Ode to an Aged Artist - Part VII

Thursday, August 19, 2010 - The Final Installment

It is time to bring this series of postings to a close. I hate to see Ode to an Aged Artist come to an end, but the painting, now titled Odas Elementales, is finished and it is hanging in the window of Annex Comics on Broadway in Newport, Rhode Island. It is a good place for it.

The proprietor of Annex Comics, Wayne Quackenbush, has been very supportive to the alternative high school, The East Bay Met School, where I work. He has provided internships to some our students and encouraged other students to display their artwork in his shop. If you are in Rhode Island and looking for a comic book/graphic novel/sequential artwork, you know where to go.

I have enjoyed the process of making and writing about this painting. The title comes from a series of poems by Pablo Neruda that I have quoted frequently in these postings. Odas Elementales is usually translated as Elemental Odes, but I’d translate it as Odes to Basic Things. In the making of this piece, I was trying to do the visual version of what Neruda does in these poems: describe everyday objects in an accessible style. The amazing thing about Neruda’s odes is that in one moment they seem to be nothing more than lovely, clear descriptions and in the next moment they seem full of deeper meaning.

I think of my painting as a self-portrait that I don’t appear in. I’m telling you about whom I am by presenting some of the everyday things from my life: roosters, elephants, the cup I drink my morning coffee from, the quilt design called tumbling blocks, Honduran clowns, some tile patterns that have stuck in my head, tomatoes from my garden, and a little doll bought in a tourist market in Guatemala. These things are present in my mind and attached to some of my sweetest memories.

Can you tell this from the painting? Do these objects seem full of deeper meaning?

Alive

This painting uses all the conventions of the old side show banners that lined circus midways advertising amazing and disturbing attractions. Like them, it is painted on unstretched canvas and has grommets for hanging it. I’ve copied the painted banner within the actual banner that these signs always had and also copied the style of lettering that would have proclaimed, Dickie the Penguin Boy, Jack Joyce’s Performing Horses, Amazon Snake Charmer, Huey the Pretzel Man, Rasmus Nielsen Scandinavian Strong Man, Professor Price Tattoo Artist, Alligator Girl, and Shella Queen of the Jungle.

(My reference was Freaks, Geeks & Strange Girls – Sideshow Banners of the Great American Midway, by Randy Johnson, Jim Secreto, and Teddy Varndell.)

Almost all of the midway banners contained another element, a circle containing the word “alive.” This appeared as assurance to the rubes who were going to pay a nickel to enter the sideshow that they would see the living, breathing, genuine article, not a painting or a statue or a work of taxidermy. However, I think it carries another meaning. I think it is a declaration of existence.

I’m alive! I’m here! I woke up this morning on the right side of the grass! How amazing!

And finally, it is all that matters.

Ode to an Aged Artist - Part VI

Saturday, August 14, 2010

The Tomato

it’s time!

come on!

and, on

the table, at the midpoint

of summer

the tomato,

star of earth,

recurrent

and fertile

star,

displays its convolutions,

its canals,

its remarkable amplitude

and abundance,

no pit,

no husk,

no leaves or thorns,

the tomato offers its gift

of fiery color

and cool completeness.

This is a fragment from Pablo Neruda’s Ode to the Tomato.

In the painting, will people recognize this heirloom variety as a tomato or will they think it some kind of little, red pumpkin? It would seem that this is what Neruda thought a tomato looked like when he wrote about “its convolutions” and “its canals.” I haven’t got anything against a big, perfectly round beefsteak, but I swear you can’t beat the flavor of these old varieties. Besides, they are much more fun to draw.

The tomatoes from my garden have been bringing me an inordinate amount of joy this summer. I’ve been eating about two a day, usually as tomato sandwiches for lunch. Here is my recipe: I get some good, crusty bread and saw off half inch slices. I spread the bread with some honey mustard to get off on the right foot. Then, I add cottage cheese, or humus, or avocado, or all of the above. Finally, I slap on a slice or two of tomato and finish it off with a generous amount of salt and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Of course a few strips of crispy bacon will make this sandwich even more memorable, but then there is not much that bacon won’t improve. I’ve been known to wash this down with a mid-day beer, but ice tea is good, too.

I’m getting close to being done with the painting. I think I can add details and polish it up in another day or two.

Ode to an Aged Artist - Part 5

(I figured out recently that if you click on the picture you can get a larger version of it. If you click on the enlargement, you get a good close up that will let you see the texture of the surface and the details of the painting.)

Monday, August 10

Here come the roosters! I love roosters. When I was living in Honduras they were everywhere and not a day went by that I didn’t actively admire them.

“Damn,” I’d say to myself or to Deb. “There’s a handsome bastard,” meaning I’d just spotted a rooster with dramatically shaped plumage, an eye catching comb, intimidating spurs, and a combination of iridescent colors that took my breath away. Some of these guys stood knee high to me. Occasionally, I’d run across an aggressive one, but usually they gave their full attention to scratching and pecking and doing the other thing roosters do. Only a few had the time to spare to charge a gringo.

