The Cars of Somewhere

Recently: another job in another suburban “community” with a large entrance sign that uses words like “woods” or “lake” or forced language like, say, “The Glenn of Tower Island”. These signposts are requisite before every new subdivision. They often use phrases (“hounds”, “manor”, “briar”, “woods”) meant to impart the fantasy of old world luxuries from the realms of the landed gentry. Here in the middle of the world as elsewhere - since these places are nearly identical regardless of geographical location - the reality is nothing of the sort.

The reality: winding roads of barren, badly constructed barracks meant to resemble someone’s idea of upscale dreaming. These sorts of places speak first and foremost to the car culture. Cars are everything here. The garages are not only front and center but, in fact, they mostly obscure the living areas, the place where humans - not automobiles - live. Most every car within view is new and many are large suv’s. My rusting wagon with the crumpled bumper is an outsider, a sickly invader. It impinges upon the world of the shiny and new, the world of maintaining a certain visible level of status.

I come here to work. My client is a wonderful person. It is easy to criticize this kind of living, I suppose, as it would be to find fault with my own way of going about things. But I cannot help but find these places sterile and odd and sad. In some newer housing, porches have actually made a re-emergence. Imagine: porches! Places to rest but also to engage with your neighbors. Partake in the life of your street. Imagine the cars out of sight. Imagine not caring what kind of car someone drives or whether or not it is squeaky-clean or new or expensive. Imagine being able to actually walk to a grocery store.

I grew up with Leave it to Beaver and Mayberry of the Andy Griffith Show. The cozy comfort, reliability, honesty, and unpretentiousness of those worlds was built into writer’s scripts and on Hollywood back lots. But the feelings they engendered were real and truly important to all of us in a million different ways. The phoniness comes with the territory: trying to build an ideal community. I think we instinctively know when these places are working and when they are pushing an agenda.

Guest Writer: Poet Edward Grayson

Ultimately, what seems to matter most is what matters least.
We all appear destined for that which most eludes us. Those things which
come easily do not bring with them much satisfaction.

Words are not words anymore. Neither are they weapons.
What are words?
Object lessons. Pirouettes on a tilted stage. Seed pods for the next forest.
Houses built without walls or location.
Are words the temporary band-aid for the meta-temporal wounds?

We cascade along the sidewalk and manage to meet up for a drink.
Then, a stranger starts screaming and threatening violence and we have
seconds to decide whether to stay or go.
The evening finishes up next to an empty swimming pool where crickets have drowned in the puddles left behind.

Words are the weeping silence of forgotten promises.
What are words?
Clogged plumbing in the darkness of the desert.
Rained-out concerts behind the violet curtain.
Cracked teeth underneath new cars we have collected.
Words kill the empire but leave the weapons.

Another window pane shatters on the subway to hell.


Edward Grayson’s most recent book is titled, “Why the Not?”.

Departure

In 1980 I found myself in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

I strolled into a large gallery where Max Beckmann’s first triptych, Departure, dominated one wall. I sat on a bench and took in this monumental painting for what seemed like an hour.

I had been familiar with Beckmann and his work. He had taught at Washington University, my undergraduate school, and a friend and former professor owned one of Beckmann’s easels. But on this day I saw this painting....really saw it....and it changed my way of working.

Now, decades later, I am of mixed feelings about the whole business of art-making, still in love with it but not sure where it fits in a culture of constant shifts. Beckmann was changed by the trauma of experiencing the first world war on the battlefield. He was changed by Matisse and Picasso and the onset of new artistic horizons. He was changed by the second world war and his move to the United States.

Culture moves and expands, adjusts and changes. Fashion is fashion.

I maintain the we humans have not changed so much. Departure still moves me today as it did thirty-one years ago. Art gets shoved into History. It gets written about one too many times. Then it gets digitized and experienced through headphones while stepping sideways in long, cramped lines of people trying to pick up aesthetic philosophy like a lint brush.

