives to my suburban and working class origin. Additional studio critiques with Robert Motherwell, Alan Kaprow, Jim Forsberg, and other visiting artists reinforced my comprehension of and commitment to the particularities of visual and expressive structure in my own paintings. Encounters with resident staff writers, Stanley Kunitz and Alan Dugan, and such visiting authors as Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer, further enriched the stimulating environment. Moreover, writing Fellows, Louise Gluck, and Roger Skillings (See notes #5 and #6 below.), were deeply disciplined and exemplary colleagues who provided compelling models of commitment and resolution. The privileged year of living in that remarkable village offered us many opportunities for extraordinary conversations, short-term employment opportunities, and social interactions with cultural figures of note such as Jack Tworkov, Ross Moffett, Mary Oliver, Larry Rivers, Jacob Druckman, Hudson Walker, Edwin Dickinson, Karl Knaths, and many others. We also learned first-hand about financial insecurities as independent artists. We were challenged and transformed by the experiences, and better prepared to return to life in a less compatible and supportive milieu. With the encouragement of Morton Grossman who had taken up a professorship at Kent State University, I accepted a graduate assistantship to pursue my Master of Fine Arts degree at that Ohio school, turning down several other offers. My brief period of excitement and optimism about further graduate study soon turned to anxiety and disgust when the National Guard tragically murdered unarmed students on the Kent campus on May 4, 1970. Unfortunately, with no other immediate option, I naively rationalized our relocation to Ohio.

The education that I received at Kent State University far surpassed my expectations. With a full graduate scholarship, teaching income both from Kent and several local museum education programs, as well as from the G.I. Bill, I immersed myself in my studies, which included a broad range of courses in art history, literature, philosophy, and studio. My advisor, Mort Grossman, introduced me to the other faculty and graduate students, and enthusiastically encouraged my maturing studio practices that broadened to include sculpture, installation, and printmaking, as well as painting and drawing. I discovered that many of the other MFA students were extremely gifted, critically informed, and ambitious. I particularly valued the extraordinary paintings and insights of Craig Lucas, who has remained my good friend over these many decades. I was also provided with an excellent personal studio and access to first-rate technical facilities.

Although I flourished academically in all aspects of the MFA Program, we became increasingly alienated from government foreign policy under Nixon and began considering leaving the United States. Remarkably, the Kent State University library had excellent holdings on Canadian art, and Dr. Ben Bassham, a superb art historian, guided my independent investigations of Canadian culture. Moreover, KSU’s Blossom-Kent Summer Program gave me an additional scholarship and employment to study with R. B. Kitaj and Leon Golub with whom I had a wonderful rapport. Additional contacts with other significant visiting artists such as Lynda Benglis, Dorothea Rockburne, Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsburg, and Robert Duncan were important catalysts for my learning and growth as an artist. Daily encounters with Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork, Buried Woodshed, on the Kent campus further suggested to me that my suspicions about the deterioration of the once-perceived, just political and social aspirations of the United States were probably correct. Due to unprovoked police violence on the anniversaries of the May 4th shootings, the discovery of undercover agents among student groups, and other related travesties, we resolved to leave. Miraculously, an offer from Otto Rogers of a sabbatical replacement teaching position at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon enabled us to begin our seemingly new lives in western Canada. In August 1972, we loaded our blue Volkswagen bus with Fran’s piano, our daughter and son’s toys, and assorted necessities; hitched up the over-flowing, home-made trailer with the rest of our meager belongings, and continued our northern journey in search of a safe and nurturing community. When we eventually crossed the border, passed the strip-mined landscape of southern Saskatchewan, and, then, found ourselves travelling on the open prairie beyond Regina, we were greeted by Humphrey and the Dumptrucks as they played the tune, Going Back to Saskatoon, on CBC radio, and felt sure we were coming home.

Our optimism about our future in Canada has, of course, largely proved well-founded. Our family has worked hard to fulfill ourselves and to contribute to our chosen country. I have certainly pursued my work as an artist in several different communities, and have deepened my knowledge of historical precedent, my awareness of cultural difference, and aesthetic possibilities. Over the last thirty-six years, I have greatly benefited from the extraordinary examples of the numerous artists, writers, academics, and other exceptional citizens whom I have had the good fortune to know. In my judgment, my art has become more resonant, more expansive, and more accomplished because of these many experiences and opportunities for reflection and service. My professional work, particularly as an educator, administrator, and writer, has helped me to clarify my beliefs, objectives, and standards that I have sought to pursue in the studio.

LANGUAGES of the VISUAL

“To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure.”

—Virginia Woolf, The Waves, (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1951), p. 100.

Over the years, I have sought to gradually internalize the countless influences in my paintings and related practices, and can, now, better articulate those fundamental beliefs that I am convinced are crucial to a truly visual art, particularly for the continuation of informed painting and drawing. Optical and physical facts and how they could be organized to assist my understandings of perception and interpretation have become an essential component. I longed to make paintings that celebrated the visual and could not be subverted into another art form. As I mentioned previously, I have had no desire to replace the practices of others, but rather have sought to make art that added my own efforts to the extended traditions in accordance with my own capacities and circumstances. I have felt that one could not escape the weight of the past, and that it was necessary to confront the visual languages to which I have had access. I did not want to avoid precedent that might be useful; nor did I wish to exaggerate that originality of my own efforts, as I had come to realize that many other artists often had. I was committed to learning from the past as well as to meeting the challenges and inventions of my contemporaries, as fully as I was able. I seem to have developed a love affair with all great art throughout history and in each culture that I encountered or intentionally sought.

In the late sixties, when I had first felt confident enough to make my entry as a professional, I began to understand the historical and ethical imperatives and responsibilities that the readily available versions of Modernism placed on my own practices. It became evident to me that I was most deeply affected by painting and sculpture that investigated immediate perceptual reality with a disciplined intelligence and a psychological profundity. The plastic interrelationships between the visual elements of colour, plane, line, scale, etc. presented expressive possibilities that could be perceptually accessible and did not depend on information that was external to the dynamic pictorial experience. Although the official art world was beginning to tire of the pictorial anxieties of the first generation of the New York School, I was personally intent on comparing the sublime grandeur evident to me in the evocative works of Motherwell, Newman, and Rothko, and the coherent improvisations of de Kooning, Kline, David Smith, and Hofmann with the ironic images and mechanized propositions of Andy Warhol and certain other Pop artists. My intellectual allegiance remained with the earlier generation while I developed a pronounced skepticism toward the often, formally arbitrary nature of Warhol’s actual paintings. Nevertheless, his clever exploitation of the strategies of mass culture and industrial production in the creation of his public persona demanded respect. My range of interests quickly expanded to include the systematic explorations of Albers, Stella, Tony Smith, and Judd, as well as the strategic colour-field processes of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. To this core of compelling, first-rank American artists from whom I learned a great deal, I soon also added Jack Youngerman, Al Held, and Ellsworth Kelly. Each of these painters impressed me with their vital examinations of seemingly familiar issues such as positive/negative interchanges, ambiguous spatial structures, and immaculately focused, formal situations. Moreover, I began to dutifully read the criticism of Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Rosalind Krause, and Michael Fried while I savored the writings of Hans Hofmann, Joseph Albers, David Smith, and Fairfield Porter.

Against this background of recent and contemporary American art, I began to look back attentively at the origins of Modernism in Europe in the obvious achievements of Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian. I also began to read their own writings about art, as well as those of Paul Klee, Vassilly Kandinsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. Almost simultaneously, I developed a deep fascination with English painting and sculpture that had been largely ignored by the art history and studio professors with whom I had studied. Early to mid-century painters such as Augustus and Gwen John, David Bomberg, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Ivon Hitchens, and Ben Nicholson captured my attention, and offered appealing alternatives to the aggressive, sometimes chauvinistic examples of much contemporary American art. Among the, then current, English artists who also seemed to raise significant issues, Anthony Caro, R. B. Kitaj, Richard Smith, John Walker, and William Tucker most intrigued me. In addition, I began to reflect on the earlier, still meaningful to me, examples of paintings in the United States that derived from observation but depended on a fully articulated, formal organization for expression. Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Edwin Dickinson, and Georgia O’Keefe, among others, seemed relevant models of aesthetic integrity. Moreover, the painterly distillations of Fairfield Porter and Richard Diebenkorn further convinced me that representation continued to be a viable option.

With the beginning of my appointment at the University of Saskatchewan in 1972, I felt a pressing responsibility to unpack this densely layered heritage, and to discern the essential visual structures and strategies through which painting and drawing could convey meaning. My more mature grasp of plastic form, as well as my pedagogical knowledge, enabled me to design courses that were comprised of rationally conceived, development sequences of assignments that would provide students with a relatively stable body of useful, transferable knowledge and experience. In addition to my confirmed objectives of equipping students with the knowledge and skills for constructing formally coherent and personally meaningful images, I sought to promote a greater awareness of the authentic contributions of Canadian artists that were certainly equal or superior to the accomplishments of practitioners from other nations. This, in turn, I believed would nurture their own confidence, and would encourage them to recognize that valid and pertinent art could be created in the immediate Canadian context. At the time, I developed great admiration for the historically significant work of Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, Paul Emile Borduas, Jack Bush, and Jock MacDonald, as well as the contemporary achievements of Paterson Ewen, Bill Perehudoff, Dorothy Knowles, and Otto Rogers. Eli Bornstein’s influential presence as former head of the Art Department in Saskatoon encouraged my interest in Russian and eastern European Constructivism as well. Consequently, my early educational responsibilities and pedagogical aspirations for my students greatly influenced my own essential aesthetic commitments, curiosities, and priorities that have, in fact, largely continued to the present day.

