Minor Artist

Minor Artist

2:30 am Thursday night (Friday morning) while driving home, I was woken by a report on the BBC.  A painting by the seventeenth century Spanish artist, Diego Velasquez was discovered by the British auction house Bonhams.  The work had previously being attributed to the “insignificant” nineteenth Century British artist Matthew Shepperson.  I can’t be certain that the descriptive “insignificant” is correct, however I’m determined to put it in quotes, because I am certain that the adjective used by the BBC reporter carried the same weight and condemnation as whatever cocky slur he may have actually used.  I was tired, but of sound enough mind to tell you that what I had heard, and what I’m reporting back to you, is accurate enough in spirit to be taken as true.  I hadn’t been drinking but rather mixing drinks and pulling beers, at what might be remembered in history as a minor cocktail bar in Inman Square; a lesser neighborhood just outside the somewhat significant city of Boston, a secondary metropolis to it’s much more important neighbor; New York.

The next morning over coffee, with my two and a half-year-old son watching Super Grover 2.0 move an ominous iceberg for some dancing penguins from Brooklyn in the next room, I navigated the Internet via the information shredder Google.  First in an attempt to find a transcript of the BBC report I had heard earlier that morning, next to find out the dirt on the “new” Velasquez painting, and lastly to find out who the hell Matthew Shepperson was.  Velasquez had been one of my early heroes of painting, particularly his non-court paintings.  His Aesop and Menippus were benchmarks to strive for in my own early work, and they inspired my first trip to Spain.  At the Prado Museum in Madrid I really caught on to what Velasquez was about.  There was possibly the largest room I had ever been in on the second floor, which cleverly housed a mass of his works in chronological order.  As a student at the time, I couldn’t have imagined anything better than to see his work this way.  Velasquez is one of the few, and maybe the only old master that I know of, who after achieving success and notoriety (not to mention a court appointment), continued to develop and evolve as a painter.  So many of the “greats” sat on their accolades and masturbated.  Diego Velasquez was no one trick pony.  Had the BBC reported that a work by virtually any other old master had been discovered, my curiosity would not have been so piqued. 

It was easy to uncover the story of the lost Velasquez.  Where there are millions of dollars and pounds at stake, there are storehouses of words, pictures and quotes from experts.  The short of it is that some descendant who was cleaning his basement cupboard, hoping to get a few hundred pounds for his ancestors minor attempts at painting, is in fact going to be a millionaire.  I won’t bore you with the “keen-eyed experts at Bonhams’” tweedie-bow-tie details.  You can Google “Matthew Shepperson/Velasquez painting” and read what the self-conscious, academic, “expert” historians have determined for yourself.  But please don’t miss the irony, and it’s not that this fucker is gonna to be rich; It’s that, had the exact canvas in question been attributed to Shepperson and not Velasquez, as it had originally been, it would have been considered relatively worthless. 

Do you understand what I’m telling you? 

The exact same physical object, paint, and subject, owns a completely different value, both monetarily and aesthetically, not based on it being any different at all, but only based on what someone or ones tells us to think of it.  I’m not claiming to be some kind of an authority on Diego Velasquez or anything, but to be honest with you, between you and me, I might think that a painter does inherently have access to some insight that isn’t available to some academic who has never picked up a brush.  Regardless, I have no clue weather or not it is in fact a “true” Velasquez, but quite frankly, who cares?  It’s still the same painting it was before it was a Velasquez.  Right?

But more interesting to me… Matthew Shepperson, the “minor artist” as the UK newspaper “The Guardian” referred to him, or a “Largely forgotten” artist as CNN has stamped him.  You’ll find little information on the 19^th Century painter; save a scarce few images and a couple of old auction sale records.  Clearly nothing important, Two-hundred-year-old dust collectors’ selling for a few hundred pounds a piece.  But let me tell you the real history of the “minor” artist.  I’ve got the story that hasn’t been published on his Wikipedia page yet (if it existed)… because I am Matthew Shepperson. 

At a young age, the artist knew he was driven to do something different than the other kids he had kicked the footie around with.  He knew he didn’t fit into the same crumpet mold that his schoolmates comfortably nestled their ass’s into.  At a mere fifteen years old he found himself unable to sleep.  He stayed up through the night long after all of his family had gone to sleep, pouring himself into reproductions of old master paintings that he had admired.  Trying to figure out how they did what they had done.  Closely scrutinizing their drawing technique, brushwork, and design.  He had read both of Harold Speed’s books on drawing and painting again and again, ear marking each page that might help him further his own work.  He knew that the emerging French artists were on to something with their Japanese sense of composition, but he was subconsciously reared in the conservative, proper, crown-style of the UK, and just couldn’t push himself far enough to take a risk.

He would hang a mirror on his bedroom wall and try to draw and paint his own image over and over again, never getting it just quite right.  He would marinate in the frustration of his lack of ability.  He’d occasionally see glimpses of success, and only these small hopes would push him to continue.  It’s like my friend Beau once told me about the game of golf.  The game fucking sucks and just when your ready to heave your bag of clubs into the drink, you hit a beautiful shot, and that one in a hundred shot keeps you playing. 

Eventually Matthew would complete the mandatory studies required by the state, and he quickly left home in search of a school or mentor that could train him in the ways of drawing and painting.  He was buckling under the weight of his ideas and ambitions, and he needed to find a source for the technique he was lacking to properly express himself.  At age seventeen or eighteen he settled into the Atelier of an accomplished painter of his day.  He thought the master’s aesthetic antiquated and conservative, but his technique he admired above all others.  He labored for five, maybe six years.  First copying the works of the great masters he admired, then making to-scale drawings from antique sculptures, picking over them, each day being told by his chosen mentor that they weren’t quite right.  That this value was too dark, this proportion too wide, and so on and so forth.  But eventually his determination paid off and he got it right, and he could now count drawing as one of the weapons in his little arsenal.

It would be the same with his painting and design studies, failing and failing until finally at the age of twenty-one he would get it.

Matthew spent the next years of his life trying to marry his newly acquired technique with the raw creativity and drive of his youth.  Wrapped in the reality of needing to provide for his food, clothes, and housing, he picked up odd jobs.  He painted the occasional dreaded portrait of some bourgeois’s snot nose kid.  He peddled what he could of the small, trite, easel paintings that he had made, which he sold before ever really being able to judge them properly for himself.  He cultivated contacts and attempted to build relationships with a handful of art dealers, who proved to be not much more than street pimps.  They robbed him of most of what he earned, and abused him if he didn’t turn the tricks that were expected of him.  He soon had to navigate the awful truth that he had not become the artist he had dreamed of becoming.  The struggles of daily life had never allowed him the luxury of figuring out what his art should be or could be.  He never moved to Paris, Rome, or New York.  He never forged friendships with the “in” crowd who were pioneering the new movements that would change the course of art history forever.  He sat alone in his little studio, lit by the ambient North light so prized by the painters of his day, consistent and almost ethereal from dawn until dusk; and admired the little portrait of the man with the strange facial hair that he had acquired from a friend who failed to pay him for an enormous work he had helped him with.  A work he hoped his significant contribution to might further his own career… and he, Matthew Shepperson, silently slipped into obscurity.

