Scumbler

by William Wharton

  We have our kids sleeping on platforms. It saves floor space and they don’t have to make beds. There’s a mezzanine-type balcony all around the living room. You can use it to get from one bed loft to the other. There’s a place up there for trains or slot cars when they’re young, stereo sets as they get older. We have a house rule, earphones only; these old nerves can’t take loud music of any kind. Kate agrees, thank God!

  I built a fireplace where we can climb in and warm up around the flames on cold evenings. A nest inside a nest.

  It’s a terrific place for us to raise a family. Every night, family dinners at a ten-foot-long table I knocked together from a single slab of three-inch-thick mahogany cut from the center of an African tree. The bark is still on the outside edges to remind us where wood comes from. I bought this piece of wood at a sawmill in the neighborhood: weighs over two hundred and fifty pounds; took four of us dragging it up our three flights of stairs. A big heavy table like that can help hold things together no matter what happens, gives some weight to life, keeps it from just flying away.

  Evenings, after dishes, we do our sitting, reading, talking, homework, model building. drawing, around that table. This is one fine place to live, love. Our kitchen is smack in the center and open. When you’re in that kitchen, you’re in the command post, can see everything, control our family tree house. Swiss Family Robinson in the center of Paris.

  There’s no television, never has been in our family; that’s one reason we ducked out of California. There’s just that big open room for living, eating, sharing; each person in the family has a private place for sleeping and working. Peapods inside peapods; five bedrooms. The plumbing’s tricky but it works most of the time.

  I rent our apartment at five hundred bucks a summer to American university professors doing research in Paris. This almost pays the year’s rent. We’re down at our rugged, ragged stone water mill summers anyway.

  That’s the way it goes. Christ, if you’re an artist with five kids, two already away at American universities, you have to figure something, somehow. It’s how I make my rat-nesting instincts pay off; me the slum landlord of Paris.

  I RAGTAG MY WAY THROUGH LIFE: BORN-

  AGAIN CRIPPLE: CURSED WITH SOMETHING

  EXTRA: A THIRD ARM GROWING BETWEEN

  MY EYES; BLOCKING THE VIEW; MAKING

  THE FEW SEEM MANY.

  Now, in this crazy book it might be easy to get the wrong idea about how my life is lived.

  I’m writing a lot about painting, about what happens out on the streets, but my real life, the one I live for, is home with Kate and our kids.

  I hardly ever paint past five o’clock, even in summer, and I never paint on Sundays. Lots of Sundays we go to one of the zoos—we all love animals—or we row in the Bois de Bologne or, more often, the lake at the Parc de Vincennes.

  I’m home for dinner almost every evening and while we eat we all share what we’re doing. I’m just not writing much about that part of my life here, maybe another book; no, I’ll never write another one, not enough time.

  Remember, above all, I’m the nester and this is my home nest. Don’t get confused by the flickerings or you’ll never understand this book, what it’s all about.

  II

  SELF-PORTRAIT

  Raining today: Paris has too damned much weather. I clean my box and set up for a self-portrait. I do one each year, usually in midwinter; good for winter glump, cheap emotion massage, gets the neurons hopping. I’m working in what used to be Tim’s bedroom before Annie went off to school and Tim took her room. It’s my mini-studio. Actually, I don’t need much space to paint.

  Self-portraits are by far the most interesting paintings. Just look at Tintoretto, Chardin, Rembrandt, even David. Active and passive simultaneously, body with a brain seeing a brain through a body; the eye painting the eye seeing the eye. There you have it what the painter is, what he’d like to be; the way he paints, the way he’d like to paint, all in the same place at the same time. Looking inside yourself must be the hardest—at the same time, the most rewarding—thing anyone can do.

  Take Rembrandt. Cocky at first, full of feathers, bearing down, concentrating like a fool, believing in it all. Then, slowly backing off, starting to wonder, letting the brush paint for him; he begins staring in the black hole; keeps painting straight to the end, kisses the wall, falls in; emptiness, the emptiness of a full moon.

  I’M SELF-UNSEEN; NEITHER HERE NOR

  THERE; AN INVISIBLE BODY-SHAPED HOLE

  IN SPACE; CONSTANTLY GETTING IN MY OWN WAY.

