The Colorman (28 page)
Rain pushed James out.
His letter and the paints for her were his forgiveness.
THE END
Whiteness (is)...the emblem of many touching, noble thingsâthe
innocence of brides, the benignity of age ... among the Red Men of
America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest
pledge of honor...âH
ERMAN
M
ELVILLE
W
hite, of course, is not really a color, but neither is it the lack of color. White is all colors. What our eyes and brain perceive as white is really all parts of the visible spectrum reaching our eyes in the same quantity.
White is pure and innocent, white is unnerving and dead. White is open and inclusive; it is the white light of acceptance and forgiveness, and it is the face of fear, ghosts and skeletons. It can represent surrender or an offering of peace. It can also represent the worst kind of hatred when worn (pointy) head to foot. White has no allegiance, more slippery even than black; it slides around meaning and representation while tempting artists despite its poison. Always the biggest tube in the paintbox, white varies in quality, covering power and texture significantly. Many artists continue to use Lead White despite its dangers, since for them, the way lead white moves, how it clings to the brush, holds the stroke, its perfect degree of translucency, the way it takes other pigmentsâall of these are what painting, what doing art,
is
for them. Asking them to switch to a safer material is like asking Dizzy Gillespie to find another instrument. It's just not at issue.
In 1952, John Cage created the astonishing 4'33'', a musical composition built entirely of silence, in response to Robert Rauschenberg's controversial White Paintings of the year before. Of course, Rauschenberg wasn't the first or last to worship white in this way. Malevich's Suprematist paintings were made in 1919, and Robert Ryman has been well known for his work in white since the fifties. But however tempting, it is misleading to read art only through time as though appearing next means anything other than context and behind-the-scenes intrigue. Art is not science after all, it is not about linear “advances,” however art historians would convince us otherwise. Art is only tangentially about technology. “To Whom It May Concern:” Cage wrote dismissively. “The white paintings came first, my silent piece came later.”
The more memorable description he gave of the white paintings was this: “The white paintings were airports for the lights, shadows and particles.” He evoked Plato's famous metaphor of the cave, where human beings were bound prisoners whose lives were lived entirely through watching shadow play on a wallâendlessly naming the forms that they saw there. Socrates asked us to imagine what would happen if a prisoner, not convinced that the shadows were reality, broke free to the outside world. How impossible it would be for the escapee to reenter the cave and convince those left behind of what he had seen.
It is all in the light. Socrates saw that; Rauschenberg saw that. It is all right there in our full spectrum white light. How remarkable that Socrates presages media, the puppet-world of celebrity, the little boxes of shadowplay on which we follow them, and the impossibility of reconciling the things we don't know yet to the things that are right in front of us. Being blinded, paradoxically, might sometimes be the only way we can begin to see
The eye is not a camera, after all, the retina is not film, though they are so often compared. When all the rods and cones are stimulated to the same degree, the resulting sensation in the brain is white. This might explain why a white light is so often reported by those in near-death experiences. Perhaps all the senses, not just the visual ones, are flooded with stimulus at that moment. Perhaps death is not an absenting, but a welling up.
Maybe the body and our flawed mushy sense organs, which string time and experience out into their illusion of variety, are all at once freed from such a stricture, and the soul at that first blinding moment perceives just undifferentiated whiteness. Everything all at once, all here, all now.
...And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling
,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there was to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulateâbut there is no competitionâ
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
â T.S. Eliot
An opening at Harris/Gelfman gallery in Chelsea. Large formal portraits of young women standing in front of moody Hudson River landscapes, a slash of train tracks are always in view somewhere in the frame. The figures are life-sized and hold bottles of Budweiser with car keys dangling from their fingers, or they cradle bottles of prescription drugs, tiny glass pipes, lighters, mysterious bunched aluminum foil and spoons. Small details spell out the tragedy or signal possibility and hope. A clear plastic key chain ornament spells M-O-M and is lined with a scribbling of bright crayon. A torn open envelope dangles from a hand from child protective services. A silver NA coin with “30” imprinted on it. And in every portrait, the vestiges of hope in the clear depth of the expression on the subject's face. It's like the artist is trying to save them by preserving that hope each by each.
Displayed under glass is Rain's box of Highland Morrow paints in their hand-made tubes and bottles. It is well used, but still quite abundant. Alongside the box are two small wooden crates of one-of-a-kind Highland Morrow paints. Morrow:
Bone White
is imprinted in the wood on one of them and Morrow:
Caput Mortuum
is stamped on the other. A hand-lettered card dedicates these ultimate and irreplaceable materials to Rain Morton, to art and to the future, and is signed James Morrow.
First and foremost I thank my husband Seth Gallagher for his love and his tireless belief in me, and my children Ronan and Freya for their love and patience. For me, you are the whole wide world and everything that's in it.
