Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  Figure 2 (2014, 84 × 92 in.)

  The ends of each element used to be sharper, and are now more curved; with a curving rather than sharp end, not only does the eye move more slowly as it traverses the painting, but the motion of the hand is also more apparent, and thus the hand itself is more obviously present.

  The elements were for some years, in the 1980s and early 1990s, horizontal and vertical. Now, and going back more than fifteen years, they are diagonal. The horizontal line can be a challenge because it often suggests landscape. Cote chose to free himself of that reference and work with the diagonal. The diagonal is inherently more unpredictable. It is alive, dynamic rather than static: there is more motion in it. “The painting has to have visual energy that is apparent. That visual energy is the necessity of a painting,” he says.

  Sometimes that motion is explosive, even dramatic, as in Figure 3, with grounds of different shades within a single panel, longer elements, and more insistent motion in one direction (if we see them moving left to right); sometimes it is quieter, more meditative, the elements floating up the canvas and toward the space above, beyond the limits of the painting; or across the canvas; or drifting down, as in Figure 4, with its shorter, relatively thicker elements, gentler colors, and random-seeming (not random in actuality, of course) placement on the ground. (Naturally, but also disconcertingly, one viewer will see motion up, and another down, in the same elements.) These diagonals, painted as they are, could be seen as a geometric gestures.

  Figure 3 (2009, 84 × 96 in.)

  The angles of their placement are sometimes steeper and sometimes flatter (i.e., more toward the vertical or more toward the horizontal): the elements in the white/blue-ground painting, Figure 5, are the most horizontal that Cote has done in many years. Most often, though not always, the elements are contained within the edges of the canvas, not touching the edges or moving off them either at the outer edges or at the center. Most often, each element is separate from the others, moving independently, though it is subtly associated with a finite number of others by the sharing of tone or color.

  The elements are usually arranged in equal numbers on the two panels, but not always. In Figure 1, with its orange/orange grounds, for instance, a different balance is achieved: the elements on the right panel are twice as long as elements on the left panel, but half in number. In Figure 2, darker yellow/lighter yellow, they are asymmetrical in number but achieve balance through the fact that the smaller number of elements have greater optical radiance.

  Figure 4 (2013, 70 × 100 in.)

  Thus, what changes from one painting to the next, besides the overall dimension of the painting and the colors of the grounds, are the numbers and sizes of the elements, their placement on the canvas, their orientation, and, of course, their colors and tones.

  Another constant is Cote’s manner of applying the paint that will form the ground: in many layers, but thin, even, and flat, rather than textured. Cote prepares the canvas by applying three coats of gesso before applying three or four coats of ground. What might seem a mechanical activity serves a purpose, which is to give him a deeply assimilated sense of the size, and the dimensions, of each panel. Cote’s intention is that the paint should not call attention to itself, as it would in a more thickly applied, textured surface. His aim is to avoid that distraction—toward texture, toward the paint, toward the gesture, toward the history of applying the paint—from his primary concern, which is attention to color and tone. Cote’s primary interest is in color, along with placement; and the activity of the drawn in relation to the activity of the color. He is interested in the energy in color, and in realizing that energy, the life that is in color. What is its life? Its life is the emotion it conveys, since it is not serving to depict something. Although his paintings are not figurative, not about phenomena, do not depict things in the world, they are nevertheless about human relations and emotions, via the life and energy in color itself.

  What occurs in the process of developing the painting is this: in his preliminary drawings, which are done on a small scale and without color, and then through his color studies, which go through many changes before resolving in decisions about the placement and color of the elements, Cote finds an initial, working “solution” to the “problem” posed beforehand by the painting; he evolves an idea of what the painting will be; and he decides on the colors, tones, and placement of the elements in the painting—how to relate what is behind (that is, the ground) to what is in front (that is, the elements). He finds certain directions he wants the painting to take. This is done intuitively; he gravitates toward certain relations of color and tone.

  Then, as he actually engages in painting it, the painting once again opens itself to question; the painting changes, becomes active in determining its own evolution, refuses certain solutions, suggests others, evolves in unexpected directions. It grows from his observation of it, not from something outside of it. Cote thus works his way from the known into the unknown, and the painting, as a result, is new to him, a new presence. Even as he works with a set of choices similar to those of previous paintings, the painting must be, he says, a painting he has never done before. At the same time, he is working from disorder, in the process of the exploration, to order, in the finished outcome. “Logic should allow for illogic within it,” he says.

  What does not change, within the process of creating the painting, is the color of each ground, once determined, and the size and positioning of the elements on the ground. What does change, over days and weeks, is the color and/or the tone of the elements. By organizing the placement of the elements beforehand, he allows for freedom in his use of color and tone. In some paintings, as in Figure 3, the differences among the colors or tones of the elements are obvious; in others (for instance, Figure 5, red, white, and blue), the elements on the two panels contain the same colors, yet because the grounds are different, the colors of the elements also appear to be different. Or, in one panel of a given painting, though not in the other—as in the right-hand panel of Figure 4—the difference in tones of the elements may be almost imperceptible at first (especially in reproduction, but even in the presence of the painting itself) and then gradually become more and more conspicuous the longer one continues to look, until it seems as obvious, in the end, as it was hard to perceive in the beginning. (But, Cote points out, you don’t have to know the colors are the same; you just have to experience what effect this has on you.)