THREE PARADIGMS

“Not by planning and not by choosing
I learned the mastery.
What a damnable trade
Where winning is like losing.”

—Stanley Kunitz, “The Bottom of the Glass,”
The Testing Tree, (Boston and Toronto: Little,
Brown, and Company, 1971), p. 56.

Embedded in the foundations of my beliefs is an unshakable expectation that truly profound painting requires a thorough integration of subject and form in the communication of a desired content. I also have come to believe that authentic meaning can only be achieved through the viewer’s perceptual engagement with the actual work of art. There are a few key painters in western culture whose work clarified a few essential factors that must be addressed if a painting is to have aesthetic integrity. In my view, Paul Cezanne was the first artist to understand fully the potential of a painting to embody its own inherent order. Although it may have, in fact, been inspired by the observation of the literal world, a completely convincing painting would, nevertheless, exist as a separate, though perhaps equivalent, expressive reality. Patrick Heron, the late British painter-critic once wrote that

when Cezanne resolved visual realities into countless groups of delectably ordered strata of fragmented brush strokes parallel to each other, he was magnifying something seen. But the stacks and shelves and clusters of square-ended parallel brush-strokes are not invented arbitrary abstraction: they are the intuitive magnification of fragmented stratifications which his remarkable eye saw hinted at absolutely everywhere in the visible world . . . these clusters . . . came into existence as a space-creating plastic device, and one of immense originality and power.

—In “Solid Space in Cezanne,” Modern
Painters. (See note #7 below.)

Cezanne achieved a remarkable union of emotive image, process, and formal specificity in his extraordinary paintings. Cezanne’s paintings are comprised of a relational accumulation of judiciously located planes and lines of nuanced colour derived in large part from observed subjects. For instance, in his paintings of Mount Saint Victoire, which rose above the farmland outside of Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne employed the formal elements of subtle lines and small planes as “common denominators” that visually connect different literal objects and subjects such as sky, rocks, water, and foliage into gently rhythmic orchestrations of arresting, painted sensations and movements. Recalling the specificities of seen places and things, Cezanne’s compelling paintings seem to possess an inner necessity that demands the viewer’s careful scrutiny of their shimmering surfaces and complexly constructed spaces. His pictorial assertions and doubts function as equivalents of his own restrained confidence and human vulnerability. In my view, a deep understanding of Cezanne’s immensely original achievements has an ongoing relevance for any painter who aspires to an art of substance and continuity.

Also inhabiting my Pantheon of essential painters is, not surprisingly, Henri Matisse, whose adventuresome leadership in the conscious exploration of the dynamics of colour influenced generation after generation of painters throughout the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-first. He recognized painting as a vehicle to investigate the optical and psychological tension that was possible between the physical facts of the picture plane and the perceived spatial properties of colour. Always sensitive to the potential of the interaction of colours to evoke light, Matisse was also capable of employing contrasting hues and tones, saturations and intensities, and atmospheric passages and solid surfaces in the purposeful construction of images of disarming beauty and deceptive, emotional complexity. In addition, he often tested the poetry of elegant and economical simplicity while, in other instances, he considered the expressive potential of the juxtaposition of complicated patterns and structures derived from the observed domestic environment. At other times he fashioned haunting images that were simultaneously exotic and on the verge of recognition even though they were conjured from direct perceptual experience in Paris, Morocco, or elsewhere. Later in life, when illness threatened to disrupt his inquiries, Matisse dug deeply into his vast visual memory and employed his profound pictorial intelligence in the construction of painted paper collages that ranged from poetic representations of the figure to seemingly non-objective integrations of structurally expressive colour and emotive shapes. As in Cezanne, I am thoroughly convinced that the insights and implications of Matisse’s hugely inventive paintings, drawings, collages, and sculpture demand the sustained consideration of every artist of serious ambition.

Following the inspired alchemies of Matisse and Cezanne, the apparently logical yet daring deductions of Piet Mondrian seem, in retrospect, the product of cerebral investigations into a verifiable formal order disconnected from the experience of the world. Yet Mondrian, too, began his creative journey with the careful scrutiny of the visual offerings in the external environment and its metaphysical propositions. From his earliest works to his final canvases, Mondrian produced paintings of material grace and transcendent beauty. His early light-filled landscapes are characterized by colour relationships and organic structures that are coherent and refreshing gifts to the eye and the spirit. These paintings have a sense of necessary negotiation between sensory experience, spiritual faith, and conscious awareness. As his search for wholeness proceeded, Mondrian eventually understood the significance of the perceived spaces between literal things. This epiphany led him to the consideration of possible congruence and interactions between pictorial intervals, planes of specific colours, and the actuality of the physical canvas. His initial investigations sought to reconcile pictorial incident to the shape of the support that belied a desire for a logical order that had its roots in his spiritual beliefs. Through a system of provisional constants and variables, he explored oppositional relationships between horizontals and verticals, primary hues, black and white, contrasting rectilinear shapes, etc. At times, the literal or implied compositional focus seemed to acknowledge the field of vision. A faith in the relative stability and specificity of precisely structured formal and material elements seemed to offer an almost universal vocabulary that could transcend national boundaries, the flux of historical narratives, and the vagaries of previous knowledge and external reference. Of course, at the end of his career, while living and working in New York City, he allowed the social and cultural rhythms and colours of urban existence to enter his practice. This embrace of new experiences and his acceptance of these seemingly contradictory impulses reinforce the probability that art making must always be subject to reconsiderations and renewals. Mondrian’s rigorously human abstractions offer precise perceptual experiences that exemplify the possibility of unity and the value of ideals while also suggesting that the tyranny of absolutes belong to the domain of ideologues who desire control and have little respect for individual creativity or collective worth. For me, Mondrian’s rewarding paintings serve as monuments of aesthetic and ethical integrity and discernment that resist consumption and commodification, while existing into the future as resonant objects of contemplation and dignity.

In the previous pages of reverie and reflection, I have sought to make sense of my long journey, to date, and of those countless influences that have shaped my beliefs and practices as an artist. I have been obviously privileged to have known countless gifted individuals, and have seen great art in the many parts of the earth where I have lived and traveled. I was fortunate to have been invited to live in Canada many years ago, and have always taken my responsibilities seriously as a artist, educator, and citizen. I have come to believe that our nation has produced significant art and artists that offer complex examples of the intersection of unique circumstances and opportunities. Our best artists, many of whom I have known personally as colleagues, or have studied with respectful attention, deserve the admiration and support of the nation. They have contributed in estimable ways to the state of our individual and collective identity. Without them, Canada would exist as a valuable though largely unexamined piece of real estate to be plundered by external forces. As our artists have meditated on their experiences in Canada and elsewhere, and have acted with their hearts, and heads, and hands, they have also shared in that vast and varied enterprise of continuity and change that has been art around the world. I believe deeply that the experience of and practice of art develops an understanding and sensitivity to human commonality and difference.

As Hannah Arendt so wisely affirmed in her book, The Human Condition, “the immediate source of the art work is the human capacity for thought . . . Works of art are thought things, but this does not prevent their being things.” She further asserts, however, “the proper intercourse with a work of art is certainly not “using” it; . . . It must be removed carefully from the whole context of ordinary use objects . . . their durability is almost untouched by the corroding effect of natural processes. . . . In this permanence, the very stability of the human artifice, which, being inhabited and used by mortals can never be absolute, achieves a representation of its own.” (See note #7 below.) It remains my own firm conviction that one of the most important objectives for great works of art is to embody the continuity of civilization and to encourage hope for human endurance and understanding.

NOTES:

1. Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real, (Cambridge and London: The M.I.T. Press, 1967).
2. Alan Kaprow, “Impurity,” Art News, January 1963, pp. 30-33, 52-55.
3. Cleve Grey, (ed.), David Smith on David Smith, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1968).
4. Louise Gluck is the former Poet Laureate of the United States and received the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, (Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1992).
5. Roger Skillings is well known for his short stories set in Provincetown and the novel, How Many Die, (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2001) that examines the impact of AIDS on that community.
6. Patrick Heron, “Solid Space in Cezanne,” Modern Painters, Spring 1996, p. 17.
7. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 167-168.

Monday, February 26, 2007. Endnotes.