Men with passion, ambition, and even just an inkling of talent, especially young men, can be cocky mother-fuckers.  I know; I was.  In My twenties I would’ve been the first to refer to Matt as a minor artist at best.  To be honest, the little I’ve seen of his work superficially reveals an imitator’s aesthetic, little imagination, and average technique for the day.  I would have given Matt the casual sidelong glance and written him off as shit.  Back then, before carrying the heavy maturity that a totem pole of failures will bring, I would not have had the compassion, insight, nor experience to speculate on what his day-to-day could have been like.  I wouldn’t have had experience enough to show compassion or even a little pity, for the likely possibility that he may have spent his entire fucking life pursuing his dream, working his ass off, only do die a nobody.  Back then, I would not have been able to conclude that if the portrait in question in fact was not a Shepperson, and was indeed proven to be the work of Diego Velasquez; that circumstance alone tells us that Matt had something.  I’m pretty sure Shepperson had no Idea that what he had acquired was a Velasquez, however I’m certain that he had a sharp enough eye to decipher good from great. 

Diego Velasquez was very well known and admired in Eighteenth and Nineteenth century England.  Shortly after Shepperson died, the British artist R.A.M. Stevenson (brother to famous author Robert Louis) had written what would come to be considered in his time (and still today) the definitive book on Diego Velasquez; for no scholar whose never been in the trenches can truly compose a monograph on a painter the way a brother painter can.  You can be sure that if Shepperson had known what he had, so too would his descendents.  My guess is that he just had a heightened enough sense of aesthetics to know greatness when he saw it, even if he struggled to reproduce it in his own works…  And that totally sucks for him.  I think Matthew Shepperson fucking tried and tried but never could get it “just right” in his own work, but tragically, he knew what “just right” looked like.   It’s heartbreaking to recognize awesomeness, but not to be awesome yourself.  Matt… I feel you man. 

But like I was saying; It was easy back then as a young punk, soon to be “somebody” artist, to arrogantly judge what was good, and to bury with violent indignation what was bad, never considering the life or the person.  I’m not trying to come off like some god dammed hippie who thinks that anything someone creates is beautiful or some shit like that, it’s just that I know this fucker.  I know that he probably poured his heart and life into his work, and good or bad as it might be, it sucks for him that he ended up, in the eye of history, being a nobody.  And to add insult to injury, he’s even more insignificant because he’s only now being revived in relation to Velasquez, one of history’s handful elite.

It’s like the jackass who comes to the bar when you’re six deep on a Friday night and treats you like a servant, with no regard for the fact that you’re actually a living breathing human being.  Assuming that since you’re slinging drinks for a living, you’re not worthy of a please or thank you.  The fucker that you say hello to, or ask “how you doin’?” and they don’t even acknowledge your query, and proceed to bark the order of what they need.  And when you tell them you don’t have the “Stella” that they just ordered they groan and roll their eyes like you’re intentionally trying to fuck them and say “gimme a Heinekin then”; with no regard for the beer list that you offered them two times; that doesn’t list “Heinekin” as an option either.  They’ve got no care or clue about the hours and years you spent following your dream, and the struggle to hone your craft to an art; only to find yourself unable to do that which you thought you had been destined to do.  Arriving in a place where you’re required to be polite to someone who likely doesn’t have a sliver of the talent, drive, or intellect that you have.  On the other hand, I can’t blame the bastards for wanting a drink and thinking of me only as a vending machine; but fuck them anyway!

Being even less than minor myself, I now have sensitivity and compassion for all of those who tried, that I didn’t have when I thought I actually was or was going to be somebody. Those who spent their whole lives wrestling with their drive and vision, working jobs rather than perusing a family or career in order to realize their art; hoping that some day somebody else will get it.  I’m not talking about the money either; I’m talking about some kind of recognition of worth.  Maybe secretly some kind of nod to being special in a way that most are not.  We spend our youth in a drug like haze only to arrive at the sobriety of what you thought might happen to you because of all of your vision, hard work, and ambition didn’t.  Had Velasquez not been a Spanish court painter, but rather found himself having to decide at thirty-something years old if he wanted to live like a bum or pick up a shift here and there so that he could live a “normal” life with his wife and kids, his Aesop painting wouldn’t be less important; you just might not have known it existed.  I’ll go out on a limb and say if Aesop had been the only work Velasquez ever produced he would be no less important.

So, Matthew Shepperson, your work may or may not suck; who am I to fuckin’ judge?  Maybe you were nothing more than a minor artist, or maybe you could have been the genius of your time; but you just never made it to Paris.  I’ll never know, but bravo on the Velasquez.  I can only secretly for you, imagine that the experts at Bonhams auction house got it wrong, and that maybe it was you in fact who painted that little portrait of the man with the funny moustache.  Maybe it was your Aesop?   

The big thaw redux: The big freeze

The big thaw redux: The big freeze

Ironic, to state the obvious, that I left you during a late April snow with promises of more, and I’ve come back to you only now after a prodding from an un-seasonal October Nor’easter; So rare that it’s only happened four times in our recorded history.  The lack of power, combined with the eighteen inches of snow at our little cabin, slowed my feet down enough to remind me how I’ve neglected you.  Contrary to your assumption though, the summer was not a time of reckless frivolity. The work was done, but it was of a different medium.  Our little story had to be shelved for a bit, but things happened in the studio.  Paintings, prints, stickers, t-shirts, and the launch of www.asizindustries.com; but now without further ado…

The big thaw

Snow in April is enough to force anyone’s hand to the bottle.  It’s like the classic Godfather scene, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”.  There are things to be done here I know, although sometimes getting to the point is like the nausea you feel just before getting up enough chutzpah to plant you tongue in some attractive strangers mouth.  It’s been a long time for me, but we all remember that the base hit is the hardest part, and once through the ice rounding the other bases is a matter for Newton’s physics.  Maybe sometimes patience is a virtue but more often than not it’s a form of procrastination (I’m stuck at second and that fucker at bat can’t bunt to save his life). Sit tight though and bear with me, the big thaw is coming and spring is almost here.  We’ll be planting our tomatoes soon enough.  

