LOOK OUT DOG - SLOW DOWN TRAIN

181. LOOK OUT DOG -- SLOW DOWN TRAIN (nyc, 1967):

I asked her what color she painted with and she replied 'post-partum blue' and I laughed at that just for the sake of doing something and she looked again and said "I worked on saying that for a long time and really never had a reason for saying it before but just then it fit right in - actually it's cerulean blue and it comes from a tube and I've never had post-partum blues" to which I replied "it's all the same to me but a good joke nevertheless" and the canvas before her was spread with blue and rather indistinct but that was her aim anyway and it was supposed to convey one of those light and cosmic feelings about the airiness of the universe and the splendor of illumination and perfection and all that (she painted that way - always some low-grade message) and it really did nothing for me - the swirls and curlicues or even the color - but I said little about it because there'd have been no point for me to start expounding about line and form and distinct areas of design and the flow of the eye over shape and form because these were all things I'd picked up and developed for myself in my own art-education and development process and if it wasn't for someone else then that was OK by me but it always did seem that a lot of the newest people who came to painting or using brushes usually went in the same direction she'd followed - indistinct swirls and large fields of color without reference to shape or area and with no underlying direction of the movement of color they'd get lost in to the thrust or urge of segment or form : you end up with merely a blob : and then because of that they'd have to settle and compromise and with a resultant vague design of hue and stroke they'd come off giving it all some great new-age sort of title about inner urges or dreamy cosmic-mind connections and because of that it always turned out muddled and wide and without parameters and - again because of that - just totally random color-craft and not really 'art' at all but it was always enough to satisfy the vague aspersions they cast towards 'art' and all that by these people who would just as glibly have accepted Tarot card readings as 'philosophy' - that's as as simple as they kept things and they'd most certainly never spend any time studying the subject matter of what it as they were attempting to do : too much work that : so what I saw before me is essentially 'hobby' as a habit and not much more but I gamely proceeded on (her name was Lara Myers from Brewster) and said "why don't you do a few of them in varied hues and connect them all together - maybe four - as one larger painting so they could hang as one and then maybe take a broad line of some dark color and trail it somehow across all of them - tying them together visually with the stroke of that line and unifying the whole - that could maybe work you know" and she looked over and said "hmmm not a bad idea really but I'm not sure I want to go like that I was thinking more that the idea here of color was enough - a big burst like an enormous floral hue" and I said "yeah but I don't see that - it just looks like a swirl of same-color activity all over the canvas - maybe 'nice' but unnecessary" to which she replied "oh what's 'necessary' anyway and who'd care about that?" and I shrugged "yeah OK" - I'd gotten tired real quick of the routine and figuring I had to share studio space with her I probably should just keep quiet and just let it go and I'd been through this all before and it was never fun if it was made to be uncomfortable - like that other guy who was once here and who painted 'Vietnam Portraits' as a series - one after the other of people in field uniforms or khakis and clutching rifles and other firearms while looking off into some distance - even a few Vietnamese guerrillas were painted too and it was all pretty sinister but striking at the same time and it certainly stopped a person short and even the technique and the skill both were pretty good - facial shades and shadows and colors all worked nicely while overall everything always had a hue of some strange 'Army Green' behind it - it all came together very nicely and although I really saw it as valueless in terms of 'ART' and tradition and development and such it was done nicely and stayed around with some quality but then one weekend it was all gone as was the painter himself and I never knew to where he'd gone or what had happened - which is where Lara came in she was his replacement in this large half of the studio we'd been given to share and I immediately liked her enough to sense an interest and a perhaps kinship in things but I never took too well to her 'art' per se but nonetheless I kept out of it and decided just to like her for herself and leave it at that - she was bit tall but carried herself quite nicely with dark hair of medium length which hung casually to her shoulders and stayed nicely put her eyes were a decent brown and her face suggested depth and lightness at the same time with each expression in turn suggesting something else - as if two or more things were going on simultaneously at each moment and overall I found her quite pleasing and easy to be with until at some point the other precipice was reached : the point at which our ideas diverged - things like caution and precision (both of which I lacked) and finesse and style (things apparently important to her) so that although we never 'clashed' we always were of somewhat divergent ideas about what we each were doing - a gentle verbal patter became our form of sparing and talking but it was genial and manageable at the same time and since for the most part she was there a lot more than I was I let it go - I came and went a lot (as these tales convey) and whenever I was there I was usually diligent in working silently and artfully alone so that I eventually came to consign the space over to her singly - more or less - and we never really discussed my art or what I was doing and that was fine with me and the more I thought about it I often thought (based on what I witnessed there are the school) that girls were just different when it came to art - this sounds tired and stilted today - but it seemed they had and kept to a single-minded dedication to its prettiness and gracefulness and sensibility as if they were making decoration or something else and it kept them right there 'with' it and to it and nothing very much outside of it ever entered - no weird walks or collecting things or striking out in other directions of form or material - it always stayed calm and gentle or at least that was my feeling about it then - it all had to do with so much more than that and so many other things which only later evolved into the world we have today where much of this has been dis-proved by society or negated by reality and anyway the 'practice' of things is much different and greatly altered now.