split

You know I get up and have all sorts of boring things to do each day that are stupid and useless and time consuming and are fashioned to look important, have deadlines, official letters from scary government departments, endless bills, idiotic demandments, blah blah blah.

And then for some reason I have to make one little painting.  And a voice that sounds similar to mine is speaking in a light lilt.  So I have time I will do one. And only one.  And I never know somehow what it will be.  That seems odd doesn't it.  Yet it is a fact.  Others will stand in my defense.  Honest.  And I work on these paintings.  And in order to spy on it I empty the dishwasher serendipitously glancing at it. I watch it dry.

I know or soon realize that this is not me but some other person wearing a me costume.  That's odd.

But I am there too.  As an observer.  I watch him paint.  And when he gets done.  He does another one.  And one other.  That is all.  And this goes on every day.  Day after day.  Strange.

You know, believe it or not, someone came in my house this January and stole 600 paintings from me.  Nothing else, just the paintings.  That is seven or eight months of my life.  Gone.  It makes me feel a little depressed.   Sort of like my life is ending.  And to top it off, they are rolling up my past life while they are at it, so that my existence equals zero.  There will be no note of my life, no note of my work, nothing to leave my children, just a zero.

All these paintings are gone,  The guy who took them has let me know that if he feels a hint of the police he will just throw them away.  Now he just waits for them to increase in value.

It seems almost impossible doesn't it.  But it is where I live.  The police don't need me and man they expect the same.

I am not busy.  I am the laziest person I know.  Like most artists, I feel like a suicide who does not deserve to live if there is a day that I do not paint.  But I also feel four or five hours is enough to earn my stay here for one more day.

On the best ordinary days of my life, I paint in the morning, go for a walk, take a nap, and run a few errands in the afternoon.  Then in the evening I see my family and read Cormac McCarthy or Henry Miller, Jim Crace or Samuel Delany.  This it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day.  But if you call me up and ask whether I won't maybe blow off work and go to the Museum of Contemporary Art or the Art Institute. or just drink all day long I will say no thank you.

I don't drink, never really did except for coffee of course, and it seems it takes up too much time.  And I don't like Art galleries and shopping, don't like movies much, don't like socializing, don't like watching girls, it all seems like taking a plunger to an hourglass, which has so little sand in it already.

I am alone, isolate, and I like that, though it does seem to feel a bit fragile some of the time.  I don't
understand others motivations.  I don't understand what they do.  I'm not really very interested.

There is some complicated math problem I am working on day and night and it can only be expressed through paint.  I am trying to explicate a dream.  But each day my dream is shattered.  Now my memory begins fading.  The past is destroyed through this theft.  I am now alone in this nightmare.

Though I can't discover a loss as large as this, I do remember writers burning their manuscripts. throwing them out the window, quite amazing to me.  But none with painters. None.  Just stolen Dali's and Picasso's...

And now me.  All these paintings are gone.  Forever.  And hundreds more...