  As the painting evolves, then, the color and/or tone of the elements changes; and in fact, in consequence, the ground itself, though its color and tone are not touched again once they have been applied, also changes in response to the changes in colors and tones of the elements applied on it. In some sense, all the preparation of the drawn elements and the colors of the grounds is done in preparation for then altering color and tone within the elements, to create the relationship between the elements and the grounds, and also, more surprisingly, between the two grounds. For each ground itself is active in the painting, its activity determined by the elements on the surface. Conversely, Cote may establish symmetry in the different aspects of the painting, through sequences and sets of numbers, and then has the option of unbalancing it through the colors he puts on the elements. The painting, in the end, because of the particular use of color and tone, may feel unbalanced, working against the symmetry supplied by the drawn elements.

  Most complex, then, is this question of balance, the relation of symmetry and asymmetry in the paintings, the interplay of different kinds of balance between the numbers of elements, their sizes, and their colors. The two-panel structure itself implies, as a premise, a concern with balance, and the symmetry or asymmetry of the elements continues and complicates the preoccupation with balance.

  * * *

  To look at balance or symmetry in a little more detail, we may follow what is happening within a single painting. In the white/blue-ground painting with red-orange elements, Figure 5, Cote worked from a series of decisions—
about the horizontality of the diagonals, about the ground color choices of dark blue and pure white, about the length of the elements. These particular diagonals appear almost horizontal. The lengths of the elements are the same on both panels: there are two sets of four each, with what seems like an “off” middle between the sets. There are three “spines”: one implied vertical in the middle of each panel and one physical vertical where the two panels meet. Each set of four elements within each panel is of four different colors, but those colors repeat within each panel, though reversed in order: 4321 and 1234. The elements are asymmetrical in position, but symmetrical in number and color. They are deep in tone because the blue ground is deep in tone: the tones of the red-oranges need to be deep in order to be in the right relation to the deep blue, for us to sense that they have an attachment to the blue. (On a scale of 1 to 10, in depth, the elements would be a 7 or 8.) The interaction of the elements and the grounds is contrapuntal: the blue comes to the red-oranges; the blue gives to the red-oranges and the red-oranges give to the blue at the same time as they set up an opposition to it. The white ground separates from the elements, pushes them out toward us, whereas the blue ground magnetizes the red-orange elements, so that they relate chromatically to it. They therefore relate both chromatically and contrapuntally.

  Because of the arrangement of the drawn elements, those on the blue ground appear to rise from the implied vertical between the two sets of four, whereas those on the white side appear to descend from the implied vertical. The ends of the elements on the left are tapered one way, the ends of the elements on the right are tapered the other way.

  Figure 5 (2014, 40 × 92 in.)

  * * *

  Cote works with contrasts and oppositions: the balance of planned versus intuitive or spontaneous; of disorder evolving into order, of measured versus rough, of ground and elements; of simplicity (of parts) versus complexity (of the whole).

  The formal constraints are privately imposed; the results are then public.

  So it is within these repeated constraints that Cote explores what can be done—and perhaps the possibilities are infinite—with depth versus surface, with activity, dynamism, symmetry, asymmetry, balance, motion versus stasis, motion into and out from the canvas, motion up and down the canvas, convexity versus concavity of the painting, motion of the elements versus the ground, prominence of the elements versus the ground, using simple factors to create a complex work, and more.

  Viewers find the paintings electric. Some find that a painting appears convex, the middle coming out toward them: they walk up to the painting to make sure. Some viewers see the elements moving up, while others see them moving down, moving quickly or slowly. A painting of his has no particular narrative meaning or message, says Cote. You don’t read it; you work on it visually. You have to look at it over time. You have to want it.

  It is like music, he says: We accept sound; are we willing to accept color—the way things look? That is harder. We are used to accepting music—it has always been abstract.

  2014

  WRITERS (2)

  “Emmy Moore’s Journal” by Jane Bowles

  Many of Jane Bowles’s typical superb narrative characteristics are evident in just the first two pages of this small story: the clear and forceful narrating voice; the odd female protagonist; the humor arising from this eccentric protagonist’s worldview; her obviously tenuous hold on “reality”; the inevitable distinct and funny secondary characters (here, the “society salesman” whom the narrator has “accosted” in the Blue Bonnet Room); the pathos of the main character’s valor, disorientation, and ultimate defeat.