I am so grateful to Chis Sulavik for his passionate love of books, story and the written word, and for his granting that energy and fervid belief onto me and
The Colorman
. And thanks to the brilliant and reckless Amanda Tobier, for her help and expertise.
I thank Patricia Willens for her faith in me, and for putting the seed to the earth. Patricia, along with my other college roommates, Nina Livingston, Mallory Polk and Christine Yeh, have been an ongoing and powerful influence. I thank them each for generously bringing their intelligence, boundless love and specifically varied perspectives on the world to me.
In many ways I wrote this book for the artists in my family: my mother Austine Comarow, my sister Cara Ginder and her husband Bob Ginder. My mother is not only an artist, but an inventor and an innovator, and my thanks to her is woven all through this book. This story began in Bob's loving worship of the deluxe box of Windsor and Newton paints he won in a painting competition, and was fueled by nights in his and Cara's studios in their loft in Tribeca and later in their home on the Hudson River. No amount of thanking could begin to reach what they are to me and how fortunate I feel to have them near. I thank my beloved late grandmother Terry Dintenfass, the art dealer, who introduced me to New York and taught me to live as though I were looking back on it all. My thanks go to my brother Andreas Wood and his wife Clea Montville, artists in film and theater, who have always been so encouraging and inspirational to me. To my father John Wood, an astronomer and optics engineer who taught me through his great love of science that light is the medium that describes everything: thank you. Thank you also to my stepmother Marika Wood, whose dedication to art and to all that is intellectual is unsurpassed, and to my stepfather David Comarow for dedicating his life to his belief in my mother's artwork, and for bringing it out into the world.
I want to thank my hometown for being such a draw for the most interesting people in the world. I am so privileged to find one fascinating and close friendship after another here among artists, musicians, writers, photographers, filmmakers, firefighters, gardeners and chefs. My first loves of grown-up life, Anne Symmes and Steve Ives have that rare and quite telling habit of shining their bright lights onto their friends and colleagues. They have been as close and as intimately supportive as any tight family during the years I have known them, and they were among my first readers; I thank them for their encouragement, love and enthusiasm. I also thank Patty Donohue, Larry Quintiliani and Kristen Sorenson for being deeply sympathetic sounding boards during key periods of working on this book. And to my panel of experts, Kim Conner, John Plummer, Dwight Garner, David Rothenberg and George Saunders: thank you helping me through the tough parts.
A huge thank you to Jean Marzollo, my mentor and a powerful poet, educator and artist. Her generosity, advice and support have been invaluable through this adventure.
Heartfelt thanks to Donald McRae the author, for his unparalleled support and friendship. To Nick Tobier, the artist, early shaper of my experience of art and a great friend for many years: thank you. And I thank art dealer/curator Eric Stark for giving me some of the most intense encounters of art-seeing I've ever undergone, and for generously opening his experience in the art world and in life to me.
I thank John Paine for his insightful rearrangements. Thanks to Emily Church, Isabella Piestrzynska, Nicole Ellul, Heather Marshall, and Spencer Gale for their hard work on behalf of this book. And thanks to Kathleen Lynch, the artist who created the beautiful cover for The Colorman.
I dedicate this book to all artists out there, in all media, of all degrees of exposure, most especially none. Dar Williams put it best: early on in her performing life, she says, she realized with no small degree of awe that audiences “actually want you to succeed,” and that this realization can be the source of great courage when pursuing something that makes most of us so vulnerable. May you all recognize and embrace the encouragement and support that is out there for you, and thank you Dar for helping me see mine!
Finally I thank John and Susie Allison, my cultural muses, my security blankets, my partners-in-crime. What they do for me is just like what a great vol eybal player does to the bal . That subtle but firm, delicate springing set, boosting you gently but powerfully up until you're perfectly poised for blast-off. Their help has been more than just psychological; I used their house as a writing studio and John Ray was the very first gentle reader of this novel.
The authors of the most fantastic books about pigment, art and color after Cennino Cennini: Philip Ball (
Bright Earth
), James Elkins (
What Painting Is
) and Victoria Finlay (
Color
). Thank you for bringing such a fascinating and mysterious subject to life.
Jamie B., the pigment chef at Art Guerra, New York.
Winsor and Newton for their magisterial and luxurious oil paints.
Natural Pigments and George O'Hanlon, the real colorman of Mendocino County.
www.naturalpigments.com
Scott Burdick and Susan Lyon for their amazing oil portraits, and their beautiful and generous website:
www.burdicklyon.com
Artist Tad Spurgeon and his amazingly thorough site about painting, paint and color:
www.tadspugeon.com
Erika Wood
Cold Spring, NY
July 2009