Pack Light

As we made our way from Saigon to Mui Ne, I feared I might loose my left arm at the shoulder.

It was a scorching hundred plus degrees when we left what had formerly been known as Saigon and is now Ho Chi Minh City.  It was winter in Vietnam, February, but hotter than any summer I had known before in Boston or New York.  It was the early morning and we had all day to get to the remote beach town of Mui Ne, around a hundred miles south of Saigon on the South China Sea.  So in the interest of saving money and adventure, we decided to take the local bus.  We should have been suspicious when we arrived at the bus station.  There were no others like us, and even though we had been traveling through some of the most foreign of places, we always found ourselves in earshot of backpacking post hippies and Australians.   There were none here.  But, the locals were welcoming if not in awe of us, and we were kindly escorted to the bus we needed to be on by a friendly stranger with seemingly no other interest than to lend a hand.  We boarded the bus, a nine-passenger mini-van, along with a small Vietnamese family of three, and waited to leave for the beach vacation that we so needed at the mid-point of our travels.

The commonly held opinion of Massachusetts’s drivers is that they suck.  They’ve been nicknamed “Mass-holes”.  And my native New York drivers aren’t thought of with much higher regard, even though I think they’re operating on a more competent level.  Any travel book you read will tell you not to even think about driving in Naples, which I’ve done, a little sketchy but not totally bananas.   South East Asia however is a whole different pissing contest.  We’d seen evidence back in Hanoi in a taxi from the airport.  Fast, aggressive, and topping the spectacle was when we passed a scooter with a whole, full-sized pig strapped to the back.  On foot in Hanoi we’d seen scooters with refrigerators balanced on the passenger seat; two different instances, one side to side, one front to back.  I wish I had a photo to show you so you would believe I’m telling the truth.  We were traveling during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, and by the time the army of scooters with teetering orange trees passed us, we were just merely amused.

And so we left the bus station with no fan-fare, though I’ll admit I was suspicious of our flight attendant crouching at the sliding door of our van like the marksman on some gun ship, or maybe in his case the EMT of a Medevac.  I was only slightly alarmed when turning on the highway, one lane in each direction; we immediately swerved into the left lane, the lane for on coming traffic.  I opened my book as a distraction.  I’d barely scanned the first page when all of the sudden our van lurched almost to a halt and we swerved back into our proper lane on the right.  Slowing to a more reasonable speed, our flight attendant in one motion opened the door and it appeared that he was to check his chute and jump, but instead he re-appeared with a new passenger clutched in a Native American type grip, forearm to forearm.  I checked our little Vietnamese family for reassurance and they seemed un-phased by the rescue so I settled back down and chalked it up to someone missing their ride, trying to think the best of our pilot.  We resumed our position at break-neck speed in the chicken lane dodging eighteen-wheelers and running a bicyclist into the ditch beside the road.

Sadly the first getaway car, reverse parachute boarding technique wasn’t the last.  Less than half an hour into the drive our van was full, and in no time it was over full, not coming to a full stop once to take on any of these stowaways.  We counted nineteen people.  If someone wanted to get off at a legit stop they often had to climb out of their window, which would have been too small for either Rhonda or me.  We were packed in so tightly that even with the teenage boys sitting on Rhonda’s lap, nearly all of my left side protruded vulnerably out of my window.  Fear is a difficult emotion to deal with when it has separated itself from claustrophobia.  Though I felt the fear of both, it became very apparent that the fear one gets from closed spaces is a childish luxury in light of the reality I was confronted with; trucks, buses and cars coming within inches, maybe less, of taking off my arm. 

Bag lady you gone hurt your back

Dragging all them bags like that

I guess nobody ever told you

All you must hold on to

Is you

One day all them bags gone get in your way

So pack light

(From “Bag Lady” Erykah Badu)

I learned to draw before I was allowed to learn how to paint.  In the beginning, drawing for me was a laborious production of “noodling”, as we called it.  We would sharpen a piece of diamond-hard vine charcoal to a long needle like point and work like surgeons dissecting the shadow-line.  This imaginary line that separated the light from the dark, along with the edge of the visible form, in a visual situation that consists of a simple white object lit by one light source, is where the actions at.  All illusion of form happens here. The amount of time the students, myself included, could spend on something this basic seems absurd to me now.  We would spend months, and in some unique cases a full year working on the same damn drawing.   However, as we were gaudily framing our prizes and patting each other on the back, we didn’t realize that the whole experience had nothing to do with the creating and finishing of the particular work.  The work itself was merely a means to an end.  It was more like the Karate Kid doing old Miyagi’s yard work kind of thing.  In spending such an exorbitant amount of time trying to understand what you were seeing, and then wrestling with the technique of getting it down on paper exactly as you saw it, you were learning principals that can only really be believed through experience.  For me, one of the biggest revelations was that shadows are flat.  Light creates form.  In the absence of light, form cannot exist.  Think of this next time you see a painting or drawing and think that it’s a little fucked up.  If the three dimensional illusion doesn’t seem quite right, I’ll bet that the jackass who made it spent most of his time looking into the shadows, meaning; trying to find form in a place where it inherently cannot live.  I know I did every damn day, and each week my instructor Paul would come back and with a few swift strokes flatten the shadows I had been laboring over for the past week.  The same holds true for where the edge of the form meets what’s behind it.  If they’re the same value, or the same relative darkness on a grey scale, then there’s no line that separates them.  The two objects at these points visually become one, we called this “lost & found”.  This is really basic shit, like learning your ABC’s as a three year old.  Sadly the language I was learning was so ancient that many of my fellow students mistook this kindergarten grammar class for art. 

It took me a year to get through my first “cast drawing” (our drawing subject, derived from the nineteenth century French academics, being the traditional plaster cast of some famous antique sculpture).  The summer before my second year studying with Paul was spent working on a painting of a cast from the nose of Michelangelo’s David.  I was working under the casual instruction of one of Paul’s most senior and competent students.  This painting was approached very much in the same way my drawings the year before had been, laboriously “noodled”.  The only light moment of the summers work was the morning I had come in to find a tissue shoved up David’s enormous nostril by my friend Gregory, the king of comic relief and “keeping it real”, as they say.  Sadly at the time instead of lightening me up it pissed me off.  The thought that my subject could have been disturbed even slightly was enough to send me through the roof with anger.  I was being taught to settle for nothing less than perfect, and if the subject was jostled in even the slightest way it could have thrown all of my attempts at perfection in the fucking gutter.

