Portrait of the Artist in His World

From Round Bend author and artist K.C. Bacon comes this sketch of a painter's world. Is it autobiography?


PAINTER'S BLUE

Next to a gallon of mineral spirits were several tin cans that once held tomatoes and beans but now had slender paintbrushes thrown into them, nose down, up to their necks in gray sludge. The music was on like it always was, and an East Texas troubadour was singing about some road bearing low to the far side of things and longing for a girl with twang.

Next to the music box sat a pack of willow charcoal drawing sticks, medium, small and large, with child's crayons, gesso, packs of various sizes of drawing papers scattered about, and a ring of artist's tape hanging from a nail. Every wall of the small studio was patterned with paintings, made either of canvas or wood, vivid explorations of the color wheel, and dozens of half-finished paintings had been stacked against the walls on their sides, drying like Mexican leaves in a shed surrounded by flowers.

Two of the only three visitors ever invited into the studio employed the same word when describing the look of the painter's studio: vigorous. And the third one said, "intense," but later said, "vigorous," too.

The painter didn't like to think about himself in adjectives, content rather to think of himself mostly as a sitter in a chair, positioned between his able easel and the long table where the colors got flattened out of large tubes like tendons torn at by a mad masseuse. The spent tubes piled up in a sculpted heap, lain there by the painter's sense of practiced discard and sloth. When asked that gruesome question, "What kinds of things do you paint," the painter would mumble things like, "line and form and color," or, "places that look like people," or, most usually, "stuff." Sometimes the painter wouldn't answer at all, just turn or walk away. But when he said things like that it was usually during a time when he was evading the studio, trusting his conceit that time away from his studio might later make a better next stay. Then the painter spent his time pulling weeds in his garden, or pretending he was interested in cooking, or smoking too much, sulking and drinking, sometimes with others.

The painter only talked about painting. But not everyone understood him. He'd say things like, "the studio and I aren't much individually, but together we make a halfway decent mess." And the painter really did think so. How could it be else? They'd spent all those years together trying to create things worth their familiarity.

Today, the painter had been painting since noon, and, as was his habit, had done in a half bottle of sale cabernet while sitting and staring at the painting-in-progress leaning on the easel, a precarious, confidant panel of birch, partitioned by three closely toned ochre hues, featuring high swept red diagonals above a wide black mouth that displayed several cruel, fractal teeth. For reasons only unknown to the painter, it had a sick green tongue slithering down one side. Last week he called it, "a short dragon in a sad tattoo."

But the painting wasn't working well and, if he'd been a despairing man, the painter would have despaired. No, the painter was just a painter. For him, painting wasn't about promise or pleasure or purse. It was about living with the life worth living with.

Years before, the painter had written something his dealer had placed in an art magazine, one of several short statements by what the editor had termed, "working artists." (He remembered scoffing at the idea that there might be "non-working artists," over brandies with his dealer.) In his statement he had made much of the notion that line represented the intellect, the Apollonian intent, and that form represented its Dionysian alternate, emotions. He'd written that only through the act of painting is the painter able to merge idea and feeling, with the imagination driving the painter's will.

But he wasn't very sure about that now.

Now sixty, the painter shuddered at the idea of enlightenment, or whatever it is that bar philosophers suggest they've achieved. The completeness of life for the painter was only found in his chair between the easel and palette, or on a knife combed with streaks of odd color limned into a glob of mixed white, or in the sweep or joust of his hand/arm as it thrust away from his shoulder. Or in a still, eye closed moment of music and smell of paint.

Though it once had mattered to him, the painter hadn't had a proper show in years. When he was younger ambition and will were as plentiful as testosterone. The painter had wanted a name; money, too. Then, somewhere along the way, he realized that no matter how much his name or money, it could always only be little of each. After that, the painter began to look down on dealers and collectors and the legion of art appreciative fans. He looked down at their sad account of accomplishment, gossip adorned by prices. But, the painter didn't feel that anymore, either. When he thought about at all, the painter reckoned that he'd rather produce something more shoddy than good, as long as it didn't help him lie.

And that was the only rule the painter followed. He didn't believe in God and didn't believe in not-God. His only faith was in motion. His creed was human will as it powered its way through work towards the mystery of life.

Sometime after three, the painter caught from the side of his eye an edge of a white paper towel as it suddenly waved at him as if to say, "Color, you old fool, color." And he looked up at his troubled easel, then down, resting his eyes in his hands, a painter at prayer. "Ok, mystery - should I go with yellow next, or should I go with blue?"

And the painter opened his eyes to find himself staring at a painter's cobalt-ruined shoes.

K.C. Bacon


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