The first major retrospective was held in 1989. I was there, introducing many of the paintings. They gave me a show on the side as compensation. It worked out for me; I’m not sure I’d have a career today if not for that show.
It was the first time more than a handful of people had seen the completed “Saguaro Night.” It created quite a stir. I showed them where the damage had been, and how the repair and subsequent paint-over had created a fracture line that led the eye through the marching saguaro and to the lone red figure on the other side. Although clearly embarrassed, a couple of people timidly offered the observation that that fracture line was reminiscent of my jaw line scar. Bullshit, of course—people see what they want to see.
“The magic, Mary, comes in how sometimes only a few tentative brush strokes of the right color, in the right position within the composition, make the painting what it is.”
I hear that advice of my father’s, and other bits of aesthetic lore, every time I stand in front of a canvas. And in my father’s work, no painting bears the truth of that advice better than “Saguaro Night,” and the few brushstrokes making that running, burning figure.
Those first few months out of the hospital I painted constantly, rarely taking time to eat or sleep, it seemed, rarely seeing my father, who was busy with his own creative firestorm, working on “Saguaro Night,” and other, similarly dark paintings. Occasionally he invited me into his studio to see the progress he’d made on the painting. This was unheard of for him, and showed, I think, how sorry he was for what had happened. Additional evidence of this sorrow came in the form of late night rants to no one, drinking and stumbling around outside, wandering off into the hills. Screaming and cursing. Sometimes in the morning I’d find him stinking and out of it, lying in front of the door, and I’d drag him in. We never spoke of that. It became just another part of his artistic process, a stage in his “research,” and therefore off-limits to conversation.
There was no red figure in the painting for the longest time. Then there came that night when the Javelina herd barked and squealed and just generally went crazy. And in the distance I heard my father screaming back at them. And in the distance I heard more screaming. And I looked out there into the dark Sonoran desert night and saw that he had built a fire out there. He had set fire to a saguaro, which raised its spindly arms in agony and tried to run away.
I’m not sure when he returned, but I heard him working in his studio all day, and he slept most of the next day, and the day after. That’s when I slipped into his studio and saw that the red, running figure had been added, and that now the painting was complete.
On that second day of his sleep I saw the birds circling a distant spot of desert. Remembering what we did for the Javelina, that poor dumb pig, I grabbed a shovel and headed in that direction. But I did not want my father’s help, preferring to leave him to his dreams.
In His Image
Something iffy had slipped into his face. Of course it was probably just a matter of looking too closely. An occupational hazard—K.T. was always looking at things a little too closely. Couldn’t see the forest—actually hadn’t seen a forest in years. Couldn’t see a face for all its pixels. He stared into the mirror, ran one finger down his skin from right eye to lower cheek, fascinated by the way the skin tones changed, the crinkles vanishing then reforming, new lines appearing, and everything just taking a few seconds too long to spring back into shape. A loss of elasticity, a decrease in flexibility. Signs of age as sure as the whitening of his scraggly beard hair and the bluing of the flesh under the eyes. A mask, wasn’t it? K.T.’s old-man mask. Sometimes he considered shaving the beard and getting some sort of tribal tattoo across the lips and around the chin to replace it, maybe make the dark under the eyes a permanent, deeper mark. Something bold to mask his age. But he suspected that much tattoo on facial skin would be a painful process, and he didn’t have the time anyway.
Instead he threw cold water on his face and turned away from the mirror. He didn’t think many people liked what they saw in the mirror. Always this discrepancy between the face they imagined and what appeared on the screen. Like listening to your voice on tape: the words and the particular pattern of speech might be yours, but the voice wasn’t yours at all. You sounded better, you looked better, in your head.
Except media types, actors, announcers. They spent their lives making the face and the voice match what they imagined, what someone else imagined, what they read in the script. K.T. figured he of all people should envy such control, but he didn’t. There was comfort in the discrepancy between image and substance. Rightly or wrongly it suggested depth of character.
In any case, nothing to have an anxiety attack over. His favorite saying of late, he’d posted it at the top of his web site. Of course people who were compelled to remind you there was nothing to be anxious about often suffered from raging anxieties. He could feel the nerves playing with the muscles of his face like spider hairs. Damn, but he was a mess. Nothing to worry about. No big deal. The face was a mask and the mask was just a few cells deep, nothing more than a thin layer of electrons.
He made his way back to the screen, fatigue causing him to bump into things, sending stacks of old magazines tumbling onto discarded pizza boxes, stray clothing, unopened mail. He hardly noticed. He owed a new client a picture by midnight, and one of his few prides was that he never missed a deadline.
The assignment was another creepy one—he seemed to be getting a lot of those lately. A drawback of advertising on, doing most of your business through the web. Photo Manipulations Inc. There was always some fool wanting him to graft a young starlet’s head onto a naked body, but that was more idiotic than creepy. He’d accept their credit card, though—who was he to say? They were just images, after all. They couldn’t really hurt anybody.
But fellows like this new client—and they were almost always male, very few women appearing to need his services—what they wanted couldn’t exactly be called pornographic, he supposed, but pondering the whys and wherefores of their requests to any degree always filled him with unease. The best he could do was lose himself in the technical aspects, leave the philosophizing to the alternative news groups. Wet images, dry images, women covered head to toe in a stew of nameless food items. Everyone seemed to have a special interest.
But it was all just a shim of electrons, a thin peel of a mask. Nobody died, they just got older, more set in their ways.
The new client had sent him a snapshot of a young boy, six, maybe seven, a little stocky, reddish hair, his back turned to the camera but his face twisted around to see who was behind him. Smart kid. It pays to know who’s behind you. Only a hint of anxiety in the kid’s expression but still plainly there, especially at the higher magnifications.
The other photo the client sent was that of a fat sow suckling her young on a bed of straw and gray, lumpy mud. K.T.’s assignment was to replace the sow’s head with that of the young boy.