  I set up my mirror and stare into it. The urge to paint is coming on like a blush, catching me up, pulling me down. I struggle to hold in there. It must be a little bit like going crazy, this urge to paint, to fall through a brush.

  Actually, I love to paint anybody. The trouble is getting people to sit. When I ask, they act peculiar. Women think I have something else in mind. Nobody can believe somebody else might just really want to look at, listen to, talk with another person. Everybody’s alone, knowing they want something more, not knowing what it is, or how to have it. The overwhelming, final big mystery: joy.

  Practically all men cross their legs, fold their arms, maybe expect me to rip at their flies.

  After all, I am an artist. Men live such dumb lives anyway, continually defending their precious inviolability, their phony territory. Mostly they’re afraid somebody might just find out nobody’s home. They live in film sets like on Universal Studio lots, fancy façades, nothing behind, a front for the tourists.

  Generally, people seem to be getting more and more invisible, slipping around inside their stories. Even some women are turning slightly translucent; I can see through them against certain kinds of light. Or maybe I’m going people-blind; there’s hardly anybody around for me anymore. Could be I only need new glasses: thick, rose-colored; multifocal, with catalytic platinum frames.

  HOW TO AVOID A VOID? FIRST THERE WAS

  THE VOID, THEN THE WORD. THEN THE WORLD.

  IT JUST CURLED BACK ON ITSELF!

  Everything’s ready now. The box and a 25F canvas in front of me; palette set with earth colors, tarp, varnish. The mirror’s on my left. I paint best over my left shoulder, probably because I’m right-handed.

  THESE FIRST STROKES AGAINST WHITE:

  LIGHT FIGHTING; A SEDUCTION TO WHAT’S GOING

  TO BE AN OVERWHELMING OF WHAT WAS.

  In the mirror, I’m holding the brush in my left hand. I try to see myself as a left-handed painter, switch-painter, leadoff painter. No. That’s not me; ambidextrous I’m not. I never punch singles to the opposite field. I’m always swinging for fences and mostly striking out. Mirrors lie too. Lies reflecting lies into something we can almost believe. That is, if you’re a believer. We’re running out of believers: I believe.

  I try scrunching back on my haunches and staring. I’m a Russian sitting down before leaving on a trip; say a few prayers. Got to let this happen to me, get into the magic passive-active mood.

  I’m ready. I lean forward. I let go, fall into my private craziness, the insanity that keeps me sane.

  When I paint anybody, even me, I go a tiny bit berserk. I want something that can never be, probably isn’t meant to be. My easel’s set so I can see the model or the canvas, not both at once. Everything close; no secrets; we’re involved in a birthing, for better or worse.

  But this time the model’s the mirror, me. And I’m wanting the impossible, to get close to myself. It’s hard! I’m always twice the distance between my eye and the mirror. I know I’m there on the surface, but I seem to be in the distance. I lean close, closer, trying to see me, to crawl inside myself without touching.

  In a mirror, eyes are static; they don’t move. The mind blanks it out, a minor hysterical blindness. It gives self-portraits a stare, that and the painful concentration.

  HOW HARD CAN ONE LOOK? DOES LOOKING

  MAKE US BLIND TO SEEING?

  When I paint anybody else, we’re jam
med close: model, me, easel; a triangle, knees touching, wrapped into each other around my paint box. We need to get close or it’s only looking. And just looking is like counting, or measuring or describing—or, worse yet, estimating.

  There can be no sitting still. We’re not catching a moment; we’re trying to paint a lifetime, two lifetimes, all lifetimes, past, future, present. This isn’t a Polaroid instant camera click-whirrr-wait. We’re human beings making mistakes; jumping around in our loose, confining skins trying to make mistakes real, make them ours. Somehow, life must be caught in the paint, poured, forced, squeezed, seduced, transmuted into it; hard, hard, like labor-hard. Hard labor, over forty years of it now, and nothing’s really been born, only a series of miscarriages, abortions, anomalies.

