William Wharton - Scumbler

I set up my mirror and stare into it. The urge to paint is coming on like a blush, catching me up, pulling me down. I struggle to hold in there. It must be a little bit like going crazy, this urge to paint, to fall through a brush.

Actually, I love to paint anybody . The trouble is getting people to sit. When I ask, they act peculiar. Women think I have something else in mind. Nobody can believe somebody else might just really want to look at, listen to, talk with another person. Everybody’s alone, knowing they want something more, not knowing what it is, or how to have it. The overwhelming, final big mystery: joy.

Practically all men cross their legs, fold their arms, maybe expect me to rip at their flies.

After all, I am an artist. Men live such dumb lives anyway, continually defending their precious inviolability, their phony territory. Mostly they’re afraid somebody might just find out nobody’s home. They live in film sets like on Universal Studio lots, fancy façades, nothing behind, a front for the tourists.

Generally, people seem to be getting more and more invisible, slipping around inside their stories. Even some women are turning slightly translucent; I can see through them against certain kinds of light. Or maybe I’m going people-blind; there’s hardly anybody around for me anymore. Could be I only need new glasses: thick, rose-colored; multi-focal, with catalytic platinum frames.

HOW TO AVOID A VOID? FIRST THERE WAS

THE VOID, THEN THE WORD, THEN THE WORLD.

IT JUST CURLED BACK ON ITSELF!

Everything’s ready now. The box and a 25F canvas in front of me; palette set with earth colors, turp, varnish. The mirror’s on my left. I paint best over my left shoulder, probably because I’m right-handed.

THESE FIRST STROKES AGAINST WHITE:

LIGHT FIGHTING; A SEDUCTION TO WHAT’S GOING

TO BE. AN OVERWHELMING OF WHAT WAS.

In the mirror, I’m holding the brush in my left hand. I try to see myself as a left-handed painter, switch-painter, leadoff painter. No. That’s not me; ambidextrous I’m not. I never punch singles to the opposite field. I’m always swinging for fences and mostly striking out. Mirrors lie too. Lies reflecting lies into something we can almost believe. That is, if you’re a believer. We’re running out of believers: I believe.

I try scrunching back on my haunches and staring. I’m a Russian sitting down before leaving on a trip; say a few prayers. Got to let this happen to me, get into the magic passive-active mood.

I’m ready. I lean forward. I let go, fall into my private craziness, the insanity that keeps me sane.

When I paint anybody, even me, I go a tiny bit berserk. I want something that can never be, probably isn’t meant to be. My easel’s set so I can see the model or the canvas, not both at once. Everything close; no secrets; we’re involved in a birthing, for better or worse.

But this time the model’s the mirror, me . And I’m wanting the impossible, to get close to myself. It’s hard! I’m always twice the distance between my eye and the mirror. I know I’m there on the surface, but I seem to be in the distance. I lean close, closer, trying to see me, to crawl inside myself without touching.

In a mirror, eyes are static; they don’t move. The mind blanks it out, a minor hysterical blindness. It gives self-portraits a stare, that and the painful concentration.

HOW HARD CAN ONE LOOK? DOES LOOKING

MAKE US BLIND TO SEEING?

When I paint anybody else, we’re jammed close: model, me, easel; a triangle, knees touching, wrapped into each other around my paint box. We need to get close or it’s only looking. And just looking is like counting, or measuring or describing – or, worse yet, estimating.

There can be no sitting still. We’re not catching a moment; we’re trying to paint a lifetime, two lifetimes, all lifetimes, past, future, present. This isn’t a Polaroid instant camera click-whirrr-wait. We’re human beings making mistakes; jumping around in our loose, confining skins trying to make mistakes real, make them ours. Somehow, life must be caught in the paint, poured, forced, squeezed, seduced, transmuted into it; hard, hard, like labor-hard. Hard labor, over forty years of it now, and nothing’s really been born, only a series of miscarriages, abortions, anomalies.

IN DIVERTED LINES THOUGHTS DISGUISE

AND OPEN LANDED MINDS ARE PLOWED

BY CROWS. SOWN, EATEN, SEEDED GRAIN.

I’m drawing, trying to let it happen, at the same time doing it; establishing figure-ground relationships without thinking too much, not designing or composing. Part of what I am is how much space I take up, how and where, and I don’t know what the difference is anymore. It gets harder to sustain the illusion of importance in uniqueness, individuality.

It’s much easier having another human being close to me, talking, yawning, smoking, nose-picking, staring at space, smiling, frowning, lifting eyebrows, twitching, sniffing, belching, more or less hiding farts, sneaking peeks at me; or the painting. These things slip through me into the painting, give it life, life not mine. It isn’t true creation but it’s the best somebody with outside plumbing can manage.

It’s a kind of osmosis; people filter into me. I never look and paint at the same time; I paint in a dream, absorbing my models, being absorbed by them. They become the blood, cells, chemicals, electricity in my brain. They pass around in there, mix with me, my plus and minus ions, my personal hydrocarbon chains, chemical memory banks. There’s a wild churning; then it comes back down the nerves, along my arms into my fingertips and out through the brush. Out it pours, color and light being moved around by my brain, my body, my psyche, under my eyes; blurred by the model, somebody, not me, and feeding back, turning me on, symbiotic, back and forth; a bit cannibalistic, with Roman pagan feelings thrown in.

BECOME ME. COME WITH ME.

WE COME TOGETHER AND THEN

WE ARE APART; A PART OF EACH,

NEVER TO GO AGAIN.

Each portrait must be a new person. It’s a new being growing from the mixing of another human with me. It’s a temporary marriage consummated, and the portrait is our child, a birth, a rebirth, second mutual coming.

Compared to really having a baby, it’s like one of those old-time ‘radio re-creations’ of baseball games before television days. The announcer would thump his pencil against the mike to simulate a hit, turn up some canned crowd noise, do an excited description of slides, tags, putouts. But it’s better than nothing. I try to live with it; without this slim hope I’m dead.

SLOW-FOOTED, HEAVY-WINGED, LATE TO

STING, AUTUMN HARVEST BEE GATHERING

FOR THE WINTER COMB AND THE SUN PASSES

LOW ACROSS THE FADING SKY.

I paint very traditionally; grind my own paints, size the linen a special way so there’s a flexibility to help with the dance of my brush. For me, working on canvas board or wood is like dancing in ski boots.

I do a thin, double priming to attain just the right absorbent quality. I paint my underpainting with a personal medium, a combination of Lucite, varnish and linseed oil, then work with impasto wet-in-wet technique, followed by glazing and scumbling. I lean on all the usual tricks, plus some few I’ve invented myself.

OUT OF DARKENED SKIES, A BEAM CUTS

LIKE GLASS, DEFINING CLOUDS. I

CLOSE MY EYES: BETTER THE KNOWN

CONFINES OF AN EVEN DARKNESS.

In our days, it’s hard to find schools teaching these things. Nobody seems to care enough. Everything’s only instant gratification, a veneer of the immediate visible result, without concern for permanence or even what passes for permanence. Sometimes I seriously think we might be living in a dark age of painting.