I worked on that painting every day that summer and it turned out as technically close to perfect as I could have imagined.  I was impressed with myself.  When class was back in session in September, I began setting up a still life.  Paul taught still life painting very much like the Miyagi technique employed in drawing the year before.  I spent months arranging objects and doing life size studies on disposable brown kraft paper with charcoal and chalk.  I was taught to fold long strips of paper and tack them to my studies as frames to work out different cropping and compositions.  Paul wasn’t fucking around here and when he said he wanted you to explore every possible design and figure out why one worked and one didn’t he meant it.  Each week I was sure I had found a great design and I’d be approved to begin painting, and each week Paul would come in and show me how I could improve what I was working on and it would be back to square one.  I thought I was going to be painting a still life, what I didn’t realize until much later is that I was learning how to design. I had been working too hard for Paul’s respect to intentionally buck his system and start painting but I was frustrated with the reality that it was nearly December and I hadn’t been approved to start painting yet, so without permission I decided to begin another drawing as a distraction. This time, bored with the aesthetic of the antique cast, I arranged a piece of white cloth and tacked it to a board as my subject.  Contrary to the objection I imagined Paul would have, he seemed pleased with my ambition and ingenuity.  I commenced the drawing with the same “noodeling” technique of the year before, not aware that Paul himself had moved beyond the Jean-Leon Gerome pedigree we had come from, and had entered a place of his own that he was intent on test-driving on me. 

The first time my mother met Paul she likened him to Burl Ives.  When my dad asked, “so, how’s my son doing here?”, an attempt at breaking the ice and feeling more comfortable in an element that couldn’t be further from his own, Paul stated, “to err once is human, to err twice is stupidity.  He rarely errs twice.”  None of us had a clue what the fuck he was talking about, no less what it meant to “err”, but I was used to leaving conversations with Paul and spending hours with the dictionary trying to understand him.  Paul’s a small man with a beard that’s bigger than he is and glasses that you’d call spectacles.  If he were to walk on the set of one of those sentimental Merchant Ivory films you’d think he was already in costume and ready to resume his role as the visiting doctor who just arrived in some fucking buggy.  The lore about Paul was centered on precision and commitment to the classics, but at our first critique of the year I saw a Paul that no one had warned me of.  He took a piece of soft vine charcoal, un-sharpened to the needle like point I was accustomed to and proceeded to make grand sweeping marks on my prized piece, working in unison with the blunt fragment and a needed eraser.  It took all of the restraint I could muster not to tackle him and salvage what was left of my precious work.  For nearly an hour he scribbled and smudged the drawing I had spent so much time laboring on, all the time quoting various works of literature, poetry and memoirs of the great artists.  I was dumbfounded when I should have been awestruck.  I had prepared myself for the standard critique of; “this is to wide, do you come from an overweight family because you tend to draw things wider than they are, the angle here isn’t quite right, take a simple height to width measurement and you’ll get it, if you look toward the thing you’ll see that you’ve looked into your shadow” sort of shit.  This couldn’t have been more different.  It was a symphony, as if over the summer break he had immersed himself in 1960’s abstract expressionism.  After he left me speechless and pissed off, sitting in my Salvation Army arm chair, brooding for what seemed like hours, I glanced up at my drawing that I had thought was so brilliant and realized that his drawing was brilliant.  Backing up from it and seeing it from a far I realized that the corrections he had made were a work of genius.  He had aggressively simplified all of my “noodling” bullshit to honest, powerful statements of form. It looked as if a wind had been let in and blown the charcoal onto the paper leaving it in just the right spots. He had simplified and un-complicated all that I had done.  I would later know this concept as; “with as little as you need to do to make it” and  “do it with your foot if it gets the right effect”.  Paul was a master of quotes and sayings, and they got the point across, at least to me.  From here he and I had a different understanding, and we took this trust into painting the still life and later into the portrait and figure.

Pack light.  It’s an aesthetic, it’s a technique, and it’s just fucking practical.  I think about it each time Rhonda and I prepare to leave for a trip, each time I arrange a room, and each time I start a new painting.  Uniting simplicity and brevity in design, technique and function turns me on.

I was a backpacker when I was younger.  In backpacking you carry all you need for your trip on your person.  Food, water, clothing, shelter, and later in life, booze.  I was 24 the first time I left the United States, and the first time I ever boarded an airplane.  I was so fucking nervous that I got loaded on Johnny Walker Black in the airport bar, flew all the way to London with my pack on my lap, and arrived with a massive hangover. It was a four-week trip starting in London then Paris and ending in Madrid centered entirely on seeing art.  I was mostly searching out works of the Spanish artist Antonio Lopez Garcia, which at the time were merely lore here in the states, and seeing historic murals in churches that were in such disrepair that I knew they might crumble before the next time I visited.  I packed for this adventure as I did for any hiking trip I had taken in the past, only lighter because I didn’t need to carry food and shelter.  I bought a Jansport knapsack, the kind my high school girlfriend used as a book bag, and filled it with the bare essentials.  One pair of shorts, two T-shirts, two pairs of boxers and socks, one long-sleeved shirt and a sweater.  I brought a pocketknife, a small container of laundry soap, a journal and a book.   Rhonda and I have taken many trips since and though the focuses of our adventures have broadened, we still travel with the tiniest of packs.  A few years ago we spent a couple of months in Asia with 2000 cubic inches of pack space each.  I’ve known too many people who’ve missed out because their load was too large.  We travel with virtually no itinerary, deciding each day over an afternoon beer what our plan is for the next.  When your able to carry all you have on one shoulder, picking up and moving is cake.  Whether we’re catching a flight to another city, boarding a tiny cargo boat up the Mekong, or cramming into a nine-person mini-van with seventeen others.  I’ve seen too many paintings and consumed too many meals that could have been good but their mothers couldn’t let go enough to keep them simple and honest.

Unfortunately, I believe the natural progress of life is like a snowball rolling down hill gathering more as it goes.  At nineteen I could pack all I owned in my car and I lived happily in a one room apartment in the projects.  Now we have two mortgages, yard tools, a studio, a car and a kid with all his stuff too.  There’s part of me that’s convinced myself that you can live light in your mind even if you’re heavy in the foot, but I’m not sure if it’s true or just some mid-life rationalization. My pack has gotten too heavy to make it up my painting studio stairs these days.  Maybe if my career worked out financially this wouldn’t be the case, but maybe it would.  But I’ve believed it and lived it before, and I know that if I can do it with one stroke of the brush rather than one hundred I’m inevitably more satisfied.

