When I was in art school I wrote poems about autumn and my
feet.
Its autumn now and I’m living in the same exact
neighborhood. I walk the sidewalks
and absorb the nameless colors of the pavement stones, the cement, the bark of
trees and the drift of fallen leaves.
There are hills that lend geographical meaning to my walks, even if
there seems to be a destination and a prize (a ladder, a lunch, a new
sketchbook), the actual volume of the land has far more weight than any
excursion’s impulse. The untethered
quality of my body is exaggerated because my equilibrium is broken. I move through the streets as though
hydroplaning. Exactness doesn’t seem
desperately precious until it departs.
So much is possible and unwritten that I lean into the
ghosts that occasionally accompany me.
They, of course, can only offer furry warmth. It is not nothing, but it isn’t related to the manipulation
of the days. It is a back blow
glow of love. It is definitely
something because it is what I have lost in the real time of this
dimension. But I cannot access it
in a retinal, tactile way. I
cannot hear their voices. It is
the autumn of intuition; it is the autumn of the cracked heart. Radar is off, sonar is down and the
stride of my feet is unpredictable.
When I wrote of my feet I was interested in what a month of
walking barefoot in Brooklyn had done to my souls and heels. Ridiculous or not I remember it with
nostalgia for the strange, dreamy focus of an 18 year old trying to be an
artist. The searing energy of that
time propelled me buoyantly and haphazardly forward. My lack of finesse and discernment was melded with a
hypnotic ability to focus visually, and to work. I made lots of bad paintings, lots of silly drawings. But there were some gems that fell,
fairytale-like from my frog-spewing hand.
It was gloriously unedited and overseen only by the impulse to move my
hand across a piece of paper or canvas.
I drew all the time and everywhere. I drew on the subway; I drew the ballet classes at Julliard
when the Royal Ballet from London was in town, always hoping that Nureyev would
show up. I drew in Eric’s, the
local bar---you could drink at 18 then.
I drew sitting in the hallway in front of my dorm room. I painted everything that seemed paint
worthy, which in my case was figurative, dream imagery. Only later did I try to be more of an
abstract, even minimalist artist.
An interesting phase in which I painted and drew fields of color with
odd, X-marks-the-treasure-spot scribbles, occasionally words. That didn’t last and I returned to the
creation of spaces and unfinished narratives. I relinquished monochromatic and grey tones for the
world of intense color. My crazy,
shoeless self was back.
And so, here again on the same sidewalks, although the
neighborhood is vastly changed, there is still a lingering sense of those
cracked feet. Can I find that
ruthless propulsion into image making without the barefoot month? This is perhaps a question for my
ghosts.
