Artist's Proof
Authors: Gordon Cotler
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Contents
Â
For
Amy, Joanna, and Ellen
with love
1
A LONG FRIDAY â¦
O
NE
T
HE MORNING OF
the day I was accused of murdering a sixteen-year-old girl I happened to open my eyes at daybreak, an hour or more before my usual time. I had every intention of shutting them instantly. No such luck. I found myself looking up at that offending hand, the grotesque hand that had begun to bug me yesterday. That did it; I knew I wouldn't get back to sleep. Not until I'd fixed the damn thing.
I once read somewhere that Beethoven's family would get him out of bed in the morning (was it Beethoven or was it Haydn?) by playing an unfinished phrase on the piano (or was it the harpsichord?) The poor composer would have to drag himself to the instrument and hit that last note to get some relief. The principle seems to work for painters. For this one, anyway.
I knew that hand wasn't right from the moment I painted it. The way the thumb met the palm wasn't abstract, or expressionist, or surreal, it was just unhumanâmore like a saguaro cactus that had been hit by a truck. I couldn't stand looking at it that way another minute, especially as it was about twice the size of a normal hand. It would have to be fixed, and now.
I was working large. Really large. The back wall of my studio/home was higher than it was wide. I had twelve feet of canvas nailed across it, and the canvas fell fourteen feet, to about waist height. To reach that miserable hand I had to scramble to the top of my rolling aluminum scaffold clutching a can of brushes, naked as a blue-assed baboon. I had a week's supply of acrylics plus a couple of rollers stashed on the platform.
I put in a concentrated twenty minutes on the hand before I finally felt the sense of relief Beethoven, or whoever, must have gotten from playing that final note. By this time there was no way I would get back to sleep, so I figured I'd put in an hour with a sketch pad somewhere down the beach.
It had been at least a year since I'd gone out to draw with the morning sun still almost touching the ocean and the beach houses flooded with that low, straight-on light. My drawing doesn't have much to do with my painting, but I have to draw every dayâpeople, houses, beach junk, anything my eye falls on. Call it a compulsion, but drawing is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. A violinist who doesn't practice every day is a fiddler whose hat sits upside down on the sidewalk. I pulled on sneakers, jeans, work shirt, and heavy windbreaker. At the beginning of May, the east end of Long Island can still get a chill breeze off the ocean in the early morning. I scooped up my drawing kit and a giant pad.
My house has two doors, one to a footpath through the dunes to the beach, the other facing the gravel automobile road that is scratched across what was once a potato field. I went out the beach door.
I've mentioned “the east end of Long Island” and “my house,” and I may have conjured up an image of some postmodern bleached-wood architect's conceit in the Hamptons costing in the neighborhood of a million. I was not in that neighborhood. In actual fact, my place was not much more than a shack that could have been cast ashore on a high tide and might go out again on the next. Nor was it located in one of the cutting-edge, frantic, celebrity-intensive Hamptons. Not nearly.
When I was on the NYPDâI had been off the cops about a year at this timeâword circulated that Sid Shale had this beach house out on the South Fork. On a lieutenant's salary. Internal Affairs fell over itself launching an investigation.
Two IA guys actually shlepped out here on the Long Island Expressway on a Friday afternoon in July, a journey I support as a harsh alternative to capital punishment. When the guys reached my place, hot, sweaty, irritableâready, I suspect, to file charges if they found so much as a deposit bottle I couldn't account forâthey took one look and collapsed in each other's arms, dissolved in laughter. I happened to be in residence at the time (I was taking a vacation week to paint), and I witnessed the scene through a window, including Cop A's gasped, “That's a
house?
”
Since then, the beach house had become my principal residenceâin fact my only residenceâand I had done some work on the place. I insulated and heated it for year-round use. I cut a window on the beach side in the shape of either a swordfish or a blowfish, take your pick. I raised my bed on a platform, so I could store paints and stretched canvases underneath. I painted the outside walls in three not nearly complementary colors and constructed a huge found-object sculpture outside each exterior door and named them
Flotsam
and
Jetsam.
Most important, I lifted one wall eight feet because I wanted the added painting surface. That made for a shed roof, and I installed a skylight in it.
Despite what I had spent on winterizing, the structural changes made the place nearly unheatable in months with an
R
in them; I consoled myself during those months by eating oysters whenever I could afford them. I took further comfort in the thought that my abode was probably as warm as Buckingham Palace; if the queen could take it, so could I. And with the added height I could work big. Really big.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
T
HE DIRTY SAND
was strewn with assorted junk and the remains of marine lifeâmost prominently, the nearly black lengths of stringy seaweed I think of as the discarded hair of mermaids who come ashore in the night for a cut, bleach, and set. A few more weeks would pass before the village would begin raking the beach to tempt sunbathers. I would more than likely make a find this morning for either
Flotsam
or
Jetsam.