At some point in every life, one finds the ‘departure’ to freedom.

WAR & WAR

My stepfather Phil served twice in the United States Army. He fibbed about his age the first time and served in Europe. He was a kid. So young.

The second go-round he was shipped off to Korea. Still very young. A teenager.
He never spoke about it until a year or so after lengthy hospital stays and serious surgery. Even then he said little. I had to think fast and ask questions while the door was open.

He told me about advancing across a cold, barren river valley....being shot at and having no where to find protection.

He told me about the locals who flooded the roads in an attempt to escape the hell that was unfolding all around them. He told me that sometimes the Army could not get them to move aside and allow the military convoys to pass. They would not move, even after repeated requests. Then the jets were called in. They flew overhead and obliterated everyone and everything on the road. The convey moved forward.

The photos presented here show Phil and a fellow soldier (Phil's on the right), a view of a local scene, and a family portrait retrieved off the body of a fallen North Korean soldier.

War is not only Hell it seems. It is much worse.

TWO PHOTOS

A couple of quick digital photographs taken a few years ago standing at the edge of a parking lot next to a winding park and pier on Lake Erie.

It was a blustery cold day on the far edge of Fall with Winter’s bluntness creeping closer.

I was up that way with a friend who was buying a used wood-burning stove. This place was a stop on the way home.

In these two photos one cannot tell that a parking lot fronts these dunes. Neither can one see the lake. Instead, small moments in time come together to create visual dreamscapes that engage the eye and mind and emotions. These photos are mysterious. What lies beyond? Where is this? The softness of the light and contours of the land; the long shadows and contrast between sand and resonant sky; the way these images invite us to belong in them - all of this is accidental and momentary and coincidental. When the parking lot is present in the photos, the magic evaporates in familiarity and the mundane.

The majesty of this world captured by chance.

PAINTING

The joints on my right hand always ache.
I’ve been painting a long time.
Lately, it’s been mostly on walls in homes or offices.

I stopped exhibiting a number of years ago. I don’t know exactly why.
On the one hand, the sheer cost of exhibiting out of town is enormous. Competitive shows have an entrance fee and I don’t quite see the point of them.
Galleries have been largely uninterested in my work. Too modern for traditional places and too traditional for contemporary galleries.
Artists often put up little shows with openings attended by friends and families and thereafter by wind and light and silence. Nothing wrong with that.

In the “rarified” smarty-pants world of up-to-date contemporary art, painting is mostly considered yesterday’s news. Much of what manages to make it through the critical gauntlet depends on enormous physical scale to succeed. Performance, digital media, installation - these are “Truthier”. Simplistic ideas manage to find acceptance when they are clothed in currently passable formal structures.

The most annoying phrase in all of contemporary exhibit world: “site-specific”.

I have always drawn and painted whatever the hell I have wanted to. I have had my illusions about careerism, certainly, but I have also maintained a level of integrity, honesty, and mystery that is real to me...not feigned. I have been lazy at times and not as prolific as many of my contemporaries. But I have continued on and have a small body of work that I stand by. What will happen to it when I am gone is anyone’s guess. But I imagine there will be some exasperation by those faced with my studio mess.

People like to look at paintings and tell you what you “should or could have done”. It is the worst thing to do to an artist. Many years ago a friend hooked me up with an ex-curator at the Contemporary Art Center here in town. He came and looked at my paintings. Pointing at a section of a work which played-off a painting of a sphinx by Poussin, he exclaimed: “Now this...is idiotic”. He said this because in his mind he was learned and experienced and I was naive. The truth is that he was an imbecile. But I remained polite and didn’t tell him what I thought of his expertise.

I watched a 2007 documentary on the painter Alice Neel last night, directed by her grandson. It was memorable as well as tough to watch because it zeros in on the wonder and exuberance but also the sheer difficulty of living life as an artist.

It is worth it and for many of us....there is no other way.