I saw a rooster

with feathers of Spanish

luster:

black and white cloth

was the stuff

of its shirt,

knee britches,

and arching tail feathers.

its feet sheathed

in yellow boots

displayed the sheen of defiant

spurs.

The

proud

head

crowned

with blood

intensified

its scornful stance:

a statue

of pride.

I love Neruda’s “Ode to a Rooster”, but my perception of roosters is very different from his. The cock he anthropomorphizes so eloquently is a regal character, a kind of benign monarch or the barnyard. Neruda describes him finding a crumb of bread which he passes on to his hens, “keeping nothing for himself / but pride...”

I’ve observed a lot of rooster behavior and I’ve seen nothing that I’d describe as generous or even unselfish. In fact everything in a rooster’s behavioral repertoire seems to have to do with satisfying a limited number of biological imperatives: scratch, peck, scratch, peck, jump a chicken, scratch, peck, scratch, peck, jump a chicken.

Oh yeah, and crow. I don’t know what the biological imperative behind crowing is, but I’m sure there is one.

Remember learning that roosters crow at dawn? Forget it. They crow any damn time they feel like it. However, at dawn they crow in unison, every one in town and there are hundreds, thousands.

Interestingly, in the US, when roosters crow, they say cock-a-doodle-do, but in Latin America they say ki-ki-riki-ki.

Here’s Neruda on rooster sex:

swift movement

of love, ravishment

of feathered shadows,

I praise you,

black

and white

rooster,

strutting

sum

of virile rural honor,

father

of the fragile, egg…

He got the “swift”, “ravishment” and “strutting” right. The rooster jumps on the hens back, pens her head into the dirt, flaps his wings wildly three or four times, and he’s done. The hen gets up, shakes herself off, and goes back to scratching and pecking. The father of the fragile egg struts around bragging about what he’s just done. I know. I am anthropomorphizing, too, just like Neruda, but you watch a rooster right after he’s jumped a hen and tell me that he not thinking, “Yeah, baby! That’s what I’m talking about. I gave it to her good! Call me the love machine.”

Maybe roosters are viewed differently in every epoch. Writing in the fifties, Neruda described a dignified, benevolent, patriarch, a kind of pre-feminist cock. I’m a sixties/seventies/eighties kind of guy. I think about equality, self-determination, and empowerment for the hen. And yet I love roosters and think they are beautiful. Maybe my rooster admiration is post-feminist.

Ode to an Aged Artist - Part I

Tuesday, August 4, 2010

I am working on a big painting in my studio. I’ve decided to document the making of this painting as part of Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man. Each day that I work on it, I’ll take a photo at the beginning of the session and write about the process. I’ll also share information about the imagery.

I am starting to think about this painting as a self-portrait that I don’t appear in. Sure, that is true about any painting, but this one more than others.

It is hard to paint and write at the same time. I keep needing to wash the paint off my hands before I can tap the keys.

I wish I had started earlier. I’m already a couple of days into the painting and some of the early laying on of color was interesting.

The Title

Over the course of his long career, Pablo Neruda wrote in many styles. At one point he composed a series of simple, accessible, observational poems describing everyday objects. In 1954 he published these poems as Odas Elementales, Elemental Odes. He was only 50 at the time and would live another nineteen years. However, these poems are referred to as “late career” works. One is called Ode to an Aged Poet and contains the lines:

There I left him

hurrying toward death

as if

death awaited,

she too, almost naked,

in a somber park,

and hand in hand

they would make

their way to

a decaying resting place

where they would sleep

as every man

of us

will sleep:

with

a dry

rose

in

a

hand

that will also

crumble into dust.

How’s that for looking mortality in the eye?

The Tiles

I started painting a tile floor underneath the elephant. To get the pattern I want, I will have to paint equal amounts, more or less, of four colors; purple, white, light green and dark green. I did the purple part and it took me an hour. There are three more hours to go on this one section.

Here is another nice mess I got myself into.

I saw this tile design in Guatemala and sketched it into a notebook. It has been in my mind since then.

The Elephant

Here is a paragraph from something I wrote when Deb and I came back from Botswana. I’ve only been to Africa once, for two weeks, but the images stick with me.

I was surprised by the emotion I felt at seeing the animals. The African Jacana was a brown so warm and rich it was reason enough to feel joyful. Giraffes were so improbable that they confirmed life is essentially a mystery that can’t be explained by theory or faith, a notion that brought with it a lovely melancholy. Many of the animals were giggle inducing, only one step removed from Disney cartoons. The monkeys, the mongoose, the secretary bird, seemed to be auditioning for the next version of the Lion King. The old elephants with their tattered ears and battered tusks seemed enduring in a way that only someone over sixty could really appreciate. They made me feel proud and courageous to be old and in Africa.

But this elephant seems to be wearing a lace unitard. What’s with that?