227. Study for Birthday
After our guests left I resumed the walk I normally do. During the festivities of the week, I did not visit my studio for a serious length of time. The particular painting that was waiting for me to return and finish it had already been causing me some consternation. Nonetheless, we could now walk. The zig zag through the suburban streets out of the way, we gradually came to the first long avenue of fields and farms. It was high summer and rain was punctuating otherwise warm days, lending some drama to my pushing of the pram. It had only been a week since I walked here and yet this time, the first thing I noticed was a plum tree exploding into the street. Plums were strewn all over the asphalt. They had that smoky blue look of fruit that was so rich in its red ripeness it turns into a profound violet. Although they looked succulent they were smeared all over the road. This vivid impression was fading when I started to encounter the apple trees that were also now bursting forth with fruit. And wait, one was in fact a pear tree, as it turns out.
Maybe I only noticed this cacophony of fertility bursting forth because my thoughts had been immersed in my painting of a birth. I stopped talking about this painting because people seemed to have had overactive imaginations when I said I was painting a birth. They seemed offended but I think they assumed that I was literally painting the seconds of the baby appearing. However, birth is more of a marathon than a sprint in my experience as a bystander. Personally, I also think it is not so horrific but rather I see it as quite a sensational achievement. I definitely don’t think it could be scandalous for me to paint. However, this had seemed to be the reaction I was getting. I had a photo that I had taken and wanted to use. It is in keeping with my theme of situations. I was in such a situation and it was logical to use a photo in the process of using paint to allow some new disclosure of painterly, emotional and conceptual space.
It was an exceptionally difficult painting and I already abandoned it. It’s final status is as a study for a second attempt to resolve the articulation of something that is unique in the meeting of the paint and this motif. I am not distributing images of the painting at the moment. At this stage I do not plan to post it on social media.
As usual I am still listening to my audiobook on these walks that precede my hours in the studio. I am still trying to finish Knausgaard’s autobiography. I am searching for gems of brilliance in this last stretch of the text and finding them fewer and fewer. It is a giant book. 3600 pages. Much of it is like an ascent to a literary Everest taken at such a small gradient so as to feel it is pretty flat. There are a few trap doors. There are a few rollercoasters. There are a few hairpin bends. This last section however, feels like a downward spiral through territory that is thorny. Despite its ghoulish forensic examination of human civilization however, it is equally compelling for the parallels it makes clear between the present day and Germany of the 1930s. He mentions that Adorno refused to analyze the text of history’s worst person. I can appreciate that decision. Knausgaard has worked maybe too hard to put the reader into the shoes of even a terrible dictator and it just is not really consistent with the factual situation. It reminds me of when I was doing my PhD. I was impressed by Robert Storr’s analysis of Gerhard Richter. Storr was the Director of MoMA and Richter was the world’s most famous painter (at least after Storr’s retrospective of his work). Storr’s fatal flaw (for me) however was that he was always selling Richter as someone thrown into a historical situation that just made the logical decisions that anyone would. I always thought about this as Storr’s ‘structuralist bent’ arguing that ‘anyone would have acted the same way in those circumstances’. I felt like this was a marketing style approach to pitch an artist and a retrospective to a boardroom or to a public—indeed, so that they could imagine themselves in his image. After several years of trying to unpack the painter and his critics I felt this really mischaracterized the elements that were unique to Richter, good and bad. Sure, we all need to ‘identify’ with people to grasp their lives trajectories but, and maybe this is why I so enjoyed reading Levinas at the time, there is something also so irreconcilably Other about the other, and trying to put the reader into the shoes of this painter or that dictator is at best impossible and at worst quite tortuous. I hope this critique is something that Knausgaard could take in his stride. His account of life as a writer makes me acutely aware how unqualified I am to critique his magnum opus.