These were, and always would be, “works in progress.”
I decided to head west. I had drawn the houses in that direction many timesâthe nearest was nearly a quarter of a mile distantâbut the unfamiliar early light made them seem almost a new challenge. The low sun barely warmed the left side of my face as I picked my way over the minigorges and temporary rivulets created by winter storms.
I walked a few hundred yards without seeing a soul. But then, as soon as I found a likely spot to settle down for a first sketchâan overview of sand, sky, and housesâa gaunt figure rose over the dunes some distance ahead: Don Quixote with lance. He came from the road, made for the high-water mark, and then ambled along it in my direction. When he got close I saw that his pantaloons were actually baggy jeans tucked into high rubber boots, and the lance was a fishing rod. He wore a floppy hat and a torn T-shirt, and a creel was slung over a shoulder.
He was a surf caster out after bluefish. If these guys ever haul one in, I've never seen it. I'm willing to believe they're all following doctor's orders to do an exercise designed to strengthen a weak wrist.
I hoped this one would take his stand before he reached me, so I could put some foreground interest in my sketch. But on an otherwise deserted beach the man of La Mancha didn't stop walking until he was abreast of me. By this time I was sitting on a west-facing perch on the high-water shelf, pad on my knees, pencils, pens, and charcoals stuck points up in the sand, water jar, paints, and brush beside them.
The fisherman eyed me resentfully. Since I had picked this spot, it must be a good one; never mind that I wasn't equipped for fishing.
“You planning to stay here?” he asked stupidly.
“Maybe twenty minutes.”
He thought for a moment. “Well ⦠you was here first.” Fair was fair. He turned and continued on down the beach.
“Hook the queen of the bluefish,” I called after him. I was glad to see him disappear. After ten minutes of futile casting he would have put down his rod, taken up a position at my back, and advised me that I wasn't getting it quite right. Bad enough I had to take criticism from the seagulls that sometimes waddled up and quickly waddled away, unimpressed.
I faced up the beach and began drawing. Pencil to virgin paper, I started as I always do, in the lower right-hand corner and working my way up and across. No blocking, no erasures, no hesitation in my long unbroken lines. No conscious thought, actually; my eye signals my hand without the message passing through my brain. Total commitment to the moment. Drawing is the purest, truest, most naked form of art, the keenest challenge to the artist. It brings my senses alive, it makes my blood pound. As almost always, I had a hell of a good time.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
B
ACK HOME AGAIN
I was surprised to find the answering machine blinking at this early hour. I punched Play, recognized Leona Morgenstern's voice, and started making coffee. I knew it would be ground, dripped, and possibly half drunk before Lonnie signed off. She was in her shrill mode:
“Sidâ¦? Are you thereâ¦? For God's sake, pick up.â¦
Hello-o-o-o�
Where the hell are you at seven-forty-one in the
A.M
., passed out? Have you taken up serious drinking? Sid, you can't drink like Jackson Pollock until you
sell
like Jackson Pollock. Which brings me to my point. I've got hold of a live one. Remember the Texan I told you about who came in on Tuesday asking to see your work? Rich Texans are harder to sniff out since they got out of oil, but this one gave off a heady aroma. Computer software? Rocket components? Something.
“Sid, he wants to meet you. Six
P.M
. sharp at the gallery. To
day.
This is a command performance, don't fail me. Show up on time and make nice for a change. And Sid, need I remind you, your daughter is not in community college, she's at
Bennington
College. For ten dollars less she could live at the Waldorf. With room service. Sid, you can paint, but can you sell? The jury is still out.
“Oh! I forgot to ask the other day. Are you still on that âI'm working big, really big' kick? Because the buyers for corporate board rooms aren't buying these days, and if they were they wouldn't buy a larger-than-life expressionist painting that shows the final collapse of the greedy class on the beaches of eastern Long Islandâyour cry of conscience that I think of as the
Guernica
of the Hamptons, and who needs it? So, Sid, will you pleaseâ”
I shut the thing off and climbed to the top of my extruded aluminum scaffold with my coffee mug and went back to attacking the canvas. Lonnie was wrong, of course. No way was this work an homage to Picasso. If it had been, I would have admitted it. Many good paintings have been inspired by other paintings. And
expressionist?
Not by a long shot, but Lonnie felt more secure when she had a handle to hang on to.