Paint

Paint

The blank canvas. Before the first brush stroke lands upon it. Painting is dear enough to me that I don’t know where to start, which is something that happens to me with a canvas sometimes, upon which occurrence I generally leave it alone.

I am the son of an artist. My mother, a painter, a poet, had a long simple wooden box when I was a child, in which she kept various objects, many of them from the Living World, to use in drawing and painting still life. As I think back upon it, that box was as close to an altar as I grew up with in our home, and though at no time did she tell me it was sacred, and though I doubt she would use that word herself, I was aware that inside of that box was a world. Most vividly what I remember is the complete skeleton of a mouse. What the box taught me, what she taught me, in relation to the box, because in earliest memory I don’t think I touched it–not that she forbade me, but that the care with which she handled, and then studied the objects suggested to me that they were not ordinary things, to be handled in an ordinary way. And I think it was this, in recollection, that set art apart for me, by setting these things apart, so that it was clear they weren’t simply to be handled, but to be gazed upon, to be examined so closely with the eyes, to be brushed so acutely with the attention, that every curve and yield and articulation of bone was seen fully. Every bulb of rattling seedpod, the tissue of its wrapper hugging the plump seeds beneath, the specific geometries of that spike of amethyst. The militant orange of dried kernels on an ear of heirloom corn. And their colors, infinitely deep, held up in shafts of sunlight bright with bits of dust moting. Have you ever really gazed into the heart of an amethyst held up in a beam of sunlight? Stared into the orange of an heirloom corn kernel–because with the light just right–you can see in through the skin, and it is orange all the way in. A jewel masquerading as snack food. I carry it with me, always, this sense that in the grain pattern of a bit of wood, the waxy shadow on a persimmon, there is more beauty than it is possible to rightly know, and that if I let my attention grow still enough, let my gaze become single enough, the mysterious beauty of the ineffable will be staring me full in the face.

I have an image, before holding a pencil, of brushing the objects with the tip of a pointed feather, of sweeping them as if to remove dust, of tracing the outlines of them with this flexible tip. As though it were a drawing exercise, and I was being instructed in how to follow the contours of the object. That I might then, holding a pencil, or a paintbrush instead, follow those same contours with my hand as my eye swept across them. That my eye could trace the line and my hand render it faithfully. This is technique.

I was never much good at painting still life. I’m still bored by fruit in a bowl on canvas, no matter how expertly rendered. Finding my voice, artistically, took a long time. I remember sitting in a market café, Brandt’s it was called, the closest thing to Paris in mid-town St.Louis, with a pad of watercolor paper, and painstakingly painting the interior of the café, in a realist style. I labored over this drawing for several hours, eating bread or something, three brushes, a folding kit of Winton watercolors with maybe 48 little wells of color, the ones I liked to use dug out like little troughs from dipping my brush. When I finished, I stood up to look at it, and it was terrible. More precisely: uniformly boring. I had looked at the tables, the arches, the bustle of the café, but I hadn’t seen anything. I peeled the image off the watercolor pad and threw it away. And then, in about three minutes, I painted the inside of the café again, only this time at speed, with five colors. And when I screwed up the floor, I went, in my head, Aw F it, and instead of a floor I painted rolling green hills inside the cafe where the ground should have been. Looking back, it is the first painting I liked. It took me five minutes. Or, perhaps, the painting I threw away was part of the painting I liked, and it took me several hours. Was the first painting a waste? Or could I not have painted the second painting without it?

In Brasil, in 2006, I abandoned technique. I was there on an artist residency staying on an island off the coast of Bahia. A painter from the country’s interior never arrived, and there stood vacant for the first few weeks while I was there a painting studio. I was sitting in a glass box looking out at the ocean and trying to write, tormented by the men outside of my window playing soccer on the beach. I’d finished a novel prior to arriving, and I had nothing to say with words. I finally gave myself permission to play soccer, and that’s likely how the rest of my time would have gone had not the following occurred.

At the residency, there came to visit us a woman named Alba Liberato, a poet, in her late sixties at the time, who joined us for lunch. She was wise and kind and wonderful, and in my few fragments of Portuguese I sat listening to her, enjoying the pitch and timbre of her voice, her genuine warmth, and her kindness. Unexpectedly, she invited me to accompany her back to the mainland for a poetry reading that night. I agreed. We took the ferryboat, communicating as best we could, her speaking volumes, me catching a few words. Her husband picked us up in a tiny car, and we drove through the dusk, the smells of petrol, the sounds of laughter and the bustle of Salvador. At their home I was greeted by a Pit Bull who threw herself upon me seal-like, all wiggles and wags, licking and spinning and licking. We stepped into the living room and Chico turned on the lights. I was arrested. I blinked, and did not know which way to turn. I had landed in the living room, which was more like a museum, of one of the most remarkable plastic artists in Brasil. In every direction, on every wall, was a painting, a sculpture, a print, that took my breath away. Each one a world, with an entire story frozen within it. Not frozen. Vivisected, really, pinned up alive, a vivid dissection sealed selected styled awake. Each animal, plant, and figure rendered in singular aliveness, with colors so bold and ultra-vivid that they hummed off the canvas and made the air vibrate. I shook myself and then began to shake. I proceeded to stand in front of each one of them, allowing my eyes to receive them. He juxtaposed colors I’d never seen paired, would never have thought of using together. His figuration alternated between strokes of absolute precision, and total abandon, equally comfortable shaping a fluted nostril, rendering the emotive curve of a lip, or draping a giant splash of color across the canvas, and using it for a head.

His paintings seemed to me a sermon, a story, to be meta-communicating something to me about life itself. The way he drew an armadillo–its shapes, its pattern–I felt like I was seeing an armadillo for the first time in my life, that I was looking at the blueprints from which armadillos were made. And even that doesn’t quite do it justice, because it didn’t even really look like an armadillo; armadillos aren’t emblazoned with green and yellow stripes. It looked like the spirit of an armadillo, and I sensed that henceforth I would understand actual armadillos better after having seen it. When I got back to the island, I moved from the writing studio to the painting studio. I built a frame, stretched a canvas, and began to paint. I did not know, when I began, what I would paint. But it came, steadily, day-by-day, a man, the life on the island, the beach, the water, the dogs around the compound, the squirrel monkeys in the trees. I had wrapped the canvas all the way around the sides of the frame, which was several inches deep, and I painted the sides, the top, the bottom. This was the first painting I finished that felt truly in my own voice: not derivative. I don’t have close to the degree of technical mastery of Chico Liberato, nor do I have yet his piercing vision that has come from his talent and a lifetime of dedication to craft and his particular consciousness. Yet I paint regularly, I have the habit of making murals–of turning walls into a celebration–and it makes my life brighter for absolutely sure. Life, says Chico, is the color that we paint it.

A vida é a cor que nos pintamos. –Francisco ‘Chico’ Liberato