Scumbler. William Wharton
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do the hands, put the brush in my right hand. I tone ground with burnt sienna, use a cloth for wiping in the main forms; work up shading and volume.
FIRST IN EARTH, THEN AERATED. WE’RE
CARELESSLY CREATED TO FIGHT THROUGH
TIME AND SPACE TO OUR PROPER PLACE,
TO DIRT.
It’s time to thicken the medium; build up my darks. I start brushing in cool colors, beginning movements from the light side; pushing colors in under where the impasto’s going to be.
Look at those stupid eyes; they’re staring back with such intensity, as if it matters. Get that, too, Scum! Work that in! Boar’s whiskers, you really love yourself you broken-down fart; what else, who else. All painters love themselves or they wouldn’t do it; writers too, probably; I think old Camus even said it once.
I start mucking in the background; moving out there some of what’s happening inside. Now grab that kink around the nose and make it show again up here in the right corner. I’m happy, juggling two, three dimensions simultaneously. It’s enough to make one want to stay alive. It’s all lies, one bigger than the other. OK, make the hard one truer; paint it louder.
I squeeze gobs of opaque paint on the palette: titanium white, all the cadmiums. STOP! Careful with those cadmiums, Scum; use burnt umber, more raw sienna, yellow ochre, our kind of colors, cheap colors. I’m the earth-color man; Scum of the earth. Let’s not forget!
CAN WE EVER BE FORGIVEN
THE MOMENTS OF OUR BLISS:
THE TINY CRACKS IN LIFE
THAT AREN’T JUST LIKE THIS?
Now we’re backing in. Picking out the highest points with light. Fan the white bleeding away into rolls of color and darkness across the forehead and into the penumbra. Make it live! I’m alive now, breathing through my brushes; color like blood, light like oxygen.
We need to keep my brush in close; laying it in carefully, deeply, with strong tenderness. Yellow next to orange and then together. Make it stand up. Light! Light it!
Goddamn Scum! Now drift back with the highs fading away. Gently scumble. Scumble, you scum; pearl away, fade back but still keep it close; help those sharp edges move together. Birth the lie into life; squeeze in that missing ‘f’. Only a word, but first was the word. No, first and last is the void.
I smell myself: part oil, part sweat, all horseshit. Here I am, laughing at me laughing at myself and crying at the laughing. I wasted valuable years trying to be a serious Dostoevski type, a latter-day van Gogh. Then I buttered myself deep with Middle European suffering, Sturm und Drang; after that, I experimented with nineteenth-century melodrama. Now I’m cried out, dried out. All I ask is something to make some reason – now, before it’s too late. How dumb can you get?
LISTLESS LISTENING, CRYING, SCREAMING,
ALL WATER ON WATER. AN ENDLESS FLOWING.
ANOTHER PROOF OF OUR NOT KNOWING?
I lean in tighter. Get the stinginess, the meanness, the fear, Scum. It’s in the lips; frothed with hair but it’s there; you know, you live with it.
Over sixty years with this same face, this same body. I’ve watched it grow bigger, harder, softer, sadder, hairier. Now I even grow tufts like foxtails inside my ears. I’m falling, failing from the effects of gravity, cell deterioration, laughter, weeping and plain boredom. Watch the cracks deepen, the flesh putty out, slowly turning into aged meat. Put that all in, Scum; make it visible. Death’s stalking just around one of these hours. Maybe yesterday.
I finish off the blue jacket; decide to leave out the hands, after all. Darkness is pushing me down, pinning me. I can’t believe it; here I’ve been painting over four hours; actually painting some of the time, blubbering, yammering the rest. The family will be home soon.
I lean back and look. It’s not a bad painting; still too much self-pity. I’m like one of those donors jammed into the bottom corner of a medieval painting. Only I’m all alone in the center of this canvas, begging to nobody, everybody; praying for everybody, nobody. Definitely obscene, in the deepest sense, unbearable, not to be seen.
I clean up; pack away the box. I need new pig’s bristles; the ivory black’s almost gone again, too. I use too much black in my painting. I can’t catch myself doing it, but the paint’s going somewhere; I’m not eating it. I’d better watch that.
EATING BLACK: CONCENTRATED SEARCH FOR COLOR,
OR, PERHAPS, THE LACK OF LIGHT IN WHICH TO
BURY THE NIGHT. BUT NIGHT IS ONLY A LACKEY;
COLD AS NO HEAT, SLOW MOLECULES. I FACE
BACK TO BLACK, NO ONE, NOWHERE.
3
Slum Landlord
I work outside today, Saint Valentine’s Day. It’s cold but I’ll take any sunshine I can get. I feel all cramped up painting inside, as if I’m cut off from life. I’m happiest out in streets, fighting crowds, cursing cars, yakking with people; it all gets into the work.
My painting’s got to be part of life, not just about it anyway. I’m OK inside for a while, sharpening up my personal carving knives, digging into myself, getting close, but then I’ve got to break out and muck around. In some strange way, I have the feeling I’m most alive when I’m painting, as if the other time is a kind of waiting. I don’t know what I’m waiting for but that’s the way it feels.
I’m working down on the Rue Princesse in the Latin Quarter. I’ve just started on a woodworker’s shop, menuiserie-ébéniste. The owner of the place comes out. We get into some standard everyday talk about ‘lost-artisanship-craftsmanship, world-going-to-hell’, all that tired jabbering. He asks me to put his name on his sign; it’s weathered off. I think he wants me to climb up over his door and do some actual, honest-to-God painting up there, but he means in the painting; that’s fine with me.
The painting’s going to be mostly browns and some dark blue-grays, with a light bulb hanging inside, lighting raw wood and sawdust; yellow-ochre hollow spaces. I’m doing the place almost face on, slight angle left. There’s a big old carved doorway on the left I want to finagle in somehow.
The door’s closed when I do the drawing. Halfway through my underpainting, the concierge comes out, jams this door open.
She’s an old gal, new face painted on. New face has nothing to do with her real face; hair cut gamine, bright red. She looks terrific, like a clown. There’s still a good body there too; moves easily, holds herself straight; thin freckled legs. Nobody with freckles is ever old. She’s maybe seventy and packing some fifty pounds of libido; comes on and chums me with ‘Oh-la-la’ old-fashioned-girl-style press; hands all over me. I love it.
I ask if she’ll stand in the doorway so I can paint her into my picture. She runs her fingers through the red straw hair; bony, bent fingers. She leans in the doorway, arm cocked against the wall. She’s wearing a blue-flowered dress. I paint it orange, need an orange accent. I gussy the dress up and make her about forty. Wish I could do that for myself, for everybody. No, there’s a time for each of us.
EACH TO A TIME A TIME FOR EACH—
WE WADE THROUGH OUR LIVES, THROUGH
MINUTES, HOURS, DAYS, MONTHS, YEARS
TILL WE GASP FOR AIR, DROWN IN TEARS.
She can’t believe it when I’m finished; a thing like this takes me maybe five minutes. One thing, I really can paint: good, fast, powerful. I might just not have enough aesthetic, or maybe too much – somewhere in there. I can spin around, fall down and begin painting anything in front of me, wouldn’t shift my eyes. I love it all, can paint everything; no damned discrimination. There are fifty paintings within a hundred yards of anywhere I’m standing. I know it. I could spend the rest