It feels good

I must admit it feels good to be back in Painterland.  I've been busy the last few days, and they were fun, but this is the place I call home.  This is where I sit at the big table and Vincent sits across from me, and James Whistler to my left, and Matisse and Picasso to my right.

Anyone of them could be sitting anywhere really.  They do not move around though.  There is a lot of drinking going on, though there are those who never drink,  there are a few chess games that are happening.  And there is me, embarrassed to be here at all with these geniuses,  I'm just sitting here and I feel like I am in heaven -I am glad to be here -I know I am a defalcator, a confidence man...

And I know they know it too.   -but they just don't care.  There is too much to drink and to eat, and marvelous arguments going on about nothing.   I am glad to be invisible in this grand company, just to listen and to watch.

And once in a while someone will stop and talk with me for a minute or two, be it Max Ernst or Andre Breton, Robert Rauschenberg, or Juan Miro.  I find them all charming, all flattering, even though the comments may not be so flattering.  They are all interested in images, in the shaping of perception, in the recall of memory.

And though I can be here only a minute or two before it all fades away in the morass of responsibilities and duties,  this visit has been golden for me.  Thank you my friends for having existed, for having lived in this world, some even concurrently with me.   Thank you for all you have created.

shiny new essay

I'm a shiny new essay.  I'm supposedly gonna talk about art.  But I don't really know much about it.  I like to make art.  That is if this is accepted as art.  Well no, because I don't really look for acceptance as a measure of art.  That would be a bad idea I think.

You see, acceptance is just not a value one can use for this stuff.  It doesn't work as a measure.  Why not? Well for example,  when Manet did his magnificent painting of Olympia, there was a movement if you can believe it to cut that painting up and burn it.  It was hated.  The critics thought he was cutting up people because the girl stood behind a bar and her lower half was not visible.

And no, I don't measure anything I do against a Manet.  That doesn't work either.  You see, he is now a famous and acclaimed artist.  I am a nothing and an unacclaimed nothing.

I am a nobody nowhere.  Yet, to give another example, just one more okay?  When Magritte came to Paris and Breton got him a show there,  the critics laughed at it, and Magritte went back to Belgium, ashamed and penniless.

This stuff juste happens.  And continues to happen.  Nothing has changed.  But what has changed is that many artists know that it is hopeless..and yet, even believing that, they still criticize themselves, and call themselves every tragic and ugly name they can think of.  Well maybe nothing at all has changed.

I have few illusions:  the cause is lost in advance.  As for me, I do my part, which is to drag a fairly drab existence to its conclusion. -Rene Magritte

transmogrification

or moving garbage into art and art into garbage or moving trash into art and art into trash or moving nothing into nothing and reverse.

...when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, What does it mean.  It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable. -Magritte

You just go in there, into painterville, and you can see all the famous and the infinite number of non famous painters.  They were all currently painting whenever they were or are alive, and still are, though we like moving them into the past and gone.  Doesn't matter really.  While in painterville you can talk to whomever you like.  Many are very friendly.  You can, if you wish, borrow their techniques, copy their signatures, talk to their friends, and even eat their food.  It is nice.

I will admit, since you insist on it, that most of the alive ones are a bit defensive, a trifle sensitive and weirdly compulsive about some nutty idea, well like most people of course.  But they are, each and every one, you know, interesting, especially when you get inside them.  But that is yucky, bloody and gooey, repulsive even, so let's leave that for Goya and that British guy,  we shall stand as proudly as we remember how, until we get bored, then we will sit down.

         
It is boring even sitting down, so let's lay down and close our eyes, and go back through painterville, and say hi to everyone, though I must say I am happiest to say hi to Blaise Cendrars and Louis Celine and Paul Bowles, what are they doing here anyway?, and go out the entrance to this boring stupid world of idiotically opinionated, creepy ant like creatures who all bite the ankles of the ones directly in from of them.  Ahh, what a waste.  And poor Nany, holding her mouth and her eyes in her hand as they find her heart an accurate witness.

And we go forth into the day.  Like an Egyptian.

Well you can see, I don't create any mystery.  Because in fact this whole darn thing seems completely mysterious to me.  How can something be understood on one level? and not exist on any other?

How do I complain about one lousy sentence which make no sense, and then loudly and happily sing the dumbest lyrics ever written to the entire grocery store?

lethologica

Really, you can't blame me, it's just what the painting did, the paints themselves.  I always try just to do exactly what I did yesterday.  I don't try to use new and bold colors, I don't try to use colors at all.

I don't try to use imaginative canvases in oddball shapes or even canvas itself.

Really I just try to do the same thing every day.  I am trying only to think of something but the word for it escapes me.  The entire everything escapes me.

Except I like movement.  And I like going there after a time and seeing what was made that day.  Yes I try to use a process that is out of my control beyond my ken.  I try not to read music, I don't really like notes and in particular I don't like the sound of picks against the string.

I am usually only happy when the painting looks like I went to painting land and ripped out a hunk of it and returned with the bloody hunk and it dried itself to death almost as soon as it got here.  It ends up looking like a leaf or maybe fresh concrete.

 And occasionally like a strange plastic pig or a man with a an attitude and a cigarette or maybe his worried daughter with ridiculous hair.

Magritte

Between ourselves, it's terrible what one lays oneself open to when drawing an innocent picture. -Magritte

Of course, Magritte was not the top tier of painters.  That was Picasso.  And once you leave the top tier, you starve.  Or, of course, never get there in the first place.  And so of course, after leaving Paris after his great humiliation, with the critics laughing at him, he went home to Belgium and painted Picassos and Chiricos for a living.  And it's alright, Chirico had to paint Chiricos too for a living, and got to suffer the humiliation of stealing his own signature and dating the paintings back to the time he was popular.

All I can say is just fuck them all or as Magritte put it -My art is valid insofar as it resists bourgeois ideology, in the name of which life is extinguished.

Once, on regaining the light of day, I noticed an artist painting in an avenue of the cemetery, which was very picturesque with its broken columns of stone and heaped up leaves.  He had come from the capital -his art seemed to be magic, and he himself endowed with powers from above.  Unfortunately, I learned later that painting bears very little direct relation to life and that every effort to free oneself has always been derided by the public. -RM

Now I don't actually paint like any of that.  I am too desperate just to paint anything.  So I just let the paint do what it likes and I try to stay out of the way of it.  If it fails I know I got in the way -I started thinking and painting, both ugly things to me.  Just let the paint talk, and once in a while, every hundred paintings or so, something will emerge, something beautiful...