  IN DIVERTED LINES THOUGHTS DISGUISE

  AND OPEN LANDED MINDS ARE PLOWED

  BY CROWS. SOWN, EATEN, SEEDED GRAIN.

  I’m drawing, trying to let it happen, at the same time doing it; establishing figure-ground relationships without thinking too much, not designing or composing. Part of what I am is how much space I take up, how and where, and I don’t know what the difference is anymore. It gets harder to sustain the illusion of importance in uniqueness, individuality.

  It’s much easier having another human being close to me, talking, yawning, smoking, nose-picking, staring at space, smiling, frowning, lifting eyebrows, twitching, sniffing, belching, more or less hiding farts, sneaking peeks at me; or the painting. These things slip through me into the painting, give it life, life not mine. It isn’t true creation but it’s the best somebody with outside plumbing can manage.

  It’s a kind of osmosis; people filter into me. I never look and paint at the same time; I paint in a dream, absorbing my models, being absorbed by them. They become the blood, cells, chemicals, electricity in my brain. They pass around in there, mix with me, my plus and minus ions, my personal hydrocarbon chains, chemical memory banks. There’s a wild churning; then it comes back down the nerves, along my arms into my fingertips and out through the brush. Out it pours, color and light being moved around by my brain, my body, my psyche, under my eyes; blurred by the model, somebody, not me, and feeding back, turning me on, symbiotic, back and forth; a bit cannibalistic, with Roman pagan feelings thrown in.

  BECOME ME. COME WITH ME.

  WE COME TOGETHER AND THEN

  WE ARE APART; A PART OF EACH,

  NEVER TO GO AGAIN.

  Each portrait must be a new person. It’s a new being growing from the mixing of another human with me. It’s a temporary marriage consummated, and the portrait is our child, a birth, a rebirth, second mutual coming.

  Compared to really having a baby, it’s like one of those old-time “radio re-creations” of baseball games before television days. The announcer would thump his pencil against the mike to simulate a hit, turn up some canned crowd noise, do an excited description of slides, tags, putouts. But it’s better than nothing. I try to live with it; without this slim hope I’m dead.

  SLOW-FOOTED, HEAVY WINGED, LATE TO

  STING, AUTUMN HARVEST BEE GATHERING

  FOR THE WINTER COMB AND THE SUN PASSES

  LOW ACROSS THE FADING SKY.

  I paint very traditionally; grind my own paints, size the linen a special way so there’s a flexibility to help with the dance of my brush. For me, working on canvas board or wood is like dancing in ski boots.

  I do a thin, double priming to attain just the right absorbent quality. I paint my underpainting with a personal medium, a combination of Lucite, varnish and linseed oil, then work with impasto wet-in-wet technique, followed by glazing and scumbling. I lean on all the usual tricks, plus some few I’ve invented myself.

  OUT OF DARKENED SKIES, A BEAM CUTS

  LIKE GLASS, DEFINING CLOUDS. I

  CLOSE MY EYES: BETTER THE KNOWN

  CONFINES OF AN EVEN DARKNESS.

  In our days, it’s hard to find schools teaching these things. Nobody seems to care enough. Everything’s only instant gratification, a veneer of the immediate visible result, without concern for permanence or even what passes for permanence. Sometimes I seriously think we might be living in a dark age of painting.

  The little I did learn as a painter I got by looking, reading or copying. Every morning for five years I went to the Louvre and climbed all over, inside, the good ones. I ate, drank Rubens, Titian, Rembrandt, Chardin, Velásquez, Goya, until they were a part of me, I was part of them. I’m closer to some of those long-dead people than I am to most of my today friends. These painters are very visible. Each was somehow desperate to be and struggling to become. They were part of their time but walked through it. They put themselves out into the future with everything they had. In them you find pain and joy blended into strength—real strength, not just muscle stuff. They tried to live in times not yet there.

  I’m still drawing. I’ve got to draw through to the painting. Drawing is turning space into volume, not just making lines. There’s actually no such thing as a line. Good drawing for a painter is showing where the paint must go and what it should do. It’s easy to get caught in drawing for itself, then have nothing left to paint; romancing until there’s no room, no space, no place for making love, an isolated unpainted unpaintable corner.