Jon began his portrait of Kurt Cobain soon after his weekend show at Loosenz hair salon, part of the annual St. Clair ArtWalk. It was Jon’s first public showing of his work and he stayed drunk from the Friday night opening until tear-down Sunday to get through it. The centrepiece of the show was “The Good Doctor,” Jon’s large, head-and-shoulders portrait of the late Hunter S. Thompson. The famously irascible journalist is imagined in a moment of absorbed and even serene contemplation, liberated from the self-generated props that attached to his image and obscured it. No porkpie hat, no cigarette holder, no cigarette even. No drugs or alcohol in sight. No handgun. Even his equally famous collaborator, the artist Ralph Steadman, is absent, though symbolically present, Jon tells me, in the circles that hover near Thompson’s thinking head. They are the minatory orbs and eyes that rush from the horizon at the viewer in Steadman’s manic drawings. They have become more like soap bubbles, pure placid geometry. Forms. They look Platonic, I tell Jon at the opening. He wanted to depict Thompson as he was, “an intellectual,” Jon says.

If he were art-school-trained, Jon tells me the first time I visit his studio (or his painting room, or the unicorn room, since Jon never calls it a studio), he would paint a picture from the background out. Working from distant space toward the viewer and the focus of interest. But he always does the figure first and has to devise a background for it later.

“The background is the hardest part,” he says. “Always.” The circles that float about Hunter Thompson’s head, cinching the abstract space he lives in, were the very last additions to the painting.

Jon grows agitated thinking about backgrounds. He pours himself more wine and makes jabbing motions with his brush.

“I’ve got the figure, but then some kind of background has to go in. But then I have to change the figure to fit the background.”

He points to where Cobain’s dark bathrobe, still rough, meets an even rougher, just patched-in, background of lighter gray. Moves his brush agitatedly on and off, just above, this borderline.

“Back and forth. This, then this. It’s frustrating.”

After the Artwalk show, I next saw Jon at a group tarot reading at my apartment. It was early January. Jon showed me an image on his digital camera of the new painting he was trying to finish for a four-artist show at the end of the month. Cobain was drawn in pencil on a grid on another large canvas, with parts of his face, and particularly his hair, already worked up in paint. When I expressed pleasure in the half-done look, with the underdrawing showing through, Jon said he had considered showing it that way. But then decided against it. He was unable to finish the piece despite marathon sessions until 4 and even 6 a.m. (he starts work at 9 each morning, as a framer in an art shop). At the opening, despite viewers’ interest in “The Good Doctor” and another completed painting, Jon said he didn’t “feel part of the show. I’m in it, but I’m not.” There was no new work.

When we first enter his painting room with our bottles of wine and beer, Jon shows me his visual starting points. A photocopy of a magazine picture of Cobain, in the early days, before he was famous. Behind him, an eager-looking head off his right shoulder, is his bassist Chris (now Krist) Novoselic. On the other side, removed a little, a slouching temporary drummer with a moustache and a mullet haircut. Looking “out of place,” as Jon says. It is before Nirvana’s final lineup.

Jon made a copy of this copy, cropping the other two men out of the picture so Cobain stands alone. He drew a careful pencil grid over the image, numbered down the lefthand side, to help with the transfer to the large scale on the canvas.

The other visual aid is a textbook drawing of a hypodermic syringe, with its parts – plunger, barrel, needle – separated and labelled.

“He was a junky,” Jon says a couple of hours later, when I remark on the lack of musical references in the picture. “A great musician. I mean, hearing Nirvana changed my life. But a junky.”

The act of painting puts new spaces around Jon’s words; they seem softer, more measured. His normal speaking voice is gentle and modulated, even a little courtly, but when animated by a passion, the words tumble and spill, like a swift smooth river hitting jumbled rocks. When I made the banal observation that there were no guitars or other musical props in the background, a loud guttural “Noooo!” pounced on my words as if to swallow them. At the tarot reading the most accurate thing said by the cards, everybody present agreed, was that Jon is “violently passionate.” He was pleased by the characterization, calling it “something to live up to.” But the approach and withdrawal of painting – leaning to the canvas, concentrating on a stroke, coming back – impart a more meditative rhythm. Violent passion exists alongside, within, a certain measure and control.

He says he gets tense, wound up, before starting to paint. Usually he smokes a cigarette or two, to calm down and to put off entering the room. “Frustrating” is the word he uses most often in connection with painting. Once in the room, though, he stays for several hours at a stretch. Up to six or seven hours.

It’s only when he comes out that he finds out how long he’s been in there, since there are no clocks or watches in the room. It’s a “timeless” place. He tells me that he’s asked friends to remove their wristwatches if they’re visiting him in there.

Usually he’s alone, but he has no problem with someone else visiting. “It’s irrelevant,” he says.

Around and above Cobain’s head is a halo, so far just in white gesso and pencil, like the halo above Christ’s head in Byzantine paintings. Six syringes, needles inward, pierce it at regular intervals like sun rays. Cobain has shoulder-length hair, chiselled features, large intent eyes. Is wearing a dark robe, his gaunt chest bare. I’m surprised for some reason to see Jon is not shying away from the Christ comparison. Is going straight at it.

JH: He does seem angelic to me. Maybe that’s ironic.
MB: It doesn’t seem ironic to me.
JH: No?

Jon paints with only one colour: Payne’s Gray. Mixed with titanium white in various proportions to produce different tints. (Or should that be shades? Colour + white = tints. Colour + black = shades. But if your colour looks black to begin with? The blues in the composition of Payne’s Gray would seem to make tints the more correct word . . . though shades of gray sounds more right. . . .)

Straight out of the tube, Payne’s Gray looks black. Not a matte black, though. There is an elusive sheen of blue that catches the eye. On the tube of Liquitex acrylic – the only brand Jon uses – the composition of Payne’s Gray is given as bone black, ultramarine blue and ultramarine violet. Jon mixes in white in various quantitites, but the most frequent tints that strike my eyes in his paintings are, from darkest to lightest: black (straight Payne’s Gray), dark blue-gray, lighter gray-blue, gray, and white. The effect is not monochromatic (though technically it is) so much as coherent. A world defined by certain laws and strictures. A world of bounded permissions, perhaps.

(Beside me on my desk, a kind of talisman as I attempt this portrait in words, is the “business card” – Jon puts quotes around the words when he says them – that Jon had printed for the show in September. It gives his name in capital letters: JON HISCOCK, and underneath, in tiny lower case letters: an artist. The third line, in an intermediate font, is his phone number. The letters and numbers are black on a white background.

On the back is a ten-second sketch Jon supplied at the opening. A scrawl for his unruly thick black hair, lush black eyebrows and Elvisy sideburns. Dots for his more or less permanent Wve o’clock shadow. Straight large nose. The near side of the face firm in line, the other wobbly, cut up by shadow, or turning. He’s there, fleetingly.

On our way out after the second opening, the one he wasn’t “part of,” wasn’t “there,” Jon lit two firecrackers. One exploded on the sidewalk and the other he tossed into a parking lot. The parking lot attendant threatened to call the police, who had a RIDE trap set up nearby. After a brief slurred argument, Jon slouched away, shoulders hunched, sweatshirt hood pulled up.)

Not long before I leave this first night, Jon tells me that I’m “dead wrong” about something. I don’t remember what we were talking about – we didn’t record the meeting and I put away my notebook after the first few minutes – but I’m sure he’s right. I think so even as he is saying it and I remember it that way.

Dead wrong. It is a familiar feeling to have while working on something, perhaps not more so on a portrait than on any other kind of project. In doses not too toxic it can be a good push forward.

I’ve watched Jon paint, talking between the silences, for three hours. It’s midnight when I leave. Jon says he feels stirred up and will probably paint a few hours more.

He goes at it till four, as I learn the next day.

One topic we keep circling back to is the mystery of one’s subjects. How beyond what you know about why certain subjects attract you – givens of temperament, of personal history – there remains a puzzlement, often an irritation. Motifs repeating themselves. Variations on themes. Like cranks who go on making the same point long after you’ve acknowledged and understood it. Or think you have.

As soon as I got home, I jotted down fragments I could remember accurately from our exchanges about this.

JH: I don’t know why I paint celebrities. Celebrity disgusts me. (Laughs.) The business of celebrity.

Jon’s largest and most successful painting to date is “The Good Doctor.” If he can finish the Kurt Cobain, he would like to paint Charles Bukowski. Thompson, Cobain, Bukowski: they’re celebrities of a certain kind. Outsider figures, individuals from the margins who could have remained there, but their gifts found an audience and they occupied the spotlight. Each one of Jon’s figures, whether a celebrity or not, is alone on the canvas. The space is never shared with another figure. And it is shared with very few objects.

JH: I’m interested in individuals. Or individualists. Each person stands alone, don’t they? I mean ultimately. (Murmured, with long pauses. This seems, to both of us I think, a sterile line of thought. Pre-programmed, automatic.)

And most of Jon’s paintings, and all of his best ones, are of suicides. (Or attempted suicides: a girl with a ladder of scars on her wrist.) Thompson, Cobain. Bukowski, for all his self-described excesses, died of leukemia in his seventies. That may be why Jon says he doesn’t “feel much connection with him,” despite liking his writing. I would be surprised if Jon paints Bukowski. It will be a departure.

MB: I don’t think I could trust someone who hadn’t considered suicide.

JH: No, I agree. I don’t think you could.

MB: They wouldn’t seem quite human.