  A closer look, tracing the progress of the story over just these two pages, sentence by sentence, shows the following shifts: The story opens without prologue or preamble, with a clear and plain declaration in simple, forceful language, by a strong first-person voice: “On certain days I forget why I’m here.” Already, we experience this narrator as emphatic but not quite in this life or not quite competent. In the second sentence, we sense a certain insecurity: “Today once again I wrote my husband all my reasons for coming.” The fact of her introducing him as “my husband,” instead of by his name, suggests that she wishes to stress his role in relation to her rather than his unique individual identity in a larger public world. In the third sentence, her reliance on him (“He encouraged me to come”) as well as her insecurity (“each time I was in doubt”) is further stressed. She hesitates, he urges. In these first three sentences, we haven’t yet seen any sign of the humor that is almost omnipresent in Bowles’s writing. In the fourth sentence, it appears: first, along with a reiteration of her husband’s authority, there is the oddity of the faux-clinical phrase “state of vagueness”: “He said that the worst danger for me was a state of vagueness.” Then comes the name of the hotel, so prosaic, so deliberately flat or unromantic (for a hotel): “so I wrote telling him why I had come to the Hotel Henry.” (Compare her naming of Camp Cataract, in her short story of the same name.) Still in the same sentence, there is then a third moment of humor: “—my eighth letter on this subject.”

  But with that statement, something else has crept in. The narrator is declaring that she is writing to her husband for no less than the eighth time about why she has come to the Hotel Henry. Since this is unarguably many more times than would seem necessary to anyone else, it suggests that the narrator is someone obsessed, or highly anxious, perhaps neurotic, perhaps even seriously disturbed. The fourth sentence is not yet over, though, and now the tone changes: “but with each new letter I strengthen my position.” With this change in tone comes another moment of humor, arising from the disproportion between the language used by the narrator, which might be that of diplomacy or international relations, and the subject: why she has come to the Hotel Henry. The new tone is one of sudden self-confidence.

  Now the long paragraph continues in the same confident tone, which evolves, even, to sound a note of defiance: “Let there be no mistake. My journal is intended for publication.” And develops, further, into the heroic, now colored by delusions of grandeur: “I want to publish for glory, but also in order to aid other women”—the choice of the lofty aid over the more common help enhancing, with a single word, the suggestion that the protagonist has unrealistically high ambitions. (Compare, in “Camp Cataract,” this wonderful bit of dialogue: “‘Not a night fit for man or beast,’ [Harriet] shouted across to Sadie, using a voice that she thought sounded hearty and yet fashionable at the same time.”)

  The paragraph then relaxes a bit, rambling on with some disjointed information about her husband, his knowledge of mushrooms, herself, her physical attributes, her Anglo stock (“Born in Boston”), and some incoherent generalizations about “the women of my country.” Eventually the narrator trails off altogether, lapsing into uncertain, repetitive speculations about Turkish women and their veils.

  Typically, given the skewed hierarchies of Bowles’s characters, the event with the best possibilities for some drama is tossed away within a parenthesis at the end of the second page: “(written yesterday, the morrow of my drunken evening in the Blue Bonnet Room when I accosted the society salesman).” The subject of drink will reappear in a deadpan, touchingly simple statement later in the story: “When I’m not drunk I like to have a cup of cocoa before going to sleep. My husband likes it too.” As for the unfamiliar term society salesman, it will be defined through the unfolding of the story—although the incident will not be fully narrated—and the man himself, an exceptionally wealthy department-store clerk, will soon be described with Bowles’s typical vivid precision and ear for the percussive possibilities of English as “a man with a lean red face and reddish hair selling materials by the bolt.”

  Jane Bowles’s half-unworldly, off-kilter heroines are of course versions of aspects of herself, in her troubled course through an often flamboyant or exotic bohemian life to her end in a clinic in Spain, where, weakened by alcoholism and a previous stroke, she died in May 1973, at the ag
e of fifty-six, soon after, in fact, writing “Emmy Moore’s Journal.” It may be too easy to say with hindsight, but the bleak return to the bottle at the end of the story—really, the story’s bleakness throughout—seems to announce Bowles’s imminent capitulation in her decades-long struggle with the challenges of her life, which included many episodes of manic-depressive psychosis, and of her writing, which was hard won from severe and recurring writer’s block. Back in 1967, John Ashbery called her “one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language.” Although she is still considered one of the best by many contemporary writers and readers, she remains stubbornly underrecognized.

  2012

  Osama Alomar’s Very Short Tales in Fullblood Arabian

  Osama Alomar, a young Syrian writer who has been living here in the United States for the past five years, belongs at once to several different important literary traditions. Most immediately evident are two: that of the writer in exile, either voluntary or involuntary, from his own country and culture; and that of the writer of very short stories.

  The plight of a writer who has an established reputation in his own country, and none at all here in his adopted country, is a plight shared, of course, with immigrants of other professions, including, for instance, the Puerto Rican lawyer who leaves a thriving practice on the island to manage a small grocery store in Cambridge, Massachusetts; or the Jewish scholar or physician who flees Nazi Germany to work in a textile factory in New York. It involves the profoundly disturbing change in his identity in this new world, and often in his own eyes. His identity in his new community is, in a sense, an involuntary disguise; and he faces the challenge of holding his two identities in balance, adjusting himself to the new, keeping alive the old. Alomar left a culture in which his prizewinning fiction and poetry had been published in four collections to date, appeared regularly in literary journals, was shared out loud with appreciative others in convivial living-room gatherings. By contrast, his writing is known here to only a few. How fortunate, then, that with the publication of Fullblood Arabian he will begin to find an audience in the United States and in the larger Anglophone culture.