Opening the icebox

Don’t give me shit.  I know what I’m burning in my Dutch oven is not really Bolognese, and it might make Marcella Hazan roll in her grave; that’s assuming she’s dead.  My Italian Grandmother whose family was from the south, a little town called Formia on the coast just north of Naples, called her meat sauce, “meat sauce”.  She usually made it with ground beef, but I prefer whole cuts.  On rare special occasions she would add pork ribs, which would make my father’s brothers brag to each other like they we’re still trying to bang the same girl.  “She’s put the pawk in it tonight”, “ahh, that’s where the flay-vas at”; it was like the pope was coming for dinner or something.

 I like to call mine Bolognese.  I like the way it sounds, and I tell my wife “we’re having Bolognese” with all the Roberto Benigni I can muster.  Bowl-oh-NAY-zeah!

I start by opening the icebox.  What’s in it;  any short ribs, ox tail, pork ribs, lamb shanks, shoulders?  You get the point.  I’m looking for the stuff that needs that long love time, not something you’re going to whip together in half an hour.  I’ve made this stuff out of one kind of cut, and five kinds.  I think it tastes better if you get two or three and one of them is pork, but I’m just saying.  I’ve had a beef short rib fetish for a long time but lately I’m on a shank kick.  Lamb shanks are great.  So are pork shanks.

Regardless, get your meat together. 

Then see what else is kicking around.  Garlic and canned whole peeled tomatoes are essential (the tomatoes not being so essential if you’re making a classic Bolognese).  Mario Batali will tell you that you need to use the tomatoes from San Marzano, Italy.  Maybe you do.  Each time I go to the grocery store I almost buy them but they’re a million times more money than the other brands.  They might make that much of a difference, but I can’t bring myself to spend six bucks on a can of tomatoes.  I like the Pastine or Renzi, but honestly, you cook the crap out of them, I’m sure that in the end just about any will do.  Carrots are nice.  I’m trying to remember if I ever add celery, I usually don’t have a supply handy.  I never use onions.  I stopped adding onion to my tomato sauces a long time ago and I think it’s a good thing.  Traditionally you braise your meat in milk or cream, but I’ve always added the cream in the end.  I should try it the other way sometime.  Herbs are good, and nutmeg, and if you have the rind of an old hunk of Parmesan Reggiano, toss it in.

Most people fuck things up in the first ten minutes. 

Get your pan hot.  I like to use a Dutch oven.  You don’t need to spend your kid’s college fund on a fancy Le Creuset at Williams Sonoma, hit the camping section of Wal-Mart and get a Lodge cast iron one for twenty bucks.  I recently stepped up to a Lodge enameled cast iron one for a little more at Target and it’s pretty awesome.  Anyhow, whatever you’re using, get it hot, I mean really hot, like smoking hot.  Coat it with olive oil.  Season your meat with twice as much kosher salt and freshly ground pepper as you think you need to and arrange the soon-to-be delicious cuts in the pan.  Don’t throw them all in at once, you need to keep the pan hot, so take your time.  If you need to brown the stuff in two or three batches, who cares?  You’ve set the day aside for this, right?

Now, open the bottle of red wine that you’re going to deglaze the pan with.  I like to cook with wine that’s from the country I’m cooking.  It doesn’t have to be that bottle of Tignanello you’ve been hanging on to for just the right special occasion, but it should be something that you’d like to drink.  I’m still surprised at how many Americans drink shit wine on a daily basis, and the excuse is always that they can’t afford to drink anything better.  Bullshit.  The magnum of Yellow Tail that you’re drinking is no cheaper than a simple Rosso Piceno from Le Marche, or even a Tuscan IGT.  All over Europe there’s tons of great inexpensive wine being made, and more often than not it will be far more food friendly than the cheap mass produced fruit bombs in the super-size bottles.  Find a wine shop that has a good selection of European stuff and get to know the guy who’s doing the buying.  Nine times out of ten he’ll turn out to be a pretty helpful person who will be happy to turn you on to the good stuff that he drinks, but needs to stand on his head to sell to the locals. 

Anyhow, pour a glass.  (Any excuse to drink a little wine in the afternoon is a good one).  The wine is meant to be a distraction.  If you’re looking for the right bottle to open, fumbling with the corkscrew etc, you won’t fuck with the meat you just put in the pan.  And don’t.  The best way to screw up a great meat sauce or braise is to not get the right crust on your meat.  Leave it alone; it will take a while.  Don’t poke it or move it around or anything.  Drink your wine, prep your garlic and carrots, and open your cans of tomatoes.  By now the meat should be a deep dark golden brown.  Flip it over and pour another glass. 

I worked last night, and Thursday and Friday before that.  I’m still a little wound up from the Germans who didn’t realize that I make my nights money on tips.  My feet and elbows are still sore and I’m still a little grumpy and tired.  I’ve been treating you like you were reading an Anthony Bourdain book.  I apologize.

The last time I made Bolognese was a week or so ago on a day that my son Rafa decided not to take his afternoon nap.  He was all wound up and cranky.  I cook a lot with Rafa and even though he doesn’t have the smelling thing down yet, I get a kick out of handing him stuff to smell; herbs, garlic, ginger.  He makes the same face that I do, but I don’t think that he’s breathing in.  I think he’ll get it in time.  Anyhow, he was bonkers so I set him up in his high chair next to my cutting board and started prepping.  When I was chopping garlic, I put a clove on his tray, same with the carrots and herbs etc.  He drank from his sippy cup while I seared off the meat, and he went berserk when I deglazed the pan and the alcohol burned up in a KISS like display of pyrotechnics.  We tasted it together and adjusted the seasoning and with all of this, his restless day turned into a good one.   This is why I like to cook this kind of stuff.  It’s the sort of thing that once you get it going your more apt to open a book or go for a walk or have sex than flip on the TV.  It’s slow and the dividends are huge.

Once my meat is that deep dark golden brown I take it out of the pan, drain off some of the fat, add a little more olive oil and toss in the carrots, (if you’ve got celery you’ll probably want to throw it in now).  I like to dice them super small so they kind of fall apart by the end.  Once they’re soft I squirt in a bunch of tomato paste.  Remember back in the day when tomato paste only came in a can and you always had to toss out what you didn’t use?  Nowadays, you can buy it in a tube.  It’s awesome.  I always have one in the fridge, and tend to use it more often since I’m not hemming and hawing about throwing away half a can.  I like to fry the paste up getting it good and dark, not burnt, but caramelized.  Just before it’s done I add the garlic.  How much?  Am I using lamb and ox tail, or pork and chicken thighs?  I try to add just the right amount, cutting the clove in half and slicing it as thin as I can without breaking out the Goodfellas single edge razor. 