JH: No. If you haven’t grazed the bottom you . . . haven’t lived. Have you?

Jon begins the night’s painting by painting over what we agree to call his “endnotes.” These are the last, loose strokes he makes right at the end of the last night’s work. They amount to an idea, a starting point. In rare cases they might furnish a line that can be cleaned up and kept. More often, they are a gesture towards such a line, so they get painted over and the better line tried in their place.

The endnotes of a month ago are tendrils of Cobain’s hair. Jon spends all the time that I observe tonight working at strands of hair. Painting over the endnotes, first, in Payne’s Gray straight from the tube. Then trying new curves of hair. Or firming up, outlining, other strands. Painting out, painting over, he says, is what he is doing most of the time. Waiting for a painted-over section to dry so he can try it again.

Jon prefers to work close to the floor, crouching or kneeling. He positions the canvas to allow this. At the start of the evening, he turns the canvas upside-down on the easel to work on the needles in the halo. He tapes one of them off with masking tape. But as soon as he starts on the needle, he stops. Turns the canvas right-side-up and begins on the hair. Except for an attempt to firm up a jawline and define the collar of the bathrobe, the hair is the focus of the night’s work.

It amazes me to see how the quick adjustment of the bathrobe collar, just a preliminary sharp angle that will be “rounded back” later, pulls the face above it into sharper focus. Touches of abruptness, of severity, work like necessary struts amid the tangle of curves and ovals, drooping hair and worn fabrics. Like the glint of something man-made in foliage. Jon nods in agreement when I quote a comment that Payne’s Gray doesn’t exist in nature. It approximates things, it verges on them. But it’s artificial.

Jon keeps a hand mirror with a bright red plastic handle near the painting. He turns his back on the image and views it in reverse in the mirror.

“It lets me see things I wouldn’t see.”

JH: Your subject must say something about you. Don’t you think?
MB: I’m not so sure.
JH: That it says something?
MB: That it says something directly.

I explain – confusingly to my own ears – that subjects do speak about the artists that choose them, but often in tricky ways. It’s not a straight line back. As I speak I’m standing back from my own halting words, listening to them skeptically. Could you ever be quick enough to catch your true subject? Jon is doubtful and so am I.

“I try to be straight,” Jon says. “I try to be direct.”

“I wish I could be looser,” Jon says, making sweeping motions with his hands. The brushstrokes of the painter he is imagining at the moment.

“You seem loose to me,” I tell him. He does. His tolerance for the unfinished background, its hovering nagging question. The endnotes. And the ability I see to follow his nose, press hunches no further than they lead, reverse himself a thousand times.

“I’d like to be loose.”

Friday, March 2, 9 p.m.–1:30 a.m. A Mouth Emerges.

Over the four-plus hours I watch Jon work tonight, Cobain acquires a mouth. “Not his mouth,” Jon emphasizes. “Just a mouth.” I sense he is trying to leave himself room to maneuver, keep himself loose and looking. Once you say, That’s it, you’re blind. For better or worse, you’ve stopped. Discipline and desire are both involved in delaying that point. They are two sides of staying with something. Trying to keep up with it as it moves.

Jon rarely calls his subject by name. Never Kurt or Cobain, and only occasionally Kurt Cobain. A name has come to seem as superfluous and inadequate as it can become with a spouse or with anyone who is constantly in the room with you. When it is employed, as it may be in moments of anger or frustration, it is to try to reassert a distance that has long since vanished. The edge of bitterness that creeps into the name at such times is the acknowledgement that the distance can no longer be recovered. You’ve left the safe home of names.

Kneeling, outlining hair strands, Jon tells me that he grew up in a home that was “terribly repressive . . . extreme.” “No outside influences until around puberty. They came in then from friends. He” – he means Cobain, Cobain’s music – “helped me become my own character. An individual. To start becoming.”

But Jon talks less tonight, and I ask fewer questions. When I arrive at 9:00, he’s been painting for two hours. He started right after he got home from work, skipping supper. His music’s playing: The Cars, Talking Heads, The Motors. He gets up as soon as each side ends and turns it over or selects a new one. He buys the vinyl albums at Vortex, the used record and CD shop. He’s never painted without music playing and says he never will. He couldn’t. “The silence,” he says, and laughs loudly at the very thought.

“A funny-awful story,” he tells me. After working till 4:30 Monday morning – “very drunk and stoned, but working right up to near the end, not just sitting contemplating the last 2 hours” – Jon got himself in to work at 9, then had no wish to confront the studio after his shift. “The mess, the bottles . . . and the painting, of course. The painting.” (Does he ever put a painting away so as not to see it? I interrupt. Turn it around, hide it? During the month-long layoff, say. No, he says, never.) “Finally, Wednesday night, late, I came in. I heard a hum. It was the turntable, going around and around. Two days.”

“What was the record? Do you remember what was turning?”

Jon stands with his head bent, trying to get it. Finally he does.

“Judas Priest! ‘Breaking the Law.’ I love that song.”

Pot, he says, can help the painting, but it is a more deliberate calculation and a finer one than alcohol. “Just enough . . . an edge . . . not,” he gestures at the armchair. Not sunk paranoid in the chair, “contemplating.”

Though he thinks there will be a great deal of contemplating with this picture. He keeps using the word, as if getting used to an unpleasant fact. I can’t help thinking of a boxer in sparring sessions, or early in a fight, absorbing solid but acceptable body blows. News it’s better to learn early rather than be surprised. Establish a baseline, a threshold.

The work of the night will be the mouth. That’s not clear to either of us at first. But there’s a sense of something impending, to which everything else is preliminary. We front-load our questions and answers into the first half hour, getting them out of the way. After that, when Jon sits down to take a break, we just chat, about the painting or other topics.

The size? He has to think about it. 3 feet by 5 feet. From his chair, Jon says, the face looks “Satanic” as often as it looks “angelic.” I check an impulse to say that the same person could play Christ or Satan in a movie; that might be an elementary casting principle. I hear my own voice more tonight, worry that I’m talking too much.

From close in, usually kneeling, Jon holds the painting by its edge with his left hand. The way you would grip someone’s shoulder you wanted to hammer home a point to. His face is two inches from Cobain’s. He lays his right forearm across the painting to brace the canvas, hold it steady while his wrist and fingers move with the brush. When he ducks away for more water or paint, the canvas bounces, taking some moments to come to rest. I ask him about the problem of this bounce, the jostling it produces.

He nods, it’s a problem, but with a blank look in his eyes, as if I’ve just brought up the problem of it being cold in the winter.

“Is it better with a small painting? You can stretch it tighter.”

“Worse. Then I put it on the floor and lean on it. All my weight. It sags. Pulls loose.”

Is it a portrait he’s painting? A question that came to me the other night and I forgot to ask. Jon says it’s a good question (I’m not sure it is), but we get no further than agreeing that we’re not sure just what a portrait is. As with a lot of common words – love, work, art, friendship – there’s really nothing beyond a usable common understanding, a tacit agreement that we’re scanning the same terrain when we employ the word. And even that falls away quickly under scrutiny. It’s not a likeness in the usual sense of the word, we agree on that. But “likeness” is another word that seems to crumble, dissolve, as you handle it. Likeness to what? How like?

First the old mouth has to disappear. This has already happened when I arrive. Yesterday Jon tried to work on the mouth but it “turned huge” so he painted over it. The old mouth shows through the gesso, a dark blur, as if behind a diaphanous white fabric pinned over it. Fabric is the wrong word, though, since the hanging white shape looks large and slabby, meaty, like a cow’s tongue. Without a mouth the chin looks huge, melting – yet Jon is not a surrealist. He’s not strictly a realist either. (Though what would strictly mean?) These categories won’t help.

The hair, especially on the right side, has been tightened. Many of the strands are outlined in black, so that a single curve of falling hair could be, in isolation, its own painting: solid black outline, blue-gray interior, white highlight. Jon mumblingly refers to such touches as “graphic elements.”

The effect of the more finished hair is to pull not only itself into better focus, but the whole face. It seems to have emerged from thicker to thinner fog, or from deep underwater to closer to the surface. Strangely, the untouched parts get pulled into tighter focus along with the worked-on bits. The eye wants to resolve. It tugs the elements toward a provisional resolution.

The endnotes of the layoff, which were painted out last time, have returned and found their form, at least for now. White tendrils of hair, longer than the main mass of hair, curling inward on either side like long commas or fish hooks.

And there are new endnotes scattered over the canvas. Decisive ideas in different places, whose overall effect is of a surge, an attempt to lay hands on the image and yank it a degree closer out of the fog. Loose white lines, one on either side, suggesting arms of the bathrobe. Up till now the robe – or perhaps a baggy sweater, a shapeless cardigan leaving the chest bare, Jon isn’t sure – had been an amorphous black shape; it is surprising how much these delicate wobbling verticals, just in gesso, lighten it. A shape like a large X-acto blade, with the point up, has been outlined in black on the throat. This large, hard-edged lozenge attracts the eye. In some crude way it bodies forth a voice, the musculature of making sounds. Tapering black lines, creases more like slashes, go up beside the mouth – where the mouth was – like the Joker’s painted laugh lines. Along with the “huge” mouth, whited out but looming, the effect is clownish. A circus clown’s painted face. Jon points this out and chuckles at it. The art bus has its destination, serious, but along the way you get treated to these comical sideshows.

