Ladders, Wild Beasts, and Aging...

Or how an aging painter ruminates on the surprise and shock of his own work

Now that my ladder’s gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

cf. “The Circus Animal’s Desertion” W.B. Yeats 1939

As an older painter, I’ve been ruminating about late-career studio work for many artists: what could easily yield a kind of predictability–but also aridity, creative-block, and the need to break out of well-established artistic ruts. (Especially if you’ve been moderately successful and have a marketable “style” or “look” to overcome.) If you’ve been at all successful, the necessity of making money becomes less pressing in “retirement” (do artists ever retire?). You’ve saved just enough or have some sort of pension and Social Security income… but you then more easily slide into a pattern of internal rather than external struggle. You have all the brushes and paints and canvas or paper, chisels, wood or stone that you need. You have a decent workspace, and you’ve established a discipline or ritual of studio practice. The lines have fallen in pleasant places as the saying goes. But you now find yourself periodically unmotivated. No one is pushing you to have an exhibition or pressing you to complete a commission on schedule.

You’ve entered a kind of rest–but maybe also an art desert.

Aging here in the United States is, at least for the privileged classes, all about leisure, rest and recreation–until such time as your body or brain begin to give out and you end up in nursing care. But artists generally don’t view their work as something they intend to leave off doing, no matter what kind of future they move toward. We keep making art because art making is not a luxury for us. It’s a necessity on par with physical exercise. Use it or lose it as athletes say. In one of Yeats’ very last poems “The Circus Animal’s Desertion” the poet laments the loss of belief in all his familiar tropes and symbols–his fantastical poetic landscape created over the course of his career–and feels that he is reduced to raw emotion and wandering amongst all the familiar human foibles–the rag and bone shop. His trained animals have broken out of their cages and abandoned him, and he is without means of artifice or escape. His ladder is gone.

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My graduate painting mentor, the American painter Philip Guston, is famous for having abandoned a successful career as a formal abstractionist at the top of his worldly acclaim. He left behind his vibrant so-called “abstract impressionist” canvases that were filled with woven brush marks and subtle oscillating color, and he plunged into strange, morose, apocalyptic images that were more Goya than Monet, more Kafkaesque storytelling than aesthetically pleasing explorations of distilled light and texture suitable for framing. My own work has, of late, taken a turn away from the aesthetically pleasing and more toward the darker range of feeling--falling over a precipice of sorts into a chasm of unknowing. I’ll admit to a certain bewilderment, and I have a hunch it’s about our current social chaos and increasing anomy.

Who would want to own these things? is the question I’ve begun asking myself as I leave the studio after a day’s work. I even literally shake my head in perplexity as I close the door on the workshop at the end of the workday. But something keeps me coming back or at least worrying these new images. And I mean worrying them as in pushing forward despite misgivings and puzzlement. What are they really about? What or whom are they for? Have I exhausted the gift that has accompanied me my whole life or has it metamorphosed into some macabre carnival? (As of this writing I am 73 and have been making art nonstop since before I entered first grade at Bethlehem Elementary School in Richmond, Virginia.) Unlike most people I’ve never not made art. Every little kid draws and paints and glues stuff and molds clay, messes around with crayons, cut-outs, and that sort of thing. Every little kid who is able and has the circumstances will make sandcastles or tree-forts if he or she is able.

But I’ve never stopped making stuff. Never grown up. To be completely honest, I never expected to be making these things at the beginning of my eighth decade. I’ll take any advice or comments and critique that’s out there. I’ve gotten some excellent feedback from my painter friend Ben Aronson, and my wife Meg has declared forcibly, “You’re supposed to make these things!” And I guess that should be enough.

Maybe it is.

In any case I’m still standing in the studio pushing paint around and experiencing surprise and even awe at times. Where do these images come from? To be continued… (that is, if anyone is uncorking this message in a bottle…)

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