  DESCRIBING MAKES SLASHES, MINOR

  SCRATCHES IN STEEL WALLS OF OUR

  SEPARATENESS. WE ONLY MAKE THE

  IMPOSSIBLE MORE SO.

  Somebody watching me work can go mad. It’s like watching a tailor working carefully, with good material and fancy stitches, sewing up a coat with one arm longer than the other or with no neckhole.

  The point is, there’s no sense in imitating life, or representing it; it must be invented, imagined. This does not necessarily mean abstract or nonobjective objects or theatrical distortions or strained efforts at intellectual composition either. Those are the easy ways, avoidance systems. One needs to show life the way one sees it personally, the way it is felt.

  So, in the end, my own particular paintings come out a bit crooked in ten different directions. OK, so that’s the way I am. I struggle to show my personal reality, the only one I know. I try to paint it carefully with full attention and much love.

  GETTING LOST IN THE SPACES BETWEEN,

  A GENTLE LEANING TOWARD EACH OTHER.

  When I’m actually painting somebody, they see me staring, poking at the canvas with my brush, leaning in, backing off; I’m trying not to jump up and down. Once in a while I remember to smile. I want them to stay with me, not run away or disappear. Most people think I’m painting them. Actually, I’m painting the taste, the smell, the space they’re taking up. I’m trying to paint them all the way from fetus to corpse, and all in one moment, all in one place.

  They see me paint one ear too high or too red. The painting looks like Eisenhower or Uncle Jim in 1962, and they get nervous, restless. Sometimes they giggle, or laugh!

  God in heaven, this is a serious business: it’s a painting; I’m digging inside both of us and trying to put it in one place. We’re damned close to communication, a serious effort to glue things together.

  By the end of a painting I’m sweating down to my shoes, toes are squishing around in sweat pools. Did Rembrandt paint Hendrikje Stoffels the way she looked? Hell, in five different paintings she looks like five different people. She probably was, and he loved all of her. It’s the all of things that’s beautiful; a painter’s got to paint past the flickers, somehow. Or at least convince himself and a few other people that he has.

  BLEND A HUSHED WHISPER, A SKITTERING

  IN ONE CORNER; THE TASTE OF SMELL.

  I stand; go to the toilet. I sit down again and stare into the mirror some more. Haven’t actually been looking at myself enough lately; been looking at a memory. I know I’m a vain bastard but I never really look close except when I paint me. It’s as if I’m only checking my watch, checking to see how long it is till something, not looking to see what time it actually is; how much time I’ve spent, how much I mi
ght have left.

  I look at the old “visage.” It’s aging faster. There’s more sag in the eye sockets and dark purple-blue smudges, more veins breaking out in the cheeks. I look like a fatal terminal all right. It’s about time. God it’s hard to know when to give up and let yourself start dying.

  There’s practically no hair on top and the beard’s almost pure white. I rub some yellow ochre and black into the beard; gives about the right color. That looks better. A beard hides most of the ordinary muscle sag; terrific advantage. I wonder why women don’t have beards. Probably men needed them to absorb hard punches; men’ve been living the physical dominance stupidity a long time, women have maybe learned to take those socks and keep on with it. No hairy hidings.

  One thing, if women did grow beards, they sure as hell wouldn’t shave them off. They’d make something beautiful of them, the way they have with tits.

  I’M TRUE, SO ARE YOU AND SO WE

  LIE. BECAUSE, TO TELL THE

  TRUTH, WE BOTH LIE, YOU AND I.

  I get to work on the underpainting; transparents. I’m working fast with a big brush. It’s terrific doing self-portraits; only posing when I’m looking, nothing wasted. I’m into it.

  He twists his head, stares out the corners of his eyes: suspicious-looking bastard; gazes out as if he doesn’t want to look anymore; getting harder all the time. Put that in there, Scum, get that. If you’re not honest here, you’re nothing. But remember, always distrust professed honesty. It’s the ultimate con job.

  I’m laying me in down to the waist; maybe I’ll do the hands, put the brush in my right hand. I tone ground with burnt sienna, use a cloth for wiping in the main forms; work up shading and volume.