And: it helps to laugh sometimes at the one you are wrestling with from two inches away.

There aren’t six needles in the halo, there are eight. And they aren’t spaced evenly, they stab in at different intervals. I miscounted the other night and imposed my own symmetry, even though Jon told me he liked “irregular symmetry” and I told myself to take note of the phrase. Attention is hard. Hard to achieve at all, harder to maintain.

Now, an hour into the night, I notice a small dark circle on the near cheek below the right (Cobain’s left) eye. A mole? I ask. A “heroin scab,” Jon says, chuckling again, but for now he’s letting it pass as a mole or birthmark. He has others in mind.

The 3″ slit in the lower right of the canvas is another thing I didn’t see before. It’s in the hastily painted light gray of the provisional background, which doesn’t even reach the top, petering out in smears into gesso. It’s easily missed, part of an area that the eye dismisses. (One consequence of any careful observation is the realization that normal looking is a swamp of so many assumptions and other booby-traps that it amounts to sheer disregard. Functional blindness.) All of his canvases are torn, Jon tells me. He gets them from the store free, and patches them along the way. He takes me into the bedroom where “The Good Doctor” is hanging. The rip was in the ear, he tells me. Peering close, I see a slight bulge in the paint surface. Jon tells me to stick my hand around the stretcher edge to feel the canvas from behind. I feel the stitched-up seam, like touching a scar.

We both agree that it feels better to use what’s at hand. Fix it up, work around its flaws. It would be horrible to work with shining new tools and materials. They’d be chasing you out of the room.

“I’m going to do the mouth tonight,” Jon says around midnight, several hours into it.

I register my delight by punching the air with bowed head – a rock star’s fisted tribute, or John Carlos’s Black Power salute at the Mexico Olympics – worrying even as I do so that I’m queering things. To an artist working, overt enthusiasm is glucose: a quick rush, then sugar blues.

But Jon isn’t paying close attention. Seems sallow, sunk in himself. Sunk in the chair, staring at the canvas. Everything so far tonight has been a long ramp. Our exchanges often signalled this:

JH: I don’t like this (as he outlines hair, applies highlights) . . . this boring . . . tediousness. . . .

MB: Fussy, you mean? Finicky.

JH: Yeah. The hair’s done, I think. Does it look done to you?

MB: It looks good.

JH: (muttering to himself) Well, I’ve still got to do it.

Poling through a swamp, or paddling, or running on land – some sort of locomotion that requires more exertion than depressing a gas pedal – you don’t sight by the thing you’re passing at the moment. Or even by the landmark just up ahead. Muscle and time are still needed to pass those things, but your momentum, the rhythm you’ve acquired, makes you confident in doing so. On the other hand, you don’t want to fixate overmuch on the furthest point you need to reach. Assuming you can even see it. Craning that far ahead is dispiriting, counterproductive. Middle sight works best. Try to bring the next stage into focus, concentrate on bringing it closer, sharpening its details – that means you’re advancing – then, when it seems assured, though still a ways off, let your eyes drift up the shoreline to find the next mark.

It could be a rough analogy.

MB: . . . being tolerant of chaos . . . but not too much . . .
JH: . . . within limits . . .
MB: . . . fixing . . . form when you find it . . . but not before . . .
JH: You need both things. . . . that’s the hard . . .

I don’t want to impose too many ideas on this. I need to watch. Look.

Jon springs out of the chair, walks to the canvas and begins dotting the chin area rapidly. Rapid pecks at it, like a woodpecker. The brush tip a pointed beak. Flick, flick, flick.

“You’re doing the stubble first?”

“I need something to put the mouth in.”

It all happens very quickly. In no more time than it took to shape and neaten a strand of hair, the lower third of the face is dotted with Payne’s Gray straight from the tube. The mouth area is still a blank white oval. It is strange how these quick black whisker dots – too dark, but he will add various grays and whites to them – seem to build up flesh and dimension. Because hairs must grow out of something? I don’t quite understand it, but I’m seeing it. Layers of skin are thickening out towards us. And the black Joker slashes are receding behind them. Jon must have seen that potential in them before, must have built this flesh somewhere already.

MB: Not so satanic with the stubble. Or angelic.

JH: No. It’s humbling.

A shadowy, unshaven man is taking shape on the canvas. He looks more real, but also more anonymous. A stylized Kurt Cobain has given way to him. It is a bit unnerving and miraculous, this power of the stubble. Dead cells extruding, sweat and pores, problems, sleepless nights. The “done” hair is too good for this guy, too neat. A bum is wearing a rock star wig. Jon seems jittery, anxious or just keyed up, into it. He keeps stabbing in more specks. “It’ll be much lighter,” he keeps telling me or telling himself. Murmuring it, face next to the canvas. “Lighter . . . softer . . . with some whites and lighter grays. . . .” Ducking down to load the brush at the little pool of pigment, then peck, peck, pecking it in again.

He’s worried about going too far, but it isn’t a time to hold back. The idea’s got to be seen through. Give it its full strength, its due, then see if it’s lawful in the piece. Otherwise you’ll never know.

JH: Once I start painting I never look at the reference pictures. Not until much later. But when I do, I’m always surprised how close it is. Take a look at the hair.

MB: It’s true. The way it falls. The curves and shapes.

JH: Even individual strands . . . small details.

MB: Maybe you’re imagining your way back to it.

JH: Or just forgetting. (loud laugh) Forgetting then remembering.

MB: Taking the long way home.

JH: Yeah.

Jon takes a step back, stares at the painting with a numb expression. He looks tired, a bit irritated. Sick of it, maybe. He dips his brush into water, then into the Payne’s Gray, making a more watery black. Then starts adding this watery gray with a loose wrist, smearing it back and forth with what seems a sloppy motion into the stubble, starting below the nose. Swish, swash, more water, pigment, swish, swash.

I feel a start of fear watching this. Why are we giving up on the stubble so soon? It seemed promising. After watching the quick but precise dotting of the stubble for the last half hour, the offhand negligence of the new strokes especially unnerves me. Without warning I’ve been yanked from Seurat to a kid slapping paint on his dad’s garage. Why? What just happened?

Soon, though, the new strokes become a little more measured. Rounding the mouth, Jon adjusts his own rhythm, reining it in a little. And I see that he hasn’t abandoned the stubble idea. Not at all. We’re at least one crucial stage from that. First we have to follow this bum all the way into the shadows where he broods and lurks, where he lives. He certainly won’t come out into the daylight to meet us.

Once more, just a few minutes before the night’s work ends, I wonder if fatigue and discouragement are running the show. The white mouth oval shines like a flattened moon out of the stubble-shadow. Now Jon starts swiping loose diagonals into it with the dark watery gray. They are the most slapdash-looking strokes I’ve seen him use yet. They look close to doodling. I’m puzzled, then I understand. The white is just too glaring. If it’s too late to construct a mouth tonight, the area has to at least become a darkness. He’s painting the mouth endnotes.

But, no, that’s wrong again. As I watch, with a bewildered dawning joy, I see the loose criss-crossing lines begin to suggest a shape. Something familiar in this nest of streaks, evolving from the jumbled dark. Two lips, full, fleshy . . . crease in the upper . . . black slit between them. I’m watching it, but I can’t say how it’s happening: with the casual-seeming swipes, and no shade other than the straight Payne’s Gray, the variations coming from more or less water and the start (darker) or end (lighter) of a stroke, a clumping or trailing-off effect.

It’s as if the mouth wants to evolve. It seems to rise out of the canvas of its own accord, assembling itself out of whatever odds and ends are available in the swamp.

In which case the essence of this drawing – drawing in paint – is letting it happen?

Supplying the raw materials, minimal guidance, but otherwise getting out of the way?

It sounds eerie, but also intensely comforting. The bewildered joy has quieted to a steady pulsing warmth in my chest, like someone has thrown a loose blanket over me.

Cobain has a mouth. Cobain? Somebody does.

“Not his mouth,” Jon says again as he slumps in the chair. It’s rough, provisional, it will change a dozen times. He mutters this all again but without insistence. He seems satisfied, too. Also very tired.

“That’s it,” he announces. “I’m finished for tonight.”

But he goes on staring at the figure in front of him. We both do.

“The eyes,” he says. “The eyes are going to be a bitch.”

Tuesday, March 6, 9:30 p.m.–1 a.m. Interrogation.

Jon has whited out the mouth again. He says he did it just before I arrived. Over several hours the night before he had worked on the mouth, trying to modify it toward the “smirk” Cobain habitually wore, a trademark sneer that was always hovering. But he went too far, it got away from him and turned into a grotesque. He’s not sure if what he envisions is even possible. Expressions that hover, that hint, are at least as hard to maintain in paint as they are in life.

Jon has also reduced the range of beard, pushed it to the perimeter of the face, and at the same time made it thicker, the hairs longer. He wants to know what I think. I answer cautiously. It seems too lush, too pruned. Scruffiness was the essence of grunge, shaving sporadically. A well-tended beard can be more work than clean-shavenness.