Only a sensitive person can sauté garlic.  It needs to be treated with respect.  If undercooked and raw it can be obnoxious like a pubescent teenager, but if you over cook it, you might as well toss it out and start over.  It becomes bitter and useless.  Pay attention to your garlic, it’s like your relationship with your spouse. 

Just when it’s on the verge of becoming bitter trash, I hit the pan with the red wine, enough to cover everything and then some.  Since I’m already holding the bottle, I usually refill my glass.  I like to cook the wine down till it’s almost syrup like, scraping up anything that stuck to the bottom during the browning with my wooden spoon.  Add a can of tomatoes (reserving the liquid), and a little salt and pepper.  I like to squeeze the tomatoes with my hands before I put them in; maybe it helps them break down. 

Next comes the stock, many people leave this out of their sauces, but I think it’s the pulse of the dish.  If you can ever get your hands on Veal stock, the shits like gold.

I used to work at this restaurant that made veal stock every morning.  When I first started I was seduced by the smell each time I would come in for work.  I remember my manager cackling at me and saying that she wanted to burn her clothes when she got home at night to get the smell off.  Fast-forward three years, I now doing her job, the smell of roasting bones would turn my stomach.  But nothing has the gelatin of veal stock, and it will really make your braises rich and silky, sadly it’s kind of hard to get your hands on.  I used to get the real stuff from the restaurant, but now days I’ve got to make due with what I have at home, usually beef or chicken.  I try to make stock often and freeze it in ice cube trays so I always have some on hand.  If I don’t have any, I’ll sheepishly use a low-sodium boxed chicken stock (Rachel Ray would be proud).

Now, pile in the meat you had taken out earlier, add enough stock to just about cover it, put a lid on it, turn it down as low as it goes or throw it in a 300 degree oven and leave it alone.

I’m thinking as I often do, of a critique with my instructor Paul years ago in the late afternoon light of our Tripp Street studio.  The aesthetic of our studio was to follow the direction of the light with our charcoal marks or brush strokes, creating a methodical collection of stripes like some zebra on steroids, or a hard driving rain in an autumn windstorm.  In adjusting my work he surprisingly went across the grain with his marks, and I immediately called him out on his fumble.  He began to tell me a story that was totally unrelated to the drawing at hand.  When he was a kid, every time his mother would cook a ham she would cut an inch off of each end before putting it in the roasting pan.  One day, like any kid with their incessant barrage of questions, he asked his mom why she always hacked up the ham.  She said she did it because that’s how her mother did it, and that was that.  At the next holiday gathering Paul asked his grandmother the same question, and not surprised he got the same response.  Finally Paul sought out his ageing great grandmother and put the question to her.  “Well Paul, I did always cut off the ends of the ham, and I did it because we couldn’t afford a roasting pan large enough to hold the entire thing.”

I have a friend who doesn’t cook, but likes to eat well.  Last time he visited, over roasted butternut squash tortellini with chilies, brown butter and sage, he said that he wanted to learn a few recipes.  I’m more of a principals rather than a recipe guy.  I’ve always wanted to write a cookbook, (though I’m by no stretch of the imagination qualified to do so), that had no recipes at all, only principals.  There would be a chapter on how to sauté, how to roast, grill, braise…  you get the point.  If you learn how to work with a pan on a flame you can sauté or sear anything.  But if you learn how to make Salmon with capers and lemon, you might be eating the same fucking dish for the rest of your life. If you only learn a recipe or two you’re screwed if the store is closed and you don’t have the quarter pound of bacon the recipe calls for, when in fact you do have half a pound of pancetta about to rot in your fridge that would work just fine.  If you can make Bolognese, you can make Coque au Vin, or pulled pork, or pot-roast, or lamb shanks, or brisket, or any other braise.  It’s the technique of braising that’s important, not the recipe.  It’s like learning to paint, if you first learn to see and then learn how to interpret what you’re seeing and put it down on paper or canvas, you can paint anything you want to.  But, if you only learn how to draw or paint a figure by some schematic technique, your limited to a life of awkward contrived work. 

After a couple of hours, dig into your pot and pull out a hunk of meat.  Give it a pinch, if the meat falls apart in your fingers then your there.  Take all of your meat out and pull it apart.  I like to leave things a little chunky, but whatever you do at this point, it’ll be good.  Toss out the bones and throw the meat back in the pot.  If it seems like you’ve got too much liquid, leave the top off and let it reduce some.  This is when I add the cream and the herbs.  I usually warm the cream up first, I don’t know if it would separate, but it seems like a good idea to add warm cream to a hot sauce.  I’ve been on a chili flake kick lately, I don’t think it’s traditional to add it, but I dig it.  I stir in enough cream until I get the deep rusty color of my grandmother’s Sunday meat sauce.  Then I let it cook a little longer.

It was Mario Batali, not my grandma that taught me how to cook pasta.  He says to dress it like a salad.  It should be the condiment; the pasta should be the main event.  This shit is great with home made pasta; wide noodles.  It’s also really good over a board of creamy polenta.  Transfer a few ladles of it to a sauté pan, boil your pasta a few minutes shy of done and finish it off in the pan with your sauce.  Take it to the plate and hit it with a drizzle of olive oil and a little grated Parmesan  (spend the dough on the real stuff, it makes a difference).  Along with what’s left of the wine (or maybe a second bottle if it was that kind of a day) and a crust of bread toasted and rubbed with a clove of garlic, something good on the radio, and Rhonda across the table; we’re ready to eat.  

How-to

This blog medium is uncomfortable.  I’m used to reading and writing from left to right, but this is more like a Hebrew text.  You need to work right to left or in our case back to front, or start at the bottom and work your way upward.  Or maybe you can just read what you want to.  I know that you can’t see the point yet, but I’m hoping you will.  Theses stories should all tie together eventually.  Maybe.

Old is the new new

They’re bulldozing the Hutong.  Beijing was a hard-hat zone when we were there in January of 06, and the coldest place on earth.  The Chinese were rapidly preparing for the upcoming Olympics, teaching the locals that hurling up a lugie or taking a leak on the side of the street might not make for entertaining prime time western television. However with all of the high tech western updates, the Starbucks Empire hadn’t yet staked their claim, which made each morning something of an adventure.  It was equally as hard to find a joint to have a drink at the end of the day.  With a city that occupies the same mass of land as the country of Belgium, you can see how sniffing out a coffee or a cocktail might have been a challenge. 

As we climbed the Drum Tower and passed the monks banging their gongs “Power Station” style on our way to the wrap around observation deck, we could hear the din of progress.  To see the plowing of a neighborhood like the swift snow removal after a nor’easter in my own city is something to behold.  In the short time that we could stand the pecker-shrinking chill of Beijing’s January, a city block of residences could be cleared. 

