6.8 Monk Plays Oceanside

8 June 2020. Monk Plays Oceanside.

The first time around with this--maybe 1997—much more playful. The sly thrill of just being able to conjoin the two—Monk and the Beachside Stadium, or thereabouts. Which never happened, of course—that corrosion of salt air. Concrete bleachers and rusting metal. But I remembered it again today, needing something much less distinct, something full of wandering, if only in the line.

I should never have let it go—the painting, that is—like letting go a part of myself. Maybe because it was connected with Peter—the loss, regret. But also a kind of honesty, which increases over time. Vision of him standing by the barbecue, when C’s family visited, looking up and smiling—that Peter smile. She has it in a special frame, needs a little repair. He was tending steaks—a venerable task—you could see he enjoyed it. Not just the cooking, but the being part of things…

Monk’s face as he plays, eyes rolled upwards into his head—drunken but not from alcohol. That inner state he taught us, but with flat thumbs and a defiant smash. Hard to understand, from such a distance, what that meant—that absolutely full-bodied intensity, foot pumping the pedals, on and off the floor, almost leaping…

Set here against the Buena Vista lagoon, blurring towards the ocean. Late afternoon, sometime in the fall. That smokey light, with whatever’s left of the sun half-disappearing into mist. Very still. Tells you you’re home.

6.7 Taking the Knee

7 June 2020. Taking the Knee.

I resist the phrase--the way the culture so easily recapitulates itself for commercial purpose (in this case the media)--but the act itself is too important--and shows in the image, no matter what we call it. And in any case, major league football is big-time business, so who could expect otherwise? However, everyone in this line-up is doubly valent--each player a part of the group--that's implicit--and at the same time an individual. That is, you see the meaning of this moment expressed on their faces--in their postures as well. For each one of them...

Can we read this? What's seen on each face? And how does someone like me (a white boy) show it? I think of Winslow Homer--his indelible painting, Gulf Stream--with the figure of the Black Man lying stretched across the deck of a de-masted sailboat--the sea roiled with sharks (there's even some red in the water) and far in the distance, a sailing ship that will almost certainly never spot him. Doomed. But still, Homer treats the man's face with dignity--even if there's a great deal of anger in his resolve. A lost sailor? A shipwreck? An escaped slave? The date of the painting is 1899, so we're 30 years after the Civil War--and who knows how literally we should take this thought--but viewed as "unrecognized guilt" (thank you, Charles)--at least on Homer's part-- we have a point of entry...

How different with the faces of the football players. Their resolve shows not so much anger as hope--in the same way The Star Spangled Banner can almost inevitably bring out something of this feeling--the way the heart lifts at its first strains, even when we know better...

And why not-- they should  have hope--they've been taught to win... Will teach us how to win, too...

6.4 Nymph and Shepherd

4 June 2020. Nymph and Shepherd.

Precisely in that interval between art and life, and just yesterday--I could hardly believe I was witness--a young deer, over by the back fence, up on her hind legs, reaching for new leaves on the ivy. An image I'd seen so many times over the years--but always in a painting, Titian's Nymph and Shepherd. A very late work--one of those rough, open-ended canvasses--among my very favorites--I'd found it in a catalogue picked up at one of the used bookstores in downtown Oakland, nearby the old studio--so that would have been in the early 1980's. Reproduced in black and white, from an obscure picture gallery somewhere in Hungary. At least that's how I remember it.

Which is how it was then--knowledge of such things being hard to come by. Inadvertent. Happenstance.  Even the museum obscure. Whereas today images of paintings are so readily available--there's even a Wikipedia article on this one, listed as being in the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm Collection, now in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, with an accurate color reproduction showing all of Titian's subtle warm-cool tonalities.

When I first found the painting, even in black and white, I already sensed it was crucial. Came at the time I was looking at a lot of Titian--as a kind of guide-- the way he let the painting itself precede the drawing--the massing of form rather than the Florentine outline. That Venitian sensibility--color over linear edge. (Which may seem funny, today, since I've allowed myself to return so much to line in these drawings--but the malerische is in there too--hidden away in all the erasures and pauses...you can see this especially when they're enlarged, becoming a kind of autobiography.)

The meaning of Titian's painting became apparent as well--or at least the way I understood it. Two young figures, shepherd and nymph, reclining in the foreground, music, love--while close behind,  buttressed on a slope, a broken tree. Just one living branch--and reaching up to seize it, the figure of a deer. (I'd say young stag from the look of his male appurtenances.) I would have been in my mid-thirties then, but I knew Titian was speaking to me--clearly he'd painted himself here, reaching up for that last branch. (He'd have been in his eighties at the time--this was painted a year or two before he died.)  I found the arc of time in  the painting astounding--and Titian's vigor--how he saw himself as a painter, even at the end...

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Yesterday's deer was astounding, too--I'd seen them reach of for plumb branches before, of course, deer will do this--but yesterday's pose was exactly the same as in  the painting. And just after I'd been talking with a friend about the meaning of ultimate things--and the phrase choose life. The story of the midwives again, the vigor of the young Israelite mothers. It's a matter of what one choses to focus on, always, in the balance--an image of opening...

6.2 Soldiers and Police

2 June 2020. Soldiers and Police.

And where are the images now? Two days, and the time of quiet has vanished. Was it real to begin with? That is, founded? An artificial respite, occasioned by the virus--for the first two months, everyone seemed to agree. But then a modern impatience set in. "They're all sitting together, on blankets, no one has masks," C told me, describing the park at the top of Orpheus on a recent evening. "I left..."

