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.