“Hm. You may be right.” Jon is longer getting to work tonight – fussing with brushes, changing the record, getting another beer – and he asks me more questions about aspects of the painting. He hasn’t done that before. It worries me a little. Whatever place soliciting advice has in art, I don’t think it’s near the beginning of a project. Closer to the end, as part of revision and refinement, it can feel purposeful, productive. Early on it feels more like flailing.

The making of art is so tricky and dogged, like someone following you so stealthily that no matter how fast you snap your head around, you’ll never catch more than a bit of coloured fabric disappearing into a doorway. Following you? I wonder at the image that bubbled up. If you’re making the art shouldn’t you be the tracker, the gumshoe? Staying with the target no matter how hard or shiftily it flees. Yet it does feel like both: following and being followed. Staying with, and staying ahead of. Keeping your eyes peeled both ways. All ways. Which takes how many sets of eyes? I’m drinking wine.

MB: The mouth in the photo is wide. Thin-lipped. You can hardly see the bottom lip. What I see is really a black line. A bit of edging at the top. It looks like a gash.
JH: I know. But that won’t work.
MB: It’s a slit, basically. A black line. A crevice.
JH: It turns into a moustache.

I remember some advice I got from a teacher, a famous writer I’d paid for a correspondence course with, in the one year I sought instruction. “Be bold in your solutions.” It helped, when I remembered it, and when I applied it at the right time, in the right situations. My teacher himself seemed to follow it indiscriminately. His writing employed so many high-wire acts that ultimately you couldn’t believe any of them. You sensed a net everywhere.
MB: One thing about Cobain, his features are big. Big jaw and chin, nose, big luminous eyes. A shelf of brow, crowding down.
JH: Yeah.

Jon sounds slightly suspicious, defensive. Another reason to avoid advice.
MB: I don’t think you can go wrong by going dramatic with this guy. Contrast. Exaggeration. Like you say, you can always pull it back later.
JH: Yeah.

Fortunately, we move past this and Jon evolves his own method for the night. It amounts to a step-by-step interrogation, a mode I haven’t seen him use before. Posing each question and answering it in words and paint. Increasingly, the words fall away.

How wide is his mouth?

Wider. Wider still? Jon follows the new longer line, a real face-splitting crack that he comes at from various angles, fleshing in lips, thinning them back, modelling in several shades of gray. After an hour he gessoes the whole thing over, waits drinking in his chair, and begins again.

Where is his mouth?

Maybe it should be lower. The present placement is true to life, but it’s not working in paint. Something’s wrong. The chin is too dominant, too distant . . . detaching from the face. What about here? Halfway into a promising mouth, he whites it out. Too low. Tries a median mouth. Median height, median length. Better.

What about stubble on the upper lip?

Not beard, stubble. Stipple it in. Not too heavy. Not a moustache. The strangest thing happens: this extra hair, stubble tips poking through, actually lightens the beard I found too heavy. It reduces it visually, clips it back. Because the eye seeks a middle point, knowing how hair grows? Something even stranger: there’s the the suggestion of a smirk! The stubble is actually lifting the lip. Smirk, snarl, sneer – it’s hovering. How? Jon doesn’t know exactly. We’re both chuckling, gurgling like pleased babies. Sometimes you just take what you can get.

What about darkening around the nose?

Some fairly dark gray, storm cloud smudges, pushed in alongside it. More black, straight out of the tube, under the nostrils. This too helps the mouth. Lengthens it somehow, mobilizes it. It’s like a transfer on Silly Putty: tug at any point and it affects the whole. Features distort, come alive.

The forehead?

Gray smears, dark, darker. Strange at first, this dark oval patch like a skullcap slid down in front. Across. Across is magical: the brow shelf building. Across, roughly. Tissue over bone. Drop down and try some on the upper cheek, near the beard line. More collateral gains. The beard that was too lush now fits even better, the new shadows have trimmed it back. The blank white forehead was distorting things. Remember that. Factor in the unfinished. When in doubt, bring it along partway. Sketch its volumes.

A friend of Jon’s is making him a website. They’ve joked about using his name to advantage, perhaps with the insertion of a space: HIS COCK’S ART. How many people looking for porn sites would stumble on that? A fraction might stay for the art. This relates to the legal battle fought by the original owners of the name Nirvana. “A hippy band in England,” Jon says. Whatever their settlement in court, their real winnings might be a continual stream of stray online customers, long after their real sales had dried up.

I wonder how many sloppy shoppers might click on J.K. Rowlinge, author of Hairy Potter and other Magic Tails. One thousandth of tens of millions might even be a living.

JH: I could care less about money. It’s recognition. Recognition of my art.

MB: True.

And mistaken identity never furthers that cause. Reverses it, in fact.

Jon puts on about the tenth album side, sinks in his chair. The figure stares out at us in patient puzzlement: How we gonna work this? It’s at least a more companionable challenge. The stubble-smirk, the new mouth, the darker smears, the hacked-in forehead: they amount to a new, small purchase. Which means everything.

Doggedness has disclosed a few surprising tricks, even some minor miracles. What started out as an almost dejected inquiry has turned out to be the most solid night of work yet. Pinsteps became leaps.

I realize that all night I’ve been returning to the throat shape, paying tribute to it in glances. Jon hasn’t touched it tonight, but in previous endnotes he slabbed more, and darker, paint onto it, and rounded off its X-acto-like blade. It’s heavy, solid and mauled-looking. I keep coming back to it, barely realizing I’m doing so. This plate of crude metal welded into the throat. That mouth is working. It might be the mouth. The rest of the painting has caught up to it a bit tonight.

MB: How did you settle on this palette? The Payne’s Gray.
JH: It happened a long time ago. I was using the other colours . . . all of them. . . . Then I started using less . . . reducing. . . . I found this.
MB: How long do you think you’ll use it?
JH: I’ll use it till I’m done with it. I know I will be . . . someday.

(Dumb question. The only possible answer.)

Payne’s Gray is named after the watercolourist William Payne (1760-1830), who developed the mixture for use in underpainting. Two centuries before “Do It Yourself” became the guiding ethos of punk music, Payne was part of a movement by some drawing teachers to adapt salon painting techniques so that amateur painters could use them. Payne taught his students how to block in a painting with broad washes, paint clusters of leaves using a brush tuft split into several points, and create rough, rocklike textures by “dragging” thick paint. Payne was attacked in some circles for his how-to guidelines, but non-academic painters embraced them eagerly.

Underpainting?

For the next four hours Jon paints the eight needles in the halo. Standing up; he says his legs are sore from so much kneeling. He goes from needle to needle – barrel, plunger, varying the amount of liquid present – using the whole range of Payne’s Gray he’s worked out, all the degrees of his monochromatic “spectrum.” He doesn’t seem oppressed or impatient with the finicky work tonight. I have the impression of a creator enjoying an interlude of comfort with his creation. Establishing that comfort . . . perhaps even storing it up, banking an earned familiarity against a time when the piece will turn its back and stalk away, a stranger deaf to your entreaties. Jon paints swiftly, seemingly contentedly. He asks me occasionally about a detail – the placement of a highlight, how much detail might be desirable on the graduation marks on the barrel cylinders – and I offer an opinion. I go long stretches without looking at the painting except in glances, and Jon doesn’t need to step back or regard it from his chair. We chat about other things. The conversation has an esoteric, free-ranging mood. Telepathy comes up. I tell Jon I consider it an established fact, something always operating to a greater or lesser degree, but at levels seldom available to our conscious control, we know so little of it. But are moving about, deciding things, according to its dictates. Really? Jon expresses amazement, though not disagreement. He says that the spirituality of his upbringing – his parents are Salvation Army officers – “crushed” all vestiges of his own spirituality. It is the second time he speaks of crushing. When I mention the difference the shadows worked into the forehead have made, smudgy cloud-like strata he’s been layering in since my last visit, he says, referring to the white forehead untouched for so long, “Yes, that forehead was just crushing.” We talk about how recognition of other humans is possible despite wholesale changes in their appearance. None of the usual suspects – even the eyes, the “windows of the soul” – seems adequate to account for this. You would know someone you know well even if he/she were wrapped in bandages. Wouldn’t you? “You’d feel their presence,” Jon says. Something like telepathy seems the only possible answer. Unless the personality itself has changed, as happens when love ends, or when a friend changes radically after an interval, an absence that may be temporal or due to mental illness, addiction . . . something disruptive at the roots. Again, telepathy. The signal is coming from another station.

He’s not sure how he can get the needle tips as fine as he wants them. We discuss tiny brushes, perhaps drawing the finest tip along a straight edge. Then he decides he will try a razor blade. Get the tiniest amount of paint on the edge, press it down and off. It will be hard to minimize the paint, keep it from beading thicker. He nods. He’ll try it soon.

