...Comes from some other beginning's end

'Beginning' always sounds hopeful.  "In the Beginning..." is ripe with potential that immediately puts one in a state of (positive) expectation.   But before God created light, the world was "formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep."

Some beginnings are dark.  Let's set the mood now.



(This song by R.E.M. was a plea from Michael Stipe to Kurt Cobain, during the 10 days or so that the latter retreated from contact with the world, and ended his life.  Dark enough yet?)

November and December of 1994 were, up until recently, the darkest time of my life.  Nikole broke up with me in mid-November.  People close to me at the time said my behavior was akin to someone who had just gone through a divorce.  To this day I don't know why it affected me so much.  Break-ups are always hard but this one set me on a roller-coaster ride for almost the next two years.

At the time I was taking my first actual painting class.  I was pretty excited about this class.  Art was beginning its hold on me (see previous post) and painting was the thing.  Picasso was a painter.  Drawing was pretty much a precursor to painting.  I was ready to figure this thing out.  My professor, Avery Falkner, did a nice job introducing us step-by-step.  First, get used to paint- black and white only. Next, add a couple of colors.  Okay, now add multiple colors.  All of it very representational- painting objects that look like the objects.  Then, we had to paint a scene through a window and work on contrasting the interior light with the exterior light coming through the window.  I remember staring for hours upon hours at this picture- focusing on the blank wall.  I was completely amazed at Edward Hopper's ability to use a myriad of colors to create what is perceived as a white wall with a shadow on it.  Not just white paint with an area of grey- there are greens and yellows and purples and blues.  It captivated me.  Art (painting) was more than the object depicted- it was the depiction itself- the colors and textures of the paint.  It is pure abstraction couched in a guise of realism.

Towards the end of the semester, in late October/early November we were assigned a painting project that would officially launch us into abstraction.  We were to find or create an object that would be the beginning inspiration for a painting.  The painting would concentrate on abstract qualities of marks, colors, textures, etc. but still retain a trace of the image of our object.

Well, hindsight is 20/20.  I had found these nails that were, like, 7 or 8 inches long.  They were huge.  I thought they looked cool and reminded me that the group Nine Inch Nails was named after the belief that Jesus was crucified, nailed to the cross, with nails that were nine inches long.  So I took a piece of plywood and started banging these nails through it.  As they broke through the back surface, the wood splintered and chipped, revealing the layers of wood and glue that make up the 'plys.'  For added measure I tied string around the points of the nails.  Sharp menacing nails, literally tearing their way through distressed wood, held together by a constricting tie.  Yeah, Freud could have a field day with this image and the state of my relationship with Nikole.  (I, however, never really studied Freud- I though everything was fine!)

If you've ever thought abstract art looks like crap- you should see it during the process of being made!  Ugh.  It was horrible!  Painting and painting and looking and painting and perhaps scraping away... it can be a grueling process.  But I was learning it is a very reflective process.  When you are painting an object realistically it's easy to know when you're done... when you've included all the details and it looks like what you're looking at.  With abstract art, you are propelled by a vague notion.  You don't know exactly what it's supposed to look like, but you just know it's not there yet.

I remember one class period just looking and journaling... I'm not sure if I even painted that day.  And I remember another day feeling that the way to represent what I was trying to represent (the mix of black glue and yellow wood that characterized the shattered plywood) was to repeatedly do a criss-cross pattern with a brush loaded with black and yellow painted.  I just did the same movements over and over and over... it was a strange sensation- doing something that didn't seem to work, yet believing that if I continued doing that same thing, it would somehow work out.

And it did.  In a big way.  After struggling with what seemed like painted mud day in and day out for about 3 weeks...it suddenly... clicked.  Nikole had broken up with me at this point- she dropped the bomb while I was in the middle of this project.  And I remember all of a sudden standing back and looking at my painting.  It looked like how I felt, and had been feeling that past month.   Picasso had made a big triangle foot because it somehow depicted the horrific feeling that was the subject of the picture better than a realistic foot.  It wasn't about the foot.  It was about the feeling- the effect.

The fish was caught- hook, line, and sinker.  I stood looking at the painting, a sensation like scales falling from my eyes, and the thought... "This is what I want to do for the rest of my life."

So I present to you... "Nails & String" (I deliberately did not want a heavier, more profound title)... and the song that was playing in my apartment when Nikole walked in on that 'fateful' night.  The end... that prompted a new beginning.

Every new beginning...

Semisonic has a great song called 'Closing Time' with the poignant line 'every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.' It will be a few more years before that song comes out and enters my soundtrack, but the sentiment works at this moment- because the new beginning that was my life as an artist arose from the end of my relationship with Nikole. Of course, life rarely presents clear breaks without some sort of foreshadowing, so let's start with the art thing.

I actually began my tenure at Pepperdine as a business major. I took one business math class (which academically I had no trouble with) but I looked around at my fellow business majors and thought, "This is not my crowd!" Not knowing what else to do, I became an art major. You would think with my drawing ability that decision would have been a no-brainer. But that decision was fraught with anxiety- because at the same time I took that business math class, I was also taking a class called 2-D Design. It was my first introduction to abstract art- and UNLIKE business math, I didn't get it. The whole argument, "The artist meant to do that" was, I felt, a load of crock. And even if they wanted to do it that way, what skill was involved?

All that changed the next year when I took a couple of drawing classes. These were no problem for me. While I learned much, the skill of rendering an object or person in front of you came easy to me, I'd been working on it all my life. But during one class our professor, Joe Piasentin, took us to see a show of Picasso's 'Weeping Woman' series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. While we were pretty much on our own as far as meandering through the show, our professor did focus us a bit: "I want you to look at the different ways Picasso portrayed the crying eyes." So, for example, the image here, notice how the eyes are actually bowls pouring out the tears. It struck me.

But I was struck more by another drawing I saw in the exhibition, a small study for one of his major works, Guernica. The drawing depicted a mother, distraught over the death of her baby, whose lifeless body she holds in her arms. She is climbing a ladder, presumably to escape the horror that terminated her child's life. (This picture is NOT the drawing but it's very similar, to give you a visual.  I have yet to find a reproduction of the actual one that I saw.) The drawing was a simple line drawing done in pencil- which was important because I could see the 'ghosts' of the lines he erased. In particular he had drawn her leg 'correctly' - you could follow the curve that delineated the hamstrings, curving in at the back of the knee, bulging out at the calf, and tapering along her Achilles' tendon to the roundabout curve of her heel. A single line that was perfect. A 'perfect' line that he erased. He replaced it with a big fat triangle that resembled nothing of the human figure.

I didn't understand it.

But I did understand one thing- it was deliberate. The artist meant to do it that way and there was no denying it. You could see his choice- the initial, 'accurate' rendering, and its subsequent erasure and replacement with something...else.  This was the beginning of the beginning for me.  The fish was moving towards the hook.


Meanwhile, Moscow (for me) and Uruguay (for Nikole) had brought much reflection.  We had some serious discussions.  We decided to stick with it- and even decided to 'have a song.' In hindsight, though, I think it is telling that the song is a question... can you feel the love tonight?  In the romantic sense of the movie, the answer is of course yes.   But the question is not rhetorical, the choice remains open...