Letter to a Friend

Parts of a letter to a friend….
Otherwise I am enjoying one of my drawing streaks. I have never been one to work on some regular, punch-the-time clock sort of schedule; it’s more periodic outbursts with me, an eruption of ideas and energy that can go on for three or four months and then lay dormant for 6 months, while I get into other things of interest to me. For the first time in ages I am working on a horizontal format, me, a strictly vertical guy for decades. I don’t know what got into me. On a sudden impulse I turned my paper because I had an idea to do a three panel triptych, like Max Beckmann was fond of doing. I am also in a more formal frame of mind, which is odd for me, as I am usually focused on subject matter and content. This time I am more concerned about pattern, the black-white-and-gray patterns I am getting by mixing pen and ink tones and shadings with pencil. When I sit back and contemplate what I have done, I am looking at how all the bits and pieces are hanging together; I am asking myself, do they all harmonize? I am getting an overall grey look with white and black accents in the grey field. There is a softness and subtlety to the imagery that I really like.
What is the nature of the imagery? Well, let’s see, how about an explosion in a cartoon factory, or perhaps a kind of intoxicated surrealism, or like the theater of the absurd. One thing is for sure: it is horror vacui taken to an extreme. One drawing I have titled “Merry Mayhem,” and another “Four-square Evolution.” The sizes of the images are small, 12” X 8,” like Paul Klee’s work, diminutive but complex and lively. However, I have not abandoned the figurative/symbolic imagery I am noted for. No indeed. I saw this German film two weeks ago, “Eight Miles High,” starring this incredibly sexy young actress. She inspired me to do two ‘hieroglyphs’ featuring her as a Betty Page retread strutting her stuff on my typical floating stage with symbolic bric-a-brac surrounding her like broken and random pieces of memory, all tokens of my experience more than what belongs to her. I have done 5 things like that which are larger than the other group. All this work is as good as anything I have done in the past. So at 73 I am not slipping or losing any of my power. The one problem that I do have that is connected to old age is the “yips.” Golfers and pool players are familiar with the yips. They are those sudden uncontrollable twitches and jerks, the result of old and tires nerves. They can ruin a putt or make you miscue at the worse time—or make you draw a line you didn’t want there. Such ‘accidents’ can screw up am image.
Interestingly, I sent a bunch of my drawigs to RC, that old friend from college, who I have been communicating with a lot last six weeks. He said he would, unlike Fred Spratt, comment on them. He knows the story how Fred would not comment on them because they were so far removed from what he does; he just couldn’t relate to them. Well, it has been three weeks since I sent those things to RC and so far nothing has been forthcoming. It really doesn’t matter because he has already rendered me a service that I deeply appreciate. Both he and I have had a long time interest in what is commonly called “Outsider Art.” After some back and forth about some Outsider artists, he told me that is how he is seeing me. I am an outsider despite my education, because I have pretty much thrown the baby out with the bath water, which is true. In Primus Rota I characterize this by saying my education “was cargo I no longer needed so I threw it overboard.” RC has given me much to think about. The label does fit with my eccentric and highly subjective imagery, which have been inscrutable puzzles to so many people and, frankly, to me too, although I do speculate about them for the hell of it, to be playful. It fits with my character and what I have experienced in extreme moments of vision and illumination, which removed me from the club of professors at UNLV. My work has been so personal since 1968, that fateful year for so many people my age and younger, and for a long time I have ignored the trends and fashions of the moment and gone my own way, no matter what the consequences. The guy who took my place at UNLV was once a colleague of RC’s. He painted stripes, what Celine liked to call “necktie art.” He is still there, Head of the Art Department now, and probably still paints stripes. God bless him. Some belong there, I didn’t. I work on the basis of inner impulse not external dictates and I have been following that star for four decades, and so I say fuck the art world, its money, games, and galleries, and all the rest of it. Right? Right…
The following is a response to the above from SD, my friend up in Canada.
“Your comments about “outsider artists” don’t surprise me at all except that you think that is a revelation. That’s how I have always thought of you. Beyond the art, it speaks for your integrity. I think of you as one of the few people I know who has stayed with your values all the way through.”