I wonder if there is a companionable phase that is also necessary to making art. Nothing so sly and meretricious as setting out to “make friends” with the piece you’re working on. It’s more attentive and respectful than that. It could be a matter of getting used to the fact of something in your life, the presence of it. And that could be related to adjusting your energies for the long haul, accommodating yourself to what something is going to demand of you. Partly it must be simple fatigue, a need to juggle the pace. It can’t be war all the time; not even war is. Or a part of war is periodic ceasefires, carols between the lines. Those don’t contradict war so much as they make it possible. All-out battles would end soon, one way or the other. The all-consuming soon consumes itself. It is rare.

Jon takes no breaks at all over the four hours. That is a first. Another first, he tells me, is that he painted for several hours during the daytime yesterday. I feel excitement hearing this, which I am careful not to show. For the same reason Jon is careful not to overload his brush with paint, and curses viciously when he does so. I would be happy to think that on this piece he’d reached the stage where effort, no matter how great, does not include the effort to make effort. Self-sustaining momentum, no need for lash or spurs. Fatigue, at least the most debilitating kind, has far less to do with going than with not knowing where to go.

The throat piece catches my eye again, but not so aggressively. It has been worked back into the figure more, a bridge or passage between the chin and the upper chest. “Dark,” Jon says, pointing with his brush at the black area where the throat disappears, or has begun to, into shadow under the bearded chin, “in there. I dropped it back into the dark there.”

Monday, March 19, 9 p.m.–1 a.m. London Calling Elvis.

All night is devoted to getting the needle tips right. They have to be fine enough but also dark enough, a tricky combination. Jon has already tried laying down the razor blade with Payne’s Gray on its edge. The paint blobs a bit, lays down unevenly. He tries taping off the upper needle and running the black-edged blade up into it. Better, but still unreliable. At times a good dark line results, other times it goes faint in places. He tries running the blade the other way, down off the tape into the white of the halo. Better, the best yet. But . . . the lines are inconsistent. And when the method involves a one-time application, they can’t be adjusted easily if at all. How can any of the methods tried so far yield seven needles (the needle of the eighth syringe disappears behind Cobain’s head) with a uniform darkness and thickness?

Painting is intensely pragmatic. The art of the possible. Stretching the possible, to be sure – hence “intensely” – but a part, perhaps the largest part, of stretching the possible is learning the inventory of what is possible and adding to your own store of it. What can happen, what can be made to happen, between the painter’s hand and the viewer’s eye: you enlarge the possibilities by solving problems. One after another, an endless chain of them. Every tool is custom-made. Even if you borrow it from another, it must be adjusted to your own purposes: the grip changed, the blade changed. . . . Even the most specific demonstration by another can only furnish at best an idea, a starting point.

What is perfect? never comes up. What is fixable? comes up constantly. Errors that look equivalent to me – wayward blobs, blotches, tiny smears – produce diametrically opposing responses in Jon. “Fixable,” he’ll say calmly, “I can fix that.” Or: “Aaargggh! I can’t fix that.”

Time and again, a needle is tried with a new method, the result considered, then painted over again with gesso. Try, gesso, try, gesso, try: the rhythm of slow breathing. “Waiting for paint to dry,” I say. Jon just grunts, lost in thought. He commented in an earlier session on the amount of time he spent waiting for paint, watching it. He sounded meditative, not displeased. To repeat it now is merely to remark on breathing.

Like last night, Jon seldom moves back from the painting. During the paint-drying pauses, he stays close, his eyes moving about. I stay close too, behind him or to one side. I am reminded of two doctors (or a doctor and nurse) at a bedside. Or a surgical table. You may pause but you don’t leave the table.

The area of the inner halo, where the needle tips are being tried and retried, is getting lumpy and ridged with paint layers, with tiny furrows where the razor has cut into the acrylic surface. Frustration edges into the process, a hint of worry, knowing that there is only so much mauling the surface will take. The accumulations from the previous attempts complicate each new one, making its success less likely.

A reverse technique, two hours in, works best so far. Painting a line of black, letting it dry, then pressing down the blade and working thick white along one side of it then the other. Pulled away at the right time, a black line the thickness of the blade remains. It looks good.

Too good, it turns out. After Jon completes several more with the new method, he steps back to view it from a few feet away. I join him. The needles, so perfect, are too fine. They are needles on the canvas, they don’t resolve as needles to the eye.

More esoteric methods are imagined and discarded: cutting a slit in tape with an X-acto blade, making a stencil in effect; wrapping the razor blade in something to add a layer of thickness. . . . The method that works finally involves using a thicker edge – an old Bell calling card – and taping either side of it. Painting black the thin slit between the lines of tape. Peeling the tape off. Some bleeding occurs, but: “Fixable.” The line is right: dark enough, thick enough.

Despite the many obstacles encountered with the needles, Jon seems comfortable tonight, undismayed. This is working. His occasional strangled cries are working. He asks me to choose the music during the last hour. This is a first. He says he’s sick of his own tunes, he’s in a rut with them. I put on London Calling. Then an early Elvis Presley record, right near the start. “I Got A Woman.” “Tryin’ To Get To You.” “Blue Moon.” It is amazing how companionable the two records are. The thumping bass, the rockabilly verve. A certain raw twang to the guitars, an ache in the voice. A throbbing liveliness . . . you know without needing to ask that this record, this very one, was high on The Clash’s personal playlist. They had it playing where they lived. I’m sure of it. Jon agrees. “Even the covers,” he says. Some energy of the streets, a chipped-brick, frayed-nerve gaiety. Anarchic yodelling – they both have it.

Sunday, March 25, 9 p.m.–1 a.m. Untitled.

“I want it to be beautiful,” Jon says, a remark into silence after we have been talking about the pattern of overlapping checks, in various grays, that he has been building into Cobain’s bathrobe the last few days. Watching Jon’s hand go straight to a spot and brush in a rectangle of paint, then lift off, pick up more paint and come down again in another spot, without hurry and without hesitation, I am curious about what guides his choices of what tint of gray to mix, what size of shape to lay down, where to place it. All these variables. Jon answers as best he can but we must resort often to the word “instinct.” It may be imprecise (or maybe not) but other explanations seem false, formulations in retrospect. The inquiry dwindles. Jon keeps on painting. “I want it to be beautiful,” Jon says.

I want it to be beautiful. I look at him. Of course he does.

I pick the records again. Gordon Lightfoot follows Joan Jett at one point. The contrast is too severe – or if severity is not the point, then at least unfruitful. It forces a rupture and a choice. We go with Joan tonight. That is the mood. It reminds me of Jon’s mantra, his modus operandi: “I’d rather go too far. I can always pull it back.” It’s a method that courts clash and dissonance: much of it will be noise, but a fraction will yield usable sounds. Weird piquant chords. Plowing way over at the edge of the field you find stony, unproductive ground (ignored for good reasons as well as bad), much labour . . . but also the rare arrowhead. Not just last year’s manure. We talk about the deplorable dereliction of radio station DJ’s. Sitting on mountains of recorded music and playing the same five tracks by U2, the Stones, Led Zeppelin. Even a station calling itself The Edge never trying the simplest raw experiment. What edge?

Edge of Main Street.

MB: You’re leaving the shoulders black?
JH: So far. For the contrast with the hair. I want to bring them down into the checks. Fold the black down into it.
MB: It’s amazing how quickly this pattern is building up a sense of fabric. The texture of it, bulk. Quilty . . . with a sense of spaces . . . floating. Yet dense at the same time.
JH: It looks like something he’d wear. Something he found in a thrift shop.
MB: They’re rectangles but they’re giving a sense of fibres somehow.
JH: They’re checks but it’s not a checked, a checkered shirt.
MB: Not one of his plaid lumberjack –
JH: No. Not that. Though . . . it could be anything he wore. Something old.
MB: Old and shapeless.
JH: Something he wore.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” is in this pattern Jon is developing, as much or more than in the facial features above it. The checks so similar, identical at a glance, yet each one different. Its own shape. Like a school of fish, ranks and layers of sameness, yet within the school organic entities, separable (with difficulty), particularized (briefly). Unidirectional shiftings, yet cross-currents within these. Lines of code superimposed, the digits swimming out of focus. Cobain dead before the internet. Before MySpace, Facebook, YouTube. Grunge: the last non-internet phenomenon? Is that part of the homesickness?

So far Jon has worked in three phases of checks, all in tints new to this painting. The darkest first, then a lighter, now a lighter still. Perhaps a lightest one, close to white, will fleck in sporadically, playing off the whites in the face and in the halo. And the darkest phase is to follow. Bringing it back in some measure, tying it to, the black it started from. The black still showing strongly through the interstices between the checks. Carrying power through three overlapping layers, in slivers.

The checks are horizontal on the sleeve, suggesting its volume as a cylinder. Then vertical on the front panels, framing the scrawny white chest. Still just a gesso chest, two nipples roughly circled in. It will have to be worked up farther next, Jon thinks. The painting has come far enough that unworked sections can’t be left too long dangling. There’s an ongoing accord of parts now.

Some of the checks float right off the figure. Some straddling the line of the fabric edge, some right off it . . . in space beside the arms, on (above?) the chest. The effect is eerie . . . and right, somehow. An effect of blurring, decomposing even. Deconstitution . . . flakes lifting off in places. A test pattern that leaks out the edges of its box.