I agreed, of course--but then we can't leave the entire century. Even as we carry all centuries past, each one with its retelling. Goya's Third of May still holds. The animation comes through even in a sketch--the diagonals, of course--but they're the result, not the cause. Of a time lived, rather. On the side opposite, Giorgione--the watchman figure in The Tempest--replacing a woman's figure prior. That the origin of a militia could be maternal? No urgency in the pose, though. A watchman of dreams...

The middle section? Well, maybe they haven't told me their story yet. Whose doing? Who knows the story, that is? Thinking about the Mary Frank on the cover of a recent NYRB--saw it again this morning. An African figure leaping across the gap between two rocks. She's drawn him in silhouette--evocative, always--and the rocks are real, that is, they're fragments of photographs. She made this just last year--at 87...

Hope still...

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Note: Found the Mary Frank image on DC Moore Gallery site. It's a detail from a collage painting, As You Can See,  made in 2018-19. And the rocks are actual rock--not fragments of photographs. Oil, acrylic, graphite, paper and stone on board, 49-1/4 x  96 inches.

5.31 Young Racoon

31 May 2020. Young Racoon.

A visitor just now, and I'm so used to seeing Goose, the neighbor cat--that this came as a surprise. The same coloring, yes, but then the lift to the shoulders as he made his way through the high grass--not domestic. You know right away. A certain roughness--Chris Alexander's phrase for one of the necessary elements in a good design--a good anything, really--the roughness corresponding to something alive, something not completely controlled. Yes, we give in to the gods--whatever they may demand...

Evenings here of old--when a string of them would parade into the kitchen--the first alert little head peering over the top of the stairs coming up from the back door--two dark eyes set in a black mask, The lady of the house would welcome them, after a fashion, of course. I once had to scoot out a whole family of who were aiming to occupying the downstairs room. Babies included...

But most memorable of all were the visits by Rashi and Tosfos. Talmudic scholars, both--even if they were also in the possum family. Their favorite place being underneath the back side of the couch. That took some doing on my part--a long bamboo pole--just enough to prod them gently into action. I don't know who was most startled--after all they could hear me coming--but a wild living creature like that--in the living room--what can you say?

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Gary Snyder--in his excellent book, The Practice of the Wild, describes how his family would open their Yuba River cabin for one month of the year to all creatures who wished to visit. Indoor deer, for example--or a stream of fire ants making their diagonal across the wooden floor. However, even the Snyders hedged their bets--flour and staples were secured in a strong trunk--and I'm not sure what they did about bear...

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That's the shelf-like bracket mushroom there behind--growing out from the trunk of the mimosa tree. It's gotten quite large now--just the right size for a raccoon umbrella...

5.30 Rastaman

30 May 2020. Rastaman.

People would say elders, but that's sentimentalizing, and when you look at these faces, there's something more essential going on. Yes, some are old enough to remember even Leonard Howell--the Rasta founder--maybe not quite to the beginning, in the '1930's, but from the late 1950's, say, when Pinnacle (the Rastafari redoubt in the hills above Spanish Town) was intact--and lived through it's destruction, with the exodus to the slums of Kingston (Back O'Wall, the Dungle, Trenchtown).  Materially, a time of great privation--and the lives of most of the Rastas then were extremely poor--but also characterized by elements of real hope--the mission to Africa in 1961, the dream of repatriation, then Jamaican Independence in 1962--and the indelible experience of Haile Selassie's visit to the island on April 21, 1966.--thereafter known as Grounation Day. And the music emerging in parallel--Ska, Rock Steady, Reggae, and the way it reached an audience far beyond Jamaica... The world of Roots Reggae--the Skatalites, Burning Spear, the Ethiopians, and of course Bob Marley--the spirit of that music reflects this great opening...

But Jamaica's political situation turned increasingly corrosive, with nonstop gang violence egged on by both of the primary political parties (the Rastafari were neutral, but everyone was drawn in, regardless.) And then the emergence of Jamaica's drug culture, extremely violent--the trade soon enough exported to the United States--so that the world of Roots Reggae was replaced by that of Dancehall--also reflective of its time. Louche, flashy, dangerous.To the degree (as described by writer Colin Grant) that when Bunny Wailer appeared on a Kingston festival stage in 1990, he was met with a hail of bottles and stones. The crowd didn't want what him. Hard to fathom, less than ten years after Bob Marley's death--but not if one follows all the changes...

So, these faces, still from the time before--as was much of Rasta culture, I'm guessing. And then their age as well--so that the natural arc of life can be seen there too. Giving them (at least to my eye) not so much an antiquarian feel as the mein of dignified survivors. The world that nurtured them has disappeared (including the death of Haile Selassie--Jah Rastafari--however one interprets it.)
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A parallel: remembering my father's face on the 26th of December, 1991--sitting on the living room couch in Oceanside. He would have been 87. The television  was on, and as we watched, the Soviet flag was being lowered, in Moscow, for the very last time. The symbolic end to another era--the one he himself had lived through (having fought on the Bolshevik side in the Russian Civil War). I wondered mightily at the time what it meant for him to see this--his feelings, after those many years of commitment and hope. But as carefully as I looked at his profile, and as much as I wanted to know, I couldn't tell...