Incubator for Savages: Voiced Drawings
It is all wrong of course.
But I cannot begin to tell you how my spirit aches with the heaviness of this nation's sterilized rectitude - in the halls of government, in the corridors and galleries of business, even in the very proper beds across the nation.
So I am sending you this portfolio of drawings anyway. They are not even matted. I cannot make it easy for you. I am not sure I want to.
The drawings were 30 years coming. I am 49. I began as a sculptor. Studied with Zorach and DeCreeft. Had a sizable talent, an anguished ease, good mind, a curly way as good as many, and it was all growing rather nicely. Bradley Tomlin was my friend, Phillip Guston, Joe Campbell, the Woodstock ground… small prizes came, small shows… it was a start.
Psychotherapy then. Deep psychotherapy, reclaiming my lost tears, my lost longing, my rage. And love. I was afraid when it started; it was such a lonely journey; and I was terribly afraid I would lose my talent, my need even, and my identity. What foolishness!
All the while I was sculpting, I drew. I drew so badly at first that it was a shame in me. But I cared so much for drawings - the nakedness possible, the transparency. You look at a few drawings and you know everything about a man. What a gift is a pen. The state of the sinews, the flicker of the nerves… whether the hand reaches or claws. There were many whose works I loved: Klee when his nerves scratched; Van Gogh in the flat anguish of his line; Cezanne, so tormented by breathlessness and caution at his best. Others - most often their early drawings - before art comes.
After therapy I did not like to be alone in the study anymore. I was not afraid of people anymore; nor of myself with people. So I hit upon the idea of doing scultured portaits. I did maybe 150-200, most in fired clay. Very loose and deep toward the end. I learned the secrets of faces. Where the lies hide first; (I was still afraid). And then where the beauty lies – unresolved usually, waiting beneath. This is not romance; exactly the truth. For several years my wife and I rode subways, asking each other of faces across, what do you see? It was all a fierce and stringent discipline.
And how shockingly it all came together – even while it was happening to me I had trouble believing it.
Slowly it became clear that the only problem of the artist –- as indeed of anyone else –- is simply to be freshly and deeply accessible to life as it moves in and around him. Everything else follows. Everything except one thing – how to tolerate the incredible joy all this generates. Almost no one can. Thus the destruction that accompanies art – the drunks, accidents, heart attacks, for those who try to stay where the real problem is; and the terribly falsifications, complications, verbiage, smallness, bull crap forever... everybody running.
For reasons irrelevant to this record, I gave up sculpture. I did so easily. Such a burden around my life were the tons of equipment – torches, chisels, anvils, hoists, stone, logs, huge sheets of steal, clay – all so heavy, God! And in giving up sculpture I chose drawing, deeply, serious, for the rest of my life. What delight: a pen, and paper.
We left the east. For a few years I did no art to speak of. Lives were making, a family coming, love and joy were learning to be lived with.
Eventually we moved to Oregon, the deep strange woman and myself; and by now two glorious alive children. We lived on a mountain, far back from the road. Built a log house, all that. Lovely. We are not alone.
I lectured (had taught in college; college-extension, and privately, altogether for some years back east), and began to teach out here (in Oregon). In time, students preferred to come to the cabin for lessons, so here I teach. (My wife and I teach jointly now, two years later.) I built a studio. Now, when there is time, I work.
Just as one has to learn again to speak honestly, I had to learn again to draw honestly. The line itself had to be honest; the impulse which generated it flowing from a felt, lived place. Very difficult. Years of cleaning.
About ten years ago my drawing first began to break through. But there were a lot of separate parts: an honest line rooted in the body-sources of many emotions, deep feelings which were known to me, a growing knowledge, a sharpening sense of craft. But they would not come together. Then one spring, enormously moved by a night journey along Long Island Parkway (I smelled flowers for forty miles), I started a series of drawings. It began about flowers, the earth burgeoning, rebirth. A doorway opened to my childhood, to an Easter service. Soon huge unexpected things began happening. I bean reading the gospels. The process became a great chaos but drawing after drawing was lived images leaping to changes from deep imperatives, and vaulting into a wild richness of clear acts. It went on through a whole spring. I had never been there before. So of course I ran. Four years maybe.
But it was not only running. For when you are learning to contain the fullness of your love for another, you are learning to tolerate joy. And moving tenderly toward a child, truthfully, is a firm, direct lesson in art. Sound strange possibly, but it is so.
I now I draw easily, surely and deeply; and almost always truly. That is why it is time, is why I send the portfolio.
Please look at he drawings with your whole being. Cold eyes will get you only a few hmmms.
I am thinking now of Van Gogh’s anguished cry, “People, there is a thing called love! People let us love!” (To Rappard I think).
It is near where I live, of course, though even as I write it I sense I am reluctant to put the words down… drawing about what we have done to the life of people, what it is like for us to live with it... how we have shattered the simple holiness…
Forward, Incubator for Savages: Voiced Drawings, 1970, Crazy Horse Books