Substituting the frisson of immediate but containable risk for the far grimmer reality of distant but uncontrollable perils
Of all the ways to avoid living, perfect discipline is the most admired
J. Richardson
Dear Peter:
I am prompted to ask about violence. And I want to start with a line that i sometime find too clever by half and sometimes find to lay bare something about this country (America) that goes to the bone:
Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong.
Holly Near, from the song “Foolish Notion.”
Your painting, Pelican (Stag), shows the afterglow of violence – doesn’t glamorize the blood and guts of it, but (in my mind) follows through on the exchange of gazes between the violent actor and the witness to (not the victim of) the violent act. The fate of the preyed upon is already decided, and it’s the complications that follow that seem built into the idea of the painting and what it evokes. Still, the central figure – the man who stands and stares back from within the painting, dead bird in hand – shrinks no violets, hazards no apologies. I sense that you were not necessarily trying to capture what you and Chris saw – as a witness with any loyalty to a veracious account – but to conjure up, in paint, something that captured the surreal nature of that moment. Less what happened, more what reverberated in the course of it happening and being stared down, and the see-saw dynamic that followed. And the bathing of it in a swath of light, the aftermath of it, is akin to the inability not to look. A broken-necked bird, a wreck on the side of the road, the final words of someone who is (according to the official narrative) about to suffer at the hands of the state a fit punishment for the crime committed to one of its citizens and, writ large, the state itself.
And but what to make of the man with the net from Kerala? Might he suggest we are all fished for? Pelicans, stags, watchers, and makers – all source material.
Scotland and Canada claim you. You now live in Trinidad, though it’s unsure if you call it home, given the escape to Exmouth Market and whatever space in New York you have hung a canvas. You have talked about trying to achieve in your paintings a place in between places. It is easier to talk about geography, perhaps, than to dig into particular readings of your paintings and the slack vibrancy they seem to achieve.
I would like you to consider a statement from a theologian whose biography I am currently reading:
It is a consequence of the wide diffusion of the public word through the newspapers and the wireless that the essential character and the limits of the various different words are no longer clearly felt and that, for example, the special quality of the personal word is almost entirely destroyed. Genuine words are replaced by idle chatter. Words no longer possess any weight. There is too much talk. And when the limits of various words are obliterated, when words become rootless and homeless, then the word loses truth, and then indeed there must almost inevitably be lying. When the various orders of life no longer respect one another, words become untrue.
Bonhoeffer, letter to Bethge, December 1943.
Do you believe that paintings answer to the same dynamic – that images or figures can become rootless or homeless, so far disposed from what they are supposed to be, as to become false? Or at least untrue? Or is this the kind of loose talk that ought to prompt a clamp on lips?
Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all. But Keats died so young. Maybe if he would have revised the sentiment had he not been consumed by consumption (an archly appropriate Romantic death). It is not hard to become enraptured by countervailing pulls that your work repeatedly has on me: the sense of seigniorial calm clashing with a hitch – an anxious pulling-up-short – that glosses the same beautiful surface with the latency on violence. I feel like you understand both poles – or if not “understand” – have an affinity with both. Is there a way to achieve an eerie effect, intentionally? Does it come down to linseed oil and turpentine, the eye that aspires to achieve a certain effect and the eye that is rapt at discovering something new and surprising unfold in search of that now-discarded aspiration?
I’m not sure I agree that you and others of your ilk are only capable of painting one painting, again and again, in a single lifetime, but if that is the case I am eager to see what else you will do with it. It doesn’t seem right to invoke Sisyphus in the context - I don’t think you think it is a labor without satisfaction, a rote mechanical act that fate has assigned you to repeat again and again. [I am curious if you have seen Tom Thompson’s handwriting, and whether that biographical residue can hold a candle in comparison to your study of his brush strokes. I am curious if and when you read Guston’s notes on painting and if and when your ardor for his uncompromising line came to a point. I am curious if the layered tectonics of your families make sense to you – if you still feel imperious or feel perceived that way, astride a colossus of change moving inexorably forward, with a pointy aristocratic hat and a face that lacks a speck of haughtiness but offers no apology]
Don’t believe everything you think, obviously.