Living with Greatness

On living with paintings and Is Peter Van Dyck famous? 

Recently my son, Sam, asked me if his dad is a famous painter.  This was the second time he asked me this question, the first time being some few weeks ago; so he either forgot that he had asked me already, or else the question had for some reason so captivated him, and I had so failed in addressing it, that he must ask again.  I doubt that he forgot, and I am sure I did not (and do not) have a reasonable answer (A. “I doubt it” B. “not really” or C. “maybe to some people who like that kind of painting”) but mostly I was mystified by his interest.  I never even knew that he knew what famous was, and I certainly do not remember musing over any such a thing when I was seven.  My father was a preacher, and he had a local radio program on Saturday mornings, to which all we children were subjected, but I never wondered if my father were famous.  (He was not.) 

Sam was playing with the recent catalogues of Peter’s paintings when the possibility seems to have occurred to him.  When the catalogues came last spring for a show (it was just before everything shut down), Sam took a managerial shine to them and began distributing as many of them as his father could conscionably allow to school friends and teachers, who were no doubt perplexed at the gift.  (“No thanks!” said some friends brightly.)  This adorable exercise seemed to elicit from Peter simultaneous pangs of embarrassment and pride, as did the questions about his being famous. 

Considerations of fame are always embarrassing somehow, producing communal reflexive cringe.  We all seem to know on some intuitive level that it is unhealthy to want it-- at least, unhealthy to want it for its own sake.

I had not thought about this at all in between the times Sam asked me these questions, but I was able at least to contain my laughter the second time (not so able the first time) while I began to think his question over more seriously.  I should tell Sam thank you, I guess, or something, (maybe “gee, thanks a lot”) because now I cannot stop thinking about this.

What is this strange and embarrassing longing we have for attention?  Is it the same as a longing for greatness (whatever that is) or a longing to be known perhaps, or to be understood?  Or a longing to share?  What is the importance of showing or sharing one’s work?  Why do we care so much if someone else likes or dislikes our work?  Do we make works for ourselves or for others?  I said “we” and “our”, but is this just me wondering?  Why does not my child ask if his mother is famous, by the way?  And how much time should one waste lecturing a seven-year-old on the purported benefits and pitfalls of fame? 

This all coincided with the rehanging of pictures in our house (occasionally one must re-curate one’s own massive collection of unsold works) and, although Peter has since sold a lot of the paintings which were in that exhibit last spring, one of the show’s highlights is fortunately still unsold and in our collection, having barely survived purchase recently from one of Peter’s old friends, who took away instead one of my long-time favorite paintings of the house I grew up in.  (I have mixed feelings when they sell, of course.)  Peter ended up hanging this painting, called Bay Window Goggles, on the brick wall of our dining room.  It is a good-sized painting, three feet high by four feet wide, and commands the space, despite the visual contest given by the red bricks themselves, lively and sentimentally beautiful, upon which the painting hangs.  Coarsely put, it is a painting of the view from the bay window of our front room, so I now have two places in my house from which I may see this same view, begging the question, of course:  how is living with the painting of the window like or different from living with the window itself? 

I wonder how many people have had some similar experience of living with both a painting and with the subject of the painting.  I suppose it happens often with a commissioned portrait, but we tend to put portraits into a separate category.

When I spend time with this painting now, the completed work hanging on my dining room wall, it is not like when I was watching the painting being built, marveling and fretting and sighing far less for the beauty and for Peter’s dogged pursuit thereof than at the attendant mess (he has a studio!) and it is not like when I brushed hastily past his progressing painting in the studio, sideways glancing, en route up the stairs to my own studio (you would think I’d pay more attention); nor is it, of this I am sure, at all like when I leave my place at the dining table, walk the short distance down the hallway to our front room, go to that bay window, twist the blinds, and gaze idly at this same view from the actual window where Peter made the mess, over so many months, and with so little regard for my sanity.  For living with a painting is as little like living with its reference as it is like living with its reproduction, and to be honest, living with a painting is not that much like living with its painter either.  As much as it may give away about its maker and its subject, a painting is always its own thing, standing alone and on its own and by itself.  This is what makes it a work of art.