“It happened by accident the first time,” Jon says. “It was late – 4 or 5 in the morning – and a couple of my checks slopped over. I kind of liked it, but wasn’t sure. So I tried it in a few more places.”

I can always pull it back.

Talking about this painting when he’d just begun it, Jon had in mind a “mohair look” for the fabric. Fine hairs going every which way. A hairy chaos . . . luscious. One night he tried a few test hairs with his airbrush. (A machine that broke soon after and which he can’t afford to fix. He’s in no hurry to do so. He likes the effects he’s getting without it, and it was a bitch to clean. The cleaning drove him insane every time.) The result was stupendous, and strange – something he doubts he could ever reproduce, airbrush or no. Without knowing how he was doing it exactly, he found he was painting smoke. Perfect smoke, a smoke simulacrum with the airbrush. Wisps, spirals, eddies, layers – Cobain was wearing a coat of smoke. A patch of it anyway . . . getting larger, larger. . . .

“Did you think of keeping it?” I ask.

“I did. For a moment. But it was too good. You know? Like a PhotoShop effect. It looked like a photo of smoke I’d shopped into the picture.” He shakes his head at the memory. “I really couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I still can’t.”

MB: Is painting more fun now than it used to be?
JH: It is. (continuing the checks) It is for sure. It used to be a real . . . nasty nightmare. (laughs, a bit hollowly) I didn’t know why I was doing it sometimes. Why I was putting myself through it.

Seeing Jon get his arms around this thing has been exciting to watch. Watching him approach this painting in passion and doubt, lay hands on it cautiously, then more and more firmly. . . . I can’t imagine witnessing its like in writing. You can see the process of drafts, of course, the writer’s changed mood and confidence if a way is found . . . but so much is internal . . . leaving just a paper trail. No real equivalent for the physical parry and thrust I’ve witnessed. An actual grappling with an object in space. There aren’t bigger thrills in art.

Jon has a new idea for the background. An effect like rain – he makes drizzling motions with his fingers – smears coming down from the top . . . trails. Stupidly, I say something about that fitting in with Cobain’s west coast roots, not to mention his depressions, the heavy weather he lugged around. Jon looks apprehensive. He’s uneasy at how quickly his notion jumped me into narrative. Especially when doing so is not my predilection when looking at paintings. On the contrary.

Jon never gets through a night without fretting aloud about the background. But the fretting has changed, slowly and imperceptibly. It’s no longer the nervous mumbling, wisecracking, of a guy who doubts he’ll ever date a particular girl. Now he knows he’s headed for a meeting, an encounter. Nothing about that encounter is predictable, least of all its outcome. It could still all fall apart. The chances of that are always high. But he will have his chance. There will be a meeting, a relationship. Knowing that is the opposite of swagger. It’s walking . . . doing it.

Friday, March 30, 9:30 p.m.–1 a.m. The Life With.

MB: How long do you think you’ll be working on this? Do you have any idea when it might be finished? Even a rough one?
JH: No. None at all. It could be months. Even longer, I suppose.
MB: And you’re fine with that.
JH: (laughs) Yes I am.

It’s the end of March. More than a month since Jon resumed work on the portrait and I started watching him. Almost three months since he first showed me a photo of the painting underway. Subtracting the month he abandoned it, he’s been working on it at least three months. When I ask him about when he began it, his memory is vague. “Sometime before Christmas. I remember making the grid. And then the transfer drawing – I remember that well.” He muses, shakes his head.

MB: No moment when you thought, I’ll do a painting of Kurt Cobain.

JH: No. No.

Not that he remembers. And perhaps not at all. This is familiar. There is the life without before, and then the life with. The transition zone between them is hard to recall. Outside Hollywood or novels, the “illuminated moment,” the first sight that changes everything, is not so common. To be so charged, it would have to mean that a glimpse of the life with has infiltrated the life without. That can happen, of course: an illumination. But usually it is only after the life with has revealed its meaning, its changed course, that its beginnings get invented or coloured retrospectively as legend. It seems more comforting to believe that the course of a life can be invaded, radically disrupted by a new idea, a new person . . . an enlivening obsession . . . rather than sprout that obsession slowly, by invisible degrees, as a branch swells a new bud. Strange: since the latter offers more hope. (Or does it? In the botanical version, the organism already has all it needs to unfold. And often you’ve sunk so low that you can’t believe you retain any inner resources that could surprise you. You’re too fortified in routine, immured in it: you need attack, something brutal-angelic to shatter the walls. Yet what peaceably boring city would not be without its fifth columns, punks in alleys and boardrooms, appearing to acquiesce to the status quo while unceasingly looking to cut deals that will end it?)

After we have been listening to a record of Leadbelly singing snatches of old songs, just his voice on an old tape recorder, Jon puts on Kurt Cobain singing Leadbelly’s “They Hung Him on a Cross.” Just voice and guitar, chunky electric chords. It is the first time Jon has played Cobain while painting this. He comments on aspects of the song – recorded as a demo for a planned tribute album – while continuing to paint his checks. He’s beyond the danger of psychic swamping now. It’s all grist to his mill.

He works more black checks, straight Payne’s Gray, down into the other four layers of lighter tints. In one section he goes too far and a section of shoulder acquires a disturbing perpetual motion, as if it is decomposing or vibrating . . . blurry shiftings . . . it is hard to look at. “I’ll have to white all that out and start again.” Yet – something about it works. Though too far gone, it may bring back something of value. Leave it for now.

He begins on the chest. With a larger brush he begins laying in white and gray tones, building up the surface. The looser, larger gestures look relaxing after the checks. Paint loads and brushstrokes create a small juicy slapping. Black lines get added in, five of them, for the lines of sternum to navel, pectoral muscles, bottom of rib cage. The effect, especially after Jon starts working these lines into the gray-white, is of a crude voodoo doll figure: body, arms, legs. Like the twined-stick manikins hung up to terrorize in The Blair Witch Project. After a while of brushing in paint, Jon starts dry-brushing areas for blending. Stabbing and sweeping across in short, forceful strokes, jabs with stiff bristles with just a bit of paint. “Terrible on the brushes . . . it burns them out fast. But it works.”

MB: Do you think you’ll have to abandon this one again?
JH: It’s always possible. I hope not.
MB: What would force you to?
JH: Hitting a wall that’s just . . . too big. (laughs) These checks, maybe.
MB: Too big in the sense of too difficult?
JH: Not to do but . . . more like wandering around . . . not knowing where. . . .

And abandonment is at least one direction. Away.

Jon’s painting room is one of the most comfortable places I’ve spent time in. Nothing needs to happen there so anything can. Anything might. Jon’s right, it isn’t a studio. There’s no need to consecrate a place that’s already working.

The chocolate brown walls, the turntable and speakers, the sagging plaid armchair with throw, the curtain always pulled shut (sometimes with a towel around the edges to block all outside light): they are the fixtures of the cosy rec room. The mole’s hole. But it is an adjusted rec room, tweaked to an individual sensibility: the Johnny Cash photo, the Unicorn painting, the wood “panels” (so realistic and yet so impossible), the mounted toys. . . . It is an adjusted retro. Expressing what exactly? Perhaps nostalgia for a world that knew nothing of him but was ready to welcome his arrival.

The background comes up. It always comes up. It is the question that can never be answered, the one that remains . . . the one that stands in for all of the other, answerable ones. Various ideas get floated. The drizzling smears (“like rain, not rain”), smoky effects, some kind of grid, a geometric pattern, a sort-of-sandstorm of fine black points (pointillism injected with air, dispersing . . .), soft fuzzy lights (I picture luminous late dandelion heads, hovering . . . I don’t know what Jon is seeing). Jon nods at each idea, his own or mine. All have acceptable elements, none has grabbed him. He needs one that grabs him. That leaves him no choice. He flops down in the armchair, which tonight he is calling his “perspective chair.” He looks discouraged, contented.

Something obvious about this portrait of Cobain, so obvious that I took it in without realizing it at first, is the unusual placement of the subject. Or rather the direction of the gaze. In most portraits where the figure is positioned to one side of centre, the figure’s gaze travels across the picture plane. The viewer looks into the same pictorial space that the subject is looking through. The shared visual space creates an intimacy, and is partly what gives rise to the familiar comment about portraiture: The eyes follow you anywhere in the room. With Jon’s Cobain, on the other hand, the eyes can’t be met, no matter where you’re standing in the room. I’ve tried finding them from various points: they won’t be met. You can gaze at them, at him, but you won’t encounter someone looking back at you. The figure, off-centre left, gazes out of the picture space, or into an extension of it (which from our point of view amounts to the same thing, since all we have is the bounded rectangle). He stares out of the space he’s painted into, but not into the space you’re looking from. The effect is unsettling, quietly frustrating. The meeting you desire can never quite occur. You must be a voyeur, and remain conscious of that. From the first time I saw the painting I was aware of this tone of absence, of departure, of abstraction, without understanding the pictorial elements creating it. The subject is leaving the space you’ve concocted for him, but not to enter any space you can imagine.

“Exiting the stage,” Jon calls it. Exactly.