I was a student of the old.  First as a high-schooler schlepping antiques at a friend’s parents auction house, and later as a student of Nineteenth Century French Academic painting.  I felt as if we were standing witness to an act of cultural genocide, the burying of a community that for so long defined the peasant class of urban china.  It’s easy to be nostalgic though.  We Americans are a comfortable society of nostalgic aristocrats.  I imagine if Rhonda and I were living in a city of connected double-wides with no plumbing and communal outhouses we might have felt a sense of envy and triumph for the Hutong-ites at the prospect of their soon to be posh-er digs.  Regardless, I’ll admit that I’m selfish and it’s hard for me to swallow this kind of progress, (even though I know it’s probably for the best).  At times I wish I could quarantine off my favorite parts of the world so they could stay exactly as I remember them, old, quaint, and repressed.  Try not to judge me to harshly; I can assure you, of course, that I understand the difference between destruction in order rebuild a more progressive modern Beijing and the bombing of Buddhist statues in Burma.  Maybe I need to re-focus my appall?

We were listening to the best radio show ever, as we always do on the ride back to Boston from our cabin in western Massachusetts, Car Talk.  I’d been thinking about old being the new new for some time now and apparently old man Tom has similar things on his mind.

“My uncle looks into my new MG and says it’s a stick?  We’ve been waiting 50yrs for the automatic transmission”

Nothing had to be said between Rhonda and I.  We were, I’m sure, thinking the same thing.  My Mario Andretti delusions lure me to the manual transmission, and only with the birth of our son Rafa, and the need for us to own a car that Rhonda would actually be willing to drive, did I cave and buy the lesser, modern, idiot proof… dreaded automatic transmission.  Tom and his brother Ray we’re advising my kindred caller on whether or not his daughter should be taught to drive on a “stick” or not.  I sank in my seat as the only two allies I thought I had in this world betrayed me, and without hesitation proclaimed that she should absolutely learn to drive an automatic.  Humph!

Of course nostalgia is a prejudice thing.  I can’t imagine there’s anyone who longs for the DOS commands of their old Commodore 64’s, or the form feed printer paper that went along with it.  Is there anyone who’s dying to trade in their sexy Iphone for the suitcase car phones that only the rich fuckers had in the 80’s?  But the same jackass, me, will look at a ’77 Porsche 911 and say “they don’t make ‘em like they used to”, when in fact I know its bullshit.  My boring Honda Element will be safer, more reliable, and in the long run cheaper to own than that old German beater; but I’d still rather be in the Porsche. 

If it sounds like I’m confused about where I stand on these matters, I am.  I wish I had my old cast iron, laser accurate table saw rather than my brand new craftsman with its plastic housing that’s barely accurate enough for rough framing work.  But is this a problem of they don’t make them like they used to, or is it that they used to be cheaper to make and now if you want them like they used to be, you need to fork over the dough?  I imagine if I had spent a couple of grand on a new saw it might have been better than my old one?  In hindsight, I should have just replaced the motor on the old saw and called it a day.  But we don’t do things like that anymore do we?  When your icebox dies you call the fridge store, not the fridge repair guy, and he swaps yours out, carting away the old one free of charge never to bother you again.

Ours died days before my sister in law and her two girls were coming to visit for the weekend, and the thought of having mid-westerners visiting and no way to keep the caffeine-free-diet-non-aspartame cola product cold was terrifying (not to mention the sugar free Jello!).  Being neurotic about my concerns with the old being the new new, I actually called a repair guy; I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised that it was going to be significantly cheaper to replace the damn thing than to fix the old one.  The kicker is that the fridge was only 5 years old.  Didn’t Grandma and Grandpa have the same icebox as far back as you can remember? 

The world has become a country.  In the past, you could get cheap labor in the poorer parts of our own country, but now our Detroit is China and our West Virgina is Vietnam.  Maybe I could have flown in an LG repair guy from Korea to fix the fridge for less than it cost to replace it.  But then there’s the expense of the Korean translator.  But seriously, we’re so concerned with petroleum and clean air and shit like that, so why have we taken so easily to the disposable?

Old is the new new, but I’m getting older and the evidence is clear when the guy at the bar wearing a fedora and a groomed mustache orders an old-fashioned from me and spasms like a dog at an electric fence when I start to put the cherry and orange in the glass.  “st-st-st-st-st-st-stt-aaaap!” arms waving as if he was calling some batter safe at home plate after an amazing attempt at an out.  “But I want an old old-fashioned” spoken with such disgust that I could possibly think that he in his obvious garb would dare want fruit in his glass. 

I pause, resuming my trained smile, and think; right, like they made them before you could get your fingers on fresh fruit year round.  Buddy you’re a masochist and you want to punish yourself for wearing that retarded hat and even more retarded mustache.  And now that you’ve gotten up to go to the toilet, I can see that you’re further punishing yourself by wearing your jeans so fucking tight that they’re sending your nuts into your stomach.

Has the quality of the old table saw pushed us to this place, or is it just nostalgia, or maybe its just pretentiousness?  Maybe the guy I’m ordering a Bourbon or Rye from thinks I’m a pretentious jackass for not having a Vodka Red Bull?  It seems like the roots of this began with a craftsmanship/quality thing but now the tangles of nostalgia and fashion have made things harder to clearly access?  It’s simple human nature for people to spend their days looking over their shoulders sizing up what the other guy has or what the other guy’s doing? 

Or maybe we’ve gotten bored.  Rhonda loves her Iphone but laments that it might be the instrument that finally kills conversation, as we know it.  There may no longer be reason to wonder or debate anything; we have Wikipedia.

“Why is the sky blue?”

Wikipedia states:

Rayleigh scattering (named after the British physicist Lord Rayleigh) is the elastic scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the light, which may be individual atoms or molecules. It can occur when light travels through transparent solids and liquids, but is most prominently seen in gases. Rayleigh scattering is a function of the electric polarizability of the particles.

Rayleigh scattering of sunlight in the atmosphere causes diffuse sky radiation, which is the reason for the blue color of the sky and the yellow tone of the sun itself.

Will the answering of basic questions of knowledge free up crucial time for exploring more interesting ideas and questions? 

Take something like the rage of Molecular Gastronomy for example.  A clear sign that the new is where it’s at!  There’s no need to fire up the Barbecue and sear your Rib-Eye, you can have your foam in any flavor you like.  Rib-Eye foam, delicious, and not bad for your cholesterol either.  Or, if you still want the real deal, you can take your Rib-Eye, hermetically seal it in a vacuum of plastic and submerge it in a surgical machine called an immersion circulator, that will keep a water bath at a constant temperature (that isn’t within the range that the Massachusetts board of health thinks food should be stored) and it will be cooked absolutely perfectly to the temperature you want it, with no observable variation throughout the depth of the meat.  I’ve had some of this stuff and I’ll admit the best egg I’ve ever had was cooked this way, but when it comes down to it, I want flames and blood and shit.  I like that my steak at home has a variety of textures, as kids didn’t we fight with dad for the crispy burnt ends? 