If I only had a dollar for every time a student had said to me, “I’m just trying to paint what it looks like…”  But how well I understand the sentiment!

Always I am lost in the mundane.  I may sit at my place at the dining table munching potato chips, drinking coffee, or drinking wine, (three of my favorite things) depending on the time of day, sometimes reading, sometimes playing; we spend so much time here, especially since the pandemic.  What is the experience I have here and how has the addition of this painting to this room managed to change my experience here so profoundly? 

Now a painting on the wall is surprising me. 

A great painting, if it is great, gives away much indeed, so many secrets, and so much love, making no secret about it.  This is the hardest thing to write about for it is not meant to be written about.  So grave and magical (but is it so serious?  Is Peter so serious?)  Like love, and like music, it skips and repeats in real time and must be experienced that way and along song lines as mundane and as beautiful as cold white window ledges, white in the light and blue in the shadow.  Peter has always been a good shape designer.  This painting, like others, is a symphony of shape and color.  I said “symphony”, but I want to say “rock n roll”, although it is true that that kind of energy, which dances close to the edge of disorder, may be found in all genres of music.  Peter’s painting is pattern pulled from chaos, syncopated, with the shapes still moving freely despite being called to order.  A large part of the lower left corner is given to a clear bright yellow triangle which brings that part of the window close.  This shape is so simple that I can move easily from there, up and in, to the window lock on the left window, a beautiful abstraction, disappearing and then reappearing, like a yin-yang symbol, from the dark rich blue and golden-brown of the street in shadow, a cosmos.  Who knew a simple and cheap window lock could be so elegant?  There are two more, making three of them, the absence of the fourth causing me to wonder for a moment if my own window were broken!  The resting place of the painting is the truly clear blue note of sky reflected in the window perfectly placed for an almost-pause in the shadow of the building across the street.  Almost, because the painting moves so much and is never truly still.  That blue window reflection sings in counterpart with the white reflection of the window directly across from me.  Back into my own house I retreat to contemplate the ceiling and then down and around and back out the window far out into the blue sky and finally to float down the neighboring street I know so well, for I have walked it so many times, now as fresh as it was familiar, and this time waving at the lovely purple house where the raucous parties used to happen every weekend before the pandemic.  This is live music, exalting the listener and the singer alike, and the viewer as the view.  As nice as a reproduction may be, it cannot possibly do the same thing as this. 

And what happens when I return to the actual window of the front room?  To check for the missing lock and for those exquisite air conditioner units in the windows across the street and for the place where the tree used to be, which has now been cut down, and for the colors and shapes and shadows?  Do I hear the music?  It’s true that something has happened here too, for the music echoes from the dining room, and answers back from the front room window and down the street I know so well and to the other streets I know less well and from there to the many other streets in the many other cities I know not at all where I might one day walk, remembering and singing Peter’s song.

This window or that one? 

I am feeling the painting to be a portal truly, a mystical transportation device which has been installed in the dining room.  It is doing something much more than taking me from the dining room to the front room, and it is far from being a simple reminder of the other window.  Where was Peter when he made the painting?  I know well the simple answer to that question, but the real answer is more complicated.  He was very much in our front room (I saw him!) in this very house, yet he was far away, some other place entirely. 

And that is what happens to me as I sit here with his painting.  I am contemplating the possibility of one place floating upon another or of one consciousness being in two places at once.  A great painting, like great music, delivers to us the wonderful experience of feeling at once thoroughly present and totally swept away. 

Perhaps the job of the Shaman was always to take us to a place…

What about fame?  I had a lot of questions.  Are we trying to carry others away with us in a great song and dance of agreement?  I think that may be at least part of it.  (and was not my father, the preacher, trying to do the same thing?)  Famous, or not, Bay Window Goggles, at least for now, if not for long, is great and is hanging in the dining room. 

Sam asked me this morning about a grey shape in the painting on the front of the catalogue, a painting made from the other window, the west-facing one, of our front room.  Was it a defect in the catalogue?  No, it is on all of them…I think it is a shadow…shall we go and look at the actual painting and ask dad?  Ah, but the painting has sold and is in our house no more. 

Peter Van Dyck, Bay Window Goggles (in situ), 36” x 48”

Peter Van Dyck, Bay Window Goggles, detail

Peter Van Dyck, Bay Window Goggles, detail

Peter Van Dyck, Bay Window Goggles, detail

parent portraits 2019

This statement was written for the Parent Portraits exhibition at Westbeth Gallery, NY, NY May-June 2019

If you are privileged (or perhaps unfortunate) enough to claim a close familial connection to an aspiring portrait artist, then you should know that at some point you will certainly be beholden to sit for that person.  It is a responsibility that parents and siblings of artists must accept, embrace, or endure, depending on your viewpoint, and it is a well-established tradition.  For students of portraiture, especially young students, availability is no doubt the number one quality one looks for in a sitter. 

While this role has also been assumed by close friends and lovers, siblings and parents by virtue of temporal and physical proximity have often had little say in the matter.  There are few ways to hide from a young and ambitious portraitist, at least one that you live with, who wants to practice on you.  I’m sure that my own mother, after birthing her eighth child at the age of 41, did not imagine in that moment that she would be adding to her countless other parental duties the job of portrait sitting, a job that would repeat many times. 

Parent portraits are interesting because they are atypical manifestations of a typical relationship, an irregular way to reflect on a bond which is regular to human experience.  In general, a painting provides an opportunity to meditate on a subject, both in the act of its creation and in the viewing of it after its completion.   Every act of painting provides an opportunity to test what one notices, pays attention to, cares about.  The painting is a kind of mindful rehearsal of one’s own personal experience.  In the case of parent portraiture, the relationship of painter to subject may be pronounced differently.  The relationship may be more the subject than the actual subject.  Viewing a painting of someone else’s mother might make me reflect on my relationship to my own mother.   This has happened to me recently.

A hypothesis I haven’t yet tested is that historically most paintings of parents were painted while the painter was young.  Freud and Mancini are notable exceptions.

My mother politely informed me a couple of paintings of her ago that she was no longer interested in sitting for me.  She wasn’t angry.  She has over the years taken the same kind of motherly interest in my painting that any mother might take in any of her child’s activities, the same kind of interest that might compel a parent to suffer a little league baseball game, for example.  Painting was never a particular interest of hers.  Her interest in my painting and her attendant parental responsibility to it, had simply expired.

I’ve met precious few folks in my experience who actually enjoy sitting.  Regardless of the pose and regardless of how easy it may look from the outside, sitting is always demanding, tiring, and sometimes just plain boring.  My mother’s expressed reluctance to sit did not surprise me, but it was disappointing nonetheless.  Firstly, I spend summers in Alabama for the primary purpose of being near her.  Secondly, I have only recently come to feel I might use a portrait sitting as an opportunity to visit with my sitter.  Because I might be concentrating, or frustrated, I would seldom, until recently, attempt to engage my sitter in a conversation while I was painting.  I might paint my sitter in stony silence, or while listening to music, to books, or podcasts (providing to them some relief) and in my mother’s case: while listening to sermons.  I’m not sure how many times I’ve painted or drawn my mother.  Mostly, I was still hoping one day to make a painting of her that I liked. 

If you ask her age, my mother will tell you she’s 19.  In actual regular-people years, she is 88.  Heartless declaration notwithstanding, as recently as last summer my mother offered to sit for me.  I had not asked.  I was generally musing that I needed a sitter so that I could think about what I wanted to do for an upcoming portrait class, and I think a motherly sense of responsibility kicked back in.  She did sit, and we did visit, and at last, I made a drawing of her that pleased me somewhat.  The painting in this show is from 2014 (I think).  I hope something of her spirit is suggested in her gesture and expression. 

A painter might long for many qualities in a sitter:  easy to be with, interesting to look at, interesting to talk to, reliable, cheap.  My mother, still available, is much more.  Thoroughly complex, at once loving and intensely individual, kind but powerfully present, simultaneously spiritual and physically energetic, my mother remains an elusive likeness. 

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Drawing of my mother, 2018, charcoal on paper, 22” x 30”