All this makes me feel funny.  I’ve eaten shit that looks like ice cream but tastes like pizza; and I’m not amused, I’m concerned.  The ironic mustache seems silly and self-conscious to me, and the pizza-ish ice cream seems totally absurd.  But I still think I’d be happier rolling up in a ’77 911… stick shift.

Looking for a stone

Michelangelo's Atlas

Fuck the Sistine Chapel.  It’s a work of awkward contrived decoration at best.  Mike must have been in the desperate shoes that all artists find themselves in to stoop to such a distraction.  Or maybe the ego of his greatness was so awesome that he convinced himself that it was an important work; but I’m telling you it isn’t.  It’s grand, but it’s gaudy and it’s tasteless.   It’s awkward and forced.  The awe that is inspiring is the tourists lining up with their camcorders to see such a soulless greatness, and the echo that you hear in the gallery that houses the captive slaves.  The average Mike doesn’t even know that they were done by the same genius that conceived of the Vatican ceiling.  The Pieta might be Michelangelo’s greatest work, or possibly the greatest work the world has known, but the slaves may be the most natural and honest.  I might have mistaken their creator for a Taoist monk; finding the form in the rock.  Unfinished as we expect things to be finished, but as perfect and sublime as a work of art could be.  I can’t tell you how often I think of the slaves.  So often the best works that artists have produced are the works that they have done for themselves, with no strings, or better yet cash, attached to.  Have you seen Velasquez’s Aesop and Meippus?  It seems like as we get older and continue to fail, our egos subside, but it doesn’t make it any easier to find the form in the rock.  You almost need to un-do or un-learn your years to be comfortable enough to let it happen.

I spent the morning looking for a stone.  The steps leading down from our back porch land on a muddy patch that I tried to plant to grass this fall, but had been trampled by mid-October pumpkin carving with my friend Josh’s two little girls.  Regardless, with all the effort I could imagine, I don’t think that it’s a spot for grass.  When Rhonda and I were walking with Rafa last weekend we found two intimidating stones that seemed right for planting at the bottom of our steps.  The first was so large that I couldn’t even lift it off of the ground.  I’m not as fit or strong as I used to be.  It was the day after my 37^th birthday and I was feeling my age like a stripper who leaves the dance floor with only a buck.  I went back to the house for a hand truck.

The two stones that day were the start of our path, but we needed at least one or two more  (although Rhonda is becoming increasingly worried with my obsession for collecting and arranging stones).  This time alone at the cabin for the weekend, I walked down our road into the woods.  I thought about driving to the Greenfield Farmers co-op to buy one, but there is something about finding one that seemed right.  This place feels like it grew out of the ridge it is perched on.  It was ruined in the 90’s buy a builder or owner who had no ear for music, but we’re trying to do our best to find what it needs to be.  It was built on rock, literally, without a foundation, and the landscape around us at times seems like a sort of quarry-well.  Each day I feel like new rocks are being born out of the earth.

It started to rain when I was planting the first two stones.  I’m 37 now and I live in the city with a warehouse of umbrellas.  I had forgotten what it was like to get wet in the late October rain.  I thought about going in and starting a more arid project, but instead I walked into the woods.  The autumn colors look different when it’s raining.  They remind me of when I was a kid.  They’re like the madras shirt I bought at the Gap in high school.  As the trees loose their leaves the birch show themselves, Rattlesnake’s ridge grows longer in each direction.  When we bought this place late last winter the view from our back porch was all we needed, but as summer devoured us we we’re suffocated by the overgrowth.  We re-discovered the view of Rattlesnake with a chainsaw and gave ourselves the luxury of a little room to breathe and a little sunshine. 

You can’t go looking for a stone.  When I studied painting all those years ago my instructor Paul would tell me to look toward the subject I was rendering not at it.  It took me five years to understand what that fucker meant, but when I got it I got it. You find things when you’re not looking for them, when you’re not forcing them.  Maybe you don’t.  I veered off of our path and down by the old garden. I was damp and cold, but I felt like I hadn’t had the luxury of being this kind of uncomfortable in a while.  As I made my way back through the woods and over the would be brook in the spring once the snow melts, I found the stone I had stopped looking for on top of the retaining wall I had built this past summer, just a few steps from the landing where it would live.

Force

When force is applied to an object either the object or the applier breaks.  The recipient of the force may bend first, it may even withstand the assault for a very long time, but eventually it will break; or it will break the applier.  It may take a lifetime for the fractures to show themselves, but they will.  I’m sure my wife Rhonda can devise all of the examples that will de-bunk this philosophy, but between you and me, I’m sticking to my guns.  Of course there is the salad dressing problem, but we’ll get to that later.

Now don’t confuse me with an advocate for a passive existence.  I don’t buy the parable that the meek will inherit the earth, and quite frankly the touchy feely pseudo existential types ignite my latent aggressive side.  However the art of seeing a situation from a bigger perspective is something entirely different. I can’t tell you how many students I’ve taught painting to who could never learn to let go of their own egotistical preconceptions about how to draw or paint a portrait and just look at the dumb model sitting right there in front of them.

The fundamental elements of The Big look

An ominous wall blocks Man A’s progress.  Man A sets his feet and pushes with all of the force he can muster.  The wall resists, but eventually Man A breaks through the wall.  Man A now needs to make a trip to the Home Depot in order to buy the necessary supplies to repair the broken wall.

An ominous wall blocks man B’s progress.  Man B sets his feet and pushes with all of the force he can muster.  The wall resists, but man B continues to Force even though his muscles and bones begin to fail him.  Eventually man B ends up on his ass, and Man B’s wife needs to call 911.

An ominous wall blocks the unlikely inhuman Man C’s progress.  Man C sets his feet and pushes with all of the force he can muster.  The wall resists, but Man C’s force is absolutely equal to the walls resistance.  There they will stand emulsified either for eternity or until Man C (the applier of force) decides to withdraw his force and give up.

An ominous wall blocks man D’s progress.  Man D pauses for a moment, then steps backward until his eyes can take in the full dimension of the wall.  Man D then alters his Progress and walks to the opening he has seen as a result of his bigger perspective on the very far corner of the wall.  Man D passes through the opening and safely arrives on the other side of the wall.